2024.08 minutiae

As of this writing, I am still posting my announcements of new articles to both Twitter and Bluesky. I can’t help but find the prompt for each post emblematic of the current incarnation of the site. Here’s what I mean. Twitter originally had a very narrow stated purpose: it was meant to be a way to keep up with your friends’ activities in real time, so the prompt was “What are you doing?” But of course it wasn’t long before people disregarded the instructions en masse and posted whatever they wanted. So the site adapted and changed the prompt to “What’s happening?” Even that soon seemed too restrictive, so the prompt was replaced with a simple “Compose new Tweet…” box.
Bluesky, aiming to recapture the pre-Elon Musk version of Twitter, has taken inspiration from the “What’s happening?” days and asks the slightly more casual “What’s up?”
The Elon Musk version of Twitter has also taken inspiration from those days… except its tweak is to ask, “What is happening?!” The unnatural stiffness that comes with removing the contraction, the overwrought “?!” at the end… it’s certainly on brand.
Not much personal news this month, but I did take Ellie on a brief road trip to Southern California. Myers-Briggs is pseudoscience, but I do reliably test as an INTJ, and Ellie confirms that riding in a car that I am driving is pretty much exactly like this:
The main purpose of the trip was this. A few years ago, Ellie said she wanted to go to a warm sandy beach, having found that beaches here in Northern California tend to be colder and rockier than she preferred. We tried Santa Cruz first, but while she liked the boardwalk, she didn’t like the looks of the beach, so we didn’t even venture down there. Our next stop was Pismo Beach, but she cut that visit short after cutting her foot on the carcass of a dead seagull. Next we went to Carpinteria, and she liked that one, so we stopped there. I internalized that this was Ellie’s favorite beach, so every time she wanted to go to the beach after that, we just went to Carpinteria.
However, this year I thought: wait, we designated that as her favorite beach just because it was the first one she liked. Had we continued south, we might have found one she deemed even better! I found a web site that recommended doing a “beach tasting” by just going to various beaches for no more than an hour each and getting a sense of the differences. So, here is what we found:
- Santa Monica / Venice: Couldn’t even find a way to get from the road down to the beach.
- Laguna Beach: Mostly seaweed. Within five seconds of venturing into the surf, any part of your body below the waterline looked like it belonged to the Swamp Thing.
- Huntington Beach: Cleaner, but Ellie said that it felt like the water was actively trying to pull her out to her death.
- Manhattan Beach: There were no changing facilities available⁠—it looked like the idea was to keep the riffraff out.
- Hermosa Beach: Thus, this was the winner⁠—not only did it have no glaring problems, but there was even a nice walkway leading from the start of the sand almost all the way to the waterline.
However, none of these topped Carpinteria, so that remains Ellie’s California beach of choice for the time being.
Mitt Romney got a lot of ridicule in 2012 for saying at a campaign stop in Michigan, where he’d grown up, that he loved coming back because “the trees are the right height”. Mitt Romney deserves ridicule for a lot of things, but not that. I thought it was a great way to express the power of the imprinting process on a child and on the adult that child grows up to be. Like, I recognize that Orange County is pretty dystopian:

And yet, even driving down OC streets I didn’t recognize (like the above⁠—I deliberately selected spots I saw for the first time on this trip), I’d look around and think, yes, this is awful and I wouldn’t want to live here and the guys who make Youtube videos about urban design would be weeping openly, yet… this is correct. This is what places are supposed to look like, some part of my brain kept insisting. The subdivision walls are the right height.

My first year of high school, my French teacher was twenty-five. But I was twelve, and so to me, all my teachers were the same age: grown-ups. Twenty-five, fifty-five⁠—basically interchangeable. Anyway, that was a long time ago. Last year I was invited to her retirement party, but I now live hundreds of miles away, so I promised that the next time I was down south for a few days, I’d take her to a retirement lunch. And I kept my word! Here’s why I mention this in the minutiae section: I was worried that I might be called upon to speak some French during the lunch, so I was rehearsing some of the things I might find myself saying. For instance, I thought I would likely end up mentioning that I had been a public school teacher myself for a time, starting in 2018. How do you say 2018? On autopilot, I started reciting the year in French: “Mille neuf cent quatre-vingt—”
So, uh, yeah, it’s been a while since I spoke much French in a given day.
(That said, it probably would be just like the French to render the year 2018 as “One thousand, nine hundred, four twenties, thirty-eight.”)

In Southern California, Ellie and I overheard a father trying to tell his son a joke. Here’s how that went:

Father: Knock knock!
Son: Who’s there?
Father: Orange!
Son: Orange who?
Father: Knock knock!
Son: Who’s there?
Father: Orange!
Son: Orange who?
Father: Knock knock!
Son: Who’s there?
Father: Orange!
Son (frustrated): Orange WHO?
Father: Knock knock!
Son: Who’s there?
Father: Orange!
Son: Orange who?
Father: Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?

The son did not laugh at all. The father seemed pissed off at this. Ellie and I wondered whether the father was even aware that he had fucked up the joke. As you probably recognize, the first few times, the answer to “Who’s there?” is supposed to be “Banana.” The listener is supposed to get annoyed at never receiving an answer to “Banana who?” and at having “Banana” repeated so many times. “Orange” is thus a welcome change of pace, only for it to turn out to be a pun that circles back to “Banana”⁠—except this time there is an agreeable resolution, as the teller implicitly acknowledges that saying “Banana” so many times undoubtedly tried the listener’s patience. However, as I mentioned in the last edition of the Chuckle Box, we seem to have entered an era in which the main reason people think something is funny is that “it was so random”. So maybe this father actually thought that the laugh was supposed to be that saying “banana” out of the blue is nonsensical and doesn’t pay off any prior setup. Perhaps he would have had better luck getting a laugh from his daughter, Katy the Random Penguin of Doom.



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