D's Notebook

Tag: links (Page 7 of 25)

The Roommate From Hell

March 4, 2021 /

If you’ve had more than one roommate in your life, you’ve likely had at least one bad roommate experience. Sometimes they were just minor annoyances that added up over time. I had a couple roommates who went through a “refuse to do dishes” phase. I reached the point where I had a plate, bowl, cup, and set of silverware that I would wash and hide so I could always have something to eat on. The beauty of it was they always made a big show of finally doing their dishes after days, or sometimes weeks. Like I was supposed to be super thankful they had done the absolute minimum required of any person who shares a living space.

Pretty minor, and something I can laugh about now.

But some folks have roommate experiences that can destroy their entire lives.

Like this poor lady in New York. Her story is straight nusto.

The Nightmare Apartment Share in the West Village

Food Mysteries and Menu Additions

January 13, 2021 /

This is the best thing I’ve read this year.

What the Hole Is Going On? The very real, totally bizarre bucatini shortage of 2020.

Rachel Handler looks into the mysterious shortage of bucatini. It is hilarious and fascinating.

I have to admit, I don’t think I had ever had bucatini before I read this. Magically I found some this week and made the Bucatini all’Amatriciana recipe Handler includes in her piece. It was fantastic, and got thumbs up from the entire family. Bucatini is now in our high rotation! Assuming we can keep finding it, of course.

Nature, Bruh

May 21, 2020 /

I’m struggling to find the motivation to write this week. I have a couple things started but can’t seem to get them wrapped up.

Instead of working on either of those, I thought I would share this insane video instead. I hate heights so this make my stomach churn but I still find it amazing.

Via TMN

(Apologies to Rex Chapman for stealing his “Dogs, bruh,” for the title.)

Breaking Packs

May 7, 2020 /

It is so sad what has happened to Sports Illustrated over the past decade. SI was required reading for people my age who were into sports for most of our young lives. When I was a kid, Thursdays were the best day of the year because that’s when the new issue of SI would usually land in the mailbox. The magazine was full of great game stories, features on the most interesting athletes in the world, and usually one long-form piece that you would want to read again as soon as you finished it.

The slow death of print media that began in the late ‘00s was devastating to SI. They lost great writers to other platforms. The copies got thinner every few months. They tried to do the internet thing, without much success. They did the proverbial “Pivot to Video” and that didn’t work. I gave up and dropped my subscription sometime in the early ‘10s.

Recently they were bought out by a notorious firm that is known for ripping up old media entities to squeeze as many dollars out of their husks as possible before they cast them aside. My last friend who I know still had a subscription just let his run out.

I came across this article last weekend. It’s good to see SI can still do some cool stuff.

How the Internet Created a Sports-Card Boom—and Why the Pandemic Is Fueling It

I do not get the concept of “breaking” in the baseball card world. But I think it is cool that it is getting people interested in cards again. I have a big plastic tote filled with my old cards in our basement. Maybe Breaking will make them worth something again.

Reading Assignments: The Challenge Ahead

April 30, 2020 /

I shared earlier this week that I’m paying less direct attention to the news over the past couple weeks. I am, though, still reading plenty of deeper pieces on where we are at and where we are headed. I still have several articles in the queue but I thought these two pieces were very good and worth sharing. They take a look at the structural issues in our country, largely political, that the Coronavirus crisis has highlighted.

In general I am optimistic that we can restart and rebuild when the time is right. America does crisis recovery pretty well. But as these pieces note, there are some serious hurdles inherit to modern America that will make that process an even bigger challenge.

We Are Living in a Failed State

Why we can’t build

Friday Reading Assignment

March 20, 2020 /

There is so much information about Covid–19 out there right now it is easy to get overwhelmed. Especially when the news is bad, as was the case earlier this week with the release of a British study that suggested the strategies the national governments of both the UK and US were taking would simply push the flood of sick people out until late this year or early next year.

The situation is fluid, though, as everyone seems to be saying.

