Leather trivet by Murphy Studios.

At the end of April our improv class had a friends-and-family showcase at the Benevolent Irish Society hall. Hannah Kilchyk was the show photographer, and she captured this photo of me in action. I’m assuming—though who can remember in the hurly-burly of the show—that it was part of the Musical Hotspot part of the evening.

I do look industrious, and almost a caricature of what one might imagine an improv player might look like.

But I feel alive when I look at the photo

I feel “who is this fellow who can do things like this now?!”

I feel good.

Hannah Kilchyk for the HA Club, April 24, 2023

The Q&A page at Laundry Holiday in Shikokuchuo, Japan, is a model for other laundromats. For example:

Q. I’m using it for the first time, is it okay?
A. Please use it with confidence.

and:

Q. Can I wash the duvet?
A. There are things that can be washed and things that can’t be washed.
 
Items that fall under 1 to 3 below can be washed.

1. Those that are quilted.
2. It can be washed with water.
3. Things that can be used in a dryer.

The poetic concept statement for the laundromat is also a model:

The concept is “365 days HOLIDAY”
A day that starts with laundry on the morning of a holiday
The scent of soap from freshly made laundry
I feel like such a casual moment of daily life enriches my daily life.
It’s good if every day is such a holiday morning.
It’s a 365-day holiday!
I want the troublesome laundry to be fun and have a worthwhile time.
With such a thought, I made a place that makes me want to go every day.
Aiming to be everyone’s good neighbor

Canadian Tire has now completely switched over to digital price tags, wireless e-ink shelf displays that show the item name, price, and barcode.

Under the hood I imagine this both saves hundreds of hours of staff time, and involves running a complicated hundred-thousand-device wireless network in every store.

In the store today I noticed a new feature, one that transformed the shopping experience.

The Achilles heel of Canadian Tire is that staff are never available when you need them (by contrast, at Home Hardware they are always available, and often ask if you need help). This means that finding things can require multiple frustrating waits to get directions.

Until now.

The Canadian Tire mobile app now supports both real-time inventory and information about which aisle the product is on. What’s more, if you tap a button, the digital shelf tag will flag its bright LED to help you locate the product precisely. It’s really rather magic-seeming.

I had coffee with Guy, in Basel, in late 2010: he was there scouting for a move, and his modus operandi was to scout for interesting agglomerations of coffee shops, bookstores, etc., and then look for places to live in an area radiating outward. This is akin to my advice to university students: find the interesting professors and take their courses, no matter the subject. Context over content.

In this vein, I was drawn to a list of here of nine shops that stock Robida magazine. Robida is fascinating and weird and rich in all the right ways; I reason that any shop that carries it will be similarly fascinating and weird and rich. Evidence from browsing websites suggests this is the case. 

And so a plan: visit all nine. One could do worse for the spine of an European itinerary.

Here are the coordinates:

• Zabrieskie (Reichenberger Str. 150, Berlin)
• San Serriffe (Sint Annenstraat 30, Amsterdam)
• Rile (62 Rue des Commerçants, Brussels)
• Page Not Found (Boekhorststraat 126-128, Den Haag)
• Materia Prima (Rua Miguel Bombarda 232, Porto)
• Bruno (Dorsoduro 2729, Venezia)
• Edicola 518 (Via Sant’Ercolano 42/A, Perugia)
• NOI (Via delle Leghe 18, Milano)
• Frabs Magazines (Via dei Filergiti 1, Forli)

As a service to the magazine-loving flaneur, I ensured that all of the shops are in OpenStreetMap (here’s a query to get them all).

We went to Haru the other night, the Korean fried chicken joint on Grafton Street in the old Downtown Deli space. The highlight for me was the “grapefruitade,” which is everything a fancy non-alcoholic drink should be: fizzy, tart, refreshing. I’d go back just for that.

David Kessler has a free online series, Mother’s Day Grief that runs Tuesday, May 9. It’s easy to forget, on days like Mother’s Day, that what some greet with joy and celebration, others greet as a reminder of what they’ve lost.

From Wikipedia:

David Kessler is an author, public speaker, and death and grieving expert. He has published many books, including two co-written with the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Life Lessons: Two Experts on Death and Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and Living, and On Grief & Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Grief.

From an interview in Outsider about the Robida Collective project The Village as House:

Vse te dejavnosti so neke vrste poskusi premikov, ki včasih tudi ne uspejo (nasmeh). Naši ideali včasih ne ustrezajo realnosti. A prav to nam omogoča ta prostor: svoboden pristop. Zdi se mi, da nam daje odprtost za ideje, ki drugje morda ne bi imele potenciala, lahko jih delimo s prijatelji, s katerimi sanjamo naprej in prav te ideje so lahko tisti mali koraki k spremembi.

Translated:

All these activities are some kind of attempts at movements, which sometimes also fail (smile) . Our ideals sometimes do not correspond to reality. But that’s exactly what this space allows us: a free approach. It seems to me that it gives us an openness to ideas that might not have potential elsewhere, we can share them with friends, with whom we dream forward, and it is these ideas that can be those small steps towards change.

The Village as House, and Robida in general, are rich veins of interest to explore.