Category: Miscellany

I’ve got a nose for this sort of thing.

On By StevenIn Life At Home, Miscellany4 Comments

This wooden nose and upper lip carved from rosewood is one of the best things I’ve purchased in the last year.

It cost me only about nine dollars, and it sits on my bathroom counter. It’s extremely useful, wonderfully space-saving, and – best of all – it appeals mightily to my sense of whimsy.

I nearly went for one shaped like a Moai, but this one won my heart.

The nose is actually a stand to hold my glasses when I’m wearing contact lenses. I am amused every single time I set my glasses down on the nose.

I should name it.

What should I name this fellow?

I’ve said before on numerous occasions that my resting state is whimsy, and that also applies to silly little purchases that I make for use around my home.

For example, if you’re looking for the next roll of toilet paper in my baa-aa-aathroom, you’ll have to count sheep. He was ewe-nly eight dollars, and that price can’t be bleat.

Heh, sheep puns.

He's not sheepish, he protects the roll.

What’s the silliest thing you’ve purchased recently?

Do you see what I see?

On By StevenIn Miscellany1 Comment

I stopped today for a sandwich at a local shop today. I’ve been there countless times, and I’ve ordered food from this man often, but this is the first time he ever said anything to me other than the transaction at hand.

The gentleman behind the counter, whose name I should really know given how often I get lunch there, asks, “Didn’t they go out of business?”

It took me a moment to realize he was referring to my t-shirt – I always forget what shirt I’m wearing, and so I’m always momentarily confused when it sparks a conversation. Today, I was wearing a shirt with the logo of the 9:30 Club, a venerable DC concert venue that has concerts nearly every night.

“Didn’t they go out of business?” I was briefly baffled- Since I moved to the DMV five years ago, I’ve seen more than fifty shows there. It’s a fundamental anchor point for me in this city. I couldn’t in my wildest dreams have ever imagined that someone who lives around here wouldn’t know the 9:30 Club was there.

He continued, “I haven’t seen any commercials for it in a while.” I tried to explain about the giant billboard ads that show up in the Metro with upcoming shows, but maybe he just doesn’t take the Metro into the District very often.

I guess it still confuses me when someone has a reality so different than mine. I have a tendency to think that stuff that I know is just common knowledge to everyone, and I’m frequently completely poleaxed when I find this not to be true.

I suppose this applies to me as well, though. A dear friend of mine likes to say, when I’m cursing at an awful, terrible, very bad, no good driver in gnarly traffic that perhaps the reason they’re driving like that is because they have terrible diarrhea and they’re just trying to get home to a toilet really fast. Basically, it’s just like the old saying, “you never know what someone else is going through,” only with more poop.

My point, I guess, is that as often as I’m surprised when someone doesn’t know things that I know, I really shouldn’t be surprised at my own lack of knowing what other people know.

Or something. The original thread for this post has kind of gotten lost in the weeds, and I don’t remember quite where I was going with this one.

You know?

# For Nanopoblano 2025.

King Cake

On By StevenIn Miscellany9 Comments

Last week, when I needed a palate cleanser, I completely forgot that I had an ACTUAL palate cleanser, in the form of King Cake! The events of this post actually took place on January 6th, but posting about it slipped my mind because I needed to write about the Capitol Insurrection first to blow off some steam.

Several of my friends are New Orleans residents, so I’ve heard about King Cake on and off for years, but I had never had one. (I did have the German equivalent, Dreikönigskuche, or Three King’s Cake, around Fasching, but I didn’t make the connection until very recently.)

The basic idea is this: Every year, between Twelfth Night on January 6th and Fat Tuesday, when Lent begins, New Orleans is full of King Cakes and Mardi Gras events. You can get King Cake throughout that time, but don’t eat it before January 6th!

When I saw my New Orleans friends starting to talk about King Cake this year, I remembered that one of the DMV’s best New Orleans style bakeries was just a short distance away. I quick check on their website confirmed that they do, in fact, sell King Cake, and so I placed an order.

The Bayou Bakery King Cake is almost a sweet-bread more than a cake. It’s a Danish-style cake filled with “Creole Cream Cheese,” whatever that means. It’s topped with white icing and dusted with sugar in the three colors of Mardi Gras: gold for power, green for faith, and purple for justice. It comes with some Mardi Gras beads, and a little plastic baby.

Some of the stories say that the plastic baby is from the olden days when there would be a bean in the cake and whoever got the piece with the bean would be King for a day, or something like that. The more recent iteration of the story is that you can hide the baby somewhere in the cake and whoever gets that piece is the lucky host of next year’s King Cake party.

The Bayou Bakery King Cake costs $39.95 and serves 14-16 people. Since I was only willing to have ten or twelve servings myself, I took it to a friend’s house and she and her daughter helped me to consume it.

