So this magazine exists.

That's all.

Things that make me slightly less sad when I am sad

1. Saltines.

They’re just so salty. Look at those little crystals of happiness:

But they have to be U.S. saltines, not British salti --  oh wait, my bad. There are no British saltines. The closest thing you can find here are cream crackers, which besides having an unacceptable lack of salt are misleadingly not made of cream (which might have been a redeeming quality). At Spanish or Latin American markets, you can find Colombian saltines, which charmingly break off into little cracker triangles. They’ll do in a pinch, but are still not salty enough to sate my sodium-addicted American palate.

2. Marketplace.

As in the APM show hosted by Kai Ryssdal. That man is just so genial and comforting as he tells me how the world is falling apart one economic issue at a time.

3. Italian greyhounds.

I’ve written before about my favorite kind of dog, the pit mix. I love them, but they also make my heart ache a little bit. Maybe it’s because I know that they’re often rescued from dog-fighting rings. Maybe it’s because I’ve been conditioned by Sarah McLachlan-soundtracked ASPCA ads that spend a whole 90 seconds zooming in on their sad little cubical faces. Maybe it’s because I’m always a little worried that they’re going to topple over from the weight of their massive heads. But an Italian greyhound? Those dogs are fucking ridiculous. How could this fill you with anything but glee:

4. A dress that’s shaped like a bag.

Useful if you need to find a quiet corner in which to tuck your knees up into you like a ball and cry for a little bit (and then never return to within a half-mile radius of that spot in case someone saw you).

5. Taking the train in London.

Not the tube, the train. The one that comes to my station is the same train that goes straight up to Luton Airport, so you always feel like you’re going somewhere exciting, even if you’re really just going to Elephant & Castle (which isn’t as nice as the American pub chain of the same name would have you believe. Though there is a pretty good casino/bowling alley where they're sometimes too lazy to make you rent bowling shoes.)

6. Oversized grocery stores.

So many products! So many choices! So little time to think about your problems!

7. Henry the vacuum cleaner.

8. Photobooths.

9. Being tired enough to fall asleep without thinking anymore.

Is anyone else’s memory too abysmal to answer any of the “memorable questions” on website security forms? Actual options from a recent account I had to create:

What is the first name of the first person you kissed?

Who was the artist/band of the first concert you attended?

Who was your favourite teacher?

What was your favourite holiday destination as a child?

In what city or town did your mother and father meet?

If they won’t give me at least one “Mother’s maiden name,” I’m pretty much screwed.

First day

I just started a masters in consumer behavior at what I’m told by everyone is a Very Good School. I didn't choose it because it's a Very Good School, I chose it because it’s the only place in London that has a masters in consumer behavior. This is the first year that the program has been offered, and so I’m very happy that they didn't have to cancel it due to no one applying for it. There are eight of us (I’m told that one of the course directors PRed the hell out of it to some innocent other-program applicants just to flesh it out), and we’re in a department with several other small courses, including Global Leadership, Digital Entrepreneurship, Management of Innovation, and other business-jargony titles. So in addition to classes like The Psychology of Marketing, we take ones called things like Innovation Case Studies and Organisational Behavior & Health. I mean, I guess these topics are related, in the sense that you can relate anything to anything else, but so far the whole thing seems a little confused. This is fine by me, really. I’m generally confused about everything at all times, so it would be pretty hypocritical of me to begrudge an educational program for having this same quality.

On Mondays I don’t have any real classes, but we do have a Guest Speaker lecture between 4 and 5pm, followed by drinks at a local pub to continue the inspired discussion that Guest Speaker is sure to have initiated. So this past Monday -- first day of school, metaphoric pencils sharpened -- we assembled in a lecture hall to listen to a very distinguished lecturer who possesses many intimidating degrees and has written more books than I've read in the past three years. The premise of his talk was this:

There are qualities that we associate with good leaders. However, we should be aware of the difference between optimal and excessive levels of these qualities, because in abundance, they can be negative and lead to dysfunctional leadership.

