I read that a new pizza place had opened in town; the article said that it had moved into the old Brazil Cafe spot, and gave the address as 1960 University Avenue.  So I found a parking spot near where the Brazil Cafe had been, walked a couple of blocks, and… found the Brazil Cafe still there.  It had clearly been closed for a long time, but no new tenant had moved in, pizzeria or otherwise.  And the numbers were way off: up in the 2100s, and odd.  So I crossed the street to where the evens were, and walked a few long blocks to 1960, where there was indeed a new pizza place.  On the way back, I passed the Brazil Cafe again⁠—which had a sign on it, saying “Visit us at our new location, 1960 University!”  Apparently my mental map is a few generations out of date.  But I trust that I can buy a new one at the Borders in between the Blockbuster and the Tower Records.

This month I learned that the scientific consensus about the creation of elements heavier than iron has changed: it seems that they are no longer thought to be forged in supernova explosions, but rather in “kilonovas”, a term not even coined until 2010, which are collisions between two neutron stars.  Apparently this theory received observational corroboration in 2017, leading to a flurry of articles about it.  Here’s one by someone named Greg Redfern, who writes, “What astrono­mers do know is that the kilonova produced heavy elements, especially gold, platinum and uranium.”  “Especially”?  What does “especially” mean in this context?  Does it mean the kilonova produced more gold, platinum, and uranium than, say, lutetium, thallium, and ytterbium?  Or does it mean “these are the ones I’ve heard of”?

I don’t like feta cheese.  It’s not an absolute deal-breaker, but pretty frequently I will look online to see whether I want to go to the Cheese Board, see that that day’s offering includes feta, and make other plans.  A commonly suggested substi­tute for feta is cotija cheese.  I really like cotija!  I pretty much always have a wedge of it in my fridge, and I sprinkle it on all sorts of things, not just Mexican dishes.  It’s inter­esting how a very subtle difference in flavor profile can make the difference between a thumbs down and an enthusiastic thumbs up.

I do like those chocolate eggs with the matte candy shell that Cadbury puts out for Easter.  In fact, I just purchased a bag.  The stores started putting them on display on Decem­ber 26.  I assume that the day after Easter they’ll cycle back around to the Halloween candy.

As a child of the ’80s, I frequently get random ’80s pop songs stuck in my head.  Or, rather, what I actually get stuck in my head are ’80s pop songs with the lyrics I thought I heard as a child, before I had much sense of what made for plausible words to a song.  For instance, it was only this month that it occurred to me that Stacey Q was probably not singing, “We connect / When we’re together it’s so pathet­ic”.  (I looked it up⁠—it’s supposed to be “perfect”.  In my defense, she doesn’t sing “PER-fect”; she sings “per-FEH-ect”, which has a cadence a lot closer to “pathetic” than “perfect”.)

An ’80s song whose actual lyrics no longer really work as intended is “Uptown Girl”.  “She’s been living in her white bread world”?  Yes, in the 19th century white bread was a luxury, while brown bread was scorned as unrefined fodder for the poor.  Perhaps even as late as 1983 these associations might have held.  But now the cultural script has flipped.  It’s the downtown man who’d be living off Wonder Bread, while the uptown girl would be living in a rustic artisan loaf world.  (Also, the downtown man is probably paying $3500 for a studio, hence the need to economize when making his avocado toast.)

As for some more recent music: after listening to it for months, it was only a few days ago that I realized that the chorus to Poppy’s song “Cue” was not “March to the end of the world”.  I took it to be a fairly broad description of the fact that civilization is not doing much to steer away from apocalypse.  But it’s actually “March till the end of the world”.  Coupled with the other lyrics, I take this as more specifically a reference to the protests that erupted in the summer of 2020⁠—and, with the mention of “the virus”, a reference to the month of March.  I.e., here we are two years later, masks still on, half the restaurants still only doing takeout, watching waves of case counts come and go.  It will be March of 2020 until the end of the world.