The gendered Twitter.

William Gurstelle on risk taking and happiness: Fugu (tiger pufferfish) sushi in Yokohama – Golden. Boiling up a pot of pufferfish soup at home – stupid.

Also on BoingBoing a nice shout out to stabbing pens, which seem to be on everyone’s mind at the moment. Yesterday since the stupid 6 train wasn’t running, I trekked over to Grand Concourse to wait for the 4 or 5. (Good thing I left the house an hour and a half early.) Before I set foot in that station, I try to make peace with my own mortality or at least decide whether to call my bank or my spouse first when I get mugged. (V could call the bank while I call the police, I guess.) The entrance is under an overpass in the middle of nowhere, down a flight of steps with a blind corner, and since the uptown and downtown trains run in separate tunnels, no one’s got their eye on you from across the tracks. You just stand there trying to look as mean as possible. Anyhow, there I was with my back against the wall looking like a furious bitch, I hoped, when a scholarly looking guy in a light blue polo shirt and khakis came down the stairs. I was pretty relieved to have a witness for when the masked men leapt up from the tracks to either steal my wallet or ravish my person, but just when I was getting to the part about how I would gasp tell my family I love them as I lost consciousness, a real police came bounding down the stairs and pinned the startled guy in the blue shirt against the wall, in actual real life. He held the blue shirt guy with his arms behind his back as he slowly extracted an expensive looking ball point pen from the hip pocket of his khakis and punched the point in and out a few times. It looks like a knife, he explained sternly in Spanish. You can’t keep a thing like that in your pocket. Put it away. And he stepped back. The guy in the blue shirt looked startled, but surprisingly recovered enough to ask the cop for directions. Maybe the relief of being able to ask for directions in Spanish trumped the indignity of being mistaken for a thug? When he walked away I could see a sort of delayed outrage dart across his face, but he caught my eye and smiled crookedly.

“A pandemic is a nice way to get people’s attention, without expensive letterpress invitations or death threats.” – Emily Post.

On CAFO complaints:

You know all of those claims by proponents of agribusinesses about how “urban move-ins” are filing the lawsuits against concentrated animal feeding operations because they aren’t accustomed to smelling fresh country air?

It is all made up, a total fabrication, stemming from the fertile imaginations of public relations people in the employ of agribusinesses such as Smithfield/Premium Standard Farms, Tyson, Seaboard and MOARK/Land O’ Lakes.