Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

In the box on the front page of Wikipedia that mentions curious things from recently improved articles, a “travel competition” streaming show caught my attention. When I saw that one of the competitions in “Jet Lag: The Game” involved flying around the world, my curiosity increased to the point where I wanted to watch that part of it. When I do travel, in the end I do have to retrace my steps; I have to admit the thought of “taking the long way around” has seemed just a little appealing sometimes. Then, aware I do enjoy close-by comforts, one part of me wonders if that trip could be done in something between eighty hours and eight days; the streaming competition had a time limit closer to my lower bound.

To make the show more interesting, the two competing teams of two people each had to complete silly challenges along the way to be given the additional budget for booking onward flights. There still wasn’t much in the way of real sight-seeing in between rushing through airports and not getting much rest on flights, though, and I did get to thinking about the old jabs (stretching all the way back to comments about Around the World in Eighty Days) at “travelling just to wind up in the same place you left.” A few of the more esoteric competitions also mentioned on the Wikipedia page had caught my attention too starting off, but if most of the same people keep participating in them they might not wind up quite as interesting. I might perhaps have wound up thinking, at least for a while, that it’s nice in itself to know other people have done what I’ve thought about before.

License plates in my province have used an extravagant four letters (with three numbers) for over twenty years. We’ve worked through the A-prefixed codes, worked through the B-prefixed codes, and when I saw plates starting with CZ I did get the feeling it wouldn’t be long until this unusual odometer turned over. Today, I saw a plate with a DAA-prefix, and then before I’d got back from work I saw a second one.

So far as that goes, though, I am remembering that just a few days ago I saw a license plate with a “73” stamp in the corner, a relic of when they were supposed to be changed every year, and the old ecologically-minded logo “Keep It Beautiful.” Its prefix was some letters before the plate that had stayed in my family for a number of years, which also got my attention; this plate wasn’t on a fifty-year-old car, anyway.

Getting a first dose of vaccine against coronavirus when I did, two months ago, had seemed a “count your blessings” kind of fortune for me. I’d got it by volunteering to take Oxford-AstraZeneca, but had thought the small risks talked up then both known and a one-time event in a way “having to go inside other buildings than my own” couldn’t be. Aches, chills, and general discombobulation a day later had worried me and left me concerned describing them might scare other people away from their own chances, but the day after that I was feeling better. Two weeks afterwards, I thought I ought to feel a bit less intimidated by what trips out my front door I had to make, but only a bit. The second booster shot was, of course, necessary.
( Counting down )

Although at times sluggish to bestir myself to things, I did manage at last to get around to “since I can’t go anywhere, I’ll try baking.” One week after looking at the muffin tins in the supermarket but not buying them, I managed to see in a flyer that bakeware was now on sale. Baking for one, I picked up a six-muffin tin and the packaged mix you add an egg to to feel like you’re doing something with it. After mentally halving all the ingredients (save the egg) to make a dozen muffins and thinking the six I’d made looked kind of small, I mixed together two-thirds of the recommended amounts the next time and made a nicer-looking half-dozen. With that taken care of, I asked for the cornmeal muffin recipe in my family, which meant more measuring and mixing, but the end results turned out much as I remembered them. There have been times I’ve got around to something and then just sort of let it slide, but this time I do still have a lot of flour and cornmeal in a high-up cabinet.

Trying to keep up the habit of scraping words together to post to an online journal and play at what some people make a more noticed matter of, I haven’t settled on a single, apparently innocuous subject but on a handful. There are many other topics all around, but to me they seem to need more articulateness than I can manage. Still, in the present roiling crisis of protests over police racism and violence, I’m bumping up against the warning that to say nothing is still to say something, which had nudged me to a struggling attempt to say something about “wouldn’t it be better to be pleasant?” during another crisis of intolerance three years ago.

“Talk is cheap,” as the saying goes, which then bumps me against my timidity and also-current fear of infection, stretching from the presence of others to just touching something others have touched. I’ve worried before that about “accepting in the abstract but not seeking out the specific,” and worry now that articulating my own weaknesses could also be a ploy for a pat of reassurance on the back. Nor can a single effort like this obviously make things better; the most I seem able to say is that “we’re all doomed now” lamentations have been flying around for quite a while.

Rustling in the bedroom curtains woke me in the middle of the night. When the sound wouldn't go away, I started formulating an idea of just what it was and just how I'd have to respond, and at last, if with some reluctance, I snapped on the bedside light, got out of bed, and rattled the curtains. A bat popped out and started zooming around the room in wide circuits.

Imagining a flying mammal going for your face isn't encouraging, but a bat had once got into my place before (not this year, anyway), if early enough in the evening I'd shut it in the room I first found it in and searched the phone book for animal control services. The first person I'd called suggested I throw a towel over the bat and get it outside while wrapped up, and that had worked. As I got a towel out of the linen closet this time, though, a bat that wouldn't land and would only occasionally touch down on the ceiling or something on the wall wasn't easy to throw a towel on.