If you’re in the DMV and want one of these delicious cakes, they’re available until February 16th, at Bayou Bakery in Arlington. https://www.bayoubakeryva.com/king-cakes

Have you ever had a King Cake?

5/52

Prowling on little cat feet, December is upon us.

On By StevenIn Miscellany, Pop Culture33 Comments

While I have been writing a post for every day of November to be a part of NanoPoblano, I have also been reading the posts of the other Peppers. Their lives and their writings are amazing, and I am reminded of something Ray Bradbury said:

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

– from “Zen in the Art of Writing,” by Ray Bradbury

It’s been lovely to watch each of my NanoPoblano compatriots tipping themselves over each day. I wanted to also say thank you to those of you who spent time reading along and commenting during this NanoPoblano month- having comments to read and interact with made it a far more entertaining venture than simply writing into the void.

I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do for the last post of November- I considered a recap of the month, but considering how much I dislike clip shows on tv, that seemed ill advised.

I considered a few brief thoughts on some random links and articles that I’ve been collecting all month, like geese and egg creams and weird winter relationship rituals, but I don’t think I want to do that right now. Maybe I’ll come back to that in December.

I thought for a while that perhaps I’d talk about all the things that I want to do when the pandemic is over, or the things I’m looking forward to coming up. I don’t want to do that now, though, because looking forward when there’s still so much Covid to endure just seems like a special new form of torture. We’re not there yet.

I considered wrapping up with a post I’ve had stewing for a while about St. Elmo’s Fire, growing up, and suffering through limerence… but that post isn’t cooked all the way through yet, and if I serve it too early, it will give my friends food poisoning.

I thought about posting some photographs of food, because good lord I sure do take a lot of photos of food, but this isn’t Instagram and I’m not a food blogger, although I sometimes pretend to play one on TV.

I thought I would have trouble coming up with something to write about every day this month, but I never really wanted for ideas, even if sometimes those ideas were a little cheesy, and even if sometimes I had trouble finding the time and concentration to make them real.

I am delighted by the fact that I can make a blog post out of all the things I’m not making into a blog post. I like the weird symmetry of that.

One last thing, before I turn my attention to an unrelated but very important piece of bloggery… I cannot believe that not a single one of you commented on my “Chairman Meow” joke during the Hong Kong posts!

And now for something completely different:

As we roll into December, I begin the annual challenge of Whamageddon. The rules are very simple:

  1. The objective is to go as long as possible without hearing Wham!’s Christmas classic; “Last Christmas”.
  2. The game starts on December 1st, and ends at midnight on December 24th. (I use my local time zone, but not everyone follows the rules in an identical way.)
  3. You’re out as soon as you recognize the song.
  4. Only the original version applies. Remixes and covers do not send you to the fields of Whamhalla, although they might raise your pulse a bit.
  5. If you like, post on social media with the #whamageddon hashtag when you get hit.
  6. The intention is that this is a survival game, and not a battle royale. In other words, don’t be a dick and don’t play Last Christmas to your friends. No Whammied Rick-Rolls, please.

I play Whamageddon every year, because it’s a really silly bit of fluffery and I enjoy pretending to anguish over my fallen brethren as they ascend to Whamhalla. Two years ago, I was taken out by a Wham-grenade planted by someone I trusted, foolishly. Last year I survived despite some perilous journeys to places where piped in Christmas music is the norm.

This year will be strange. On the one hand, I work from home and live alone, so my media control is pretty straightforward. On the other hand, I sometimes take the metro and go into places where I have no control over what I might hear. Even a walk across the street to get a sandwich might expose me to The Song.

Will you join me on the battlefield? Will you play Whamageddon with me? C’mon, it’ll be fun!

How was your NanoPoblano month? And will you play Whamageddon starting tomorrow?

51/52 (and 30 of 30, y’all! ::dusts off keyboard::)

Drug Name or Sci-Fi Alien?

On By StevenIn Miscellany, Pop Culture11 Comments

I watch a lot of television. Because of that, I see a lot of commercials. Over and over again, I see the same commercials. Little by little, they drill their way past my disinterest to lodge brand names in my forebrain.

The worst of them are the drug commercials, with their happy people living happy lives. It’s rare that you can actually tell what condition a drug treats from the commercial alone- there’s a lot of couples walking on the beach, a lot of people playing with their children, a lot of people biking and hiking and dancing.

The mystery of what the drugs are for isn’t what got my attention though, it’s the names of the drugs. The names in these commercials are so multisyllabic and ridiculous that I started to play a little game with myself: Is this a drug from a pharmaceutical commercial, or an alien race from science fiction?

I think this is really funny, so I started to keep a list on my phone. I got this far along before I stopped:

The really ridiculous part is that I made this list a few months ago, and I’ve actually forgotten some of the alien species I added to the list.

What do you think, drug name or alien species?

44/52 (and 23 of 30!)