The Curious Case of the Abnormally Oblong Egg

I discovered an abnormally oblong egg in my egg carton the other day. But when I tried to take a picture of the egg, it seemed hard to discern how abnormally oblong the egg actually was: by itself, the egg looked pretty normal. It was only by taking a picture of the abnormally oblong egg beside a non-abnormally oblong egg—a “normal” egg, as it were—that you could see how abnormal it really was. Inside, it was the same as any other egg, and just as delicious.
 

Good Question.

[beep]
IRA GLASS: Siri, where do you come from?
SIRI: I, Siri, was designed by Apple in California.
[beep]
GLASS: Where were you manufactured?
SIRI: I'm not allowed to say.
[beep]
GLASS: Why?
SIRI: Good question. Anything else I can do for you?

-from This American Life, Ep. 454.

Where Is My Mind?

Winter is a time for shedding the old and unnecessary. Or so it seems, based on everything I've been leaving behind, in coffee shops, bars, classrooms...

Today, riding to meet a friend for lunch, I realized I had left my keys at my apartment. Thankfully I was able to share a lock with one of the coffee shop employees. A few hours and another coffee shop later I realized I had left my knit hat behind somewhere. Luckily that too was OK; someone had seen it on the floor and turned it in.

It seems I need to revisit my departure procedures: in the past month I've lost, forgotten, or left behind the following possessions: scarf, iPhone(!), gloves, bike lock, in addition to the previously mentioned keys and knit hat. Somehow, fairly miraculously, out of all these items, the only thing that got lost was one of the gloves.

In other news, despite frigid temperatures, I'm still riding most places. So far this year, I've totaled 94.5 miles. Last year I rode ~2880.4 miles; the year before that (2010), I rode 2323.4 miles; and the year before that (2009), 1014.9 miles. I haven't had a lot of luck riding in the winter. Last January I crashed twice, and the year before that, I broke my two front teeth.

We are intelligent beings, versed in mathematics.

We are intelligent beings, versed in mathematics and capable of organizing a coherent sequence of sounds in time to produce a unified composition, called music, a form of art whose truth, craft, originality, and other indefinable properties bring a quality of transcendent delight, called beauty, to the mind and sense of the listener.

This is the message to those who are out there, at a distance only death can measure.

-Don DeLillo, quoting from a text aboard Voyager 1 and 2, in his stunning essay "Counterpoint: Three Movies, a Book, and an Old Photograph," originally published in Grand Street 73, Spring 2004, wherein he discusses, in characteristically crystalline prose, Glenn Gould, Thomas Bernhard, the various hatwear of Thelonious "Sphere" (his middle name, I learned) Monk, the film The Fast Runner, solitude, madness, the idea of "The North," strokes, the danger of having the numbers in your age add up to "13," and the image above.

Julie and Joe aren't cavedwellers.

He didn't want to fight in any war and she didn't want to have a child. They had been living together for three years and still didn't have a way to refer to each other that didn't sound stupid, false, or antiquated. Language follows change and there wasn't any language to use.

Partners in a pairbonded situation; that sounded neutral. Of course living with someone isn't a neutral situation. Julie and Joe aren't cavedwellers. They don't live together as lovers or as husband and wife.

How long would this century be called modern or, even, post-modern? Perhaps relationships between people in the l4th century were more equitable, less fantastic. Not that Julie would've wanted to have been the miller's wife, or Joe the miller.

-from "Living with Contradictions" by Lynne Tillman (1982). Hard to believe this story is as old as I am!

Ill-lit and Vomit-green

A few months into this time, around December, a journalist named McGee came to interview him for Rolling Stone. In the published interview, the journalist describes the room as “ill-lit” and “vomit-green” with porn magazines and cigarette butts strewn all around. In spite of this, or maybe because of this, the journalist and him became friends. The journalist and his wife would invite him over to their house for dinner every now and then. He would sit at their table feeling shy but happy.

-from "Resident Bohemians: The Nighthawk, Tom Waits" by James Yeh, originally published in The Rumpus (2010)

"She said she wouldn't marry a man who just brought her a watermelon on Saturday"

Audio of Flannery O'Connor, in 1959, reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

two short things for HTMLGIANT

I judged something for HTML Giant's Tourney of Bookshit: "emailing yr writing to people you dont know" vs. "readings w/ so many readers no one listens."

From "emailing":

The grievously undercompensated Web editor starts typing out the polite, nonspecific response: “Dear [author], Thanks so much for getting in touch…”

From "readings...":

The reader at the reading, not talking right into the microphone, wondering if people will care if he goes on a little longer than the amount of time he’s been allotted by the organizer, whom, deep down, he doesn’t actually take very seriously, 

Szechuan Beckett

From the fortune cookie at the Szechuan restaurant where I ate lunch this afternoon:

I particularly appreciate the combo of "on in."