My seeming to keep the bat moving, though, did seem to slow it down after a while, and at last when I shoved the towel up at the ceiling the bat didn't rustle out from one side and start flying again. Pretty sure it was still in the bundle, I rushed downstairs, got the front door open, and shook the towel out. I couldn't quite say I saw the bat escape into the night air, but when I threw the towel into my laundry basket to be washed and clambered back into bed there was no more rustling.

I still can't say how the bat got in anyway this time either, though; none of my screened windows were open, for one thing. Some searching in upstairs closet and crannies after getting back from work didn't turn up any obviously gnawed holes down from the attic. I was tired enough today, however, that I do wonder about being able to sleep through a bit more tonight. Given the worries these days about fungal infections, there might be something a little encouraging about a bat population in the area.

Writing up something for this journal at least once a week "because that's what I've been doing and I don't want to just stop" is a constant challenge even if I'm not that worried by thoughts it might only be writing "notes to myself." In the past few days, though, just saying something more about a "system" or a "construction" (and very often sort of looking back to do that) feels too much like being silent about more important things involving other people, at a moment when being silent seems a troubling choice.

I want to say something in support of decency, equality, and tolerance (with the awareness that like most things, tolerance can't become an absolute) and against "I'm content but I resent your trying to say you're not" and wallowing in offensiveness for kicks. I just worry I'm not articulate enough to be the slightest bit convincing, and I'm also aware of the smug sort of "I know you are but what am I?" dismissals. The most I can do, perhaps, is try to be self-aware.

It's easy enough to suppose the Muppets of "The Muppet Show" are instantly recognisable to "surely everyone," but it might also be all too easy to get to thinking that from the moment that show went into reruns, its characters and all the puppety creations affiliated with them were left trying to live up to a greatest hour. In making a joke of this just a few years ago, their first new movie in years seemed to attract a lot of positive attention; I went to see The Muppets myself at the movies and liked it. However, I didn't get around to seeing its followup, and when I heard of a new television show declared to be trying a new take on things I could get to wondering about it having to try and climb that decades-high hill once more.

Part of the leadup to the new show was making a big deal of Kermit and Miss Piggy having split up; I might have just wondered about not having dwelt too much on them being together in the first place, but that's no doubt an artifact of my peculiar lightly developed interest in "shipping." I decided to try out the new show all the same. Setting it behind the scenes of a "talk show" left me reflecting on how "The Muppet Show" might have been the last big example of "variety shows," but it seemed a good way to update the concept while still bringing in guest stars. More than that, though, I could definitely tell some of the jokes were ones "grown-ups" would get. There are times I wonder about the follow-up to something that appealed to kids only seeming intended to appeal to those who used to be those very kids, but there might be a bit of an escape hatch in this one case in comments overheard about the very first days of Jim Henson's puppets (who, among other things, were making commercials for coffee). If it's "interesting because it does feel just a little odd," though, with some of the oddness seeming to be an emphasis on the current inherent unhappiness of the main characters, that's another thing again. I would be interested in seeing more episodes of this new show and where they go, but I'm also aware it might wind up another brief experiment.

When I was deciding where to live when I got my current job, one factor I can admit to shaping my preferences was knowing one place was close to a branch library, but its also being right behind a small shopping mall seemed very convenient too. In the years since then, though, bigger stores have opened further along the road and the mall has seemed to dry up little by little; when its small bookstore closed, that seemed to have an impact on me. It did get my attention not that long afterwards when I heard the now somewhat shabby Zellers discount department store would be replaced by a new Target as that store moved into my country. Practically all of the Zellers was taken down and rebuilt over long months of waiting, months in which the mall seemed to get that much emptier.

The Target opened at last, but I'd already heard about all the problems the stores just before it had had stocking their shelves, and things never seemed quite busy at it. By this point, the only new stores in the mall seemed ones to buy cell phones in. Two holiday seasons ago, some "temporary" stores opened further along the mall (one of them in the old bookstore), but last Christmas there weren't as many of them. Then, the news that Target would pull out of the country altogether managed to make international news. It wasn't so much that I did a lot of shopping at it myself as I passed through it on the way to the grocery store at the other end of the half-abandoned mall, but at least it was there. I can only wonder how long the big store will stand empty at one end of the half-empty mall; as much as the grocery store still seems to do business I can now wonder about the whole thing being torn down.

I get quite a number of "you might be interested in this" emails from amazon.ca these days; I suppose I've wondered about trying to unsubscribe from them, but I'm also aware that without them my inbox might start to feel kind of empty. Having recently ordered the latest "half-season" DVD set of Doctor Who to give as a birthday present, I got an email today with more links to Doctor Who discs. I read my way down the list, nodding a little... and then, at the very end, there was "Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears A Who." With all the comments about precisely targeted messaging these days, it's amusing to see a suggestion of things perhaps not working perfectly all the time after all.