Good morning. Hello. How are you? #899 (again)
Bouncing guts, dishwasher neuroses, Zevia rebrand, plastic toxic waste dumps, Mattel-Aqua detente, James Beard foundation harassing Sam, a weird parenting challenge
Good morning! Seems somewhere around issue number 897 I skipped an issue number. Whoops. So we’re gonna do issue 899 again. I’m sure I’ve made another mistake in numbering over this many issues, but I want to at least plausibly convince myself that issue number 900 is correct. So we will do it tomorrow. Damn. That is a lot of issues. Crazy. This is a crazy habit. This whole thing is crazy.
Also, I never talk about it but today’s Wordle was so hard I feel like it deserves special mention. Really custom engineered to screw with all of my Wordle skillz. I made it, but, as Wordle says, “phew.”
I think I have a theory why my abdomen muscles hurt: my running. I’ve been pulling a Kate Bush this last week or so, and I’ve been Running Up That Hill. Well, jogging. Specifically, the hill in our neighborhood which is maybe, oh, I don’t know, maybe 20, 30 yards at maybe a 7 or 8% grade. It’s not insane, but it’s enough to wind you, enough to get the heart pumping. And as someone who has not done any real jogging or running since, mm, I’m gonna say 1988, it is “A Lot.” Now, I am not particularly larger than the last time you saw me, but I’ve always had a gut, save for periods of extreme starvation perhaps three times in my adult life. And when I’m jogging, well, maybe that guy goes bouncing? And maybe that bouncing causes pain, like a well-endowed woman running bra-free in some 70’s flick? Maybe? I don’t know, I’m just theorizing here.
We will skip further injury commentary except to say someone out there recommended compression gloves for my arthritis and I have been wearing them for three nights now and so far no improvement but who knows. Really no skin off my back to keep trying. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Aug is gone for the second time and we will miss him. He really is a great house guest. We watched the Martin-Amis-penned 1980 sci-fi film Saturn 3 staring Farrah Fawcet, a very young Harvey Keitel (whos dialogue was completely overdubbed) and an older Kirk Douglas. It was not as bad as I thought it would be. Somewhat prescient in this AI era.
Aug’s only house guest sin is that he has not mastered my absolutely neurotic dishwasher silverware organization system. Am I alone in this? The first two squares of the silverware rack are for forks, spoons and butter knives. The third is for steak knives, point down. The fourth is for any other washable knives, point down. And then the final four are for all other utensils - spatulas, peelers and the like. Now, I’m not saying I’m going to put a sign up to explain this to guests, but I am saying a) I’ve thought about it, and b) I’m neurotic enough about it that my wife has essentially (dish) washed her hands of the entire situation and just leaves things on top of the dishwasher for me to deal with, which is just fine with me because that way things can be nice and organized.
But if you are a guest, and that’s you’re only sin, well, then, you are a good guest indeed.
Also guests use a lot of glasses. So many glasses. This is because they eschew the hippie soda Emma and I drink like water.,
SPEAKING OF WHICH. Zevia changed their branding and it’s so… weird? Generic? Like they took their nice, sparking, effervescent branding and turned it into something that looks, literally, like an in-house brand from a Safeway in the 80’s. I am so confused. LOOK at this:
So weird. I love Zevia. Except they IPO’d in the ZIRP-era IPO craze and they should not have. I bought their stock on day 3 after the IPO dust settled, and it is down (checks Schwab) 74% since then. Ouch. I will hold it forever though. I mean I suppose it’s good people got their liquidity event without selling to Coca Cola or Pepsi, but… what’s the incentive for anyone to work there now I wonder. Did they…. outsource this new branding? I don’t even terribly mind the lettering, but the box! The old box is so much better!
OK so the New York Times had a (front page!) article about ex Barbarian, old friend, ex Bostonian Sam Fore, who has been nominated for a James Beard award, except now they are investigsting her via some messed up new mechanism to make sure that people who win the awards are not terrible people. In concept this seems okay, except the way the thing was set up is so bad, and so predictably bad.
It really is depressing routinely watching organizations reinvent the wheel when it comes to this sort of thing (ahem Bluesky), making systems that are expertly co-opted by trolls and ne’erdoweells. Like… hire an expert! Hire a consultant! These people so did not think any of this through. In this case someone misused the anonymous reporting system to complain of targeted harrassment from Sam, when in fact all she did was make a few specifically anonymized tweets about terrible people in general. Sam said it best when she said to the private investigator (!) “you’ve been talking to me for ninety minutes and you can’t figure out who I was talking about so how is this targeted harassment?”
Also, this badass quote from Sam, just so badass: “These people have no idea what it’s like to be a woman of color in this business,” Ms. Fore said. “What they don’t understand is that I exist despite them. Winning a Beard wasn’t even on my list of goals.”
