What confuses me at times is when I say, for instance, “one two three four” and someone repeats it back as “twelve thirty-four.” Who does that, anyway?
I dreamed about numbers last night. I don’t know why. Numbers are not a thing for me. In fact, I hate the word “number” because so many people have taunted me with the question: “Number?” That question, infused with with as dead as the dial tone, so often follows my posting of a photo of a payphone.
Sometimes I know, other times I can’t, since most payphones are dead. But for most people the reason for asking is not forensic research or a quest to match a number seen on caller ID to its physical location. It’s just a matter of pranking. However long ago I moved on from that fascination I cannot deny that it survives in the ______ (German word, can’t think of it now, not zeitgeist but something like it).
But the word itself is too soft for with. No punchline ends with “number.”
…
Today’s subway featured another of the women I’ve come to think I know without ever exchanging more than eye contact. This one I call the pinball wizard, not because she plays pinball but because she never wears a mask. When you saw people playing pinball in movies set in New York City in the 1970s it meant they were in an underground, illegal establishment. That’s because pinball was illegal in New York City in those days.
Playing pinball seems like such a harmless but deliberate form of rebellion, as does (to some, at least) not wearing a mask. The rules are virtually never enforced on MTA trains, but I did see it enforced on buses earlier in the pandemic. It may have been enforeced on the subways but I rarely used them.Whatever the case I interpret her lack of maskfulness to be a deliberate little rebellion against the tyranny of government. In the future I think movies set in the pandemic era will knowingly cast their rebels as unmasked.
That’s all I think I know about her. Which is to say, I don’t know anything except that she is among many pieces of mental furniture in my diurnal passages.
…
I’ve arrived at a selfish, albeit unintentionally so, habit of leaving porn on my phone’s web browser. I should close that stuff when leaving home or whenever I expect to be around people. but there it appeared again, as I opened a web browser waiting for an elevator. No one was around and I doubt the security cameras are programmed to be porn-aware.
But it could certainly be unsettling, and even grounds for getting fired, though I think it would at least have to happen more than once and it would have to be determined that I exposed others to porn deliberately when, I can at least say with truthfulness (not that it matters) that I would never do that on purpose without clear consent.
I saw someone got kicked out of British government for being caught looking at porn on the floor of Parliament. Or something like that. Details don’t matter but the story stands alone, raising the question: What is so evil about taking a porn break?
I don’t know the details of the Brit thing. Maybe I should learn them before discussing. I am not one of those who introduces himself into a discussion by bragging that i don’t know anything about it. That is one element of Internet forums and such that I’ve never understood. I remember when metafilter was on the rocks because Adsense suddenly decided it was a spam site. Metafilter has been around since the earliest days of the WWW. It may not have the highest profile among similar sites but it’s been there.
So when articles about how the site had its financial blood supply cut off started circulating the first comments, it seemed, came from those boasting, BOASTING of their ignorance, the opening salvo along the lines of “I’ve never heard of Metafilter so…”
…so your comments on its merit and Adsense-worthiness are not worth the time spent typing the words.
Ignorance knows many forms. There is honest ignorance, meaning you simply do not know something, or were unaware of the consequences of your actions. I don’t know why this comes to mind first but Howard Cosell got railed for describing a black football player as a “monkey.” He later claimed he had no idea it was considered a slur, and that he used the term all the time with his family.
That’s ignorance. Simply not knowing and having unfortunate consequences arise because of it.
Willful ignorance is a stple of Trumpism. Selective truths, cherry-picked lies, and embrace of fantastical fabrications.
Boastful ignorance, often invoked in intellectual or pseudo-intellectual circles, asserts that If I’ve never heard of it it does not matter. I used the Metafilter example but I’ve seen it in interpersonal communications. I once asked a woman business owner if she knew of another woman-owned business a few blocks away. This was not some presumptuously sexist type inquiry. She was on record as being an advocate and quasi-gatekeeper of women-owned businesses in the area.
She had no knowledge of this place I asked about. but instead of simply saying this she got defensive, even angry at the suggestion that she was expected to know everything about the very subject about which she could get positively enthused.
I’m not sure what to make of it but my question never led to her discovery of that business, a now-defunct coffee shop owned by what I seem to remember was a Yugoslavian woman.
I have to go.
