Preface: I aim to get to No. 100 before I end this series. Four to go. Thoughtward!
🎱 The I-Me-Mine Rule: Whenever a film or novel makes an early reference to a mine, you can be sure there will be an accident in said mine later in the story. This convention is a close cousin of the Old-Yeller Rule: the more beloved the family dog, the more likely that a tragedy will befall said dog, especially if it performs a heroic act.
😫 Taking this a step further: In 1950s movies, no one seemed to question the ethics of making children cry for dramatic effect. Did they all assume young kids don’t remember and so that made it OK? (See: circumcisions.) Our mid-century-modern diminishment of children’s pain made it convenient for films like Giant (1956) to justify shooting a scene (please click to view) in which Pedro the Turkey transitions from family pet to surprise dinner guest:
I’m sure worse scenes have been shot in the name of entertainment — Clockwork Orange springs to mind here. I only hope that all those actors’ memories were, in fact, short.
😠 Speaking of what now passes for popular entertainment: I’d like to propose a boycott of show-runners whose means of attracting and holding an audience is to craft a uniquely repellent bad guy, whose main purpose is to make sure we spend one episode after another longing for the bad guy’s comeuppance. I had thought this tired practice had peaked with King Joffrey (Game of Thrones) but no, it goes on and on and on, in the name of draining viewers’ wallets.
Streaming, if I may redefine the term, is the process by which money streams from your bank account to those of Amazon, Netflix, Apple and Paramount. Did I miss anyone?
💔 Poem for Soured Lovers:
Our love was like a lemon wedge
I gave you a squeeze
and was left with the rind
🏛 I seldom make endorsements (I’m no influencer, so who would care!) but I must say how pleased I’ve been over the years with our Capital One Quicksilver card. I signed up for this card years ago because it has no annual fee and 1.5% cash-back on purchases. But other features have also come in handy: my card and my spouse’s have unique numbers and security codes; there is no fee for international transactions; and Capital One notifies me via email of international transactions, possible duplicate charges and other unusual activity. Say what you will about big-corporation banking, Capital One seems to have a secure system in place.
🥨 Pretend you own a supermarket and you are über-organized and shopper-friendly. Your decision: among what other products would you shelve bread crumbs?
Ingles, our local supermarket, decided to shelve bread crumbs to the left of ramen noodles and matzo meal, to the right of instant mashed potatoes, and above the prefab stuffing mix (see image above). This placement does serious injustice to bread crumbs, not to mention shoppers.
Bread crumbs, corn meal and like dry food staples belong in the same aisle as flour, sugar and rice — they surely have nothing in common with instant mashed potatoes and ramen. I say, bad decision, Ingles! But where would you put bread crumbs?
🥚 I am in my seventies and I’ve had several colonoscopies. (It is true — and it rhymes!) As my fellow subjects know, the sweet-salty colonoscopy prep drink — and whatever you choose to mix it with — is nothing one’s palate ever forgives or forgets. Little did I know that, due to my chosen mixture, ginger ale would forever be ruined for me.
My most recent colonoscopy made me think, why not invent a tongue-cover so that people wouldn’t have to taste that shit on its way down the chute. But of course, someone already thought of this — I found just such a product on Amazon:
Next time I need a colonoscopy, I’m checking this out — it may be my next endorsement.
😱 Chapman University of California recently released its 2025 list of top American Fears, things you and I supposedly fear the most, based on its survey of 1,015 adults. Here are the top five items on Chapman’s fear list:
- Corrupt government officials
- People I love becoming seriously ill
- Economic/financial collapse
- Cyber-terrorism
- People I love dying
My first observation: I could argue that the root causes of these fears are all interrelated, hence not independent fears. My second observation: One’s fears are highly correlated to one’s age-cohort. For example, people in their 20s don’t need to worry so much about the people they love becoming ill or dying — that gets real a few decades later for most of us. What young people really need to fear is how AI has a non-zero possibility of upending everything we know about authenticity and the role and value of people. Amazingly, that didn’t even make Chapman’s list. Let’s check in with them next year, shall we?
🥸 My spouse asked me, “How do you spell Borders, like the book store?” My response: B‑A‑N‑K-R-U-P-T. I was sort of proud of that, being that snappy comebacks generally come to me ten minutes too late. In fact, my comeback was so good that I felt compelled to write it down before I forgot. So you’re welcome — weeks after the fact.
Here’s another: “That isn’t a wine glass.” “Any glass that has wine in it is a wine glass.”
I felt compelled to write that down too.
