My car hit 202,508 miles this month, so I pulled into the parking lot of Cuesta College so that Ellie could take the above photo of my odometer.

The fact that I went from 200,000 miles to 202,508 so quickly and the fact that I was in a parking lot in San Luis Obispo are not unrelated⁠—leaving California seems inadvis­able in our wintry political climate, so this year our vaca­tioning has been limited to road trips.  Before leaving for this one, we debated what to do about the big bunch of bananas on the kitchen counter: they would surely go bad before we got back, but it seemed like such a waste to throw them away.  I said we should take them along⁠—maybe we could snack on at least a couple of them before they spoiled, or maybe we’d find one of those community food pantries.  They’re not nearly as common as the little free libraries, but I’ve seen a few here and there.  But I guess that was mostly in Portland, and I didn’t see any along the streets of our first stop, Santa Cruz.  My sense of smell isn’t very good, but Ellie started to complain that the banana smell in the car was getting overwhelming, and at this point we were keeping an eye out as much for a dumpster as for a community pantry.  (I thought I saw a dumpster near the natural history muse­um, but it turned out to be a Cybertruck.)  We were headed back toward the freeway, and the bananas were probably headed for a gas station trash can before we got on the on­ramp, but then, suddenly, we found ourselves at a stoplight and on the corner was a guy with a cardboard sign asking for help⁠—it specifically said that he would accept not just money but food.  Ellie asked him if he wanted a bunch of ba­nanas, and his face lit up.  He was happy to take the bananas off our hands, and I was happy that we hadn’t trashed them prematurely.  All in all, a happy story!  Except for the fact that we live in an era when it would be easy to distribute resources such that no one would have to beg, yet this is the world we choose.  So I guess it’s actually a depressing story with some bananas in it.

One nice thing about living in California: every time the company I work for makes me do some corporate rigmarole online, like the annual cybersecurity training or signing off on a background check, there are always extra pages to click through about all the extra rights I have as a California resi­dent.  None of them are as good as health care or a universal basic income, but it’s pretty nice when the fine print says that such-and-such a tech company will collect, analyze, and possibly sell personal data types A through Z about you, and then the finer print says, “But if you live in California, we’ll only collect A, Q, and W.”  I mean, they’re almost certainly lying about that, but it’s still nice to see.

Amusingly phrased tidbit I ran across on Wikipedia:  “New Jersey has never adopted a state song.  A resolution to de­clare the song ‘Born to Run’ by Bruce Springsteen as the state song passed the Assembly, but failed in the state Sen­ate as the song’s lyrics depict a desire to leave New Jersey.”

Speaking of songs: last month I mentioned that, following Brian Wilson’s death, I listened to some Beach Boys songs and had been so taken by a few of them that I was planning to spend the next few months working my way through their whole catalogue.  The song that had most impressed me was called “Caroline, No”.  The lyrics were written by a guy named Tony Asher, and the key line as originally written was “Carol, I know”, but Brian Wilson misheard it, and both songwriters agreed that his misheard version of the title was much more interesting.  Not only were they correct about that, but they unintentionally future-proofed the song!  Here is what my names page says about Carol:

“Carol, which has enjoyed a spot among the most popular female names in the country, reached its peak in 1945.  It emerged virtually out of nowhere in 1907, and its peak of popularity lasted from 1935 to 1954.  The popularity of the name then experienced a near-total collapse, falling to a minuscule fraction of its peak by 1991.  This name would be most appropriate for Silent and Boomer characters.”

Now here’s Caroline:

“Caroline, which has enjoyed some popularity as a female name during the covered period, reached its peak in 2000.  It made a moderate climb in popularity starting in 1960, and its peak of popularity started in 1988 and continued right up to the end of these records.  This name would be most ap­propriate for Millennial and Zoomer characters.”

I started teaching for a living in 1994; over the years I have had many Carolines as students, but I don’t recall ever hav­ing had a single Carol.  So, considering that the song is about a young woman who has only just recently entered adult­hood, it just wouldn’t have worked under the original title after about 1990.  Whereas the new title works even better today than it did in 1966!

One of the Beach Boys songs I have run into contains the line, “Eat a lot / Sleep a lot / Brush ’em like crazy”.  From context, the pronoun “them” (or, rather, “’em”) must refer to teeth, but teeth are never actually mentioned.  This is at least the third song I’ve heard that uses a pronoun to refer to teeth without an explicit antecedent!  Spiderbait has a song that goes, “I’ve always liked the way / You brush three times a day / You like to keep ’em clean / You know just what I mean / But when I say your smile / Sparkles for a mile / You tell me what to do / To go and brush mine too”⁠—here both “’em” and “mine” refer to teeth, but the word “teeth” never appears in the song.  And the Beatles have a song about eat­ing too much chocolate that asserts that “You’ll have to have them all pulled out after the Savoy Truffle”.  But… who does this?  Using “brush” alone to implicitly refer to brushing teeth, yes.  I.e., I have no problem with the “You brush three times a day” part⁠—that sounds idiomatic enough.  I can ima­gine a parent telling a child, “Make sure you brush before bed” instead of spelling out, “Make sure you brush your teeth.”  But who says, “Go brush ’em before bed”?  That sounds bizarre to me.

By the way, that Beach Boys song is a track from the Smile sessions called “Vega-Tables”.  And speaking of vegetables, after moving to a house with a back yard, I tried planting a few things, but I don’t yet have enough interest in gardening to do more than scatter some seeds and then water the sprouts at irregular intervals during the summer.  Thus, my results have been mixed.  The oregano has been enough of a success to have taken over a bigger chunk of the garden than it had been allotted.  The Cherokee Purple tomato plant produced around twenty sizable tomatoes this year.  On the flip side, while my carrot seeds almost immediately sprout­ed, they haven’t really grown at all in three months.  I deci­ded to pull one up to see whether the roots were developing into actual carrots at all.  The answer:

Both my Calendar articles this month were gigantic mon­strosities summarizing a bunch of old comic books which had been used as source material for Marvel Cinematic Universe television shows.  To write these, I first had to reread a bunch of old comics.  And I discovered that toward the end of the 1980s, a bunch of jokes started popping up with a pop culture figure as the punchline:

Avengers #291, release date 1988.0119 written by Walt Simonson

Captain America #351, release date 1988.1108 written by Mark Gruenwald

Fantastic Four #328, release date 1989.0328 written by Steve Englehart

Note that it isn’t just one guy cracking these jokes⁠—they’re all by different writers.  It got me wondering whether there was any other figure who’d played the same role in anoth­er era, i.e., someone whose name could be dropped for a cheap joke due to universal name recognition and a similarly uni­versal acknowledgment that this person was a clown.  And it occurred to me that the answer was yes: I recall that in the ’00s, the same sorts of jokes popped up about Paris Hilton.  “It’s funny because I made a reference to a person towards whom we all share a mild contempt!”  And I reckon that in the ’00s it would have seemed equally likely that either figure would have become the focus of an authoritarian cult of personality that would knock American democracy off its moorings.