#41: Disasters large and small

Actual updates

Okay. First of all, to address last issue, I’m over it. I came off really whiny, self-indulgent, and adolescent, and it was embarrassing, but I’m not editing out embarrassing moments here if they occur at the time of publication. Occasionally, even at my age, I can revert back to the way I acted as a teen, which I should have been embarrassed by even at the time. Anyway. Don’t worry about me. I’m getting on with it and so should we all.

Unfortunately, this message was not received by the inanimate objects of our house.

First, our car. It’s 12 years old, and it hasn’t had any real problems - once, some piece of plastic that covered something underneath the car came loose, and it made a very serious-sounding noise but was very simple to fix, and a couple times we got hit or scraped by other cars, and those were the only repairs we had had to do in the lifetime of the vehicle. But one day last month, Matt got in the car to leave work and noticed that it was making a really terrible sound - and this time it actually was serious. Like, multiple digits in the repair bill serious. A few things were all corroded and rotting away and falling apart, all at the same time, and it was very good we took it in when we did, since it could have failed in a very dangerous way.

So, okay, car is now running fine again, although we know it’s reaching the end of its time; once things start falling apart in this serious of a way, you know other parts might also be on the verge, and it is old enough to be a whole 7th grader now, so that’s not unreasonable. We’ve got our eyes out for our next car, but this one’s working for now.

No sooner did we resolve the car thing than we had another surprise.

Despite living on top of a hill (well, our neighbor on one side is at the top), our basement can get a little puddly1 when it’s been rainy for a sustained amount of time, or if it’s been a huge downpour, so we were not unduly alarmed when we had some puddles after a couple wet days.

Until I was washing dishes that night. The water wasn’t warming up, and I had an unpleasant suspicion - we checked another tap and couldn’t get hot water out of it, either. The guess I’m sure you’ve made is correct: those puddles weren’t the regular rain kind. Our hot water heater had given up the ghost, wetly, all over our basement floor - right after its warranty expired, too2.

I spent an afternoon on the phone with different places, making and cancelling service requests, and then got it replaced - quickly and easily, as it turns out, by some plumbers who were really decent and friendly - but of course that was another sizeable bill. I’m glad it happened now, while we still live here, and not later once we’ve moved and there are renters in the house; I don’t want this place to fall apart around their ears. With that in mind, there’s a phone call I really need to make to get our front porch fixed!3

Speaking of the things I need to do in order to be ready to move, I’ve got one box checked already, and another coming up: I finally used my ancient gift certificate for a tattoo, and I love what I used it on - I can heartily recommend getting your friends’ art tattooed on your body - and in a week or so, I’ve got an appointment down at the RMV to get (or… fulfil some requirements in order to get? unclear) my learner’s permit, at which point I’ll sign up with one of the feuding driving schools4 in the next neighborhood over, and have a few really weird weeks while I learn to drive. No one normal teaches driving, I’ve confirmed this with everyone I know who has taken lessons. The weirdness ranges from “just kind of eccentric” to “this is actually a crime,” so hopefully I just get the kind that doesn’t have a great sense of how to talk to other people and not the kind who gets gropey in the car.

It’s forward motion, baby!!

What am I reading

I am reading the exquisite work of literature known as Shirtless Bear-Fighter 2.

If you’re not familiar with Shirtless Bear-Fighter, it is a comic, and it is about this guy who - okay, I can hear you assuming it’s about a guy who doesn’t wear a shirt and who fights bears, and you know what they say about assumptions! Specifically, that in a case like this, they’re correct. He does not, nay, cannot wear a shirt, and he must punch a bear in the face at least once every 24 hours. BUT it’s more than that. Shirtless is also his name. He’s shirtless by name and by nature. And he was also raised by bears; he’s only punching out evil ones. So let that be a lesson to you. Also he often doesn’t wear pants.

Furthermore, this book puts the “comic” back in comic - it’s actually funny, which I feel is true of about 85% of the comics I really love but tragically absent from so many - and there is no bear-related pun they won’t make. The special military branch in it is engaged in counter-bearorrism. For very serious situations, they have surface-to-bear missiles. When weird and spooky doings are afoot, that’s a bearanormal disturbance. You get the idea.

Do yourself a favor. Shirtless Bear-Fighter. Read it. With your shirt on (or off? that part is up to you).

Some links

Maybe the red flag should have been wanting to emulate Captain Cook in the first place, you know? Anyone who thinks he’s cool may well have problems considering the effects of their actions on other people. Dad said, “We’re going to follow Captain Cook”: How an Endless Round-the-World Voyage Stole My Childhood

No, literally, this is the heist of a big coin. Big. Bigbigbig. The Big Coin Heist

This has nothing to do with Proust! It’s about how the bodies that determine time calculate an exact second, and whether that’s even ultimately possible, with some history on how it’s been done in the past. Super interesting stuff. In Search of Lost Time

The initial premise of this story - that three very young kids were left at a train station 40 years ago, and no one had ever been able to identify who their parents had been - messed my heart up. But aside from triggering my “small child in distress not being helped” panic5, this is a good yarn and a detective story. Three Abandoned Children, Two Missing Parents, and a 40-Year Mystery

You know, while I think it’s important for people in relationships to have some things they don’t share with the other party, there’s a line, and the line is “do they have an Academy Award?” His Secret Life

Okay, so, one of the people profiled in this article is basically a character in Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. I wonder if Stephenson based the character on a person he met in real life, and if so, if it was this same guy. Some of the issues the article raises are ones that the book takes to their logical, if horrible, conclusion. Also, I do have to tell you right off the top, moderate your expectations: nowhere in this article does it make the “30-50 feral hogs” reference. It’s still good, though! Just… know what to expect. Apocalypse Sow: Can Anything Stop the Feral Hog Invasion?

