Hello, friends and enemies. Some exciting news in my world is that the dates and location for Eurovision 2026 have been announced! It’s going to be in Vienna on the week of my birthday! The announcement was at night in my time zone, so the next morning I went about reserving a hotel, thinking I was getting on it fairly early. Not so. There were already hotels in Vienna that are completely booked up that week, which is truly wild. Fortunately, I did find a good hotel for us, and reservations have been made. We haven’t solidified any other plans yet, but that was an important one to get done early! This has also made me more motivated to study some German, which I was admittedly not feeling super excited about. Now that we have some real plans, it’s a little more fun. The youtube algorithm showed me this video of a woman explaining German words to use in the bakery and I was like, wow I’m sold.
Books and Other Words
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad is an indictment of the powers and systems that not just allow a genocide, but actively promote it. When it becomes convenient and politically safe to do so and when, as El Akkad writes, “When the time comes to assign blame, most of those to blame will be long gone,” politicians and others in power will finally say that they had always been against this. El Akkad is a journalist grew up in the Middle East and moved to Canada as a teenager. As a child, he associated the West with freedom, but it’s not nearly as free here as our reputation makes it out to be, especially when you’re brown and an immigrant. The United States in particular believes it “behaves in keeping with the scrappy righteousness of the underdog” while simultaneously being the “most powerful nation in human history.” If you think you’re a freedom fighter, but you’re actually the country with the world’s largest military, who do you fight to show that you’re fighting on the side of good? How do you prove that you’re a scrappy underdog? Apparently, you arm a regime committing a genocide. Because we need to fight people who are, “in our minds” capable of “limitless violence.” El Akkad also discusses journalism and the misguided belief that journalists should act as a kind of impartial “referee,” but being truly unbiased is not possible and only makes you susceptible to a different set of biases, like that it’s important to find a compromise between both sides.
Should one party propose stripping immigrants of all rights and the other propose stripping them of only some rights, the intellectually rigorous thing to do is consider that’s what’s best is stripping immigrants of most rights. To compromise.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a scathing assessment of those with the power and privilege to do something, but who cannot “bear the minor inconvenience of hearing about these deaths from afar.” What Israel is doing to the Palestinian people is atrocious and it is a genocide. I was watching the news the other night and it’s very clear that everyone there is being starved to death, that is if if Israeli soldiers aren’t murdering them while they wait for food. It’s easy to be opposed to something terrible that is already happened. It takes a lot more courage to do something in opposition to the status quo. I hope that our country stops supporting this before everyone is dead and it when, of course, everyone will have been against it.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- AI Killed My Job: Translators via Blood in the Machine. This is majorly depressing because translation is a job I have wanted to do for a long time. I guess I’m just gonna keep doing it for the love of the game on Wikipedia, which is okay. It sounds like the market for translators has really collapsed in the last year or two, even though the technology has not appreciably improved in this time. However, the perception of what “AI” can do has changed, leading to a lot more companies using machine translation or computer-aided translation, which nobody likes to do because it takes just as much time as doing it right the first time and pays less.
- A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers via Wired. File under: just because Republicans do it doesn’t mean you should too. I’m so tired of being propagandized on practically every corner of the internet, especially when it’s secret propaganda and the people promoting it are contractually prohibited from revealing that they’re being paid. What are we doing here?
- Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters via BBC. Lol. Lmao even. From the article, “One clip on Instagram, which has been viewed over 21.5 million times, shows a man ordering ‘a large Mountain Dew’ and the AI voice continually replying ‘and what will you drink with that?’.” I, too, might order 18,000 waters in that situation. Corporations need to stop trying to get out of paying people wages.
- DOGPILE: THE DONALD BOAT STORY via Donal Boat. I laughed so hard at this, but it’s so long and I didn’t even finish reading it. This random guy on X started tweeting at Sam Altman to ask him for money for a computer. They do not know each other; he’s essentially cold calling for donations. This exploded into a ridiculous saga of rich people on Twitter just giving him stuff. I love that for him. I wish I had known it was that easy to get things.
Doing Stuff
I made plans with some of my friends to see Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors last week at the B Street Theater. Someone dropped out so I invited Kirk. We learned that the theater had spread all of our group’s seats throughout the theater at the time of booking, but they said if we waited to enter the theater until just before the show, they could move us around since some people inevitably wouldn’t show up. This is how my girls’ outing turned into date night with my husband—the theater had two seats together then a group of seats together for everyone else. Sometimes it be like that. I did enjoy the play overall; I’ll say that first. I am now going to criticize it because thinking critically is part of how I appreciate things (but I also have legitimate criticism). Based on clips online from other productions of this play, I was led to believe that this show was going to be really gay. It was not. I looked up the original production and it was gay! They had characters in drag! I don’t know why B Street didn’t do that but I was a little (a lot) disappointed. In this play, Mina and Lucy are sisters (why?) but they read so sapphic to me in the source material that this is a baffling choice. In the book, Mina is also the character who puts together all the pieces and figures out that Dracula is causing everyone’s problems, but in this play, she’s frumpy, stupid, and desperate for a man. Why did they do that to my girl Mina? While this show had some very funny moments and the actors were all really good, I spent most of it being perplexed.
Corporeal Form
After my physical therapist suggested my knee might be suffering from a lateral meniscus tear, I saw my doctor to follow up and find out if we needed to do any imaging. The doctor poked my knee and watched me take a few steps, then declared that it’s not a meniscus tear and a lateral meniscus tear is “not a thing” (it is a thing). The doctor told me I could get an x-ray if my pain gets worse, but I decided to get one anyway because I wanted to find out if my right knee has arthritis and, to my non-surprise, it does. So now I officially have arthritis in both knees. That’s right it’s:
My knee is still feeling somewhat swollen and sensitive but I did go to jazz and ballet class this week. I think I need to wait a little longer to resume tap because of the type of movement in tap will definitely strain my knee. I’m hoping my knee will get better and I won’t have to retire from tap dance altogether! I’m still not totally sure what happened to my knee since we can’t confirm a meniscus tear without an MRI (the x-ray was to potentially rule out other problems), but I do trust my PT so I think that is most likely what happened. In any case, the only way forward is physical therapy.
Speaking of physical therapy, I have been trying to stay on top of my many complicated resistance band exercises to rehab my knee and keep up with a little garage gym time. Last week I was out there a lot but this week I really only kept up with the PT stuff. The current nice thing in my garage gym is we got a new door! Not a new garage door, but the side door, which was formerly a door that should have been used inside a house, not facing the outside, got upgraded this week. The new door has a window that opens so I can get some extra light and air while I do my exercise. I think it looks good!
Kitchen Witchery
I’m leaning in to summer produce here in the final stretch of the season. I made a corn chowder based on the recipe in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. I made it a little more exciting by throwing the corn cobs in some chicken stock to make my corn broth, and I added some bacon. We had that with this zucchini and ricotta galette. I liked it but Kirk thinks zucchini doesn’t have enough innate flavor to carry this galette. It’s full of cheese though, so I think it’s fine. The other dish pictured here is something I threw together for lunch this week but really ended up liking. It’s royal corona beans, orzo, and some green beans with a bit of seasoning and parmesan cheese. It made for quite a good lunch!
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Behold my little goblin boy.
