Mondrianyone

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons showed a couple about to be seated at a restaurant in Paris, and the maître d' was asking them, "Madame et monsieur, would you prefer smoking or chain-smoking?"

I live in northern New England. All the food trucks up here close for the winter season and reopen when it warms up again. So the whole premise was absurd.

This is my idea of pure poetic justice.

This may shock you, but . . . I can sing "O Come All Ye Faithful" in Latin, and I was raised Jewish! (Okay, my father was Catholic, but he converted to marry my mother, so I never got any RC education.) This reminds me of an old SNL skit. It was the interdenominational Xmas party at the Knights of Columbus hall, and the time came to bust out the carols. Each song, the Catholics knew the first line and then faded out, but the rabbi always knew all the words. (I'd link it, but I can't find it on YouTube.) Very funny--and kind of true. ETA: I also taught myself to sing the "Marseillaise" in French after watching Casablanca a hundred times, so I just may be strange about songs in another language.

If you're really going to buy something for this entitled guest, @Mindthinkr, I'll also endorse a Fire tablet. I bought two for a hundred bucks years ago, deluding myself into thinking my husband would use one of them. I use mine rarely, mostly for bringing online recipes into the kitchen, and when everything else goes out I can watch TV on it via Dish Anywhere. It's perfectly serviceable. By the way, I'll be dropping in at your place for a monthlong stay, and I'll expect you to install an inground pool for me. So if you can get on that . . . 😏

All of the above ^^^ and more. I think this show has jumped the snapper.

If anybody catches mogo-on-the-gagogo from anything, I'll pass out from the shock of it! Also, please don't call it my system. I'm trying to avoid legal liability for this. Address all complaints and lawsuits to America's Test Kitchen. 🙉

Okay, back to my perpetual obsession with keeping avocados fresh for an unnatural amount of time. More than two years ago, I see, I posted about putting them in a pitcher of cold water in the fridge to keep them from rotting. It worked like a dream. And then someone posted that I was risking disease pathogens by doing this. I kept doing it for a while longer--because I'm stubborn and also never got sick as a result. I only stopped when I started getting annoyed at how much refrigerator space this hack was taking up. Then I recently got an email from ATK about a different way to preserve them, so of course I tried it. The catch is that you have to have a vacuum sealer--which I do. You scrub the outsides of the avocados really well, dry them thoroughly, halve and pit them, then vacuum-seal them. I put two halves of each avocado into one vac bag and stuck them in the fridge. I think I sealed a total of seven. I bought them exactly two weeks ago, and it took me several days after purchase to seal them. Today we made guacamole with three of them, and they were all perfect. The advantage of the clear bags is that you can check on them as time passes and see if they're browning, which they weren't. So unless somebody bursts my bubble by posting that you can catch mogo-on-the-gagogo (our household fictitious disease) from this practice, I'll keep doing it. I might even do it anyway.

I think the difference is between just wanting to vent and venting and then asking for advice. If somebody just vents, I keep my mouth shut. If they ask for advice and I have an answer I believe could be helpful, I give it. But I'm on the verge of not doing that anymore, because I suspect most of them don't really want it. And even if they do, saying thanks seems to be thing of the past.

I thought you didn't know whether they were bees or yellow jackets/wasps? I don't think bumblebees or honeybees normally sting unless threatened, so it doesn't seem likely you're even dealing with bees.

Can you put up a sign saying "FREE WI-FI" with arrows pointing at the complex down the road? I'm kidding. The summer before last, we had wasps and stink bugs (I cannot express how much I hate those) nesting in our patio umbrella when it was closed, and then when we'd open it to sit at the table, they'd crawl all over the umbrella fabric. Disgusting. We tried a bunch of things, and nothing really worked. Then I had the idea of getting a dog flea collar and fastening it around the pole at the top of the umbrella. It was amazingly effective. I can't say for sure it didn't kill them, although I never saw any bug carcasses. Maybe it just made them want to be somewhere else. But if you tried hanging a couple of them around your balcony railing, that might be helpful.

Maybe not. After I posted, I looked up security bars on Amazon, and it seems they're configured differently these days. It's very hard to explain what we had, but there was a sort of frame the bar slotted into, and there was a space just about penny-sized when the bar was in blocking position, which is what would stop it from being slid into open position even if someone used a key to slide it over. They seem to have streamlined the newer designs, which may or may not be a good thing.