I will also say that Sam is one of the kindest, most empathetic, heartfelt employees I have ever had the pleasure of working with, across, oh, a thousand or so people.
So there has been this long, long battle between Mattel and Barbie and the band Aqua, recorders of the hit song “Barbie Girl” (fun fact, “Barbie Girl” is a great duet karaoke Jam for Emma and I). Back last year, when Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film was in production, Variety had a good overview of the situation and the bad blood between the two, which involves Mattel suing Aqua’s label and losing back in the day.
BUT! If you listen closely to the very end of the most recent Barbie trailer, you will notice a very quiet, brief snippet of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” as the trailer ends.
We all owe a profound debt of gratitude to Greta Gerwig for mending fences and bringing the world what it so profoundly wants.
Now Greta if you could go reunite the Star Trek films and tv shows and install a new creative regime over there, we’d love you even more.
So following up on yesterday’s depressing news about plastic recycling leaving small microplastics in our water, I was reading this Times article updating us on the situation, the never-ending situation, literally, on dealing with our country’s nuclear waste from the cold war nuclear weapons program and how completely and utterly fucked up it all is, how hopeless it all is, how it will never, ever be fixed for hundreds, thousands of years. Every presidential administration kicks the can down the road. The Hanaford site, in Washington state, is especially problematic. It’s not far from the Columbia river and it is slowly advancing toward the river, potentially dumping millions of gallons of toxic sludge into the main drinking water for a whole region of the country. Never mind the fact that when we built the site during the war we promised the indigenous people we would return it to them after the war clean. Hahaha yeah surprise, we lied to the first people!
Anyway I was realizing that in reality, the nuclear waste situation is really not that much different from the plastic situation, except it’s actually microscopically small compared to the plastic situation. The article states one or two places where Dept of Energy sites have already leaked a small amount of radioactive material into our aquifers, for example: “Radioactive plumes are contaminating the Great Miami aquifer near Cincinnati.”
But with plastic, this is already happening everywhere.
Plastic needs to be treated like nuclear waste. It is toxic, it lasts forever, it can’t get into our water.
But it occurred to me there is one nifty loophole right now. I’m sure you know about how upset people get when the government tries to make a nuclear waste dump in their town, county, state. There are probably all sorts of laws about it. But! How many laws are there about making a plastic waste dump? I mean, don’t call it a dump, call it a reclamation center or a collection or an archive or something. But I bet, by comparison, it’d be so easy to start a plastic waste safe disposal site from a regulatoru point of view. Because we’re terrible about regulating plastic. So that’s nice, at least.
Problem is it would need to be the size of, say, oh, Nebraska.
But good news! Nebraska is going to dry up and turn back into dust anyway, so maybe we can just dump all the plastic from the world into an arid former Nebraska and make one giant plastic waste dump with, like, a 800 mile safe zone around it.
Last night Jane went into this weird obsesseive K-Hole where she was pretending to be a baby and trying to lick me and it was fun for, like, the first minute or two and then I asked her to stop and to use her words for an increasingly desperate, say, five minutes, where she just kept trying to lick me and would only say “waaah” and it was so far beyond funny and I just couldn’t make it stop and it got more and more disturbing and it was the most uncomfortable thing. Eventually I had to pick her up and put her in her bedroom, which made her legitimately scream for a while. She came back in calmed down and no longer trying to lick me but still wouldn’t use her words for, oh, another 30 minutes. We slowly returned to normal over the next half hour and daddy-Jane-dance-party (Mø, Blackpink, Breeders, Dinosaur Jr) but man, it was so weird.
Later as I was putting her to bed we talked about it a bit and I reminded her of the book she was reading about bodies and consent and she finally said “I didn’t respect you.” She wouldn’t say sorry so then we had another long talk about how the secret to saying sorry is to say it as quickly as possible because that’s the easiest time. I’ve told her this before but she had forgotten. It clicked more this time and she finally said sorry. She said she was a baby and wanted to lick me and I said you can try once but if I say no you need to stop. She said okay. So I think that is all resolved but, man. Just uncomfortable.
Is five too young to teach your kid about safe words?
Justa mix today, mix of new and old. Haven’t thought about Texas in years and they just popped into my head. Great track. Ditto the album cut “Baby I’m a Fool” by Spiritualized that this week, finally, after oh 15 years, I suddenly think is great. Plus Space Needle! Does anyone remember Space Needle? God they were so good. Aqua, of course, and it’s spiritual twin from t.A.T.u. And new music from Val Forgione of Mistle Thrush. And a new FIDLAR that is probably not about the Cha Cha in Seattle but may as well be. Great song great bar. And Blackpinks’ collaboration with Selena Gomez, for which I watched the video last night and… yeah. That was bonkers.
Until tomorrow!