I started a couple lighthearted half-baked posts about stuff I'm not really qualified to talk about--I mean, even less so than usual--but I can't figure out how to hammer them into a shape that comes across as funny and not just me being dumb. I have a longer introspective post about mental health stuff in the works, but progress on it has been slow. It's good not to rush stuff, but it's left me scrambling to come up with something to talk about at 21h15. I'm not skipping a day. I'm not giving up my diamond platinum rainbow award of blog sauce or whatever when the finish line is so close.
Remember the 2010s, when people appended the word "sauce" to everything? What was the deal with that? I hope it didn't come from 4chan. I do know that when you wanted to know the source of an image, you asked "sauce?" I don't know if this meme spilled out into the broader culture or if people just independently decided "sauce" was a good or funny word to say.
Speaking of independently deciding things to say, did I ever explain why I write time like "21h15"? It's because 21:15 is ambiguous. It can either mean "nine-fifteen PM", or 21 hours and 15 minutes, or 21 minutes and 15 seconds. So if you write something like "I'm going to spin in circles until 21:30", you could either mean "until nine-thirty PM", or "until 21 minutes and 30 seconds have elapsed", which could potentially be very different periods of time. Sure, it's usually clear from context which one you mean, but why make people rely on context when you can disambiguate?
While I'm at it, I don't like when people write time like this: 09.30
When you use a period in numbers, it's called a decimal point. But we don't use decimal time. We use sexagesimal time. When you say "the time is 09.30", then mathematically speaking you're saying the time is 09h18, because 18 is 30% of 60. Why confuse the matter? If you don't want to use (h)ours, (m)inutes and (s)econds, I get it. It's weird. But at the very least use sexagesimal points (:).
Speaking of points, I saw a video making the asinine point that pre-packaged parmesan cheese "isn't real food" because it contains some amount of cellulose, and "cellulose is wood pulp". Well, I've got news for you, buddy: wood is food. Wood comes from trees, which are technically a kind of vegetable. You know the three categories of thing we eat? That's right: animal, vegetable, and mineral. It's true that most of the cellulose used in food production comes from wood, which sounds weird, because wood seems like it would be unpleasant to eat. We imagine that it doesn't taste good and will give us tongue splinters. But chemically, organically, cellulose sourced from wood is no different than the cellulose that's in all of the green plants that people eat. Are celery and lettuce "not real food" because they contain cellulose? Guess what, ding-dongs: a little bit of cellulose is good for us. It has no nutritional value, and it can't be digested, but it helps us feel full and helps with digestion, which is why since time immemorial we've been told to "eat our roughage". It keeps our plumbing in order.
That's not the reason they add a teeny tiny bit of cellulose to grated cheese, though. This is the reason: it's to keep it from clumping, to make it easier to dispense. That's it. It's nutritionally completely neutral, and there's no reason to tell people otherwise.
Now, here are two things I'm not saying:
(1) I'm not saying packaged grated parmesan cheese is good for you. It's comfort food. It's just a way to add a little savory essence to cheap pasta without having to think too much. In a perfect world, I'd buy wedges of the finest Reggiano imported from the verdant cheese orchards of Parma, but I don't have any fucking money.
(2) I'm not saying that big agribusiness doesn't constantly trick us into eating poison for our bodies and brains. They do plenty of that. All I'm saying is, we don't have to make up fake shit to be anxious about.
Anyway, sorry I couldn't think of anything to write about today. Hopefully tomorrow I get some ideas.