2011.05 minutiae

• Things from the '90s that now seem very quaint: sitcom plots revolving around someone hearing a message on someone else's answering machine.

• Saw someone online describe the Beatles' "If I Fell" as "sappy." It's interesting, because it sounds like the sort of song that would be sappy, but aren't the lyrics basically saying, "You'd better be easier to manage than my ex, because I want to get into another relationship fast in order to get revenge on her for dumping me"? Not exactly the noblest of sentiments.

• I need to rig my door so that when someone tries to knock on it I just get an email.

• Jeff Caplan, espndallas.com: Imagine what might have been if Stevenson and Kidd, the league's third all-time 3-point shooter, hadn't of gone a combined 2-of-10? ...and when I did a search to see whether anyone else had expressed astonishment that this man gets paid to write English sentences, here's what came up:
  

• Moving from the verbal to the quantitative, when I went to the farmers' market on the 10th, my vegetables came to $6.50. I paid with a $10 bill... and received $17.50 in change. I handed it back, and initially the cashier seemed to recognize her error: "Oh! Here — that's right," she said, handing me $12 even. "I paid with a ten," I said. She looked dumbfounded and proceeded to give me $2.50. I finally had to tell her that the change should be $3.50.

• It occurred to me that the Smashing Pumpkins song "1979" is equidistant from 1979 and 2011.

• So what was our brush-clearin', flight-suit-wearin', cowboy ex-president doing while the hit on Osama bin Laden was going down? Reuters: Bush said he was eating souffles at a Dallas restaurant.

• I went for a routine check-up at which the doctor asked when I'd last had a tetanus shot. I knew I'd had one in 1992 when I got hit by a bike and had a negative skin-to-street interface, but if I'd had one since then I couldn't recall it. The doctor said that unless I'd had one since 2001 it was time for a new one, so I got the shot. I was told that my arm might be a little sore for a couple of days. "A little" turned out to be "extremely" and "a couple of" turned out to be "fifteen." I also spent thirty straight hours in bed with a 102.8° fever. (And I'd agreed to work a nine-hour day the day after that — if my appointment had been a day later I would've been so sick I'd have had to cancel.)

• You really learn how much you do automatically when every use of your left arm means agony. You'd think that after a couple of painful lessons you'd stop trying to use it, but at least in my case, more than a week later I was still automatically reaching to open doors and then yelping.

• A note accompanying a DVD set of Saturday morning cartoons from the 1970s: "Intended for the adult collector and not suitable for children."

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