On a fairly warm and very sunny day I found myself walking down Newbury Street yesterday when a sign advertising baklava ice cream prompted an immediate, spontaneous and completely involuntary detour to Ben & Jerry’s. What a brilliant idea for an ice cream flavor which in fact turned out to be a delightful scrumptious treat.
Recently I had a disturbing flashback to third grade. Back then we passed around books to the kids we liked asking them for information about themselves (favorite color, favorite pet, birthday, etc.). It was an honor to be asked, although even then I couldn’t decide what my favorite color was. Aren’t they all great? Well, most of them anyways. Flash forward into the twentyfirst century, an email lands in my inbox asking me to get to know my friends better by answering very similar questions to those I had trouble answering in third grade. If I were to believe in getting to know my friends better in this way, my options would be: make stuff up, be funny, or be truthful (which would glaringly expose my inability to commit to a favorite thing when I know it will change, you know, next week or so).
Having said all this, the real reason I found the email disturbing is because it’s a chain letter and too close to the whole genre of urban legends and co. By now, most of my friends know better than to send me warnings of cancer-causing deoderant, parking lot rapes and other urban legends, because when they do reach me I usually fact check, then inform the whole list of the real story thereby embarrassing the sender (sorry guys, low tolerance levels for BS).
Anything that is sent to me with an ending “send this to x number of friends/people/enemies or the world will end/you will die a painful death, or you will deprive your friends of something funny, cute or uplifting” ends up in the electronic wastebasket faster than lightning, most of the times entirely unread. Amazingly enough, the world hasn’t come to an end and is certainly not a sadder place because I have deprived my friends of canned email messages.
Almost as bad are petitions that were being circled via email by otherwise reasonably intelligent people. What would prevent anybody from adding a whole list of made up names to the petition? Typing my name at the bottom of an email is not the same as putting my signature under a petition.
How is it that we have these awesome communications resources and they end up being used mostly for junk? If anybody ever figures out how to spam my phone text message box, I will send around a petition to make government stop it. Via email, of course …
Is there such a thing as too much chocolate?
There is more chocolate in my house than would feed a small country. That’s because I had a chocolate party for Easter after giving up chocolate for lent. For those of my friends who missed it, fear not, there will be others. Although probably not during the heat of summer and definitely not until I figure out how much chocolate each person can reasonably eat, so that I won’t end up with heaps of chocolate days after the event.
So as I prepared all kinds of chocolate treats on Saturday, I realized that it’s in fact possible to overdose on chocolate without even eating any (this was pre-Easter vigil, after which the earlier “no chocolate involved” overdose had worn off and I had a huge piece of Sachertorte and a spoonful of Nutella). Delicious!
My iBook is dead. The cause of death was logic board failure. iBook was particularly fond of entertaining with iTunes and by playing West Wing DVDs or streaming Daily Show clips. It always showed remarkable dedication, particularly during two years of constant use in graduate school, and tackled every task, no matter how challenging or boring, with a positive attitude. It lived a full life and was in excellent health up until the logic board failed and caused a sudden death. It came quickly, but not unexpectedly given the advanced age of 98 computer years (almost 4 human years). iBook is survived by a younger cousin (external hard drive) and its owner.
Condolences can be sent to the owner via comments or e-mail.
If you didn’t know that Monday was opening day of the baseball season or that the Women’s NCAA basketball championships were held in Boston yesterday, you had to look no further than the good old MBTA. Local buses prominently displayed “Go Red Sox” and “Welcome NCAA” was flashing for a couple of days in rotation with “1 - Harvard Square”. It’s fun, it makes me smile, but is it a good use of MBTA communications resources? Shouldn’t they instead display the bus route as to not confuse riders who may not be so familiar with the bus line? I mean, I can just see the confusion in the eyes of a foreign visitor: “Red Sox? I thought I was going to Harvard Square?” or “Wonder where NCAA is? You think it’s a nice part of town?” (insert foreign accent here).
Obviously I’m being silly. I suppose the whole thing adds to the uniqueness of Boston, the one place in the country where maps are useless because there is no way to determine your location based on street signs as they are conspicuously absent, where lawyers in suits wear baseball caps to work convinced that it will make the Red Sox win, where year after year Bostonians get tricked into thinking that spring had sprung and then get hit with snow in April and where the letter “r” was dropped from the alphabet a long time ago.