Last month I was on a long flight.  I didn’t want to con­sciously experience the six hours I would be wedged into an airplane seat⁠—especially since I had a late boarding number on a Southwest flight, which meant a middle seat⁠—so I de­liberately stayed up all night in order to be able to sleep through the entire flight.

Sure enough, once we took off I dozed off pretty much im­mediately.  Except after a few minutes, I felt a tap-tap-tap on my knee.  I looked over, alarmed, to find that the guy in the window seat had deliberately woken me up.

“You know, the seat reclines,” he said.

I quickly explained that tilting the seat back by three-quarters of an inch gains me no advantage while it does inconvenience the person behind me, so I never push the recline button.  Then I went back to sleep.

A few minutes later, tap-tap-tap.

“The headrest folds up,” the guy observed.

I wondered whether this was his way of telling me that my head had slumped over in his direction, but that didn’t seem to be the case.  “Okay,” I said.  I went back to sleep.

A few minutes later, tap-tap-tap again.

“Have you ever flown Southwest before?” the guy asked.

I said that I had flown it about a hundred times and went back to sleep.

He did not tap my knee again.  The next time he woke me up, it was by spilling hot coffee on my leg.

We arrived at our hotel, the outside of which looked like this:

Those air conditioners seem to me to have been not so much “installed” as “hurled into the wall by the Incredible Hulk”.

They say that pineapple is “the food that eats you back”, due to the enzyme in it that breaks down protein.  I bring home a pineapple from Berkeley Bowl every now and again, and it has never caused me any problems.  But on my trip one side of my upper lip got slightly abraded⁠—a combination of de­hydration and sunburn, I guess⁠—and when I tried to eat some pineapple, that spot swelled up like a balloon.  It took a full day before I no longer looked disfigured.

Back in 1997, not long after the Cardiff Movie Database had rebranded as “IMDb”, I was clicking around it looking at movies that had appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and discovered that one of them, High School Big Shot, didn’t have a plot summary.  In those days, you didn’t need an account to contribute material, so I wrote one and posted it to the site.  Not long thereafter, uploads by unregistered users were no longer allowed, so that turned out to be my sole contribution to IMDb.  Now, nearly thirty years later, every time someone uploads High School Big Shot to You­tube, I get a Google Alert.

The MST3K episode guide notes, “This movie is the most depressing thing we’ve ever seen.”  It goes on and on about the movie’s many dispiriting moments, such as “the scene where his deadbeat dad asks the kid if he’ll split his last five dollars with him. Now, both father and son can each go out on two-dollar-and-fifty-cent dates with gals they really want to impress. My God! There’s not enough Prozac in the world to medicate the feelings of despair my memory dredges up from that scene!”  What I did not discover until just now is that the kid in question was played by an actor named Tom Pittman, who had died after driving his Porsche off the road in the Hollywood Hills and plunging into a 150‑foot ravine, an eight-foot piece of guardrail skewering the windshield.  Those scenes in High School Big Shot were bleak enough already.  Now that I know they’re also posthumous…?

“Say Say Say” popped up on my car radio and it occurred to me that Paul McCartney was born sixteen years before Michael Jackson (1942 vs. 1958) and has now lived for six­teen years after Michael Jackson’s death (2009 vs. 2025).

I was looking at a list of the most expensive paintings ever sold and was amused to see that one was called Yo, Picasso.  I assumed it was a postmodern commentary on Cubism until I noticed that the date given for the piece was 1901.  This perplexed me for a moment until I realized, duh, it’s in Spainsh.

There’s a stain on my old jacket that isn’t coming out.  I’ve seen various remedies suggested, often involving baking soda, and I’ll probably try some of those eventually.  It’s not an urgent concern because I don’t wear my old jacket very much.  In fact, I thought to myself, “Wow, I’m sure glad this is just my old jacket and not my new jacket!”  See, I have three jackets.  I bought my “old jacket” in 1998.  I received my “rain jacket” as a present in 2001.  And then I bought my “new jacket” as recently as 2004.  It also cost a bit more than my old jacket.  So I probably wouldn’t be so nonchalant about things if it were to get a tough stain on it this close to its date of purchase.

Some of my students were complaining that my webcam microphone was making crackling sounds⁠—I guess it has hit the desk or the floor pretty hard a few times over the years.  So I bought a new webcam.  Given, you know, all of this⁠—here is where I gesture vaguely at the nation’s collapse into fascist oligarchy⁠—I would prefer not to give money to Ama­zon to the extent that I can reasonably avoid it, so after some poking around I found that the webcam I had selected was also sold by a company called Newegg.  So I attempted to order it from there.  The site told me that I needed an ac­count, so I tried to register one.  I received an error message stating that the email address I had entered was already associated with an existing account.  So I went through the “forgot my password” routine and got into my account.  I had indeed placed one order before.  Here is what I had ordered:

I guess PCMCIA cards haven’t really been a thing for a while, huh?  Yet this can’t be that outdated.  After all, it’s even newer than my new jacket!  That’s pretty darn new!