Shipping solved

Filler Item is a website that lets you plug in how far away you are from free shipping on Amazong, then creates a list of what you can buy for that exact amount. I feel like I am always just short of free shipping, and it's a pain to look for cheapo items manually. If you're only $2 away from getting it for free, and shipping would cost you $10, it makes a darn lot of sense.

You're welcome.

WTF CNN

Given how much I link to the New York Times on this blog, it's probably clear that I don't read CNN.com. That said, wtfcnn.com is brilliant. It shows you the current homepage of CNN at the top of the screen and the current homepage of a different news outlet - BBC, Al Jazeera, etc - at the bottom. CNN suffers by the comparison. You get to view two different media outlets at the same time AND feel superior to the American news establishment!

Mystery box !!!

Oh my god I love Thursday night mystery boxes. Tonight $25 netted me (from left, sort of): baby gold turnips, sugar snap peas, beautiful red and green baby lettuces (each head is the perfect side for a one-person salad), parsnips, thyme, artichokes, radishes, orach, leeks, and fennel.

Jackpot.

Good Samaritan

Our friend Mark is secretly famous - he tailed a car that looked like it had been in an accident, then called the police. Lo and behold, the genius driver had rear-ended a car, backed into a bus stop, then hauled ass out of there. This is what the bus stop (which had a lady in it at the time) looked like:

Mark's vigilance and good citizenship strike fear into the hearts of shitty hit-and-run drivers everywhere.

Hootenanny?

The beautiful thing about the Bay Area is that no matter how precious or snobby or laughable the culture seems sometimes, there really is a there there. Northern California culture is genuinely great, even when it's also annoying.

Behold: urban homesteading in SF, as covered by the NYT. I brew, so they say I am part of this movement (who knew?). I kind of think kombucha is gross (I'll never forget the look on Meesh's face when an acquaintance introduced us to "the momma and her babies", which were, of course, fungus), but if you want a chicken coop or beehives or whatever, my feeling is that you should go for it.

As such, I really want to go to this "hootenanny" tomorrow night, since it will apparently have lots of homemade things that will either kill me or be delicious. If it turns out not to be my crowd (and odds are good), I will at least feel like I have made an attempt to make my way into the local culture.

Also, a group called The Goat Sisters is playing. So I have to be there.

All the beer geeks

If you have a spare hour (and I'm sure you do) you should watch this talk by Sam Calagione, the founder of Dogfish Head, speaking last year. It is fantastically interesting if you are into beer.

Vhere is Valdo

I freaking hate Werner Herzog. I think he has great ideas, and makes them into annoying movies - mostly through his stupid voice overs.

So how perfect is it that someone has him (or someone who sounds like him) reading "Where's Waldo"? It's brilliant.

Woopsy daisy

This list of 15 unintentionally perverted kids' toys is priceless, and reminds me of Beth's Superman lightswitch plate (with strategically placed lightswitch). It is a whole bucket of what-the-hell.

My favorite is the Harry Potter vibrating broomstick, but I have seen the anatomically questionable inflatable slides, and they are also dandy. Trauma abounds.

All the smarty ladies

Well-educated womenfolk are boozehounds. Well, duh.

Oh, Banksy

Pretty good though, right?

(courtesy of Hypebeast)

John McPhee, again

Tonight I finished Silk Parachute, a just-published book of John McPhee's essays. They're pieces from here and there - some have the seeds of his book-length works, and some are one-offs. He talks about lacrosse, and the New Yorker's fact-checking team, and eating weird foods, and canoeing. All his essays make you glad to be alive.

And best of all, he ends with a short piece on New Jersey. When you come from a maligned state, you cannot imagine how wonderful it is to have a respected man of letters stick up for your homeland - and a man of letters who you kind of want to kidnap and make talk to you forever and ever, too.

Here's what he says: "I must go [to Alaska] from time to time to recover from the sheer physiographic intensity of living in New Jersey - must go, to be reminded that there is at least one other state that is physically as varied but is sensibly spread out."

Someone from Tennesse asked him why "a writer, who could live almost anywhere he wanted to, chooses to live in New Jersey."

Is he kidding?...When you cross New Jersey, you cover four events: the violent upheaval of two sets of mountains several hundred million years apart; and, long after all that, the creation of the Atlantic Ocean; and, more recently, the laying on of the Coastal Plain by the trowel of the mason. Do they know that in Tennessee? Tennessee is a one-event country: all you see there, east to west, are the Appalachians, slowly going away.

New Jersey has had the genius to build across its narrow center the most contentrated trasportation slot in the world...a tube, a conduit, which has acquired through time an ugliness sufficient to stop a Gorgon in her tracks. Through this supersluice continuously pass hundreds of thousands of people from Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Texas, Tennessee, holding their breath. They are shot like peas to New York. If New Jersey has a secret, that is it.

I love him.

Oh.

My cat is morbidly obese and has a tapeworm. I am so confused.

Allergies & alcohol

Well, shit. Alcohol may worsen allergies symptoms because it contains histamines. Since histamines are evil little beasties that make me break out in itchy hives anytime my heart rate increases (thank you, store brand Zyrtec for making exercise bearable again), this is very bad news. Perhaps this explains why my hangover headaches are centered on the sinus region? Or not.

Financial stuff blah blah

A few months ago I signed up for a daily financial planning email from LearnVest. Some days it's super relevant and really handy, and some days I just ignore it. But if you are a lady, and you are not feeling entirely in control of your financial life, I highly recommend it - it's a nice regular push to get on top of things.

For example, I am oh so close to switching from Bank of America to a credit union, and having regular reminders to be more proactive about my money has gotten me here. Now I just have to actually go to the credit union and sign up. Despite their recent infusion of investment cash, LearnVest cannot yet actually drive my ass to the bank. Maybe one day.

Miette

I never buy sweet treats from Miette because they are so insanely overpriced. But: WANT.