When I was a kid, I pored over the Nielsen television ratings in the Los Angeles Times every week; the idea of being in a Nielsen household, and having such an outsized say in which shows survived and which ones got the axe, seemed like an immense privilege.  Thus, I was excited when a Nielsen rep­resentative came by my apartment in 1995 to say that my little one-person household had been selected… only to have the offer rescinded when we went through the list of ques­tions and I reported that, yes, I was planning to move out in less than a year.  (Grad school.)  Given my viewing habits at the time, I mostly would have been making the most popular programs appear that much more popular⁠—Friends and Seinfeld didn’t need my help⁠—but maybe my little contribu­tion to the ratings could have kept Profit on the air!  Hélas.

Anyway⁠—thirty years later, with no plans to move any time soon, my little two-person household was selected.  The Nielsen people called me repeatedly, but my phone number goes to my computer and only rings when I have the Google Voice window open, so they weren’t going to get me that way⁠—and they didn’t accept unscheduled calls.  Their voice­mails said to call some other number, which turned out to be a call scheduling service.  So we got a call scheduled at a time when both Ellie and I were home (one of their require­ments), and though I tried to point out up front that the written questionnaire I’d sent in indicated that we didn’t use a TV set to watch shows, the Nielsen rep assured me that the company was up to date with all the latest techno­logy.  Perhaps that was the problem, because I’m not: when she asked, “Do you have a Roku? Do you have a Fire Stick?”, I had no idea what she was talking about.  When she finally reached the end of her script and actually listened to us explaining that we watched things on computers, she said we didn’t qualify and hung up.

Back in the day I used to love going to the farmers’ market at the Oakland DMV, not just for the produce, but for the booths offering prepared food.  I’d pick up a pizza from Pizza Politana just about every Sunday morning, and get a seeded breadstick from Feel Good Bakery to take home, though sometimes it didn’t last long enough even to make it into the car.  Then, when I was getting my teaching credential, it turned out that there was a Feel Good Bakery booth outside the education building on campus where I could pick up a seeded breadstick during the break between my Thursday classes.  But I finished the program, and Feel Good Bakery stopped showing up at the farmers’ market, and for a few years there the only time I could get a seeded breadstick was when I happened to pass the Alameda exit on the 880 and took a detour.  It’s probably been a couple of years now since I had one.

Then I read that Feel Good Bakery had closed down perma­nently: their last day of business was Halloween.  Now that the breadsticks were unavailable, for several days I was consumed by an overwhelming craving for one.

Similarly, for years there has been a delicious strawberry coconut juice concoction at the Berkeley Bowl that I have picked up once or twice a year⁠—it’d be a lot more than that, but I don’t want to guzzle my way into having to buy room­ier clothes.  Then I noticed that it had disappeared from the end cap that holds the other locally made juices.  Suddenly strawberry coconut juice was my top shopping priority.  It never did come back, but I got the pineapple coconut juice that I don’t like as much just because it seemed so impera­tive to get it while I could, now that its cousin had vanished.

Also, I very rarely drink soda, and virtually never mass mar­ket soda with corn syrup in it… but the one exception is that I do occasionally drink my favorite soda from my childhood, Cactus Cooler.  Why?  Because you can’t get it in Northern California!  A while back I picked up a box of twelve cans on one of my trips to So Cal, and they lasted for twenty-one months (and that was with Ellie pitching in to drink a couple of cans).  So what did I do on my most recent trip to Orange County?  Why, I bought another box of this beverage I very rarely consume!  Because you can’t get it here!  I may well be set for Cactus Cooler from now into 2028.  The moral of the story is that while the Rolling Stones may assert that you can’t always get what you want, in my case I always want what I can’t get.

The reason I was in Orange County was that Ellie wanted to go to a concert to see the opening act, a guy named Wes Parker; he is from Virginia, and this was actually his first time playing the west coast.  When we got to the venue, it turned out that there were two performance spaces, and we were directed to the smaller one.  I am not being hyperbolic when I say that I have taught test prep classes in larger rooms than this.  I counted the attendees and didn’t quite make it to a hundred.  About half of them⁠—the younger ones⁠—were clearly there to see this Wes fellow.  The other half, the ones with white (or no) hair, were there to see the headline act, a band called One More Satellite featuring 64-year-old Dean DeLeo of Stone Temple Pilots on guitar.  Stone Temple Pilots used to play arenas, and One More Satellite set up the sound as if that’s where they were.  In a small room with fifty people in it the sound was ludicrously loud, and while Ellie had planned to stick around after Wes Parker had left, she said, and not as a joke, that she could feel one of her eardrums about to rupture and that we had to go.  (The couple of songs we did hear sounded like off-brand STP, which I would happily have stuck around for, but the vocals were by some British guy who was no Scott Weiland, so I didn’t mind leaving early.)

