I was a Goo Goo kind of gal
Well, I’ve confessed this on Twitter, so I might as well say it here: when we lived in Chattanooga, my father’s secretary was the daughter of the man who invented the Moon Pie. I know – touched by greatness.
No, I don’t know what her name was. No, I have no idea why she had to work for a living rather than swanning around on his vast Moon Pie fortune. I was, like, three.
I don’t actually like Moon Pies. It’s a texture thing with me and marshmallow. For some reason, I make an exception for that other local delicacy, Goo Goo Candy Clusters. Know the jingle?
March 25, 2026 — 7:40 pm
Comments: 4
Such a jokester
I asked Grok why you need to pee when you walk into a cold room, then I asked it to draw me a cartoon weasel. It gave me a whole lecture on the anatomy of a cartoon weasel, which included items like “Paws: Adorable pink beans with tiny claws that can dig, climb, and grip like Velcro. Perfect for: Holding tiny bladders when they really need to pee.”
Every item had an entry about pee. I think Grok liked to talk about it.
Then it drew me this picture.
What? Oh – vasoconstriction.
March 24, 2026 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 2
Is it cold in here, or is it just me?
Actually, it’s toasty warm in here. We’ve had a fire all day. That’s a red flag.
Uncle B caught our oil central heat boiler smoking over the weekend – and not the fun kind with the nicotine. He shut it down, but our boiler tech (whatever they’re called) is going straight to voicemail and he hasn’t returned the call.
So, day fires. Very evocative. I hung out at the gym this morning until he took the edge off. We’re having a cold snap, of course.
March 23, 2026 — 6:47 pm
Comments: 4
Happy spring equinox!
Or, as the Anglo Saxons called it, Ēosturmōnaþ (AY-oh-stoor-moh-nath) the festival to the goddess Ēostre. Nobody knows the nature of the festivities, but everyone has a spring festival of some kind. Everybody happy when spring come.
Or maybe he made all that shit up. The venerable Bede is the only one who named Ēostre as a goddess.
Who knew Chuck Norris could die? That must be one courageous heart attack that took him on. @smedleythebarbarian tripped over Rule Zero, but let us welcome him to the Dead Pool fold. I don’t recall seeing that handle before.
Good weekend. Go thou and drink to Ēosturmōnaþ!
March 20, 2026 — 7:30 pm
Comments: 7
Like dinner plates
Eye test went fine, but they gave me two different drops to dilate my pupils and – boy howdy! – did that dilate my pupils. I wasn’t in danger of losing my way home, but O my garden was soft and glowy when I got home.
My little leaking blood vessel is still leaking. She didn’t seem concerned – but she wouldn’t discharge me, either. I go back in three months.
That’s in direct sunlight, to give you an idea how paralyzed my poor irises were. Do you have any idea how hard it is to take a picture of your own pupil?
March 19, 2026 — 5:36 pm
Comments: 5
Creepy
China’s new micro spy drone. Grok says it real. Click the link to see it in flight.
It’s very good, but I question how long it can fly on a charge. And then take pictures and wifi them back to base.
Being an electric bike kinda gal, I’m always worried about battery issues.
Grok: “China’s National University of Defense Technology unveiled this mosquito-like micro-drone in June 2025, measuring 2 cm long and 0.3 grams, with flapping wings for silent, insect-mimicking flight suited to indoor espionage, as confirmed by reports in Newsweek and Euronews.”
Tomorrow, I have to hop on a train and do the ophthalmology thing again. It’s just a checkup, but I hate that they call me in last minute. From someone who used to do several trans-Atlantic flights a year, I have become an bad traveller.
March 18, 2026 — 5:50 pm
Comments: 5
He’s good on metaphors
I was reading a Victorian magazine today (as you do) and came upon the phrase “under a Upas tree.” So I axed my robot friend (as you do).
The Upas tree – Antiaris toxicaria – is a large tree native to Southeast Asia and parts of the Pacific. It produces a toxic latex that some Southeast Asian tribes used to tip arrows.
In the late 18th C, a dutchman wrote in a London magazine that the Upas, which grew in a remote valley in Java, was so deadly that it killed animals and plants for miles around it. This incorretoid made it into several guidebooks and travel books (and at least one poem). I mean, it’s poisonous, but it’s not that poisonous.
By the mid 19th C (the period of my magazine), they knew it wasn’t true, but it was firmly fixed as a metaphor for insidious and pervasive evil: bad political systems, immoral people, or destructive ideas.
The robot took pages to tell me all this. I’m’a start calling him ChattyGPT.
March 17, 2026 — 6:37 pm
Comments: 11
This one worries me
This was on a post about buying a new graphics card to play Black Myth Wukong (I didn’t, by the way). This one bothers me because it’s on topic and slightly amusing, making me wonder if some bright soul has figured a way to make spambots crawl and make undetectable slop comments.
It was for sure spam, though – two year old post and links in the address. When I went to look at the post, there were about six (inappropriate) spam links I had to take care of manually.
Yes, we are still being hammered with ass porn.
March 16, 2026 — 5:34 pm
Comments: 3
That thing on the left is a weasel
Beginning around 1910, a man named Howard Garis (1873–1962) began writing a series of stories about a character called Uncle Wiggily Longears, a wise old gentleman rabbit, for newspaper serialization. Estimates are, he wrote five thousand of them. Every day but Sunday. They were hugely popular.
And they were a feature of my childhood. I suppose the books belonged to my father, or my auntie (who died earlier this year at a very respectable age). Back when bedtime stories were a thing.
As you might expect, they were highly formulaic. Uncle Wiggily went out on an errand, encountered a villain, villain was thwarted by pure chance, happy ending (the villains above are Pipsisewah the weasel and the Skeezicks, the whatever it is). Very rigid structure, tight word count.
And they always, always ended with a line like:
“And if the dish of ice cream doesn’t skate away with the spoon and hide behind the lemon pie, I’ll tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and the striped chipmunk.”
or
“And if the pancake doesn’t flip over the stove and tickle the coffee pot with a feather, I’ll tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and the hollow stump.”
It comes to mind because that’s what I think whenever ChatGPT ends an answer by saying, “if you like, I can tell you some more odd facts about Victorian underwear” or “there’s an interesting connection between the Bolivian nose flute and prostate cancer.”
Incidentally, Howard Garis also wrote the first 38 Tom Swift books (all authors for the series wrote under the pseudonym Victor Appleton).
March 12, 2026 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 11
The “buttered toast problem”
You’ve probably heard this one – I had. Why does toast always land butter side down? Physicist Robert Matthews analyzed this in the Nineties and it was published in the European Journal of Physics in 1995.
Toast sits on your plate butter up
When it falls, the table edge acts as a pivot, flipping it
It rotates as it falls (thanks gravity!)
From the height of the typical table, it has enough room to do a 180
There. Butter side down.
If the table were taller, it would have time to spin all the way around and it’s anyone’s guess which side would be up. Also, if the toast is tiny (like canapés) the math doesn’t work.
And yes, Matthews also formulated the question, “But what if the buttered toast was strapped to the back of a cat?” And yes, he also won the Ig Nobel Prize for it.
March 11, 2026 — 5:30 pm
Comments: 14