I’m not putting up a picture of my new shower door, which after many delays got put in today, because I am angry at it. I’m pretty sure the Goddamned thing got ordered incorrectly, because the piece of glass on the right, the one that doesn’t move, is fully an inch higher than the one on the left that is the actual door. Everything appears to have been installed correctly; the guy who did the work visibly winced as soon as I noticed the height differential, and I’m pretty sure that “uneven” isn’t a style. It already took, what, four months extra to get this thing in place?
Oh, and the vanity was definitely sent to us in the wrong size. This is the second vanity, mind you; the first one arrived crushed. This one was six inches bigger than it was supposed to be and doesn’t fit in the space we have for it.
And since we don’t have the right vanity, we’re still using the loaner they gave us, which means they had to remove the cabinet, which they put in first, because the loaner vanity and the cabinet don’t play nice with each other, so for a while today I had my nice new bathroom cabinet in place and now I don’t have it anymore.
I found this three hours ago, and I haven’t Tweeted enough today to scroll the irritated tweet I wrote about it off of my screen, so it’s still sitting there bothering me. I don’t know if the person who designed this shirt (and there’s a whole line of clothing with this idiotic design) doesn’t speak English as their first language or what, but a whole bunch of people looked at this fucking shirt and didn’t do anything about it before it showed up on Amazon to annoy me.
I mean, before an R? Who the fuck thinks we need apostrophes before the letter R?
Seriously, though: there are seven apostrophes in this post so far. There’s not a single word— and there’s apostrophes number eight and nine– that would suddenly become ambiguous or unclear if the apostrophe was removed. I don’t have any fucking clue why this is so complicated to so many people– seriously, it’s not fucking hard— but society just needs to get rid of the fucking thing. We don’t actually need to have a whole punctuation mark to indicate removed letters any longer. I’m not completely convinced we ever did, to be honest.
There is a sports bar a few miles north of me called Mitch’s. Or maybe it’s Mitchs’, I don’t fucking know, because the front of the building and their road sign spell the name of their own establishment two different ways. I have never set foot in this place and I never will, because I hate them, and I drive past the place fairly frequently, and every time I drive past them, I have to think about how much I hate them and decide for the ten millionth time that I’m not going to burn the place down.
I give up. It’s enough. Human beings cannot be educated to do this properly, they’re not capable. For my sanity, society needs to abandon the apostrophe.
This is at least the second time that a Neal Stephenson book has started off really really cool and then flubbed the landing. I was all ready to write an effusively positive review of this book, which is a near-future novel about climate change and geoengineering, and then it just sort of … ends, with several storylines unresolved and the overall feeling that Stephenson had a page count he was expected to stick to and didn’t feel like going back and cutting anything out so he just ended the book. You may remember my review of Seveneves from several years ago, which is roughly five hundred pages of good, then a massive time skip and another three hundred pages of garbage. This does not do that; there is a brief time skip at one point but it keeps with the same characters afterwards and generally isn’t a huge misstep, even though it scared the hell out of me. But it does this thing where you’re following several characters whose stories knit together and one character whose story doesn’t until the end of the book, when they finally do come together, and they come together in such a ridiculous and unnecessary way that it made me feel like the extra character would probably have been best cut entirely from the book. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a Neal Stephenson book, so there’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but I’m starting to feel like this guy’s move is that he writes books that are chock full of cool stuff and interesting ideas and do not actually knit together into satisfying books. I gave it three stars on Goodreads; I could probably justify four or two depending on my mood.
Also, the novel is horrendously misnamed.
I went with the Termination Shock cover for my post image because the cover of Miley Cyrus’ new live album, Attention, is a close-up of her ass in a thong. Which, like, I don’t disapprove of, exactly, but neither do I need it spread all over my blog, and my normal way of listening to music on my computer involves the album art being visible and I had to turn that off too. I’m not even sure why I bought this, to be honest, it kind of happened without my conscious mind being involved, but I liked it a hell of a lot and I really want Miley to do an album of Janis Joplin covers. Her most recent incarnation seems to be leaning into the raspy, twangy nature of her voice and into rock much more than the pop music she used to do, and I like it a lot. The weirdest thing? The audience interaction is pretty good throughout the album, but the last song is Party in the USA, as you might expect, and the audience acts as if they’ve never heard the song before. It’s really weird.
Book of the Month is going to be Shadow of the Gods, although any of the bottom four books could have taken it. I’m not done with Termination Shock just yet though.
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