2021.04  minutiae

  • Here’s a crazy coincidence for you.  About three months ago now I watched the Fantastic Four movies, but I haven’t had a chance to write them up because, y’know, all-consuming nature of working in public education.  (This is also the reason that this is the first minutiae article I’ve been able to put together this year.)  However, watching those movies got me thinking about how I got into comics as a kid.  I know that, like many others of my generation, I started with Superfriends; I also read some old comics (like, really old: Golden Age and early Silver Age) that had been collected into hardcover books and were available at the Canyon Hills Library at Dewey Decimal Code 741.597.  But what spurred me to start collecting comics, and Marvel comics in particular, was this jigsaw puzzle:

    I recognized a handful of these characters, but most of them were new to me, and I couldn’t find out anything about them at the Canyon Hills Library.  I would have to start hitting the spinner racks.  A few weeks later I got Iron Man #174, which I still own 38 years later, and the rest is history.

    So, having been reminded of this, I started poking around on the internets to see who had drawn it.  It turned out to be Paty Cockrum, stepmother of one of my old friends from my interactive fiction days!  But that is not even the coincidence I mentioned up top.  One of the things I do in odd moments, just to kill a minute or two here and there, is go to Google Maps and drop the Street View guy down in a random location to look around.  The very next day after finding this picture of the jigsaw puzzle, I happened to drop the guy down in front of a pizza shop in Olympia, Washington.  I missed by a couple of pixels and landed at the side of the building.  And what should appear before my startled eyes?

    It’s a mural of that jigsaw puzzle, advertising the comic shop next door to that completely random pizza place!  I would have been absolutely gobsmacked to have landed here at any point since Google Street View debuted, but to have it come up the day after I downloaded a copy of the original puzzle?  I guess that if you live long enough, even things with astronomical odds will happen once or twice.

  • According to Merriam-Webster, here are some words and phrases that first appeared in print in the year of my birth: “alternative music”, “biofuel”, “chai”, “closeted”, “direct deposit”, “ditzy”, “gotcha”, “guilt trip”, “junk bond”, “life support”, “smoking gun”, “string cheese”, “telecommute”, “touch screen”, “transgender”, “wake-up call”.  (I was a bit taken aback to pull up the alphabetized list and find that the very first item on it was “acquaintance rape”.)

  • I see that the Trump-hobbled census came out, with numbers that we’re just going to pretend bear some resemblance to reality because they’re all we have.  Texas picked up two additional House seats (and electoral votes).  But though this brings the nation that much closer to irrevocable doom, there is one bright side to having Texas in the union: no import duties on Texas grapefruit!  I have tried grapefruit from California and from Florida, and it doesn’t remotely compare: when Berkeley Bowl has Texas grapefruit in stock, generally at around 59¢ each, I will sometimes eat five a week (half for breakfast, half for dessert), while my interest in any other variety is zero to negative.  What I did not know until just recently is that apparently my beloved Rio Star cultivar was a mutation created by deliberately exposing the plants to cobalt-60!  Better living through radiochemistry, man.

  • I’ve been cooking a lot more East Asian food than I used to.  I went to the local 99 Ranch to get some gochujang, a Korean chili paste, and while I was looking for it, I happened across this:

    Are there really recipes out there that say, “Add 1½ Tbsp chili sauce (irregular)”?  Is this the culinary equivalent of those discount pants with one leg shorter than the other? If you use the regular chili sauce, will you improve or ruin the dish?

  • While trying out a cookie recipe, I typed “weight of a cup of chocolate chips” into Google.  It took me to a site called howmany.wiki, which provided the following answer:

    I dunno⁠—there’s a time and place for approximate values, but I think I’m going to need something a little more exact.

  • About thirty years ago I read a book by Deborah Tannen asserting that when women complain about something, they are generally not asking for help or advice, but instead just want a little sympathy.  Apparently one of these women programmed Gmail’s suggested reply feature.  One of my students sent me an email saying that his laptop had shut down and that he had reconnected to the Zoom session and was now in the waiting room needing to be let back in.  Gmail’s suggested reply?

  • Here’s a door designed to test whether you are what F. Scott Fitzgerald would call a first-rate intelligence:

    I suppose it’s not uncommon for a door to be both an entrance and an exit.  Most of them are.  But it takes a very special door to be each one of them exclusively and simultaneously.

    Not depicted: the door I saw the same day, a mile away, reading “DO NOT ENTER – ENTRANCE ONLY”.

  • As I have occasionally mentioned, I have a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which doesn’t interfere with my life much.  Sure, shopping trips take slightly longer, as I have to examine all the boxes of rigatoni in order to intuit which box is the Correct one to take.  But even the biggest inconveniences are minor, such as when I drive off somewhere but then end up having to circle around the block and return to the house to check whether the front door is locked one last time.  In fact, I recently had cause to be thankful for this particular neural glitch, as the clock ticked over past midnight and, already sleep-deprived, I sighed and realized that I would have to set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. in order to finish the rest of my prep work before school started.  As I was drifting off to sleep, the over-checking lobe of my brain kept telling me to verify the alarm one more time just in case, the way it does most every night, and while I tried to ignore it, eventually I did wake back up and groggily push the button.

    The clock said: ALARM: 5:30 PM.  Yipes!  I clicked that back around to 5:30 a.m.  Had I not, I almost certainly would have slept through at least two classes.  OCD FTW!

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