This is a completely bonkers premise - what if there was a brontosaurus living in a remote part of Africa? Better send in an Englishman to find it!! - but the truly wild thing is that a few days after reading this piece about it, the same story came up in a book I was reading that took place in the same era. The Dog and the Dinosaur

This is a gutwrenching story, beautifully presented, about a boat full of migrants from Mauritania that didn’t make it to its intended destination in the Canary Islands, and instead washed up in Tobago - all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. Adrift

Apparently this has now become a “rich guy getting scammed and/or kidnapped” newsletter, because I think I’ve had an article about such a situation in each of the last 3 issues. Here’s this month’s! An Alabama Kidnapping That’s Stranger than Fiction

It’s not an “amazing story” in the sense of anything really wild and crazy happening leading to cheesesteaks becoming popular; I think the amazingness is that it happened at all - cheesesteaks are great, don’t get me wrong, and I want one right now, specifically the one where the restaurant changed up the spice profile - but it’s a food that’s specific to one city in America, and now it is also big in one city in Pakistan, and that’s pretty cool. The Amazing Story of How Philly Cheesesteaks Became Huge in Lahore, Pakistan

So Venice has these big seawalls now that prevent storms from flooding the city catastrophically, which is great - except they are having to use them CONSTANTLY instead of for a really big storm once every year or two. This is a really interesting deep dive (sorry) (well, a little) and it doesn’t make me want to go back to Venice any less, that’s for sure! Venice is Saved! Woe is Venice6

I just thought this story on women in trucking was a cool look at some people whose lives are very different from my own. Highway Star

This is so nice! Scientists Taught Pet Parrots to Video Call Each Other - and the Birds Loved It

This is so not nice! But really, we’re doomed, truly fucked on a cellular level, and while this story is interesting scientifically, it’s just sheer horror all the way down. Plastic Waste Found Chemically Bonded to Rocks in China

Speaking of sheer horror all the way down. Why even bother, you know? Definitive Proof that Publishing Your Novel Won’t Make You Happy

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

The first two here are because I was feuding with my little external CD7 drive, and I kept getting about half of a song played and then it would skip through the rest and I’d have to start over. The plus side, when it came to this first one, is that I've determined the intro could be a good air guitar edit; you've got over a minute of guitar before the vocals even come in, so there's something to work with there. Stay tuned to see me trying it next year (I already have my song for this year).

This was the other one I heard (part of) at least a dozen times. Good thing it’s a jam.

This new Caroline Rose album is a heartbreak album, so it’s a step away from their previous couple albums that told the story of a (fictional?) popstar in the making. This one is personal and very real; it’s also explicitly a queer relationship that ended that spurred the making of this album. It was love at first listen, for me. It was really tough for me to decide which song to share; this isn’t the only one that really resonated with me, but it’s one of them. You should probably go listen to the whole thing, though, and then pay real cash dollars for it, because we support artists in this house!!

This month’s top 5: Bears

In honor of Shirtless Bear-Fighter, here are the best bears.

1. I love Kermode bears, aka spirit bears. They’re black bears, but they have a genetic mutation that causes their fur to be a lighter color - so they look kind of golden-white. They mostly live on 3 islands off the coast of BC, so they’re very much a niche bear. Yes, this is bear hipsterism, and I’m all right with it.

2. Grizzlies are always going to be a top tier bear. You already know, as a human alive on planet earth, that they are the size of a family car and can turn you into a pile of disorganized meat as soon as look at you, but they don’t go around trying to find people to eat - they’d rather be left alone, even by other bears. They have a cool hump on their backs, they live in incredibly scenic and solitary surroundings, and the time I saw one in the wild relatively nearby (in a very safe and supervised situation) is an absolutely core memory.

3. I personally think of black bears as kind of the “Cs get degrees” of bears - sure, they’re bears, but they act like raccoons, if raccoons were the size of stumpy cows. They want to eat trash and take it easy. This is very relatable. I hereby issue the black bear the “Most Hangoutable Bear” award. Note: please do not attempt to actually hang out with any bears.

4. Bear from Reservation Dogs

5. The Bears With Chairs Precision Lawn Chair Drill Team, whom we saw at Pride one year and I’ve never stopped thinking about since

Short issue this month! I was about to say something here about what I’m incensed about politically right now8, but then I heard the telltale sound of a cat horking up some barf, so, uh... gotta go! May your cats never yack on your rugs, and if you don't have cats, may you always remain safe from unwanted barf.