The other day S was preparing to bake something, and she asked me if it was okay to put wax paper in the over. I didn't know so, I typed into Google "can you put" and the number one auto-fill was "can you put wax paper in the oven" -- number one! Off just the first three words. That's crazy. Out of all the "can you put"s in the world I never would have thought "wax paper in the oven" is the most popular. And, no, I didn't Google it once before, and it was just remembering my previous search. A dubious friend of mine tried it on his iPhone and got the same result. It's just a question a lot of people have apparently. Oh, and if you wondering, the answer is, you probably shouldn't. You should use parchment paper instead.
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We finally got a profession cleanup crew out here to dry out our basement. They came at 7:30 pm on Sunday, which goes to show how busy they've been. The carpet couldn't be salvaged, which is too bad as it was less than two years old. It's not so much that I loved that particular carpet, or that we have to pay to have it replaced (should be covered by insurance); it's the wastefulness of it. I hate it when things are wasted. Food is the worst, but it's anything, including carpet. S doesn't have this same abhorrence of waste, which makes for fun "discussions" over things like heating and air conditioning settings, gas, and groceries. It used to drive me crazy when S would come back from the store with, say, a dozen ripe bananas or a dozen samosas, and we'd eat four or five and have to chuck the rest. I used the past tense in that last sentence because this hasn't annoyed me much lately. Either S is getting better or I'm just not noticing it; both are quite possible. The new grocery thing S does that gets under my skin is she doesn't read the label carefully and gets the wrong thing. Like she'll get lo-fat cheese or Garden Vegetable Ritz instead of plain Ritz, stuff like that. Part of the problem is that there are too many varieties of things now -- I've come to realize "choice" is often a euphemism for "waste of time dealing with stupid shit" -- but she should know that and check the labels more carefully. Of course, this might be why she can get out of a supermarket in about the half the time I can.
Anyway ... Where was I? Right, basement flooding. So things are still in the drying out stage, but the water is ostensibly gone. The cleanup company and the damage assessor from our insurance company happened to be out here at the same time, and they got into a little tiff about what needed to be done. Each one -- I hope you're sitting down for this -- wanted to pursue the course of action that was the most financially beneficial to them. The cleanup guy said the drywall was still in danger of getting moldy and wanted to pull up the base boards and run the dehumidifiers longer. The insurance lady said it was dry. I trust the cleanup guy more, because he had a little device to measure the dampness, and the insurance lady just had her fingernail. Plus, if we're doing all this work anyway, let's do it right. Ultimately the cleanup guy just did what he wanted. His company is supposed to be reimbursed directly from the insurance company, so I'll let them duke it out. Until of course we get stuck with the bill for the extra work, which inevitably is going to happen. Sigh ...
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So far so good with my New Year's resolution. You didn't even know I have a resolution, because I've never mentioned it before. But I do. It's to not read the comments of online articles*. I found myself getting caught in a time-sucking vortex of chatspeak snark and idiocy. I just had to go cold turkey. In fact, I think the major sites should just turn off their comments section altogether. They sound like a good idea -- they help optimize user interaction or whatever -- but they don't actually serve a real purpose, unless you consider propagating troll wars a real purpose. Online comments are like car horns, sometimes they're helpful, but overall I think we'd be better off as a society without them.
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I recently read a good/sad/infuriating article in the New Yorker about the War on Drugs. Shortly after finishing it, I was watching football (because that's what I do), and I heard a post-game interview with Peyton Manning in which he joked that the only thing on his mind was how fast he could get a Bud Light in his mouth. And I thought about how utterly bizarre it is that we produce hundreds of thousands of gallons of a dangerous drug called beer in the US everyday, and we're all so okay with it that we casually joke about its consumption. But then we spend billions of dollars terrorizing villages in impoverished nations in South and Central America to destroy this other dangerous drug called cocaine. Think about that for a minute. It makes absolutely no sense. I'm not saying that beer and cocaine are exactly equivalent nor that we should let InBev start manufacturing recreational hard drugs. This isn't how we should do things. But if we did, it would be better than what we're doing now.
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Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Until next time ...
*Some sites, such as Rex Parker, Football Outsiders, and FanGraphs are excepted because they have relatively few comments and are mostly interesting. I'm primarily just talking about the big sites, ESPN, NY Times, Washington Post, etc.
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