We were promised that this speaker would be engaging, and he was! As in he managed to stretch that one fairly obvious thought into a rollicking hour-long talk. (To be fair, he also filled up some time name-dropping the Fancy Companies for which he consults). Again, how is this relevant to consumer behaviour? Oh hell, think about that later! Everything is relevant to everything, innit? Now off to the pub!

I grabbed A., the closest thing to a friend I had so far. At our departmental meet-and-greet the week prior, we had bonded over our mutual desire to sneak out quickly and quietly without having to say goodbye or to talk to any of our program directors.  

“I’m not going to go,” she said. “I just don’t know what I’d ask him.”

I didn't either, but I figured nodding and smiling while other people ask things usually works pretty well. At the pub, I found a seat next to two other girls whom I had yet to meet. Speaker asked us where we were from. The other two girls were English. “Ah!” he said. “God’s chosen people.”

He went on to ask how we were settling in, before following up with everyone’s second favorite thing to say about our Very Good School (after the part about it being Very Good). “It’s a beautiful campus here,” he said. “But what a terrible neighborhood.”

Nods. Smiles.

“It seems like a very political place,” the girl next to me said. “I think the other day there was some sort of demonstration!”

“Oh yes. Very political," Speaker said. "And this department is very international."

Were we very international, comparatively, I wondered? I just assume that any well-known university has a lot of international students these days. It’s our radically inflated tuition fees that are paying for all those shiny new Macs in the computer lab, right?

“It’s wonderful that it’s so international,” Speaker went on. “But the problem with the international students is, after they’re finished they want to stay here!”

Nods. Smiles. Wine-gulping.

Speaker moved on to talk to another group of students soon after that. All I really heard was, “Beautiful campus, terrible neighborhood!”

Always nice to be met at your new institution by the Old Tory Welcome Wagon.

Bad Tenant

My landlord, Dr. Wang, frequently assumes that I have done things that I haven't. These things typically have to do with the trash, the mail, or some other matter of mutual household use. He usually catches me as I'm arriving home and runs out of his acupuncture office on the ground floor of the building to tell me what it is that I shouldn't be doing. This is by no means a daily occurrence, but it happens frequently enough that whenever I see him, I do my best to smile, wave, and get the key in the door as fast as possible to avoid such encounters.

For example: one day a pile of trash bags and recycling containers mysteriously appeared on our doorstep and remained there for several days. A few evenings after their appearance, Dr. Wang ran out to talk to me. "Kate," he said, pointing at the mess. "Don't put trash on the doorstep." I looked at the bags from an Asian supermarket I had never heard of, filled with things I had never seen, and said, "Ok, I won't."

The awkwardness of these interactions is compounded by the fact that Dr. Wang, who is from China, speaks English with a very strong accent, and I speak, well, no Chinese. Sometimes I just cannot understand what he is telling me not to do. Recently, very soon after having returned from a weeklong trip to Spain, I was coming home from work when Dr. Wang accosted me at the doorway and said ... something. I felt like I could put together a string of words that he was saying, but the words didn't make any sense. So I repeated to him exactly what I thought he had said: "Don't put chest out back."

"Yes!" he said, excited that I seemed to get it.

"I have no idea what that means," I said.

Dr. Wang motioned for me to follow him and led me through his office until we were looking out of the back window into the tiny concrete space between our building and the ones surrounding it. He pointed at three full plastic trash bags lying in the middle of the dismal courtyard. "Don't put trash out back," he said. "The lady next door. She says she saw you throw trash out the window. Don't do that."

