Hello, I’m Veronica
The sky is not completely dark at night. Were the sky absolutely dark, one would not be able to see the silhouette of an object against the sky.
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String Instrument
March is looking decidedly mundane, if the first five days are any indication. I’m still recovering from my St. David’s Day festivities on the 1st (more about that here) so I suppose it’s all downhill until April. Even so, the laundry is washed and folded, the dishes are done and put away, and it’s grey and rainy outside, so what could I possibly have to talk about today? Why, dental floss, of course!
Floss is even more mundane than my March to-date, yet there I stood, dwelling on the little nylon spool as I spun out another 18″ this morning. Snap off a length, wind tightly around the fingers, and commence the see-saw journey between and around each of your 28 pearlies (32 if you still have “wisdom”). It’s like you’re playing the smallest string instrument in the orchestra, and all you can contribute is the occasional enamel squeak.
Why do I wonder about floss? So you don’t have to! On the list of all activities considered “morning routine” you’re probably way more invested in brushing your teeth, washing your face, or even throwing on deodorant. Flossing is the one where you stare into the mirror thinking, “Why can’t I text while I do this?”Floss. Looks weird and sounds weird, but it’s nothing more than a silky strand, at least in its original form. Then Johnson & Johnson came up with the nylon alternative – much easier to manufacture in large quantities – and today’s product was born. Waxed or unwaxed. Mono or multi-filament. Tape or picks. Whatever your weapon against plaque and gingivitis, we’re all participating in pretty much the same activity.
“Candy Floss” Candy floss is just another name for cotton candy. Meat floss is a dried, fluffy version of Chinese pork (appropriately named “yuk”). Floss is also an embroidery term, a town and river in Germany, and an awkward dance move where the arms swing rapidly behind and in front of the body. But none of those are the first to come to mind when I say “floss”, right?
Here’s what I want to know. Why hasn’t someone made flossing more convenient in the 125+ years we’ve all been doing it? Seriously, I’m picturing those little scrubbing bubbles zooming all over the porcelain of your bathtub, leaving it squeaky clean. Couldn’t we have a similar product we swish around in our mouths? It’d be like a dose of Pop Rocks, where you have a few moments of crackling and hissing in your mouth, followed by a rinse and spit. Bye-bye plaque, no nylon required.
I didn’t manage to “habit” flossing until about age 25. Before that I was too busy accumulating cavities. I’m still trying to perfect the see-saw technique after all these years. Scrape each tooth instead of just snapping up and down between them. Rewind the floss a few times on your fingers so you’re not using the same inches on all of your teeth. Floss before you brush. Finally – the tough one for me – make flossing part of your evening routine, not your morning.
“Moon Graphite Grey Clean Slide” Here’s the math (because I just have to know these things). If I’ve really flossed every day since my mid-twenties, I’ve used over four miles of the stuff (or 20,000+ ft). At 18″ per cleaning that’s countless little lengths. But here’s another way to look at it. A typical dispenser of floss contains 55 yards, meaning in almost forty years I’ve only purchased 128. You could probably fit those dispensers into a single shoebox. And at $1.29 per dispenser, the whole box only sets you back $165.
Until someone invents those edible scrubbing bubbles, I’ll keep filling up shoeboxes with empty floss dispensers. My product is Reach; yours might be something more exotic like “Grin Fine Flosspyx” or “Boca Ela Mint”. No matter how fancy the name, it’s just a piece of nylon string. And until my March gets more exciting you’ll find me in front of the mirror each morning (er, evening), playing my little string instrument.Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.
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First-Name Basis
It’s only Tuesday as I type, but I’ve already cleared my calendar for Friday. After all, I have a very important day ahead of me. So important in fact, I need to organize a parade, raise a flag, and prepare unique dishes for the expected throng of adoring fans. But why am I wasting words on the details? You already know we’re celebrating Saint David’s Day in a few days, don’t you?
They’ll be celebrating in Wales, at least, just as they do every first day of March. You’ll find my cathedral there too, way down in the southwest corner of the country. Well, St Davids Cathedral, I mean. And the funny thing is, he’s not the David you’re thinking of, the one from the Bible who took down Goliath as a boy and became king as a man. This David helped to spread Christianity throughout the UK, united the Welsh people against a warring England, and performed several miracles. David’s a big deal in Wales.
David’s parade (not Patrick’s) St. Patrick’s an even bigger deal, of course. At least Patrick rates a celebration in the U.S. But admit it, you’re not celebrating Patrick’s spread of Christianity throughout Ireland, nor his miracle of removing all snakes from the land. You’re thinking more about what garment of green to wear, four-leaf clovers, beer, and maybe, just maybe, this is the year you participate in your local St. Paddy’s Day 5k.
