In Praise of Small Menus, by Rachel Sugar:

The first New York City restaurant I fell in love with served only one thing. I had not known this was a possibility. I had never encountered a restaurant that did not require me to make any decisions at all. Here is how it worked: You showed up at dinnertime. You got dinner. You didn’t have to take responsibility for your choices, because there were no choices. I felt like a very sophisticated baby. What I mean is, it was perfect.

Confronting the tyranny of choice is an unrealized opportunity in all manner of venues, from restaurants to bookstores.

Indeed, my favourite section of The Bookmark is the “Staff Picks” section (one of my as yet unrealized business ideas is a bookstore that sells just one book).

Beyond the familiar “who came into my bedroom in the middle of the night and punched me in the arm?!” feeling this morning, and a mild headache, I seem to have survived Shot Number Two unscathed.

But it was a good excuse to drive out to Victoria for a Factory Coffee at Island Chocolates, where Olivia took this photo of me.

The provincial vaccination clinic was as much a beautiful interlocking ballet of efficiency as the first time (April 22, a seeming eternity ago).

I learned a lot from my nurse about the places squirrels can nest (riding lawnmowers!), was told to take a Tylenol thirty minutes before bed, and sent on to the arrivals lounge to wait out my 15 minute danger window.

Another passage from Joe Biel’s The Autism Relationships Handbook:

A common joke in autistic circles is about the horrors of the allistic (non-autistic) disability. It goes roughly like this:

Person A: “Everyone around me has a disorder that makes them say things that they don’t mean, disregard rules and structure, not know how to ask a question in a format that will provide them with the answer that they seek, fail to focus on topics that are important’ to them, have unreliable memory, constantly express strange bits of coded language and hints, and creepily stare at my eyeballs.”

Person B: “So why do people think you’re weird?”

Person A: “Because they comprise over 98% of the population.”

I was attracted to Microcosm Publishing because of its novel subscribe-to-everything-we-publish offering, which I found by following links from Bikequity, which I found on the shelves at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal: I’ve been a devoted subscriber for coming up on two years.

It was only recently that I learned that co-founder Joe Biel is autistic, a prolific author himself, and that Microcosm has a deep back catalogue of books by autistic writers about autism. 

Sometimes I forget that I’m freckled. But then I sit for a close-up, and it’s inarguable. Witness:

I am modelling my new AirPods Pro, which I’ve been using for a week now, after a recommendation from my friend Sosi pushed me from cart, where they’d been languishing for months, to checkout. They arrived a few days later, and they are now seldom out of my ears.

While I like them as a music and podcast delivery system, the thing I like about them the absolute most is their noise-cancelling magic, magic that’s enough to have me wear them for that. I’ve come to learn, as a result, that there’s a lot of background noise in my life, slowly chipping away at my sanity. Cutting out that noise has mean measurable improvements in my work productivity and sense of general calm both.

I’ve generally averse to bundled services, as they almost always feel like a trap.

But I’ve started to be annoyed with the prominence of podcasts in Spotify: I’m happy happy and longtime Pocket Casts user, and I don’t want Spotify to be a podcast player (I also don’t want to support the de-freeing of podcasts that seems an inevitable part of Spotify’s recent moves).

So when my Apple TV+ subscription came up for renewal I bundled: Apple TV+, Apple Music and 2TB storage, plus a bunch of other stuff, for $33/month.

Marking this here simply to remind myself when I jumped, if and when I jump back.

There aren’t many interviews two hours and twenty minutes long that I would willingly sit through, but Van Neistat interviewed by Rich Roll is one of them. Filmmaking, sobriety, work, craft, money, and Werner Herzog.

Olivia and I have been proud to have contributed, in a small way, to the development of Purity Dairy’s new Oats & Barley beverage: over the last year we’ve been secreted out of the dairy with unmarked beta testing flagons. We’ve cooked with it (chocolate waffles!), steamed it up for coffee, made hot chocolate, and had it straight up, offering our feedback along the way.

And now it’s out in stores! It’s great to see a locally-developed-and-produced alternative to Big Oat Milk.

Isn’t this paragraph, by Eva Wiseman in Sex is back, but it’s going to be different in The Observer, just the greatest:

The trick will be to weaponise this awkwardness, and transform it into a series of exquisite tensions. It is a chance to be naive again, to purr as a person presses your back like a cat on Instagram or a David Attenborough cub. People are excited simply to sit across from a person they admire, simply to pull the window closed or wetly kiss their cheek – each drop of this excitement must be noted, harnessed and claimed as adorable. There will be people who want to lie fully clothed on top of the covers and breathe at each other. There will be people who want to use all the knowledge accrued from twice-daily Zoom meetings to direct erotic films with high production values and a plotline about office politics. There will be people who unload all the therapy they’ve had across the year on to their partner’s bed and roll around on it. There will be someone for everybody, once they’ve worked out how to say hello, I like you.

It will be eight years this weekend since frozen yogurt last hit the big time in Charlottetown:

It’s like 1998 all over again – the year Deep Impact vs. Armageddon, both asteroids-vs-Earth movies, opened the same summer – but more local and more frozen.

Both of the original adversaries in that pitched yogurt battle have long since closed, one space is a barber shop, the other an outpost of a Taiwanese grocery chain.

Miraculously, Goji’s in West Royalty continues to hang in there, ready for another froyo resurgence that, by my calculations, should arrive in 2038.