• Minor Mom emergency yesterday sent me out to the Westside, since my sister and her family--who live much closer--are staying at their summer place. Really. There's a long stretch of the drive that's one-way with no passing, and I generally try to get around any slow-moving traffic before I hit that. Like I imagine there won't be any slow-moving traffic two blocks later. I'm 53.
Anyway, as usual, I got stuck for about three miles behind a guy doing 30 all the way, and the whole time he never once used a cellphone!
• I was slightly discombobulated by the Mom business, so much so that I stopped for a fast-food breakfast sandwich, always a bad idea. I eventually got home and went back to cleaning the paint from some aluminum grid things I've been using to hang pots on for twenty-five years. I'd tried to paint them without etching them first, which you can't do with aluminum, as any idiot knows.
These things are great. They're like ceiling pot racks, but they hang vertically, 1/2" off the wall. And I can't find them anywhere anymore. The store they came from is no longer with us. It was the place where I began my collection of Taylor & ng mugs, the ones they call "Animates™" and I call "mugs with rabbits fucking on them". The hippos are nice, too.
Anyway, I'd bought some bio-degradable stripper with oranges on the label, and after I was through with the steel brush I put the racks in my cement-mixin' tub and poured the stripper over the top. And it smelled better than the sandwich did!
• Later I decided I deserved shrimp for dinner--I mean my Poor Wife did--and I was standing in line at the seafood counter when the woman in front of me asked if the live lobsters were fresh! *
• This was followed by news that Mitch Daniels' Gordian Knot trick of the day before will result--according to the county assessor, anyway--in the eliminated property tax being added back in to business property tax bills. Plus, the assessor has about $1.28 left in the bank to do the ordered reassement (an honest mistake, since Daniels and the rest of his party keep insisting that every agency of government, and all of its employees, have enormous slush funds of misused taxpayer dollars on hand). And Governor Daniels did not call a prime-time press conference to solve the problems with a wave of his magic wand!
And I Don't Give a Fug if you believe it.
*A technically permissible question, since captive lobsters do not eat, which, I suppose, is lucky for them since they aren't fed, either, but trust me, the customer in question wouldn't have gotten that right on a true-false test.
8 comments:
I'm actually ok with the lobster question, since freshly caught lobsters and lobsters that've been sitting in a tank for a long while are Different, and "freshness" is a suitable term to use for the difference.
I've been trying to find hangers for pots like that for ages...no luck.
Sigh.
Well,I don't know much about not "giving a fug," but I did buy three Fugs albums, which I still have, in Duluth, MN a long time ago. & yes, I do like boobs a lot.
Love the mug!
The lobster question may be technically permissible but it displays a rather naive faith in the ethics of commerce. Maybe I'm just a cynic, but asking a fishmonger or butcher if an item is fresh is on the order of meaningless social small talk— expecting an answer like "no, it's quite old but we keep it in the display case for people too stupid to ask" is certainly contrary to my experience, but then I've entered my pre-dotage.
Or, "May I help you?" or "How are you doing today?" or "If we can make your flight more comfortable please push the little button."
I'd be curious if anyone ever did a study of how much American speech is just wasted air, said either because a lawyer told you it had to be said, or because we're just uncomfortable with silence.
In Mr. Palomar, by Italo Calvino, Mr. P, in observing a blackbird couple, chirping back and forth, wonders if the blackbirds communicate in their chirping or in the perhaps coded silence between chirps. I wonder myself.
According to a good friend who was once head seafood buyer for a supermarket chain, in Europe they feed the live lobsters while in the US they don't. As a result, the quality of the live lobsters deteriorates rapidly in the US.
I had the penguin one.
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