I'm still not sure if the turkeys marinated in MSG were enough to make up for the lack of turducken. MSG is a superlatively delicious taste enhancement, but in comparing deep-fried MSG turkeys and oven-roasted turducken, one is led down this seductive path of MSG-enhanced turducken stuffed into a pig and pit roasted for three days as the next step in ultimate gratitude. There are obvious logistical obstacles.

Acquiring a kitchen with multiple ovens and a pit roast is the most compelling argument yet for a) working to become wealthy or b) going to chef school. But this is not about unfulfilled aspirations, it is about belatedly listing some trivial items that make me happy, as per tradition:

• Hanging pots
• Mugs with handles large enough to put all for fingers through to the knuckle
• Socks that are technically dirty, but not too dirty to wear again if you don't need to feel respectable on a Sunday afternoon
• All-purpose sewing machine needles
• Clouds

"Respect the art of pie" wrote Susan Bright. I wonder what she'd think of the diner in Iowa City I read about in the paper that tosses pie in a blender and calls it a "pie shake." No time to bake pie. No time to sit down and eat it properly with a cold glass of milk.
--Pascale le Draoulec, American Pie

Eighteen years I lived in that town. Eighteen years, and it takes some uppity woman from Santa Monica to tell me about pie shakes at the Hamburg Inn. An uppity woman on a pie quest to assimilate her French heritage and sort out her relationships. Who visits Iowa and fails to have pie, and then tosses off the Hamburg Inn as an example of the world going to hell in a handbasket, with no pie.

The Hamburg Inn is a motherfucking bastion of tradition. It is the hometown diner of Iowa City, and one does not waltz into a paragraph, insult someone's hometown diner, and waltz out again with a twirl about "pie pace" and modern life. It's just not done, particularly if one has not actually visited the diner in question. It is not a frantic juice-bar nutrient shake type of diner (though they do hurry you a bit on weekends, when there's a line).

It's like insulting someone's Mom's pie. Worse, for me, as my own mother's pies are not particularly old-fashioned or authentic (Ms. le Draoulec writes 368 pages on pie, and not once does she mention the graham cracker crust!). Though I am embarassed to say that I've never actually had a pie shake at the Hamburg Inn, I have had drinks disappeared from my tab, probably before this woman bought her first-ever mixing bowl.

My culture's sacraments have been carelessly mocked by an outsider, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously, pie shakes will be on the agenda for Twinkletree. From there, I'll play the xenophobic belligerence by ear; maybe rustle up a posse of disgruntled Writer's Workshop dropouts. We'll bake a pie to end all pies, and put it in a blender for democracy, and write poetry about it. We'll take the publishers by storm (with meringue disguising our faces) and show them through slow force-feeding that the true meaning of "pie pace" can be felt even after the pie is chopped to bits.

Or we'll have a pie shake, drive home, and fall asleep on the couch while our posse bellies digest.

So there's another theory of asteroid-induced Super Ecosystem Death, this time at the Permian-Triassic boundary (which is unquestionably the coolest and most dramatic of all Super Ecosystem Deaths known to paleontology). Ho-hum. Asteroid-induced death has been massively trendy since 2020, and people have been finding ingenious "evidence" of "impact scenarios" for years.
So fuck the unusual petrology of the month; I'm not qualified to mock it anyway.

What I want to know is why do these guys insist that the K("C")retaceous-Tertiary event was the second-greatest of all time? Sure, the ammonites died at the K-T, and all right-thinking individuals will forever mourn their loss. And dinosaurs blah blah blah. But the K-T doesn't hold a candle to the late Ordovician in any criteria but sexiness and lucrative edutainment potential. There are no attractive young tetrapods or land plants in the Ordovician, and even the coolest trilobites with the compound eyes don't evolve until the Devonian, so this is understandable. But geologists should know better than to obsess over such superficial concerns as lungs and compound eyes. We're talking half the world's brachiopods after all.

When I am King of the Planet, the relative merits of various extinctions shall be fixed by royal decree, and artists will glorify the tragic deaths of rugose coral reefs in spectacularly costumed and choreographed circuses. Authors who insist on making off-handed comparisons to the K-T boundary in order to attract the public's attention shall play the bottommost rugosids.

The thing about my job is that just when it gets all full of complicated juicy gossip, it also gets covered by layers and layers of attorney-client privilege. If I occasionally whine because I am unable to blog about work, this is why.

I've been reading legal documents. Some of these documents will eventually become part of the public record, and when that happens they will make excellent dialogue for a bitter comic strip or surrealist radio play. Meanwhile, they are super-confidential and my creative urges are stifled. Bah.

Fortunately I have a fantastic, compelling and potentially obsessive new hobby: quilting. It feels dirty and shameful to stay up late quilting, in a way that drinking alcohol and dancing to lewd music can never top. I am partaking of a classic old person's domestic hobby in a culture that values youth and mobility! Rebellion at last! So now I'll kick back and celebrate Friday with some Glenn Miller and a glass of tap water, and you can't stop me or tell me what to do, so there!

1. Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview - a vivid vituperation of something I would have been vituperating for years, if I hadn't been ignoring it entirely. On the other hand, it's probably better to just ignore the vituperating, too, as Computer Socialized Pretentiousness may be catching. I was bored halfway down the page.
2. The Art and Science of Feng Shui - it appears that decorating is a zero-sum game for Peter and I; we have exactly opposite sets of astrologically determined auspicious directions. Pictures of pine trees may or may not help with this (pine trees are wily Chi-eaters!) but is a picture of a joshua tree the same as a picture of a pine tree? Also, I can't figure out whether Mt. Wilson is shaped like a dragon, or a person putting on his clothes, or an upside-down boat.
3. Photographing Your Flowers, by John Patrick Roche - Billing his work as a "practical guide for indoor and outdoor use", M. Roche begins with reference to Aristotle and goes on to insist that amateur garden photographers must develop a firm handle on botany, as well as basic composition in black and white, before mucking about with toys. There follow a very many rules, nearly enough to build a photo-judging Roche-bot, which I think would be a fun project.