Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
1. It’s been years since I’ve thrown a real party. I don’t know when I’ll do it again but this list of 21 facts about throwing good parties was a nice read. (“Parties are like babies, if you’re stressed while holding them they’ll get stressed too.:)
2. It’s been a weird, hard week. But we’re still keeping on.
3. At least there’s the gym.
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1. I’ll always read a long piece about Costco. “Can the Golden Age of Costco Last?” (We got our first rotisserie chicken from Costco this week! A whole new world!)
2. This history of the @ symbol is delightful:
The ancient Greeks were fond of a style of clay pot called an amphora. … as time went on, an amphora became a standard unit of measure.
“Merchants had to communicate the idea that ‘I’m going to sell you a certain number of amphoras of something or other at a particular price’ quite a lot,” [author Keith] Houston says. And eventually, people started drawing an “a” with a long tail wrapped around it and skipping the rest of the letters.
3. Good news everyone, I found the cure for anxiety: 
4. And I found something that makes SO much sense:
1. Do you want to look at 800 years of English handwriting? You know you do.
2. A detailed guide on how to leave the leaves where you can and what to do with them when you need to clean them up from places like drains and sidewalks. I did not know this: “The space under a tree is an especially critical place to keep leaves since many butterfly and moth caterpillars drop down from trees into the leaf litter to pupate and overwinter.”
3. A Butlerian Jihad against AI sounds pretty good, honestly: 
1. I dunno, friends, I’ve felt pretty uninspired this week and I think my sentence structure is moving from “conversational” to “unhinged.” I might take next week off of posting to see if I can become a little more hinged? Or I might keep posting through it, as one does.
2. Speaking of unhinged, I know this is supposed to be satire but I’m 100% convinced it’s accurate. Is Trump’s TV Lying To Him?
3.More of this energy (sound on)
@freedc20009 #freedc ♬ original sound – freedc20009
1. This essay on the history (and cost savings) of the hot water bottle was educational. Bring back the big hot water bottles for feet!
2. Outlier is a fun little “one of these things is not like the other” tile game. Pick the one topic out of nine that doesn’t fit and test your general knowledge (categories range from synonyms to “types of roofs” to “Famous NY Yankees”).
3. I think we might need to do this? Just drive around the country?
4. Weekend plans:
1. I’m sorry, I think every politician that wants to lionize Charlie Kirk should be required to read some of his quotes to someone who’s never heard of him. Because COME ON.
2. Related, I couldn’t agree more with this:
3. OK time to lower our blood pressure–I just learned about “bike buses” and they are incredibly wholesome:
(The lady with the cowbell!)
1. Do you want to learn about the ancient Americas? Check out Ancient Americas on YouTube. I felt like I was sitting through a college lecture (positive).
2. Do you want to hear the departure jingles of a train line in Tokyo? Check out Yamanotes, “a web-based music box for playing the departure melodies of each station on the JR Yamanote Line/山手線 on the counter-clockwise (内回り) loop! ” (I like Kanda/Shinagawa best, I think.)
3. Do you want to act like this donkey sometimes? I do too.
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1. Happy Labor Day weekend! Fun fact, the rest of the world celebrates Labor Day on May 1 but the US changed to the fall to not be seen as supporting socialism, because of course (eye roll). As Prof. Wikipedia tells us,
Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe. In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative, formally adopting the date as a United States federal holiday through a law that he signed in 1894.
2. As this article puts it, it’s a bad time to be a hobbyist who likes to shop overseas. I’ve gotten emails from four different fabric shops that they’re just suspending shipping to the US rather than try to deal with all the tariff mess. Is America great yet? (extreme eye roll)
3. I’m waiting on bids from a couple contractors for the basement finishing. I can only hope that one of them includes a drywall guy in an alien suit:
@fuentescardi El Ovni.. estoy cansado jefe 🤣🤣 #fyp #foryourpage #drywall #foryou #satisfying #viral ♬ sonido original – FuentesCarDi
1. My brain has done a 180 from “find a new house” to “REMODEL EVERYTHING HERE”–now I’m thinking about a built-in pantry cabinet in the stairwell and why not update the light fixtures everywhere and hey, I bet an epoxy floor in the garage would be nice! I guess we’ll see how long my energy/money lasts. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
2. I’ve also spent the last two days pulling everything off the basement storage racks so I can move them out of the area with the plumbing rough-ins, which also involved sorting and culling and re-organizing. I feel this in my soul:
3. From Casual Archivist, a collection of old diner paper placements. What does your egg preference say about you?
1. After I got sad about summer ending I had to go find the “throw the comb away” passage from Astrid Lindgren, because summer definitely isn’t over yet.
To worry about the future was the wrong attitude toward life, he said. One should enjoy each day as it came. On a sunny morning like the present one, life was nothing but happiness. How wonderful it was to go straight out into the garden in pajamas, feeling the dew-wet grass under one’s feet, and then take a dip from the jetty and afterward sit down at the painted garden table to read a book or the paper while drinking delicious coffee.
2. This article about chimpanzee cultural practices had me wheezing:
Rogers soon realized the chimps had certain cultural norms, starting with a classic: grass in the ear. On Aug. 16, Juma stuck grass in his ear, followed by four more chimps that week. Then on Aug. 27, Juma plunged the grass into another, more distant orifice, in what the researchers call an “unprecedented variation” of grass-in-ear.
3. I’ve decided this is going to be me for the foreseeable future:
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