I wouldn't bother making that quiche. It was so bare-bones. If I'm going to the trouble of making a quiche, I'm going to do something more special than just eggs and cheese with some loose chives on top. I'm making one tomorrow, in fact, and it will definitely be more interesting than theirs.

We used to have one of those a long time ago, in a first apartment in a not-great neighborhood. We bought it after the place had been broken into. The locksmith who sold it to us told us that for extra security before we went to sleep to put a penny in the space where the stick would slide over when you unlocked the door, which would keep the stick from moving. So we did that, not really thinking it would have any effect. And then a few nights later, a noise at the door woke us up. The burglar had stolen an extra set of keys, and he was trying to get into the apartment with them, surely knowing we'd be there. That penny probably saved our lives. I'm suggesting you do the same.

No, not Lee Child. Not even a Brit. It was just a random example off the top of my head. Don't read into it. I'm simply expressing puzzlement at our desire to mock people in a public way for insignificant language deviations that don't affect us personally at all.

I don't want to get into a big debate about it, and I won't, but after a lifetime of correcting the errors in spelling, grammar, usage, and all sorts of other mistakes in the work of some of the most famous writers in the world, I've come to a conclusion. There are people who've never been taught these things and people who just don't seem to have the gene for them--spelling, say. One writer, twenty-plus of whose books I've done, can't seem to keep the distinction between "ground" (outdoors) and "floor" (indoors) straight, and he's crazy smart. All sorts of other errors, too, that he makes repeatedly, book after book. But that's okay with me, since I wouldn't have a job otherwise. And he's just one of countless writers--people who get paid lots of money to use the English language--who make all kinds of mistakes after having tons of time to think about what they're typing and get it right, not just speaking extemporaneously. Of course, all this correcting is done out of the view of the public, discreetly, and I would never say, "Boy, that Bill Shakespeare is really an idiot!" So what surprises me, although it no longer should, is that people who wouldn't dream of saying out loud that someone is fat or has bad skin or dresses badly have no problem with grammar-shaming others in a public way. I don't know why that's considered an acceptable exception, but it seems to be. We aren't all instructed in the same skills and don't all have the same aptitudes, but there you go. I suppose it makes some of us feel better, but I personally don't correct someone publicly unless that someone has asked me to or if a person has really pissed me off--by trying to embarrass someone else and making an even dumber mistake in the process. That's called Muphry's law, by the way, and it's amazing how often you see it.

I dunno. Having the rules of language and grammar down pat is a big part of how I earn a living, but things like saying "less" rather than "fewer" couldn't in real life be a lower priority for me. What she said in that clip is so much more important than some minor usage glitch that it would barely register on my mental screen. Consider the alternative and go after him instead. There aren't enough hours in a millennium to cover those language fuckups. Plus substantive fuckups that can ruin people's lives. And have. I give her a total pass.

I think I'd maybe redefine "friend" if I had one who used me as a crying towel but offered no reciprocity when I needed somebody to extend me some sympathy and a loving embrace. The person you describe doesn't seem like a friend to me. I have no trouble--well, some trouble, but not a lot--cutting off relationships when they become more of a burden than they're worth. I understand the appeal of having someone in your life with whom you share a history. But the upside of making a new friend is that all your old stories are fresh to that person. I hear people say that it's hard to make friends once you're past a certain age, but I haven't found that to be true. I suppose it depends to a certain extent on where you are, yet it seems worth reaching out to new people and seeing what happens. The friendship you're describing sounds painful and one-sided. No friend at all might be better than the one who's taking advantage of you like this.

Unless I've missed it, we haven't been told how it causes problems for the cashier if the customer provides the eaten item to be scanned for checkout. Because I don't think tacky behavior has any direct impact on employees, except for being tacky behavior. Anyone?

🤣

Do you think you'd do better with a monocular? (Just linked for cheapness and availability.)

I'm imagining a triangular space between the stove and the corner. If that's right, can you have someone cut a piece of cement board or some other fireproof material to fit the space? Something you can lift out when you need access, I mean. I would probably tile it or create some other usable surface to hide that substrate. When our cat first came to us, she hid for several days. My husband was out of town, so I was on my own searching the whole house. When he got back, he looked behind the TV cabinet, which is catty-corner (the obvious joke was lost on me) to the wall, and that's where she was. I agree that you don't want a cat anyplace where there are lots of wires. God knows what could happen.

I laughed at that, too. I also wondered if the recipe would still work if you didn't have a spatula in each color of the rainbow. 🌈

And you were smarter than me.

Only as covertly as possible. 🤐