Let's examine the reasons that this could not possibly be true:

• 1) I didn't even really know this concrete space existed or that it was underneath any of my windows. I mean, I guess if pressed I would have imagined that a space like this existed, or at least admitted that it was logical for a space like this to exist, but only after a lot of thought.
• 2) I don't really know how to get the screens out of any of my windows. I suppose I should figure this out before I die in a building fire.
• 3) I am far too lazy to overcome either of these thought hurdles in order to figure out how to throw trash out my window. Relatedly: I don't think I am creative enough to even come up with the idea of throwing trash out of my window in the first place.
• 4) Did I mention I had spent the past week in Spain?

I didn't try to reason with Dr. Wang. I simply said, "I didn't do that." He looked at me, dumbfounded. "But the lady says she saw you," he said.

"I don't know what to tell you. I didn't do it."

"Ok," he said, but it was clear that Dr. Wang did not trust my word over the word of The Lady. (Side note: I'm interested in just how The Lady conveyed to Dr. Wang that the guilty one was I and not one of the other two 20-something girls who live in my building.) We seemed to be at an impasse, and so I returned home to my apartment and continued to not throw trash out of my window.

In conclusion, whoever is doing mildly deviant things around my apartment building, please don't do that. Because I'm probably going to get blamed for it.

Recent news regarding my hair

Until about three weeks ago, I hadn’t washed my hair in seven years. Well, that’s not entirely true. It had been washed, but only about three times a year when I had it dyed, and even then it was just an unfortunate requirement of hair dying and certainly not a voluntary choice. After a washing, it would take seriously a week for me to like it again, which is an unacceptably long time for a modern girl who’s just trying to make it in this world while looking good and feeling good. Sometimes super-short hair is just better dirty.

When I would admit my lack of hair-washing in conversation (it comes up!), the most common reaction would be casual incredulity. “So, you just, like, use conditioner on it?” No. “What, you just rinse it every day?” No, not really. “You don’t wash it as in you just wash it once a week or something?” No, I don’t wash it as in I don’t own shampoo.

The only people from whom I ever cared to hide my hair habits were certain gentlemen who might have run their fingers through it or nuzzled their faces into it. I worried they would be horrified. But if they found out, and they sometimes did, they never seemed to care. (Side note: thank you, straight boys, for being so low-maint.)

But recently, I’ve been growing my hair out, and an earth-shattering thing has happened: it looks better when I wash it sometimes. The past couple weeks, I’ve been washing it every few days! I’ve been using a tiny bottle of shampoo/conditioner called Tulipan that I took from my hotel in Mexico City, but I think it smells like nothing like tulips and a whole lot like Cherry Robitussin. (Do Mexicans like this smell? No entiendo.) And so, for the first time in years, I am ready to buy a bottle of shampoo. I am inordinantly excited about this, but I am also stymied by indecision. In the shampoo aisle of the drug store, I can do nothing but stare, dumbfounded, at the variety of available shampoos. It’s like that scene in Hurt Locker where Evangeline Lilly sends Jeremy Renner to get cereal and he just can’t process all the basically same-looking cereals in the grocery aisle.

So you guys, what kind of shampoo should I get? Should I get something with “bio-” in the name? Should I get this kind called Fruitopia out of nostalgia for the the now-defunct mid-90s beverage of same name? Should I get my childhood favorite, The Body Shop’s Ice Blue shampoo? (It makes your head feel all tingly!) I can totally get down with chemicals, so it needn’t be Whole Foods worthy. Suggestions welcome.

Things I learned about Bermuda while in Bermuda

1. If you arrive in the country without yet knowing know where you’ll be staying during your trip and you unwittingly admit this to the customs agents by leaving the “Where are you staying during your trip?” section of your customs form blank, you will not be allowed to leave the Bermuda airport until you can prove that you have procured a hotel reservation. You will be sent to the immigration office, where a very friendly immigration officer will act as your personal travel agent and call around the island to find you a room. He may even give you his cell number and invite you for a drink later, an action that would surely get him fired were he an American immigration official.

