- When did web designers suddenly decide that making the beginnings of articles overlap with header images, making weird rotated L shapes like this one, was a good idea? Because it's really not.
- I watched some Youtube videos featuring comedians of South Asian
ancestry.
It was interesting listening to them do bits about their upbringing, in
that it had the same mixture of familiarity and foreignness that I am
used to when I hear white people talk about their upbringing, except
inverted.
- I had a dream that I was walking down the street to get some ice
cream when I ran into a distant friend of mine I hadn't seen for several
years.
She told me that I should wait around until her other friends left,
and then we could go back to my place and watch TV while cuddling in
bed.
I was pretty dubious, because I was neither particularly close to her nor
especially attracted to her, but at the same time, I've had little enough
affection in my life that it sounded kind of nice, but then again, I
wanted to get going because the ice cream shop was about to close, and
consequently I was very torn about what to do.
Anyway, the whole thing proved kind of moot, because as it turned out, I was rooming with Doctor Octopus, and when I got home, he wouldn't leave.
The ice cream was pretty good though.
- I'm just about ready to stop getting alerts that people have posted
about "Jean-Yves Adam, cadre de la police parisienne".
- Hey, did you know that the middle of Greenland is actually
a good way below sea
level?
That's going to make for a lot of prime lakefront property should anyone
manage to survive into the 22nd century.
- Even though in principle I'm all for the regularization of language,
in practice I find the replacement of irregular verb forms with regular
ones grotesque.
It's not "grinded", people, it's "ground".
It's not "slayed", it's "slew".
I don't care what your descriptivist dictionaries say.
I never thinked I'd see the day when people speaked and writed these
kinds of abominations.
- I didn't like the way it took forever to cook dried beans, but also
didn't like the expense of buying canned ones, so a few years ago I
bought a pressure cooker.
Everything I read about them said, "You're probably scared of buying a
pressure cooker because your grandmother told you horror stories about
them exploding. Well, they don't do that anymore!"
I rolled my eyes, as I had never had any such fears.
You can probably guess where this story is going.
One night this month I decided to cook up some navy beans.
I put a handful of beans into the cooker, filled it halfway up with
water, closed the lid, put the cooker on the burner, and went back to
my computer.
It always takes a surprisingly long time for the pressure cooker to start
making those characteristic pssht-a-pssht-a-pssht sounds, but after a long
while I started to wonder why I hadn't heard them yet.
But before I could investigate, I heard a "FOP" sound and then a
"HAARRRRR" and suddenly my kitchen was full of opaque billowing
clouds like downtown New York as the World Trade Center collapsed.
When the clouds cleared, I went in to investigate.
First: check on the condition of the pressure cooker.
I guess it had actually done what it was supposed to — i.e.,
the rubber stopper and metal regulator had flown off so that the whole
thing didn't explode and send jagged metal shards flying into the living
room.
(Of course, if I actually had been investigating when those pieces came
shooting off at ballistic speeds and the kitchen filled with 250°
steam, I still would have been hating life.)
Second: turn off the gas.
Third: deal with the fact that it was now raining inside the
kitchen.
The steam had condensed onto the ceiling and was now dripping down as
water with a steady pitter-patter.
I tried mopping the ceiling, but the mop was filthy so I ended up using
paper towels.
Then I realized that my oven clock was off.
The microwave clock too.
I opened the refrigerator and the light didn't come on.
I realized that steam must have poured into any nearby electrical outlets
and wondered whether I was going to have to pay my landlord a hundred
thousand dollars to replace the wiring in the house.
The outlets in the living room still worked, so I unplugged most of my
computer equipment to free up a power strip, dragged the refrigerator
across the kitchen, and plugged it in.
But that was hardly a permanent solution — I couldn't do that
with the oven, for instance, because it was also hooked up to the
gas.
Eventually I had a realization: fuses exist!
I looked for a fuse box in my apartment but couldn't find one.
When the sun came up I went outside and found that there was a
circuit breaker panel under the meter.
But when I switched the relevant switch to ON, it wouldn't stay put, and
when I went inside, the power wasn't back.
At that point I thought I was in serious trouble.
Then I thought to look up circuit breakers online, and discovered that the
actual procedure is to flip the switch to OFF, then to ON, and then
to let it click back to the central position.
I did that, went inside, and found the oven clock blinking 12:00 like a
VCR.
Whew.
Moral of the story: maybe just buy the canned beans