Nice cathedral, Dave This business of saints is interesting to me because, well, it’s not as defined as I was led to believe. The rules and processes to put “Saint” in front a first name are a little vague. Suffice it to say, you need to be a model citizen, as well as a teacher, person of influence, and someone who cares little for the material goods and comforts of this world. I know a lot of people who fill this bill, but add in “wonder worker” or “source of benevolent power” and the list drops to zero.
Do you know the way to… ? Saints are also on my mind because I grew up in California and, well, they’re all over the place out there. Francisco to the north. Diego to the south. Barbara somewhere in the middle. My childhood home was right down the street from Monica. My brother lives in Fernando’s valley. 99.9% of the state’s residents think of those as “places”, but firstly they were people. You’ll find “San’s” and “Santa’s” all over the Golden State.
Saints get a little watered down when you consider the Catholic Church’s take on them. More than 10,000 have been recognized over time. Even more to the point, Catholics acknowledge anyone making it to heaven to be a saint. I’d hope that count is way more than 10,000 by now. Maybe it’s the reason we have patron saints: the cream of the crop, the ones regarded as “heavenly advocates of particular nations, families, or people”. My patron saint isn’t David by default, but I sure like his name.
Eat Welsh Rarebit when you celebrate on Friday (grilled cheese on toast, zero rabbit) Admittedly, my mind wanders somewhere other than historical figures when I think of saints. Our dog is a Saint Bernard, one of those gentle giants you picture with a brandy brandy around the neck. A few years ago we went on a cruise, with a stop in the Baltic Sea port of Saint Petersburg. “St. Elmo’s Fire” is a luminous phenomenon caused by an atmospheric electric field. (also a pretty good movie from the 1980s). And so on.
You can read a bit more about Saint David and his cathedral in one of my very first blog posts: unsung. You’ll discover that his town of Pembrokeshire – the smallest kingdomenclave in the UK – is right across St. George’s Channel from the Irish town of Kildare, where you’ll find St. Brigid’s Cathedral, my wife’s namesake. The blog post is really about Brigid but at least David gets a mention towards the end. Even if you don’t “read a little more”, remember, Friday’s the big day. Parades, flags, and fun food, all for a darned decent guy. Makes me blush anytime somebody says, “Dave, you’re a saint.”Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.
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Teeny-Weeny Towns
My daughter forwarded a video about a suburb of Knoxville known as Safety City. In this little town you’ll find roads and traffic signals, businesses and shops, but no cars. Sidewalks are for pedestrians while streets are reserved for bicyclists and other “non-motorized vehicles”. Everything in “SC” is an easy walk, whether to the post office, football stadium, movie theater, or dinner at Applebee’s. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention… everything in Safety City is miniature.
Safety City in Knoxville Safety City is a novel concept because it reduces the real-life aspects of a town down to a dimension children can relate to. And relate they do. Entire classes bus over to Safety City to experience vehicular, pedestrian, bicycle, and fire safety at a young age. So much more effective than traffic school on a blackboard!
I’ve always been a fan of miniatures; a feeling hearkening back to my childhood. Anyone who read Gulliver’s Travels knows “miniature”, as in the inhabitants of the (literally) small town of Lilliput. Anyone who ever held a snow globe imagined those little places and figures inside the glass coming to life.
Diorama I wonder if grade-school children still make dioramas. What a cool concept for a kid. Within the confines of a shoebox you create a miniature world of your liking: buildings, people, animals, trees, etc. Then you cut a peephole in the center of one end of the box and cover the open top with tissue paper. When you look through the hole you see your little diorama world, with the light filtering through from above. It gives your creation a startling sense of reality.
“HO”-scale model railroad Model trains certainly fueled my interest in miniatures. I remember several friends who collected the popular “HO”-scale sets (1:87, or about 2″-high trains). They could buy so many accessories (endless tracks, buildings, trees, and figures) they could create an HO-scale world big enough to fill a two-car garage. Go figure, the only train set I ever owned was the “G”-scale, where the train’s a good 8″-10″ in height. Not so miniature.
Speaking of model trains, one of my favorite episodes of the old television series The Twilight Zone was called “Stopover in a Quiet Town”. A couple wakes up in a strange house after a night of partying, can’t get the phone or the lights to work, and find the refrigerator stocked with plastic food. They walk outside, only to discover the surrounding town is utterly still – no people, no sounds, no movement. Then the train whistles and pulls into the station, so they hop aboard, hoping to be taken back to somewhere familiar. But the train merely travels in a wide oval and returns to the same station where it picked them up. As the couple steps off the train, the giant hand of a child reaches down to grab them, while a mother’s voice can be heard saying, “Be careful with your pets, dear…” Twilight Zone indeed.Replicas of miniature cities can be found everywhere, whether Knoxville’s Safety City, Disneyland’s Storybook Land (viewed from canal boats), or Legoland’s Billund Resort, Denmark’s largest tourist attraction outside of Copenhagen. There’s even a “top ten” of the world’s miniature cities, including “Miniaturk”, 122 famous buildings of Turkey in a park-like setting in Istanbul; “Tobu World Square” in Japan, which showcases the world’s UNESCO world heritage sites in the presence of 140,000 miniature people, and The Museum of Roman Civilization (which I’ve seen myself), a remarkable recreation of ancient Rome’s “Golden Age” thirty-six years in the making.
