The Laboratorium: August 2005 Archives

Link to this entry

Noted with sad amusement: In the week that I’ve had my new cordless phone, I’ve had to use the “page” feature twice to find where I put the darn handset.

Link to this entry

As far as I’m concerned, the greatest development ever in post-space-age fabrics may be the 95%/5% cotton/spandex blend. It feels a lot like cotton, only more comfortably stretchy and cooler. Good stuff, and it makes for a very comfortable undershirt.

My stepfather and I discovered one particularly nice instantiation of the cotton/spandex undershirt a year or two ago and started buying them regularly. Now that I’m working an office job and need more T-shirts that can go under a dress shirt, I decided it was a good time to go looking for more of them. The hunt was strangely difficult. (I tried on a similar blend from another maker, but the fit was awful—it was a bodybuilder shirt, cut large in the torso to accomodate rippling pecs and slender below to show off washboard abs. It was also made for someone six-foot-six, despite being a “medium.”)

Some futher hunting turned up a few of them in a sale bin at about half price. Of course, we snapped them up immediately. A friendly salesman told us that there were no more in stock, but he helpfully went into the computer system and found for us all the extant shirts of that make in every store in the department chain. They were all at the same absurdly deep 70% discount.

Our best guess is that the line is being discontinued and the department stores are pushing the remaining inventory out the door. We’re going to call up a few more stores to snap up bargain-priced shirts if that really is the case, because we might not ever get another shot at more. From then on out, we’d need to ration the shirts.

We could wind up like Elaine. Is today shirt-worthy?

Link to this entry

I pulled my computer from college out of the basement. Computers were bigger in those days; it’s larger than my stove.

When I plugged it in and fired it up, I was a bit surprised to discover that the air being blown out by the fan smelled like … a Nalgene bottle.

Link to this entry

Leaving aside the courthouse itself and the restaurants and bail bondsmen caught up in its gravitational field, the main two industries near where I work appear to be parking lots and shouting.

Link to this entry

I just read Umberto Eco’s new novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, and boy am I ticked at the editors of The New Yorker. “The Gorge,” which they published as a short story in March, turned out to be an excerpt from the book.

That by itself would have been fine; this is how they do things there. Everything is Illuminated had maybe the first third of one of its two narrative threads turned into a New Yorker story and that worked pretty well, to the point of getting me to read the book. I think they ran two separate excerpts from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but they were both stories-within-the-story and stood reasonably well on their own without giving even mild hints about the rest of the book.

But did they do that here? Nooooo, they had to go and ruin maybe half the suspense of the novel. The plot of The Mysterious Flame involves an amnesiac trying to remember his past, especially his childhood. About a hundred pages into the book, I started thinking that hey, that town sounds familiar. But once I realized that, I also realized that I already knew what the big secret in Yambo’s past was, because it had been quite nicely presented to me in the pages of The New Yorker.

Thanks a whole lot.

Link to this entry

Last night, I dreamed that I had to hand in three law school final papers in four days—and had to accompany each with a pile of my packed moving boxes.

Link to this entry

Been doing some computer tinkering with my remaining bits of summer vacation. (I don’t expect to get the kind of substantial chunk of free time that some of this stuff takes again for a while.) It’s been a while since I’ve been through this kind of process, and I’ve been struck by how a few things have changed in the last few years.

Link to this entry

Your attention, please.

Any contact information you have for me is incorrect. My phone number, cell phone number, postal address, email address, and home page URL have changed. You should mark your address books accordingly.

My new home page, such as it is, is at james.grimmelmann.net (although the blog will remain here at laboratorium.net). My email address is james >>at<< grimmelmann >>dot<< net. I hope for these to remain the same for quite some time.

Link to this entry

The difference between TRUCK RENTAL COMPANY A and TRUCK RENTAL COMPANY B is that when TRUCK RENTAL COMPANY B screws up your reservation and doesn’t have a truck, they’re apologetic and courteous about it.

Link to this entry

(With thanks to Eugene Volokh. Or should that be “with apologies?”)