2. Relatedly: if you try and book a hotel room at the last minute during high season, you will have a very hard time finding one. The available ones will be exceedingly expensive, even those that are in quaint but ramshackle bed & breakfasts where the floors creak and the bathroom doors don’t fully shut. You’re frugal, you say? You want to stay at a hostel? Too bad. There aren’t any. Want to pitch a tent and camp? Too bad. You’re not allowed.

4. Bermudian money is just like American money, only pretter. Also, they have lots of $2 bills.

Bermuda's public buses:

a) Are blue and pink. Who wouldn’t want to ride on such a festive bus?

b) Seem to have no way of tracking fares. Upon boarding, passengers drop money, tokens, or tickets into a non-computerized cylindrical container while the drivers seem to pay little attention. I think you just could drop your grocery list in there and no one would be the wiser.
c) Are designed for Lilliputians. Squeezing down the aisle is a comedy of errors, even if you are a normal-sized human who should theoretically be able to walk down a bus aisle with ease.

6. In every post office you will find an Internet kiosk that you can use -- for free! Also, you will not find an Internet kiosk anywhere else on the island.

7. There is only one fast-food chain on the island. It is a KFC. At this KFC, you can get a 125-piece barrel of chicken nuggets for $60.75 and an accompanying barrel of coleslaw for $38.95.

8. Barritt’s in a can tastes better than Barritt’s in a bottle.

9. The heat and humidity cause ice melt very fast, making for watered-down dark & stormies. I suggest to local establishments that they use larger chunks of ice for slower melting. Bermudian bars, call me.

For a strange reason,* over the past year I have taken several trips to the Main Line Center for Laser Surgery in Ardmore, PA, to get a tattoo removed from my upper arm. For those unfamiliar with Ardmore, it’s a cute and snooty little moneyed town about 20 minutes outside Philadelphia. It’s the kind of place where the high schoolers play lacrosse, and where you should only go into the Starbucks if you’re prepared to hold the door for the four Lululemoned 30-something moms pushing Bugaboos who will inevitably come in right behind you. There is a Lily Pulitzer shop. There is a dog store called the Bark Avenue Boutique that sells homemade dog treats. There is a local-organic-sustainable fast food place called Sweetgreen but not a Burger King. Money Magazine put it on its list of Best Places for the Rich and Single.

The Main Line Center for Laser Surgery is in Suburban Square, the outdoor shopping center in the middle of the town. In addition to eradicating tattoos, it will help you rid yourself of dermatological insecurities such as sunspots, freckles, spider veins, rosacea, acne, and hair. At its helm is a doctor who appears regularly on local television news and in women’s magazines, and for good reason. The man is unflaggingly, almost off-puttingly animated, as if every moment of his day were the most exciting of his life. He shows a perplexing amount of interest in his patients’ jobs, lives, and hobbies, which I’m sure is very appealing to people who like talking about themselves but is horrible for those of us who would far rather divert attention back to our host than face the terrifying prospect of trying to string together articulate and interesting sentences about ourselves. Nevertheless, I find it very difficult not to like him, and when he tells me how tough I am because I sit calmly -- without the aid of numbing agents -- while he sears my skin with a laser, I always feel a little warm and fuzzy inside.

Those interested in learning more about the services available at the Main Line Center for Laser Surgery can pick up one of the 19-page glossy brochures sitting on a side table in the office’s waiting room (where you can also pick up a Werther’s Original and a Wintergreen Lifesaver). The brochure details different types of laser treatments and illustrates them with a combination of in-house before-and-after photos and stock images. Fittingly, my favorite such image is on the tattoo-removal page. Look at the picture in the bottom left-hand corner. The first sentence of the accompanying text reads, “We all make mistakes.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I'm pretty sure that in most cases people don't get all the way to half sleeves as part of a mistake.

*I was part of a study for a company that was developing a new type of tattoo ink. The idea was that they’d put tattoos on me and then laser them off. No one believes me when I cop to this. I don’t know why they’d think that I’d make it up -- I find it pretty embarrassing.

