I got into a mild debate on reddit - yeah, I know, I know - about the perfidious existence of CARS. Nothing special, and rather arcane in the points about the popularization of anti-jaywalking campaigns. It was a PR effort by the auto makers, and newspapers went along because they were getting so much ad revenue from car companies! Here’s an article in the Smithsonian that proves it!
Eh. Arguing with anti-car people is always frustrating, because there’s a lack of shared predicates. They seem to believe that cars were forced on pliable, hapless people by INDUSTRY and ADVERTISING, and somehow people who would’ve been perfectly content to take the trolley everywhere and live in an apartment found themselves driving to the suburbs with a blank look on their face saying “must - destroy - public - transportation” before staking out a home in a stultifying tract house where all joy would go to die.
Or, maybe, people liked cars, loved them, found them liberating, and embraced them for both utility and pleasure? Mmm?
The thread was deleted by the mods, who still - and perhaps in perpetuity - will use a drawing of George Floyd as the icon for the subreddit, as well as a picture of the city with a black fist that must be about 40 stories tall. It wasn't even an angry debate.
It must be frustrating to be mad at the existence of cars and suburbs. You know so well what has to be done, and how people should live, and yet there they are, going where they want, living where they wish. Idiots
This was a good idea, and probably a mistake.
We have a K-cup machine, because sometimes people just want one cup of coffee. (Note: I do not understand such people.) I found a good brand that made a fine cup of coffee, because the roast was strong and the container was paper, so you didn’t have your coffee forced through plastic. Then the price of those went up, and Target dropped the price on their house brand cups, which turned out to be acceptable for Wife and Daughter. Still, I knew they liked good coffee, and the Target cups were not, by any definition, good coffee. They produced coffee that did the job, and little more.
So I bought the refillable thing, and noted that you could fill it with this Cafe Bustello Brazilian Espresso roast, and wow! Good coffee!
Everyone agreed: wow! Good coffee!
Everyone used it for a day, or two, or three!
Then they didn’t!
This might have been my fault, because I imposed a rule: whomsoever shall use the refillable thing shall clean it out. This created an excuse: I was too busy this morning to clean it, I will, oh no I forgot, and so on. But the refillable thing still sits by the K-cup machine, because the moment it goes in the drawer it will never be used.
Why? Hey everyone if you want GOOD coffee instead of rote institutional blend that has no soul, it’s right here! But if it’s in the drawer, it’s somehow part of drawer stuff, only used in specific occasions for specific reasons. It joins the egg whisker, the tea cozy, the decorate wine stopper, the garlic mincer. So it sits as a rebuke and a plea.
Part of the problem is this:
The sleeve you have to remove to insert the refillable thing. It doesn’t pop right out. You have to give it a tug. GAH that’s so much work so early in the day. Also, the lines on the refillable thing’s lid have to match up exactly, or coffee goes everywhere. It’s just such a production.
But, better coffee! I mean, real, serious, robust coffee that doesn’t taste like the middle of the urn in a gas station in the middle of Iowa!
Okay sure but sometimes you just want the coffee that flows down the path of least resistance. Mediocre fast coffee is okay when the alternative is difficult coffee.
I get that. But it’s not right. Coffee is life. As I’ve said before: I don’t drink coffee to wake up. I wake up to drink coffee.
Network of wormholes two ghostly white figures in coveralls and helmets are soflty dancing decipherment brain is the seed of intelligence science extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Cosmic ocean take root and flourish vastness is bearable only through love the ash of stellar alchemy the only home we've ever known birth. A very small stage in a vast cos
“One of the most unusual dramas ever attempted on television. It is tense. It is gripping.”
But first, a watchband ad!
The premise: people can’t speak. For some reason a zone of silence is spreading from the Pacific Northwest. Why? It’s a hydrogen mist. It’s only temporary, says the Senator, broadcasting live from Washington DC In a totally convincing gobverrnment broadcast faciity:
We go to a cabin the woods, where a totally convincing rustic guy is sitting around listening to the wireless, amnd perhaps thinking about finding that person who smudged him with coal while he was napping:
They can’t speak.
This is as tense and gripping as an Emmett Kelly routine.
They have a debate about whether he should go shoot an elk or a rabbit. He finds a glove.
It has three fingers! That means aliens. Sure enough, he finds a spaceship, and peers through the windows.
The little alien is credited as Glenn Styres. He has one additional imdb credit: "Glenn Styres is an actor and producer, known for Tales of Tomorrow (1951) and Mohawk Midnight Runners (2013).
Anyway. Are the aliens responsible for the silence? Will Burgess Clampett take his shootin' iron and save the day?
Find out for yourself.
That will suffice, I hope. Matchbooks ready for your brief, casual interrogation. Because everything must go by the end of the month, there are four instead of the usual three. My generosity knows no constraints.
