#1180 Changing Chunks

It’s funny how what you’ve being thinking about recently can change the way you take new information in.
Like I was having a discussion recently with a friend about a news item. The news item talked about the quandary faced by many transgender people who are in transition sexually and yet still need to use the public restrooms.
Since the transgender people are neither fully one nor the other, it’s only natural that other patrons of the restrooms are indisposed to accept the presence of someone who is only somewhat the opposite sex.
Not long after that, I went by a public place that had three restrooms: one male, one female, and one that contained a “changing station.”
For some reason, that one seemed like a natural alternative.
Not long after that, I was at an energy conference, and the talk centered on buying smaller electric cars that, instead of recharging their batteries, could go to places where they would swap them out. Exchange a dead battery for a full one.
They called those places “changing stations” too. So when I went into the bathroom at the conference center and there was this fold-down bin on the wall that said “baby changing station” you can imagine what I thought.
And I also remembered how there were times when my babies were really small and whiny and colicky that the idea of a changeling was actually attractive.
I know, I’m not very nice. Still—a “baby changing station”? I think “diaper changing station” would be a more accurate name.
And speaking of weird names. At what point did the word “chunky” become good? I was looking at a can of “chunky style soup” and somehow it didn’t seem as appetizing as I would suppose the manufacturer had hoped.
Maybe because I had just read an article on the epidemic of obese children plaguing our great land. And how they used to say obese kids were a little “chunky.”
So chunks and food are not really a good combo. Especially when some people describe a certain event as “blowing chunks.”
Must be what you do when that soup is a little hot...
America, ya gotta love it.

#1179 Bottled Up

So here's the deal. The other night I was watching a musician do a show. He was like most good performers, in that he really threw himself into his work. That passion that propels a front man to stage-dive is only barely suppressed in even the mellowest performer.
You can bet there’s a roiling cauldron of emotion boiling even inside Mel Torme.
In any event, this performer occasionally went back to the amplifier area to have a drink of water. After about the fourth repetition of this behavior, I noticed something odd.
He was drinking his water out of one of those ubiquitous plastic bottles that are polluting and destroying the planet. Particularly ironic as this singer is known for his environmental and political activism.
But what I noticed was, the bottle had a screw-on cap. And instead of leaving the bottle open after he finished his drink, the musician screwed the cap back on tight again.
And I thought, I do that too. And I also thought, so does everyone else I know. Even if we fully intend to drink the whole bottle at one sitting, we almost always screw and unscrew the cap after every sip.
It’s become a national obsession.
Now I can understand the musician worried about a bottle of water spilling on his amplifier. But does he have to go through the elaborate screwing ritual between every two songs? Can he leave off the cap even once? Can I?
And here’s an interesting thought. Could he save the planet a little bit and use water in, um, a cup? Knowing full well he’s going to go through an entire performance, how about a thermos style carafe? It would keep his water cold, he could pour it into a cup, and save himself a lot of screwing.
Or if it’s the screwing he craves, he could get one of those insulated travel cups and mess with the lid on that.
Just a thought, but if we all used a few more cups and a few fewer water bottles, we’d do a lot less obsessive screwing around.
And a lot less screwing up of the planet while we’re at it.
America, ya gotta love it.

#1178 Journally Pease

One of the coolest things about living in the 21st Century is the World Wide Web. And with it our favorite source for mostly right information.
No I’m not talking about Fox News. I’m talking about mostly right as in mostly correct.
That source would be Wikipedia. I find myself using it every now and then to check dubious artifacts from my youth.
Here’s why. I once had a very close relative who used the term “journally.” They used it consistently and confidently and in no way gave the indication that it was anything other than appropriate. The occasions when this person used it were when other people would use the term “generally” but I never consciously noticed that.
If I thought about it at all, it was that it sounded okay because you have journals. You put things in journals, often regular general things, and there are journalists who report on general news.
I heard it from such a young age; it was firmly ensconced in my lexicon. That is, until college, when for the first time I questioned it and looked it up.
There is no such word.
The word this person should have been using was indeed “generally.”
The “journally” debacle is now part of one of my journals.
But here’s what’s cool about Wikipedia. The other day I had a flashback on a chant we did as kids. We would say pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot nine days old.
So I wondered. Is there such a thing as pease? One word p-e-a-s-e- pease? Well, low and behold, thanks to our wiki friends, I found out there was indeed something called pease. Pease is a mass noun like oatmeal. Pease porridge is made of split yellow individual peas and spices and is similar to hummus.
It was often cooked with bacon or a ham joint so it’s not that different from today’s split pea soup, but it was baked, mushier, and thicker.
And apparently, at least according to the nursery rhyme, had a pull date journally exceeding 9 days.
Yum.
America, ya gotta love it.