Ka-Ching!

Money is convenient because if you get a job painting a restaurant you don’t have to carry home like 70 chicken fried steaks and several enormous tubs of potato salad. Money is weird because if you’re a musician a big chunk of your pay comes from encouraging people to drink themselves to death. Money is dangerous because it lets you enjoy the labor of people half a world away without looking them in the eye. I’m more and more starting to think that money is powdered violence – dried out and ground up and sanitized so the smell isn’t so bad.

These pearls ain't gonna clutch themselves.

The disasters don’t even have the decency to wait for each other to finish anymore. All the wrong people keep dying. And apparently the best way out of this hole is to keep digging. We talk about how terrible 2020 is but look, was racism less systemic in 2019? Climate change less threatening? The wealth gap less unbalanced and health care less broken? All of a sudden this year are mean people meaner, poor people poorer, crazy people crazier? No. But we’re noticing. So maybe this isn’t the best year ever, but you have to admit it’s got our attention.

Family in the Wind

Oh for crap’s sake. There’s another hurricane coming. The good news is we may finally get a chance to eat those tinned Vienna sausages we laid in for the last storm. Those little dudes are simultaneously disgusting and oddly appealing, like Abba or Circus Peanuts. It would be amusing to take a few cans to Austria and see how actual Viennese people react to them. Meanwhile, the hurricane. There’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald story where two tornados in rapid succession devastate a small town. And one character says, "This is worse than a calamity. It's getting to be a nuisance."

Oh. And a mint.

I don’t want to brag (I want to brag) but (because) I think I may have timed this exactly right. I showed up for the first round of aperitifs and as trays of piping hot canapes were emerging from the kitchen. I got a good seat. The soup was delicious, the salad superb. There was fish and fowl and meat. Two kinds of potato, three kinds of bread, then some cheese and fruit. Now I think I might have time for a nice dessert, a coffee, maybe even a cigar before excusing myself just as the check hits the table.

Explanations are in order

I’m starting to think that language was invented because people needed an effective way to avoid communication. Like, when people say “It’s simple,” they mean “It’s complicated.” When they say “It’s complicated,” they mean “I don’t have time to explain it to you.” When they say “I don’t have time to explain it to you,” they mean “I don’t understand it myself.” And by the time they get around to actually saying “I don’t understand it myself,” it’s because they’re finally ready to admit to themselves that they don’t understand it themselves. That’s when you say to them, “It’s simple…”

Joe the Sea Lamprey

Practice makes perfect. For over a year I’ve been studying Spanish online. As a result, I’ve become quite adept at studying Spanish online. Someday I hope to say something in Spanish to a Spanish-speaking person. That’s the long-term goal. Anyway, the other morning, I was tasked with translating this sentence: “She is lost and needs help.” I typed, “Ella esta perdido y necesita ayuda.” I was immediately corrected – it should actually be “Ella esta perdida y necesita ayuda.” And I thought to myself, “For gosh sake! This is no time to quibble about grammar. She is lost and needs help!”

The Google Glass is half empty.

You know what’s uncomfortable? Standing in one place for an extended period of time. After just a little while, you want to either sit down or walk around. To facilitate this, we have chairs and shoes. Combining the best of both is the bicycle, which allows the user to (sort of) sit down while (kind of) walking around. So anyway, somebody finally realized that the Segway was a terrible idea and they’ve stopped making them. Which, hmm, why didn’t more people buy a complicated expensive machine to do something that can achieved better, cheaper, easier? Consumers can be so fickle.