Legoland Maybe all this talk of miniatures has you thinking of the recent trend of tiny homes. Those are an entirely different concept; not at all “miniature”. A tiny home is like a full-scale house with most of the air sucked out of it. The components are still full-scale but the spaces are decidedly smaller than normal. Tiny homes kind of look like shoeboxes to me. Maybe we should add peepholes on the ends so we can watch the inhabitants try to make a living in their cramped quarters.
Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.
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Game, Set, Matches
The LEGO Eiffel Tower is the tallest of its model kits and undoubtedly the largest of its Architecture Series. At a deliberate count of 10,001 pieces, this behemoth is a whole lot more detailed than LEGO’s 2014 original, which clocked in at a mere 321 pieces. So imagine my awe (okay, and shock) when I learned about another Eiffel Tower model; one with a staggering 700,000 pieces. Suddenly 10,000 seems like a nice, reasonable number.
Matchstick model It’s true, of course. A Frenchman recently converted 700,000 matches into a model of the Eiffel Tower, in an attempt to break the world record for, naturally, “tallest matchstick Eiffel Tower”. (Is there a world record for everything these days?) I suppose I can get past the 700,000 matches – even if I can’t picture that many in one model – but what I can’t fathom is the eight years Richard Plaud sacrificed to build his creation. I’m picturing Monsieur Plaud waking up each morning, bidding adieu to his wife after a croissant and some French press coffee, and heading off to his studio to play with matches, a giant bottle of glue in hand. Day after day after day.
Our Frenchman’s accomplishment wouldn’t be so interesting if there weren’t a little drama thrown in for spice. Turns out his 23.6-foot model may not earn the world record after all. Why? Because Plaud cut the heads off the matchsticks as he built. When he got tired of cutting, he contacted a French “matchmaker” (ha) and asked if he could place a massive order of headless matches. And there’s the rub, fellow model builders. Guinness is disputing Plaud’s claim of the world record because the materials used can’t be purchased by you or me, should we try to build our own matchstick Eiffel Tower (but would we?)Meanwhile, a 21.6-foot Eiffel Tower model built by Toufic Daher (coolest name ever) retains the world record. Daher’s model was completed in 2009 using six million (headed) matches. I have no idea how long it took him to build, but seriously, how long does it take to simply pick up six million little sticks, let alone shape and glue them into a replica of the Eiffel Tower?
“La Dame de fer” Gustave Eiffel (another cool name) surely had no idea people like Plaud and Daher would be obsessed with his tower 135 years after the fact, in pursuit of world records. Frankly (“France-ly?”) Eiffel’s “Iron Lady” is impressive enough to stand on her own wrought-iron feet. After all, she’s among the most recognizable structures in the world. She surpassed the Washington Monument when she opened to the public in 1889, as “tallest human-made structure” (sadly, seventy years before Guinness started tallying world records). Today she still merits an entry in the world record book, albeit for a different reason:”Most Visited Monument with an Entrance Fee”.
There’s a touch of iron-y to this post. As much as I’m making blog fodder of these Eiffel Tower model builders, I’m tempted to become one myself. Not with headless matchsticks; the LEGO version. Several years ago I completed the LEGO U.S. Capitol Building (1,032 pieces), followed by the LEGO Grand Piano (3,662 pieces), and more recently, LEGO Fallingwater (811 pieces). I keep an eye on the LEGO catalog for other models of interest but not one calls to me… except La Dam de fer. But then I pause to ask myself, am I really willing to dive into a project that’s effectively one hundred bags of one hundred pieces each, where ever single piece dark grey? Stay tuned.
LEGO’s version As for our French ami Richard Plaud, his eight years of pick-up sticks may not have been in vain after all. Guinness admits they might’ve been a little quick to dismiss his claim. In their words, they wanted to make sure “the playing field is level for everyone”. Playing field? Ah, so this Eiffel Tower model-building is a game, is it? For Plaud at least, I’d call it game, set, matches.
Some content sourced from the USA Today article, “8 years down the drain?…”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.
