A new resident in Ellie’s apartment building put up a note on her door saying that she was new in town and hoping to make friends.  So Ellie texted her at the number on the note, and what followed were several months in which this woman would text Ellie to make plans, then cancel or change those plans, over and over.  What was bizarre to me is that often the excuses for the cancellation were out­right lies, such as when she said, “Oh, that Thai restaurant we were going to go to is closed today! Let’s go somewhere else!”  (I called the restaurant to check⁠—it was open.)  It all seems very Seinfeld to me.  Like, can’t you picture a scene like this?

George:  I gotta get out of this, Jerry!  Wait, I know⁠—I’ll tell her the Thai restaurant’s closed!  She’ll never check, right?  Who would check that?

Jerry:  Why not just tell her you want to go to a different restaurant?

George:  Because then I’m the bad guy!  This way it’s not my fault.  It’s the universe’s fault, Jerry!  The universe is the bad guy!

Jerry:  The universe is the bad guy insofar as it contains you.

Youtube fed me a video titled “Rip Current Science”, and I rolled my eyes⁠—in an age of flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers, the last thing I need is someone declaring that science as we know it is dead and presumably to be replaced with some sort of woo-woo “alternative physics”.  Only after I noticed that the poster was “usoceangov” did I realize that, whoops, it’s about the science of rip currents.

Kurt Cobain killed himself on 1994, April 5, but his body wasn’t discovered until April 8.  I was doing some research a couple weeks back and pulled up this story from the Los Angeles Times:

Nirvana Pulls Out of Tour Plan

Pop music: Amid reports of a breakup, the band withdraws from talks about headlining this summer’s “Lollapalooza ’94” citing singer Kurt Cobain’s health problems.

April 6,  1994

“Health problems” indeed.  But even that wasn’t as chilling as this line in the third paragraph:

“Cobain, who was believed to be in Seattle, was not available for comment.”

Out of curiosity, I happened to turn on the instant captions for the latest Radio K episode, and wow, this technology has come a long way.  The captions were very nearly perfect!  The translator knew the word “Sammamish”!  It correctly distinguished among “to”, “too”, and “two”!  Impressive stuff.

On the flip side, a lot of technology is regressing.  I have complained in the past about the replacement of dials and switches by buttons.  Like, it used to be easy to see whether electronic gadgets were on or off.  You’d look at the switch:

But now everything has buttons, and not even the kind that click in when they’re on and stick out when they’re off.  You just have to stab at them and hope the press registers, which often it doesn’t.  Half the time when I start up my computer the monitor stays blank, and there’s no way to tell at a glance whether it’s supposed to be on or not⁠—whether I need to go crawling around looking to see whether it’s come unplugged or the HDMI cable has come loose, or whether I should just try pushing the button a few more times.  Why not just have a switch?

This month I discovered that my lamp is even worse.  Back in the ’90s and early ’00s, my beloved halogen torchières had dials.  I’d wake up, turn the dial to about 1%, and wait for my eyes to adjust before cranking up the brightness.  Now I have to push a button to turn my lamp on⁠—and it comes on with the brightness at 100%, and there’s no way to change that⁠—then push the same button several more times to get to my desired light temperature, and then hold that same button for several seconds to (eventually) activate the dimming feature.  All to avoid putting on a slider or a dial.  But I already knew all that.  What I just learned is that the lamp doesn’t work at all if you happen to be wearing gloves.  That button?  Turns out it’s not even a button!  It’s a fuckin’ capacitive sensor and therefore only works if you touch it with the bare skin of your finger (or, as I discovered, your nose).  Why?!  What possible advantage is there to using a sensor instead of a button?  Blargh, the future is stupid.

Speaking of stupid: these days I frequently drive back and forth between here and Oregon, where you’re not allowed to pump your own gas.  I guess the idea is to keep employment numbers up through unnecessary make-work.  Anyway, as I drove into Medford in the middle of the night, I saw that my tank was nearly empty, so I pulled off the freeway, found a gas station, and was greeted by this sign:

No need to apologize, friend!  You should be saying, “You’re welcome for the convenience!”  Like, I know that theoretically it is taxing to get out of your car, fiddle with with the payment screens, stick the pump into the tank, etc., etc.  But it is more taxing by orders of magnitude to have to interact with a human.

However, I think I have found a solution.  On my most recent drive through Oregon I was lured off the freeway by a sign promising unusually low gas prices, and discovered that this gas station was in fact self-serve.  How?  Because it turned out that it was not entirely under the jurisdiction of the state of Oregon: it was on Umpqua land!  Thanks for the convenience, Cow Creek Band!