machination.org

The LEGO bricks are still on the floor this morning. This is a compliance failure and an enforcement failure. I fetched the child’s first yogurt of the morning and issued a warning.

“LEGO that doesn’t get picked up gets sucked up into the vacuum cleaner!” It just happens. I’m not trying to do it. I just can’t guarantee that if you don’t put your LEGO back that we can get all of your LEGO back. That’s your job, son.

A gasp and then a shrug of denial. Quick, change the subject! “Daddy, can I watch some TV?”

I snag the Apple TV remote, waking the device, and notice that Disney+ is already launched. “How about some Bluey?”

The child accedes and the episode already queued up is entitled “Housework.” Karma.

As with all Bluey episodes, whether or not the episode is substantially focused on the topic in the title is kind of beside the point. To oversimplify: Bluey and Bingo are asked to participate in housecleaning—see, child, they have to do it too—and ultimately distract their parents with their silly walks which they then teach their parents. (And ultimately everyone does their fair share of housework. I try not to compare that to us.)

And then I see it, the crucial evidence: a knobby plastic brick in the vacuum cleaner Bluey’s Dad is running! (Rewind. Freeze frame.) There, kid. Consequences are everywhere.

A solemn nod. And then he dove back into his own LEGO pile.

It is time to go to school.

I will pick up the LEGO today when I do all the housecleaning by myself on my island of solitude and LEGO and who the hell knows what else is underfoot?

I have forgotten, if I ever knew, about how coffee rings form. And Google sucks.

Nearly every morning I pour myself a cup of coffee. Hot, iced, whatever — into a clean vessel, a mug or glass, often straight from the dishwasher having been run the night before. Every time (or every time I think to look) there is instantly a small ring puddle, a footprint of the vessel, on the counter.

I did not spill.

I am not including times when I spill, those times when there’s a splash that hits the counter or when I miss more closely and some hits the rim and flows down the side. You can see it when it happens, and there’s other trace evidence — spatter, traces of rivulet. You might even hear unexpected sounds of unexpected impacts if you’re otherwise attentive in a quiet setting.

I’m supposing some minor mystery of science on which much has been said. One that I am sure I was taught about by Mr. Hall in my 8th Grade Science class (mostly a physics class, where, if nothing else it seemed everything was fair game for a Newtonian force vector diagram).

Off to Google.

The Google results are shit.

The only thing close to an appropriate result is a Quora thread, where someone asks the same thing I am asking and everyone seems to suggest he actually spilled and didn’t know it. Or there was a hairline fracture in his mug. I know I didn’t spill. And I use a wide variety of vessels, none (let alone all) have a hairline fracture. Pigfucker Quora trolls are gaslighting this poor man and me.

There’s some seemingly bullshit answer about condensation, but water from the air would condense on the outside when I have a cold drink. Not coffee. And not with a hot drink in a cold room.

There are a lot of other interesting articles, adjacent but still seemingly irrelevant, about the actual nature of the coffee ring itself: how it’s thicker at the edges and capillary flow and evaporation being the cause. Fine. Many of them specifically suppose one spilled their coffee or describe the effect on the inside of a coffee mug. (Some allege an impact on flavor and enjoyment? I did not check to see if these web sites also had guidance on which crystal to deploy next to my coffee maker or to pair with my eggs.)

Many of these articles seem to appear around the same time as each other because some scientific paper on capillary flow came out or something (I don’t know, I didn’t go that far down the rabbit hole). They have headlines like, “Ever wonder why spilled coffee dries to leave a ring?”

NO! I don’t spill my goddam coffee. I’m wondering how the coffee got there in the first fucking place and I don’t wonder about the actual nature of the ring left behind I always intuited it was something like a capillary effect without so many words Jesus fucking Christ.

Breathe.

I don’t know, maybe I spilled my coffee.

Far up the river, 22 years ago, daydreaming and looking out the window “that’s not how you land at Albany,” or a thought to that effect.

Well that is not where it landed.

I will not forget that, and all the hell that ensued that day and for decades to come. It isn’t over.

I never met her but I was touched by her work. I knew of her as an open web advocate, as the creator of valuable resources (I own(ed) two of her books as I taught myself into something like the early stages of a career). I saw the fight she, Zeldman, and others were leading as a fundamental underpinning to my (and any) more overtly political fights. And aren’t we all (re)learning that lesson now.

My own identity is federated (as well as idle or abandoned and isolated) across many networks and platforms. I feel like some sort of social web equivalent of a vector analysis diagram might reveal a true center, or destination I suppose. Some notional node between the nodes.

It had come to feel trite to, along with “everyone else,” stop and post something, conspicuously sharing that one was aware of and appreciated, ostensibly mourned, the passing of someone well known. I have stepped back on social media, so I didn’t say anything about Robbie Robertson as soon as I heard.

But I was listening to World Cafe (I happened to be listening to the WEXT stream, pretending I can feel my idealized version of optimal weather from Upstate NY wash over me with the music being broadcast out of the Mohawk Valley) and they rebroadcast an interview with Robertson.

This is what you do when anyone you care about passes. You stop, you appreciate them, you tell others about them, and maybe you make a little vow about how you’ll maintain their memory for yourself going forward.

And while I am not of that generation and other demographics for whom Robbie Robertson was a first-order cultural contemporary, maybe even hero, the tentacles of his and others' music and that counterculture have stretched out and touched my whole life in different ways through family and geography.

Good for him. Good for me.

RIP.

What the hell happened to printer friendly CSS‽ Especially you fucks publishing 4,000... 8,000 plus word essays. Jesus. I'm doing your work for you, but just for myself with dev tools or stop the madness, just so I don't go insane. Or maybe because you've already driven me there.

And, I see all your ridiculous libraries and frameworks which, even minified, add kilobytes (if not megabytes) of cruft. Maybe not the case when also compressed, but now you're just making me use cycles on my end to realize that "benefit." It goes somewhere kids. It goes somewhere. You shit it out, we have to eat it.

Fuckin' Christ.