Time-wasting tactics

Many of us have jobs that can be boring. Those who can employ innovative methods of amusing themselves have the best chance of surviving these jobs. My friend and colleague Leslie should be commended for her abilities to kill time during her mind-numbing shift at the front desk of a quiet organic spa, a job that -- besides fielding the occasional client query about how to prepare one's pubic hair for one's first Brazilian wax -- consists almost entirely of dusting shelves, folding hand towels, and listening to the same pan flute & sitar CD on repeat for eight hours ... without internet access. Being stuck in this role is on par with being stuck in Dante's seventh circle of hell (the one where you float down a river of boiling blood and may be turned into a thorny bush that is fed on by Harpies).

Leslie improves upon her barbarous circumstances by using the day to create works of art that take product display to new levels, as seen here in a recent piece:



The Targeted Bio-Brightening Face Serum and Enlighten Skin Roll On sit side by side on a miniature wicker chair, upright and proud. Together but not touching, they are a comment on love, representing a strong partnership that will stand the test of time. Their own kind surrounded them, as bridesmaids and groomsmen would at a wedding and family members might during old age. The images and text interspersed throughout are reminiscent of the advertising and other outward influences these two will encounter during their lives and against which they must persevere. It is a beautiful demonstration of how radically overpriced skincare products can be about more than just consumerism. They can also be a rumination on the nature of relationships and time.

If you lack the artistic prowess of Leslie and do have Internet access at your boring job, may I direct you to this site, which is intended to be used as an online alarm clock. I highly suggest you instead use it to shock your colleagues by opening it on their computers when they step away and setting it to go off minutes after their expected return from the water cooler. The "Slayer Guitar" setting is a personal favorite.

Philadelphia sidewalks are full of poles to which people once affixed their horses while they went about their non-horse-riding business (you know, like getting their shoes cobbled). They're sort of like old-fashioned bike racks. Most of these posts are topped with sculptures of horse heads, thereby alerting passersby that they are specifically for horse parking:


A few, however, seem to be specifically for cat parking:


You can choose which post to use based on your own cat's demeanor. The post on the left is for outgoing and festive cats who enjoy wearing jewelry. The post on the right is for stoic cats who rarely deviate from meditative poses.

The post below is for parking one's pet pine cone, which is useful. After all, who among us hasn't experienced the frustration of a pine cone wandering off the second you turn your back on it?

Don't worry: I have found the Justin Bieber section of the magazine rack. (Side note: there is a magazine called "Yikes!")

It's no secret that a dog with a cone on its head is the best type of dog. The cone ups any dog's cute quotient 20 percent. This may seem a cruel thing to delight in: after all, that dog has no peripheral vision; he is probably confused about the presence of a giant bowl around his neck; he is recovering from some sort of painful injury or operation; he wants to lick his wounds and he's trying but he can't, he just can't! But hey, I can't help that it's fucking adorable. I'm just reporting the facts.

I present to you the cone-head dog to end all cone-head dogs. What is that thing? Why does it need to be so big and floppy? I don't care -- it's awesome. This dog is wearing the fancy Sunday church hat of dog cones, and he should be proud.

Biodegradable packing peanuts are pretty much the coolest things ever invented. For those of you unfamiliar with this wonderful bastardization of nature, a demonstration:


At first, we have a sink overflowing with what looks like normal styrofoam peanuts. Oh my! How will we get them out of there?



But with just a minute or two of running water, this happens:

They dissolve! They dissolve into a sticky, chunky mess and then dissolve into nothing and wash down the sink. It's kind of disgusting, but it's the most magical kind of disgusting.

