Fun Eiffel Tower fact: for the 1893 world’s fair in Chicago, Eiffel proposed building a copy of his original tower but twice as tall. The organizers passed on the offer and went with the Ferris wheel instead. We could have had Eiffel Bueller’s Day Off.

When I was a kid in the '70s there was a rumor that went around that Rod Stewart once sucked so many dicks that he had to go to the hospital to have the semen pumped out of his stomach. Here’s Rod Stewart himself explaining it.

Antz was the “copycat” movie that was rushed out to beat A Bug’s Life into the theaters. Back when animation studios even bothered with that shit.

“First rule of leadership, princess: everything is your fault!”

The middle school near my house is sort of like this, not truly parabolic but the side facing south has three highly reflective glass faces at slightly odd angles relative to each other, just a few degrees each. It is insane how much heat even this produces in the morning if you’re standing in the right place. In winter when we have snow, there’s always a nice green bare patch in this spot.

My mom didn’t trust the little lever thingie on her curling iron to hold it up off the bathroom sink properly. So she would rest it on a folded-up towel instead. And she would sometimes forget about it and leave it there on full heat. Somehow the house is still standing.

The house I bought three years ago has those fake wood gray planks in the living room. I deliberately left the floor uncovered during renovation on the assumption that it would be destroyed and I’d have to replace it with something I actually like. Unfortunately, that shit is indestructible.

A few years ago my octogenarian mom became incapable of sealing ziplock bags. It drove me insane because I would repeatedly go to open something like chips or crackers that I had put in ziplocks only to find the seal partly open and the contents stale. I got in the habit of just going through everything in the pantry every couple of hours and resealing all the bags. I thought this was age-related until we hired a mid-20s home helper for her and the helper had the same problem. I don’t know what it is – ziplock bags aren’t that hard to use properly.

Oh, that’s probably what it was. Oh well, Musk is still a douchebag.

When I was a kid in the '70s there were cigarette vending machines everywhere. If you wanted to smoke, you could smoke.

I’m old enough to remember coming home from bars with my clothes reeking, even though I never smoked myself.

I’m a school bus driver and a majority of my colleagues smoke. Some things will never change.

That Dorothy Hamill cut was the shit.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said “ELON”. I dunno, maybe ELON stands for something else. It was stuck on the back of a Chrysler, ironically enough.

I had this idea for a sci-fi short story that involved a long-lived alien that has been watching the earth since the solar system formed. It finally decides to speak to humanity and starts telling the story about how the earth formed from the collision of two bodies, and the humans are all “yeah yeah we know. Here’s a movie we made of it” and the alien is all “WTF? How do they know that?”

Mozart also invented a system that used dice to randomly generate music. My unverifiable theory is that he continued refining the system and it got so good that he used it to compose all his greatest hits and stopped telling anybody about his random music generator.

Jeopardy just depresses me now. I used to think I could have at least competed on the show, but for the last 20 years or so I’ve been completely disconnected from pop culture and I could never hope to answer that type of question. I also miss Trebek, god damn it. Ken Jennings is alright but it’s not just the same.

The evil truth of sourdough is that it takes about the same amount of time and effort to make four loaves as it does to make one.

I worked at/with Northrup Grumman for a few years, not directly but for a company that did contract consulting for them at their shipyards on the gulf coast. That place was basically staggering levels of corruption combined with staggering levels of incompetence. The actual NG employees did not see much of that money, though, although what they did make was pretty good for that part of the country.

That place was universally conservative, no doubt about it.

It’s hilarious that people blame boomers and nepotism for the problems of the world without seeing the contradiction.