While in OC we met up with one of my old friends from work who is now getting her M.D. at UC Irvine; we went to the OC Zoo, which apparently opened in 1985 and is less than three miles from the house where I grew up, but I hadn’t even known it existed.  The zoo focuses on animals of the south­western U.S., including a number of big cats: cougars, bob­cats, ocelots.  “Why do they have so much lions here?” I heard a boy ask his dad.  Later we encountered a girl who excitedly reported, “This zoo has so much cool and pretty animals!”  Possibly cute if these kids were four, but they looked to be around ten.  And understandable if they were English language learners, but to all appearances they were the offspring of my blond classmates from my years back in these parts.  My credentialing program had mentioned that grammar was no longer part of the curriculum, and here was the bitter evidence.  I couldn’t help but think, gee, just a stone’s throw from here is Taft Elementary.  Beam these kids into my fourth-grade classroom back in 1981, and Helen Burch would’ve set ’em straight.

I’m a little unclear about what’s going on with health insur­ance in the U.S.⁠—I’ve heard stories about rates tripling, but when the open enrollment period kicked off back in October, my increase was relatively modest, and by downgrading my plan one level I will actually be paying slightly less in 2026 than I did in 2025.  At least that’s what it looks like right now⁠—maybe on January 1st I’ll get a letter announcing the 200% increase.  One thing I did discover: when I signed up for my 2026 plan, and told Ellie what I’d be paying, she was startled, because it turned out that I’d be paying quite a bit less than what she was paying, and when she logged into the Covered California site, she couldn’t find the offers I was receiving.  It turns out that, counterintuitively, in California, ACA health insurance actually gets cheaper with age, be­cause the subsidies increase faster than the premiums.  I.e., for the same plan, based on the same income, my underlying bill is 64% higher than hers, but my subsidy is 177% higher.  That struck me as unfair to the Millennials, until I remem­bered that when I was Ellie’s age, I had no health insurance at all because the ACA subsidies didn’t exist yet.

Speaking of age: I went to a couple of museums this month (one down in OC with Ellie, one up here with my friend Amy, whom you may recognize from Radio K), and I realized that every time I look at the little plaque next to an artwork, I automatically calculate the artist’s ages at the creation of the work and at death.

I wanted to send Ellie a crow emoji (long story), and since I don’t really know how emojis work, I always copy them from web sites where I find them.  The result:

But Ellie replied that she didn’t see the problem, attaching a screenshot of what she had received:

I replied with a screenshot of what it looked like to me, with the blue bird and the black square.  She replied:

I poked around in some hieroglyphics archives and was surprised to find an almost perfect match.  I sent her the image I had found:

Her reply:

I had to sign a document electronically.  It is interesting to me that, with no particular effort on my part, my signature looks the same whether I’m writing it with a pen or whether I’m using the anterior side of the proximal knuckles of my index and middle fingers to manipulate a trackball.

Near the end of the month the Nielsen people called back⁠—and not just once, as my call logs showed a slew of missed calls from their number.  I got back to them and explained that we’d already been rejected because we didn’t have a TV, but the representative said that Nielsen actually runs sever­al versions of the TV ratings simultaneously and that the unit she worked for definitely wanted us.  I warned her a few times that they wouldn’t get much data, since our idea of staying in and watching some TV meant sitting on the couch watching Masterchef Australia episodes from 2011 on a com­puter monitor, but the rep was very eager to get us enrolled.  But after learning that this would mean carrying around Nielsen trackers that would be listening for TV signals, Ellie didn’t want to do it, so that was that.

And on the subject of TV, a housekeeping note: the TV sec­tion of my Calendar archive was getting clogged up with Marvel Cinematic Universe shows, so I have moved all the MCU stuff to its own archive, with both MCU TV shows and movies listed by release date.