Momness

It's always as surprise when I get a box in the mail from my mom. I generally know the bulk of what she's sending me -- things I bought when visiting Ohio that wouldn't fit in my suitcase, a dress that I asked her to snag from my old bedroom, something she got for me on vacation -- but she never fails to cram that box full of a motley assortment of free-gift-with-purchase extras, like a Splenda-packet-stuffed Ziploc freezer bag or stamps or toothpaste or a jacket she doesn't want anymore. When I opened my last package from her, the first thing I saw when I popped it open was this:



Can't read the note? Here:


Please note that these magazine pages have been carefully placed in a protective plastic slide. Linda, Janis, I love you both.

It was recently WHYY fund-drive time, that magical two-week period of interminable guilt-tripping and pompous preaching. After half an hour of pontificating about the value of NPR as a sophisticated alternative to those other uncultured radio stations, do you think the NPR anchor died a little inside when he then had to say, "This hour brought to you by Pajamagram"? Because I would have.

Five months ago I moved into a new apartment. It's on the top floor of a three-story walk-up in one of my favorite neighborhoods. When I first visited the building, I was won over by its busted-up door jamb, two-and-a-half-foot-wide stairwell (makes getting my bike up and down nightmarish adventuresome), exposed lightbulbs, and pervasive smell of mildew.

The apartment itself, not lacking its own selling points, is made of the scraps left over after what was once a single-family townhouse was divided into rentable units. It's a one-bedroom -- sorta. The kitchen is at least three times as big as required or desired for an apartment of this size, taking up most of the square footage. The stove, refrigerator, and sink are against one wall, my little two-top table is against the other, and in the middle is an expanse of empty black-and-white-tiled space that I still haven't found good use for (cartwheel practice? bocce court? Suggestions, please).

The kitchen leads into the Other Room, an all-purpose space that operates as everything else: bedroom, office, living room, work space (the massage table sets up very nicely between the loveseat and the bed, thank you). I ask a lot of the Other Room, especially considering that it's about 50 percent smaller than the vast wasteland that is the kitchen. The one thing I cannot ask it to do, though, is to store anything: the Other Room has no closet space. You may then wonder, "Where do you keep your clothes, Kate?" Why, in the kitchen closets, of course. Where do you keep your clothes?

I love all these things about my apartment. I love its tenement-style charm. I love its hissy, leaky steam heat. I love the concrete walls that reject my attempts at drilled holes. I love the ancient refrigerator that is so loud that it's almost as good as as white-noise machine.

I have decorated this curious apartment with my curios. And so, please join Nailgun Alley on a guided mini-tour:

Isn't this paint jobmagnificent? I wish I could take credit for it. It was like that when I moved in, painted by some mysterious previous occupant with excellent taste and way more patience with a roll of blue tape than I have.
























The problem with this lovely centerpiece is that it forces me to maintain a constant overstock of beautiful apples. How many Fujis does one girl need at any given time?


















Gin, coffee, and pizza sauce make good decor.


















These illustrations are from an old Chinese cookbook. That hand soap smells really good.



















Those little girls are perfume vials. I got the one on the right, then I got the blonde one (it's supposed to be Gwen Stefani. Seriously.) Then I decided that if I was going to have two, I should really have three so I could line them up in a vee formation like a little army of anime girls who are prepared to just smell so good at you if you mess with them.








Stuffed Mario & Luigi might be the greatest substitutes for throw pillows ever. I love how off-brand they are. Since when do the plumbing brothers wear bumblebee striped shirts, as if they're 1920's prison escapees?

Also: if anyone can hang that grid of pictures straight for me, I'd be much obliged. I find it impossible.



















Sixteen of these bright-yellow ceramic bunnies with terrifying anthropomorphic eyes were on sale for 65 cents each at American Thrift in South Philly. I bought nine of them. I dropped and broke two the second I left the store; I dropped and broke two the second I got them home; I broke another the next day. I'm left -- till the next disaster -- with four. I'm fascinated that the previous owner managed to keep 16 of them unbroken for perhaps many years, and more impressed that the previous owner found a good use for 16 bright-yellow ceramic bunnies.










