A while back I happened across a reference to the Welsh counting system, which apparently translates as follows:

But this month I learned that the Welsh counting system has nothing on the Danish one for weirdness.  It seems that the Danish word for fifty translates to “halfway to the third”.  The third what?  The third twenty, which gives us “halfway to sixty”.  Now you might well ask, “Wait, wouldn’t ‘halfway to sixty’ be thirty?”, but apparently the unstated part is that it means “halfway from forty to sixty”.  I think even Bernie Sanders would agree that Denmark should not be the world’s role model in all things.

While I was researching the above, I found occasion to type “seven” into Google Translate.  It seems that nowadays Google Translate offers sample sentences for the words submitted.  Its offering for “seven”?

“My mother died when I was seven.”

Gadzooks.  That brings a whole new meaning to the term “dark mode”.

Those “little free libraries” that have cropped up everywhere are much better than I would have expected.  Sure, every now and again I will happen upon one that just has a diet cookbook, some religious pamphlets, and a heap of literal trash.  But I’ve been really surprised to find that they more often have literary classics, some recent best­sellers, children’s books that I treasured as a kid… and, sure, those are mixed in with a lot more titles that don’t interest me in the slightest.  But it occurs to me that I’ve never seen a book that remotely interested me in the 50¢ racks that used bookstores will sometimes set outside.  Maybe the idea is that, at a bookstore, the titles are deemed by the pro­prietor to be worse and worse the cheaper you get… but with the little library boxes, the spirit of donating to the community means that people are throwing what could be $20 volumes into the mix for a pricetag of zero.

At the beginning of the month I took Ellie back to my favorite smoothie shop, Juice Stop in La Mirada.  Most of the smoothies there include either sherbet or frozen yogurt or both.  When I got back from the road trip, I thought I would try to approximate a Juice Stop smoothie, so I went to store after store looking for those items.  No luck.  It’s so bizarre to me⁠—I used to buy pints of sherbet (not just mass-market rainbow, but high-quality single-fruit sherbet) and pints of frozen yogurt (as in vanilla, not Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked) all the time, and it seems like they have disappeared off the face of the earth!  And in their place: countless brands of “lite ice cream” and “non-dairy frozen dessert”.  It’s bad enough when a company discontinues a specific treat I like⁠—the Lindt wafer bar, say, or Pepperidge Farm’s Nassau cookies, or Bovinity Divinity ice cream⁠—but it’s something else again for all companies to stop offering an entire category of dessert, especially in favor of replacement offerings made of space-age polymers.  It really makes me want to save up seventy dollars for that time machine.

On a similar note, nearly twenty years after the last time I was able to find them in stores⁠—I had assumed they were banned around that time, but apparently the bans were much more recent, if largely academic⁠—I still miss halogen torchière lamps.  I guess this is like missing lead paint, given the damage they caused, but the light they put out was so lovely.  And now apparently gas stoves are about to go the way of the halogen lamps!  I guess I have a future of living in vintage apartments ahead of me, because coil-top and glass-top stoves are awful.  I have a lot of recipes that ask the cook to turn the heat from high to low and back for matters of a few seconds, and you can’t do that with coils.  And my usual method of cooking eggplant is to stick it directly into the flames!  You can’t do that with a magnetic induction cook­top.  The eggplant doesn’t get smoky and silky⁠—it just starts sticking to the fridge.

One of the episodes I recently watched of the TV adaptation of The Man in the High Castle was written by someone named Emma Frost.  That made my jaw drop, because that’s like going to find someone to write an installment of your TV series and coming up with Clark Kent or Peter Parker.  The Emma Frost I know was once an X‑Men villain, then did a face turn around the turn of the millennium and became an X‑Man herself⁠—in fact, she become one of the team’s foremost members, to the point that she was given her own ongoing series.  And though her nom de guerre was the White Queen⁠—she started off in the Chris Claremont days wearing a white corset and underpants, switched during Grant Morrison’s run to a white “big X” costume that matched those of her teammates yet was somehow even more outlandish than her previous get-up, and most recently has switched to this comparatively demure white ensemble⁠—her series wasn’t even called The White Queen: it was called Emma Frost, for she was a big enough character that even her civilian name could sell comics.  Anyway, I looked up this real-life Emma Frost on IMDb to see whether she had written anything of note aside from High Castle.  It turned out that she was the lead writer of a BBC series back in 2013.  The name of that series?  The White Queen!! And it has absolutely nothing to do with the X‑Men!