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Dreamy Las Vegas
DID YOU HEAR? The price of Super Bowl tickets dropped this week! That’s right, you and me will pay less for seats today than those jump-the-gun fans who got theirs ten days ago. The game’s in three days so we’ve got no time to lose! Let’s make our travel plans!
I’m gonna surprise my wife. I mean, I’m the bigger football fan, yes, but she’ll be so proud of me for getting our game tickets for less! And to celebrate “all things her” I figure, why not splurge on the rest of the trip since I’m saving money on the game? Once in a lifetime, I’m telling myself. Heck, by the time the Super Bowl comes to Vegas a second time she and I could be dead!
FIRST, new luggage. I want the two of us to be those people, where just a glance at their bags has you thinking, “Whoa, who are they?”. So, a quick trip to Tumi for a couple of their hard-shell packing cases ($1,500 per) and matching carry-on’s ($750). Getting the gold finish too, because you’ve got to look the part if you’re going to Vegas.SECOND, airfare. I got me an itinerary lickety-split on Expedia, flying American. Leave Thursday, return Tuesday. Turns out we can’t get there direct since we live in the middle of nowhere but at least we can fly first class, for just $6,826, with only $600 in taxes and fees. Score!
THIRD, transportation to the hotel. I’m not about to show up at the front doors with Tumi luggage in a rental car so it’s limo service for us! My choice: a modest SUV for two (well, three, including our private driver). I know, I know, I could’ve gone with the BMW stretch limo that seats twenty-five, but what are my wife and I gonna do – run laps around the inside of it? Besides, the SUV is described as “… for the VIP who prefers discretion” and that’s a great way to describe my wife. Round-trip: $375, with $75 in tips.NOW THEN, the hotel. Gotta be big and flashy, right? Can’t be going to Vegas and the big game and staying at a Motel 6. Let’s go with the Bellagio. I don’t need a suite but I’d sure like a view of those lovely fountains. The hotel website quotes five nights for a “1 King Bed Fountain View” at $10,113, including $3,144 in resort fees. Yeah, I winced a bit with the five-figure quote but then the website flashed, Jackpot! This is today’s low rate! so I felt much better. The website also added a ten-minute timer on the rate but no worries – I booked it in less than five! Makes the $300 room service dinners seem like nothing, doesn’t it?
Bellagio Hotel In the days leading up to the game I’ll pamper my wife a little. In fact, since I love the view of those Bellagio fountains so much, guess what? I can order up a couples massage right there in the room! Only $650 for the two of us, including $110 of gratitude to the masseuses. Then we’ll be nice and relaxed for a dinner at, say, the Eiffel Tower Restaurant at the Paris Hotel (and another view of those fountains). We’ll start with Casco Bay scallops ($32), followed by mixed greens ($38) and the “Queen’s Cut Beef Tenderloin Filet Mignon” ($138), with a plate of accompaniments and sauces ($42). We’ll finish up with a couple of the house special “Eiffel Tower soufflés” ($44), and wash it all down with a nice enough bottle of red ($80). Another $110 in tax and tips calls it a night.
Paris Las Vegas Now wait a sec’. Since when does anyone in Vegas “call it a night” after dinner? So I thought about taking my wife to a big-name concert at the new Sphere but then it hit me. ‘O’ by Cirque du Soliel is right there in the Bellagio hotel! Two orchestra-center seats: $657, and only $93 tax/fees!
FINALLY… what I’ve been building to for hundreds of words now – Super Bowl XVIII. I’ve never been to Allegiant Stadium before and this’ll probably be my only visit, so… No, I didn’t go completely off the rails (like seats on the fifty or a sky box) but I do want to see the plays up close and personal so it’s got to be lower bowl, at least the 20-yard line. Oh man, what a relief! I found the last pair of tickets in Section C137 for $29,000 out the door (only $5,000 in service fees!) A flame emoji and a blinking “selling fast” sign had me sweating but I managed to get ’em before the next guy! Don’t forget, these same tickets would’ve cost me even more just a week ago. Can I find a bargain or what?
(Yawn… stretch…)
Oh, uh… hey… it’s Dave, your, uh, “weekly blogger”. Holy cow, let me tell you, I just woke up from the craziest dream. I was headed to the Super Bowl last-minute, see, and everything about the trip was the best Vegas had to offer. Hotel, dinner, show, game tickets – the works. Now that I’m awake, I’m wondering what all that fun would’ve cost me. $53,598 comes to mind for some reason but I’m sure I didn’t “spend” anywhere near that amount. Just a crazy dream. Anyway, sorry to write and run but I’ve got to return a call to my bank, asking about unusual activity on my credit card.
Some content sourced from the CNN Business article, “Super Bowl ticket prices have dropped but they still cost a fortune”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.
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The sky is not completely dark at night. Were the sky absolutely dark, one would not be able to see the silhouette of an object against the sky.
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