I bought this bike for $1 at a thrift store in Virginia. It is the heaviest thing I've ever lifted into a car. I got it solely for decoration, but everyone always asks me, "Do you actually use that thing?" The honest answer is, um ... yes, sometimes I do.





















Your tour has concluded. Thank you for joining us!

Dogs, fake and real

I am bothered by a particular domestic sculpture that is found on at least two doorsteps in well-to-do Center City Philadelphia neighborhoods. Upon first glance, we have your garden-variety stone dog, holding a basket of stone flowers in its maw. But look closer. Shouldn't the dog's jaw be slightly open? What dog can close its entire mouth around the handle of a wicker basket? He would have to have a basket-handle shaped cutout in his teeth and gums for this to be possible.


In other dog news, I live across the street from the Cutest Dog in the World. Behold:

Here we see him trying to stay in the shade on his doorstep. Aw! Somebody get that boy a parasol!

Home doctor

Perhaps you're familiar with MedlinePlus, a project of the NIH that brings together information from government agencies and health-related organizations. It's very authoritative. Its newsfeed, it turns out, is also a trove of hilarious headlines. A sampling:

Babies Come Packed With Natural Knowledge
Refusing Whooping Cough Vaccine Shown to Raise Risk
Health Issues in Childhood Often Show up in Adulthood
Experts Urge Less Weight Gain for Obese Women in Pregnancy
Staying Home When Sick Might Be Wise
Youth and Driving Don't Always Mix Safely
Looks, Money, Fame Don't Bring Happiness

MedlinePlus also runs a series of helpful health tips:

Health Tip: Use a Ladder Properly
Health Tip: Eat Enough Fiber
Health Tip: Keep Your Feet Safe in Flip-Flops
Health Tip: Why Is My Nose Bleeding?
Health Tip: Taking Care of Baby's Dandruff

I live in an old house. A lot of it is kinda dirty. Not, like, fetid and vile dirty, but the kind of quiet dirtiness that comes from decades and decades of wear and just won't go away, no matter what you do. In an old rental like this, it's easy to get slack on the cleaning and caring, because it's never ever going to be pristine and you're probably going to move out eventually anyway. But whenever I start to feel guilty about being lazy around the house, I take comfort in the fact that I am not nearly as lazy as its previous occupants seem to have been. Those occupants inexplicably painted this metal vent in the bathroom white (and honestly, this is as white as that grate now gets):

And ... hey, what's that on the upper left-hand corner of the vent there? There's a tiny rectangle that appears to be protruding a bit. What could it be? Oh look -- I see that it's removable.

Yes, that's right. The painters couldn't be bothered to remove a piece of magnetic poetry from the vent before they painted it.

It says "theater," by the way.

My favored method for letting the world know that I love something is by becoming a Facebook fan of it. I am a Fan of 80 different things, and I swear not all of them are neat products that you can buy (though most of them are). Did you know that, if you want to become a fan of something for which no page exists, you can just create one yourself? A while back I created a page for Square-Headed Dogs. It's dedicated to dogs of no particular breed whose heads could reasonably be described as cubical in shape. Not straight-up pit bulls (there are plenty of pit-bull-oriented pages to become a fan of if that's your thing), but dogs who are a just pitty enough to be adorable little stocky monsters (see fig. 1 above).

The page doesn't do much except sit there with a few pictures of square-headers on it (including one with birthday hat). For a while it had only two fans, me and someone I strong armed into joining the square-head movement. A few months later I checked back and saw that 10 people who live in Wales had also become fans. Imagine my surprise and delight when, recently, I saw that Square-Headed Dogs was up to 32 fans, including three people I actually know!

I encourage all of my readers to show their support for square-headed dogs by becoming an online fan of them. If you are a Facebook member, this is quite easy and you probably already know how such things work. If you are not a Facebook member, you will first have to click the link contained in one of the 4,396 emails you've received from friends trying to coerce you into joining Facebook. Either way, I promise it will be worth it.