Jonesy got out of the house this morning, and it was completely my fault, although in my defense I was unaware that the fat bastard had recently developed the ability to not only move at something just shy of the speed of Goddamned light but also the ability to turn invisible at will. Five or so hours of searching ensued, and said fat bastard was eventually discovered underneath a neighbor’s porch and (also eventually) coaxed out from underneath it and, after a few secondary escapes, returned home.
So the story has a happy ending, other than the fact that my planned eight-week no-absences stand at work lasted two days, and everyone in the house including the Goddamned cat is still stressed out and exhausted. So you’ll forgive me if this is a short post.
My son and I needed to pick up our new glasses, so after dinner we went to that place, you know the one, the place that specializes in bulk goods and isn’t Sam’s Club. The one that promises … low cost. Yeah, them. I’m only being cagey because of how this story ends and I don’t particularly want it showing up in search results.
You tell me: Do you see a problem with this display of potentially explosive propane products? And, having seen this potentially problematic display of potentially explosive propane products, do you then draw any particular conclusions about the tanks themselves?
One way or another, my wife works in health and safety, and is therefore precisely the type of person for whom a triple stack of propane tanks, indoors might be a problem, and while I’m not a specialist, I’m not keen on, y’know, exploding. Or being exploded at. And I’ve worked retail, and am perfectly comfortable with the idea that some manager might have told some employee to get some shit out on the floor and either been misunderstood or not been smart enough to realize what he was ordering the underpaid nineteen-year-old he was talking to to do.
So yeah: I went and found a manager, and trying as best I could to radiate this is insanely dangerous and you need to take care of this while not radiating I am an assholeand we are both about to end up on YouTube, I pointed out that maybe this wasn’t a good idea or even maybe legal and please reassure me that you’re going to take care of it.
“It’s not dangerous,” he says to me.
I blink at him a few times, reconsidering my approach to the conversation as well as my entire understanding of how the world works.
“Were you under the impression that those were full?” he asks.
Well, yeah, and okay, I didn’t exactly pick one up and shake it, because again: dangerous, and while I don’t think any right-thinking person would stack propane tanks indoors, I am quite familiar with idiots. I actually find it more likely that an idiot might stack propane tanks indoors than that a retail store would have a giant display of items that you cannot buy and cannot be used for their intended purpose, especially without any signage indicating that if you want a propane tank you should, I dunno, go to the propane and propane accessories department located in Aisle F.
So no, I had not considered the idea that the tanks were empty, and I’m not sure how bad I feel about that, and I’m pretty sure this guy thinks I’m a moron but I’m also not sure how I feel about that, because I think I’d rather be thought a moron by a stranger who I’m never going to see or speak to again than not say anything about a situation that could potentially cause a huge fucking explosion.
Maybe I’m weird? I dunno. How would you have handled this?
There was an eclipse today. I’m pretty sure none of my students were blinded by it; if any of them were, I refuse to take any responsibility for it, as I told them clearly and without qualification that they were not to look at the God damned sun without their glasses on about a thousand times today. Each.
As my focus today was more or less just pure survival, I don’t have a lot else to talk about; attendance was poor but not as bad as I might have expected and beyond the eclipse (which, as an astronomy nerd, was super cool to watch, but everyone knows about it and there’s not much of significance to say) not a whole lot happened today. This week in general is kinda placeholdery, honestly. As an IU grad I support Purdue tonight in theory but I probably will not support them in practice; a 9:00 start time on a Monday is not gonna get me watching sports again, sorry.
(Actually, okay, that’s not quite true: I was, for the second eclipse in a row, convinced that it was going to get a lot darker. We weren’t at totality, but Christ, 97.4% is not that far from totality! And it definitely got darker and the sky looked like it had a filter on it but it’s amazing to think that even getting less than three percent of our usual light from the sun still left enough light to easily see by. The sun is bright, y’all.)
I have spent most of the weekend watching college basketball, somehow, and my brother’s family was in town today, and I swear if you had asked me what time it was before I looked outside and realized it was dark I probably would have been off by at least three hours.
Lots to do tomorrow, on my last day of Spring Break. Hopefully I can get through Sunday without losing my shit too hard.
If you’ve been around here for any length of time– five days would do it– you have certainly seen at least a variant of this picture, my four Nice Bookshelves that are in my living room and are currently dedicated at least mostly to series fiction. The bottom shelves are an exception, partially, but whatever.
A few weeks ago I discovered what I thought was a spectacular sale at the furniture store I worked at– not quite, but almost, half off of these exact same bookshelves. So this has happened:
Hello, Gideon. Hello, The Boy’s toes.
So we’re back to having seven bookshelves in this room again, which I … think is probably the end of it, because of the extra room the sectional takes up compared to the sofa we had before? But who knows. At any rate, these are not precisely identical to the bookshelves we had before, because they weren’t on sale– these come unassembled, and that’s why they were cheaper. That rather tedious process has been my job for the last few days. That said, once put together, they look identical, and they’re quite solidly put together as well– these are absolutely not Wal-Mart $40 specials like the other bookshelves in the house and I have no reason to not believe they’ll last just as long as the ones we spent more money on.
We used my wife’s nice big new car to deliver a shitton of styrofoam and cardboard to our local recycling/hazardous waste facility today and I’ve got all the shelves where I want them. I have two days of vacation left and by the time school starts back up I want my books organized properly again. Right now the theme is “only fiction in the living room” and “only nonfiction in the library … other than the leatherbounds,” but we’ll see.
I’ll post more pictures once everything is properly organized.
Literally every single thing I have done or tried to do today has been frustrating, and I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow and it is not going to go well, because basically every single bad number that exists is going to be higher than it has ever been before, and if I had a window big enough to throw the entire fucking planet through I’d do it. I’ve been on vacation, supposedly, all week, and I’m still exhausted.
From the “I’d have two nickels, but it’s weird that it happened twice” department: Between Kyne Santos, who wrote this really awesome fucking book, and a simply outstanding TikTok account called Carrie the One, I follow two different math-based drag queen accounts on social media, or at least I did before I killed off my TikTok account. I say an awful lot that you already know from the title and the cover whether you want to read this book or not, but let’s be real here: a book about math written by a drag queen might be the ultimate “you already know if you want to read this” book, and to be honest this is less of a review than a notification that this book exists, and you might have missed it, and if the notion of reading this book rustles your jibblies in literally any way at all you should go spend money right away.
This book is part memoir, part textbook (simultaneously of mathematics, the history of gay culture and the drag movement, and of the history of mathematics) and part adorably unhinged geek-out about how fucking cool math is. You probably need to be at least comfortable with algebra to be able to fully appreciate it, if only because it’s kind of hard to talk a lot about math without getting at least a little bit into the weeds, but Kyne’s going to be explaining what ℵ0 is at some point and if that terrifies you you should at least take a deep breath before jumping in. It’s only 233 pages, though, so even if you have a rough time with it it’s not terribly long.
Each chapter takes on some aspect of mathematics– there’s a chapter on infinity, a chapter on algebra, a chapter on what “proof” means in a mathematical context and what the difference between numbers and numerals are, and so on, and Santos interweaves their own story and the history bits into the more technical (but again, not super technical, so far as it goes) math-focused parts. I picked up a couple of things that I am absolutely going to be bringing up in class, or at least with my Algebra kids– I have my lesson plans for Monday done already, and they’re directly from an anecdote in this book about imaginary square numbers that absolutely set my brain on fire– and Santos is one of those people who can carry a lot of what could be a slog just by sheer enthusiasm for the subject matter. Again, if you’re even the least bit curious, absolutely give this a shot. It’s well worth it.
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