2010 May minutiae

• The current name of the ship formerly known as the Exxon Valdez is the Dong Fang Ocean.

• I never realized how often I absentmindedly scrape my teeth with my fingernail until the gum area above a couple of them started to recede and it became blindingly painful.

• Email from landlord: "On 15th of this May, you will lost the Internet service — thanks for the inconvenience!"

• I've been amused by the way various news outlets have described Riot Dog, the dog that has popped up at pretty much every Greek protest for the past two years. Yahoo described the dog as "a mutt that may have some German shepherd genes, and clearly has a strong interest in civil disorder" while the Guardian noted that "the hound always seems to side with the protesters, whatever the dispute."

• I recently noticed that restaurant prices have shot way up all of a sudden. Meals that I would have guessed would cost something like $12.95 are suddenly showing up on menus with pricetags like $18 or $20. I thought that maybe I was just living in the past but then I thought to check the web sites of some of these places and, sure enough, the web versions show prices $5-7 lower than the ones I've seen in person.

• A local bakery notes on its website: A general theory of cookies may be formulated this way. Despite their descent from cakes and other sweetened breads, the cookie in almost all its forms has abandoned water as a medium for cohesion. That's a pretty abstract bakery! (On another page it notes, "A pie is a baked food.")

• I was at a local supermarket when out of the corner of my eye I saw a largish creature scurry across the floor. "Eeeagh, RAT," I thought with disgust, but a moment later I got a better look and saw it was a sparrow. My attitude abruptly changed. "Aww, cute!" But who says a sparrow is any cleaner than a rat?

• Also, there was a sign hanging from the ceiling that said: OUR COMPETITORS SAY THEY CAN BEAT OUR PRICES. LOL! That was worse than the rat would have been.

• Also also, I was looking at the ingredients list on a jar of seasoned salt and one of them was "silicon dioxide." Isn't that, like, sand?

• Danica McKellar: I've always been really cautious about guys who have a Winnie Cooper fantasy, and I'm so glad about that. I mean, I can count on one hand the guys I've been with. Coincidentally, "one hand" plus "Winnie Cooper fantasy" pretty much sums up 1988 for me.

• abcnews.go.com: Blake, a student at Southeastern High School, was gunned down Friday by a liquor store in front of his girlfriend. The liquor store then fled the scene and is currently the subject of an intensive police search. The retail establishment is armed and should be considered extremely dangerous.

• Chris Mannix on the Washington Wizards: An '09-'10 season that began with championship aspirations was shaken by the untimely death of longtime owner Abe Pollin. ...untimely? He was 85!

• Siren Delaney (or rather her real-life prototype) is now driving a taxi in New York City for a living. Life is strange.

• One evening recently my doorbell rang, which generally means either Elizabeth has sent another package to my house or someone wants to convert me to one religion or another. But this time it was a census taker. It turns out that downstairs was his nightmare scenario: there'd been people down there on April 1st, but they'd never filled out their form, and had moved out by the time the census taker could come around to follow up — he wanted to know if I could provide any information, even a guess as to how many people lived there. In retrospect I probably should have told him that there were ten million and won us some extra congressional districts.

• I clicked on an link to an latimes.com article about Facebook rejiggering its settings yet again, and something caught my eye: the name in the byline seemed awfully familiar. Jessica Guynn, Jessica Guynn... where did I know that name from? Then it hit me: she interviewed me a decade ago about Zachary's Pizza. Cool to see she's still getting journalism work.

• Looked at my old yearbooks for the first time in years. I kept thinking that I'd forgotten to put my glasses on or that I was developing cataracts or something, but, no, that's just what the world was like before Photoshop.

• Peter Berman found some fun headlines recently:
  
  • Veto puts brakes on fish, game changes
    
  • Cleveland Will Try To Move West
  That last one reminds me of a headline I saw as a kid about John Denver not going on the space shuttle as had been discussed: "Denver to stay on Earth."

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