I just finished reading the article linked to below. I don’t know whether the science and assumptions behind it are accurate or wildly off-base. I do know while most of it is extremely sobering, it ends on a very hopeful note. Social distancing combined with better testing and stronger efforts to isolate infected citizens can mean this period of lockdown we are currently in can end relatively soon and that it can dramatically reduce both the direct effects of Covid and the collateral damage. Going from tens of millions infected to tens of thousands would be a massive change.

As more states and local governments issue Shelter in Place orders, this piece suggests that the short-term pain, frustration, and isolation caused by these orders will absolutely be worth it. Hopefully soon.

Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance

Weekend Long Read

July 5, 2019 /

Remember the Malaysian Airlines flight that mysteriously disappeared five years ago, never to be found? Like the airliner itself, the story kind of disappeared, replaced by about 1000 other things that the news networks could grind to a pulp and fill their schedules with.

Veteran reporter William Langewiesche dove into the disappearance and the result was this fascinating article. He points out fatal flaws in the early investigation, aims blame at the corrupt Malaysian government and military, and separates wild guesses from reasonable theories to come up with a chilling explanation for what he believes actually happened on that fateful day. His description of the final presumed hours of the flight is both beautiful and terrifying to read.

His conclusion will likely never be proven true or false. But it seems the most likely argument for what occurred.

What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane

Don’t Stop the Music

June 26, 2019 /

Here is a pretty fascinating article that has gotten a lot of attention over the past week or so.

Jody Rosen writes about the massive fire in 2008 that wiped out a storage facility that housed thousands and thousands of original sound recordings. News just broke overnight that a huge swath of big artists not mentioned in the article also lost their original masters.

There’s no doubting it is an immeasurable loss. But as I read I also wondered if the loss is still overstated, at least for the artists who are part of the mainstream. Rosen and others argue that the versions we listen to on Spotify, Apple Music, etc are already copies of copies of copies, and when the next format change arrives they will get copied yet again, losing a little more data and clarity in the process. But I always scoff at how many regular people can tell the difference in these tiny losses from version to version. And aren’t even flawed copies better than none? Do people in 100 years really need to hear outtakes from Steely Dan sessions in order to have a culturally rich life? Or is listening to a deprecated version of Aja enough to help explain the music of the 1970s to them?

The Day the Music Burned

We Are Living In A Society!

June 20, 2019 /

I’m not usually big on complaining about what the younger generation is doing. As times change so do behaviors and accepted norms. I think everyone needs to be flexible and realize what was fine when we were 20 may have totally changed by the time we’re 40, 60, etc. But I heard this story on the local news this morning – while checking to see how many hours of today would be lost to rain – and had to shake my head.

Poll shows many Millennials, Gen Zers aren’t wearing deodorant

For fuck’s sake, people! Basic hygiene is not up for discussion. No one needs to be sending out waves of body odor for the rest of the world to walk through.

I had a roommate for a year in college that refused to wear deodorant because he said it caused Alzheimer’s disease. Fortunately this was in a large house and he was often too busy in architecture studio to come home. But the kid did get a little ripe.

What really pisses me off are the people who come to the gym without taking a whiff of their bodies first. Tuesday morning there was an older woman – Baby Boomer! – at the gym who has absolutely kicking. It was that terrible, haven’t washed for a couple days in the summer smell. And she was sweating her ass off, so the odor kept getting worse and worse. Finally, after I literally had to stifle a gag when I was two stations away from her, I cut my workout short and left. She otherwise seemed like a nice enough lady. And good for her for getting out and trying to stay in shape as she approached 60 (I’m guessing). But, good Lord, did you not notice the odor coming from your pits before you left the house?

It kills me how many stinky people there are at the gym. Do people not understand that whatever aromas are on your body grow proportionately stronger as you increase your body temperature? Sometimes the people who have doused themselves in cologne or perfume are just as bad as the BO folks as they get deep into their workouts.

There should be a simple series of steps before you go to the gym. If you haven’t bathed in awhile, take a wash cloth, put some warm water and soap on it, and give your nooks and crannies a quick wipe. Dry them off and apply deodorant or anti-perspirant. Even if you bathed less than a day ago, go ahead and give your pits a test sniff. If there’s even a hint of something growing in there, a swipe of deodorant will knock that shit down enough not to gross out the people around you.

Easy, peasy. Let’s go, people!

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