From my decision decades ago to teach myself how to bake and cook – with Julia Child’s help – so as to lighten McDonald’s load of my money, to my spare room’s many months’ supply of staples like toothpaste, shampoo, paper towels, dental floss, dish detergent, cleaning supplies, &c. – because I hate wasting time shopping for that sort of stuff weekly or even monthly – to my house being basically a big man cave, decorated throughout in a manner not unlike a museum gallery, with framed vintage film one-sheets, insert posters, and lobby cards; 20×16″ enlargements of the best Apollo program photos; poster size signed prints of the Rita Hayworth airbrush artwork of Philip Castle, who did the poster artwork for “Full Metal Jacket” and “A Clockwork Orange”; display cases of intricately-detailed Apollo spacecraft models; and my own photos, pencil life drawings, and WWII-style flight jacket pinup paintings, some of my life choices are serving me well these days.

None of it was planned for the current circumstances, but it all seems ideally suited, and believe me, I feel extraordinarily lucky.

I almost forgot that I now get to see much more often this item from Charlie Duke that’s been on the lunar surface – with tiny flecks of moon dust on it, visible in the inset – because it’s on the wall just to my right at the home PC.

Click for a larger version

That piece of netting likely came from the smallest and most easily unsnapped section toward the front of the Lunar Module – a souvenir that most if not all crews took home with them – which is visible behind Gene Cernan in this photo.

A side effect: Funnily enough, though these dishes and others that I’ve made in the last five or six weeks are all quite tasty and not exactly low-calorie, I’ve dropped several pounds eating only the things I’ve made and no fast food. Pretty telling, that.

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“Apple Card”? Tee hee, thought I as I count down the last sixteen days until I’m debt-free – not true of me since around the age of eighteen.

I heard this interstitial while listening to “Car Talk” today:

“As soon as you wake up, you need the latest.”

Do I really? This seems presumptuous.

“And that is why ‘Up First’ is here. It is NPR’s morning news podcast.”

Yikes. That sounds like a stressful way to spend the first minutes of consciousness.

“In just ten minutes, you can start your day informed.”

Yeah…no. In just ten minutes, I can start making my second Americano.

I refer you to the 31 July 2018 “Built to Burn” episode of 99% Invisible, podcast and transcript here.

I think this and McPhee’s “Los Angeles Against the Mountains” are vital to the proper understanding of wildfires, especially in the western United States. You can’t build developments in guaranteed wildfire zones, take no preventative measures, even the simplest and most effective, to protect the homes – the topic of the 99PI episode – and blithely expect nothing dire will ever happen. A few embers from a fire that never actually reaches your house can easily ruin everything.

99PI will have a follow-up episode this week.

“One of the very frustrating things that I had experienced this past summer, particularly from the California fires, is the continued sense of fatalism: ‘Oh, well, there’s nothing that could be done.’ Well, no. The bottom line is that we can do something; it just doesn’t have anything to do with controlling the wildfire.”

Watching news footage from the California fires, something stands out, especially if you’ve spent a lot of time with Jack. Once you get over the shock of seeing neighbourhoods reduced to ashes and the drama of firefighters talking about how there was nothing they could do to stop the flames, your eyes shift to something else: the green trees, untouched by fire, surrounding the burnt-out homes.

From this week: Lake Keswick Estates in California; click for a larger version

From this week: Lake Redding Estates in California

My old home office desk was feeling too samey of late, so I replaced it. The old one was all wood – well, veneered particleboard – and similar to the new one, with the same 4×3 foot footprint along with a raised monitor shelf and pull-out keyboard tray, but the new one is a better design, with 50% more desk space, 50% more bottom shelf space, 50% more room on the keyboard tray, and maybe 200% more class.

I found it via an image search for “workstation desk”, with this picture of the Cyrus desk, a metal and wood design with a heavy tempered glass desktop, on the third or fourth result page. From the look of it, I figured it would be pricey, probably between US$200 and $300, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it was just $130 on Amazon, which I believe is $40 less than I paid for that boring old workstation fifteen years ago.

I assembled it in a couple hours and found it quite sturdy. I think it’s so far away from samey as to be fantastic. I said to a visiting friend the other day, “I love this desk”, not something you hear me exclaim of many inanimate objects. My printer is on a separate glass and metal stand on the bottom shelf, with paper storage underneath, and the PC, not visible at lower right, and all cables and power strips are self-contained on the desk instead of partly behind and underneath as they were before.

As an example of how much more room there is on this desk, I could fit the keyboard and trackball and not much else on the keyboard tray before. On the new one, from left to right, I have a Logitech Harmony remote horizontal charging stand, a Motorola S305 Bluetooth headset, the keyboard, a Logitech trackball, and its receiver, which formerly sat on top of the PC. I added a hook on the left corner of the desk for the backscratcher and a soft rubber five-channel cable manager on the right corner to corral all the pesky USB cables. The 8″ long metal USB 3.0 hub with 7 ports and 3 charging ports that also used to be on top of the PC is now at the rear corner of the desk instead.

The old desk was perfectly usable, so I put it outside festooned with large “FREE” signs visible from the street. It took eight days, but someone finally got themselves a good desk and, on a less magnanimous note, I didn’t have to dismantle it to put in the dumpster.

Here are the results of the first question of a February 2018 YouGov poll of 8,215 adults in the US. They probably ought to have asked if antisocial media was involved in any recent formation of doubts, because of course it was, because it’s fundamentally and irretrievably antisocial.

An interesting Venn diagram would show the intersection of 18-24 year-old oblate spheroid-doubters with those of that age who would like to work at a cool place like SpaceX. I would bet a crisp new one dollar bill that it’s not a null set.

“Gee, I’m not sure. Could be a dodecahedron for all I know. Well…if I knew that word.”

After hearing of Punxsutawney all my life, I’m at a point where I find Chamber of Commerce-invented groundhog prognostication about as annoying as astrologist-invented 7% larger than average supermoons (sic, I say…sic), but quite a lot less annoying than the phrase “super blue blood moon”, so obnoxious it might set my hair alight if I thought about it overlong.

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.

Carl Reiner

Perhaps I ought to be inspired by this article to come up with some daft product that my new company – how about Gullible You, LLC? – could sell, but the thought fills me with a pea-green gaseous mixture of nausea and shame. How do these people do it? Steelier guts than mine.

If you want to save some time, all you really need to know about “raw water” are these words from the article: “Mukhande Singh…(né Christopher Sanborn)”. Uh-huh.

“Nootropics”? Come now. Better hobbies for all, I say.