Aitch-Bar

Writing About (Mostly) Not Astrophysics


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“Swap” by Kevin Chang (Part 2)

Also a terrifying and confusing journey

Delicious prose.

Last time, in “Swap,” we were introduced to some of the main characters: Ping and Pong, who seem to have no character traits so far other than speaking like insultingly shallow imitations of rappers. Lon, who actually is a wannabe rapper, but whose mix tape was so boring that it put Ping to sleep in a matter if seconds. The Old Man, who seems to be shambling around town in the hunt for outdated technology, and his Panda, whose appearance was startling to no one, despite the fact that he is an actual Panda.

Lon had made the aforementioned Ambien of mix-tapes, but let it fall into the clutches of the Old Man and the Panda (who supposedly “love human junks”). Ping & Pong rushed out to a show, but returned after realizing that they missed it because Pong’s watch “has been busted for years.” (Is this subtle foreshadowing of the time-travel plot?) They inform Lon that the Old Man is “da major G and everyone treats him like he’s their popdukes” and not to mess with him—as if the giant bear following him around and obeying his commands wasn’t reason enough. Also, the phrase: “I beat fo tha yolk everyday” was used. It doesn’t make any more sense in context.

This installment is the short Scene 2 and the first half of Scene 3.

———————–

Scene 2 – Lon and the Girl in the Mirror

Scene: In an enormous space in a shelter, there is nothing. No single furniture or any photos that reflect the person that lives in there. Old Man and Panda enter.

Old Man:    Ah… our plan worked didn’t it?

Panda:    Nods.

Old Man:    I know I know! He looks all… jumbled up and spoiled. It’s perfect! …He can be the sacrifice for my granddaughter after all… Eeeheehee…

Panda:     Gestures an “X” with its arms.

Old Man:    What? You think I’m mean!? Aiyoooo… it’s the same as you my little panda. You eat meat and human looks delicious to you, yes? But don’t humans still think you’re cute and cuddly fur ball from China? We’re on the same boat my friend.

Panda:    Pointing at the mirror.

Old Man:    Yes… with this mirror… I’m going to use this mirror to save my granddaughter… Jin-Mei.

Panda:    Nods.

Old Man:    I promise you that she won’t feel lonely…… ever again.

Panda:    Nods Rapidly.

Old Man and Panda both enter and disappear into the mirror.

Black out.

Lights on.

There is a trail made by Panda’s paws. It leads to the mirror. Lon enters.

Lon:    Sigh… where did dat freakin’ beast go…(notices the footprints) Ya ain’t outsmarting me anymore…

Lon starts tracking the foorstep until it leads him to the mirror.

Lon:        Did I miss anythin’? Sumthin’s wrong hea… (he looks at the mirror) Huh? (stares at the mirror more closely)

The reflection Lon sees in the mirror appears not to be his reflection, but a girl of about his age, who is wearing an old-fashioned Chinese dress.

Lon:        Why… do I look like this… (turns around away from the mirror and poses) Damn, am I hot! Wait!  (turns back to the mirror) This ain’t me! What in da world is…

Lon tries several movements in front of the mirror. The girl on the other side of the mirror synchronizes with the same movements.

Lon:        (turns away from the mirror again) Wat da (beep)ing (beep) ia dis (beep)ing mirror messin’ with my freakin’… aii… eei… aight… aight… I’m dreamin’… I’m trippin’ for some reason… ya know wat? I will just… turn around with me (beep)ing eyes wide open and…

The arms of the girl emerge out from the mirror and pull Lon into the mirror as Lon screams out of fear.

Lights dim. Scene ends.

Scene 3 – Jin-Mei, Lord Wang and the Old Man

Scene: In an old-fashioned room, a girl, Jin-Mei, who is about the same age as Lon, is sitting on the floor dazed out. Panda is sitting next to her, playing with his beach ball. A buffed big man, Lord Wang, with shaved hair and long eyebrows enters the room.

Lord Wang:     Ahem.

Jin-Mei looks up.

Jin-Mei:    Sigh… there goes my day.

Lord Wang:     What is this tone of voice I sense?

 

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“Swap” by Kevin Chang (Part 1)

Also a terrifying and confusing journey

Also a dangerous and bewildering journey into the very heart of terror.

You’re welcome.

I know it sounds presumptuous to begin a series with the implication that the author already deserves to be thanked, but believe me, you will agree, and secondly, due to Swap, my understanding of the nature of space and time have been warped beyond recognition. I’ve spent a fair amount of time around general relativity, but nothing has challenged my notions of what constitutes causality, narrative, culturally acceptable word-choice, set design, and perception of the flow of time more than this play. What is this monolithic triumph of art, you ask? A script I found in the trash.

The year was 2010, the place was the backyard of my friend Jerry, who was holding a going-away party. A few people had recently moved out of the apartment building, and there was a pile of furniture and discarded apartment things that had been left behind. While waiting for our grilled meats we opened a box, and were suddenly transfixed by the light of a thousand suns, a fanfare of angels pouring forth from within, and this script. On first glance, several things were apparent— firstly, that most of it was written in an intensely, um, “urban” linguistic style—and always phonetically. Secondly, that one of the main characters was a Panda. Thirdly, that most of the stage directions made no sense or were totally impossible.

The story itself involves a group of Chinese-American teenagers, who talk like rappers, traveling back in time to ancient China, coming back, some kind of epic fight scene featuring events that are not possible to depict in real life, and a Panda, who behaves like a person but never speaks. To be honest, I’ve read it at least twice but I really have no idea what happens or who anyone is. Sort of like Inception, but with more pandas.

As a send-off to my friend, we actually performed the final scene from the play for him, to his bewilderment, and this past New Year’s we got to talking about it, and actually ended up table-reading the entire thing. It was an excellent way to ring in the new year.

I still have no idea who Kevin Chang is, and since that’s a really common name, I probably never will. It says “ACA Play 2006” and “1/30/2006” on the top, and ACA stands for “Asian Cultural Association” which is a student group at RISD. But since it features stuff like swearing getting bleeped out, a fight where “hit point counters appear” like a video game, and characters passing through a mirror…I honestly don’t know whether this was ever intended to be performed as a play.

With no further ado, Scene 1: Lon and the Old Man

———————–

Swap
by Kevin Chang
Characters:
Lon
Old Man
Jin-Mei
Panda
Lord Wang
Ping
Pong
Extras (Jiang-shis)

Scene 1 – Lon and the old man
Scene: Under the dark blue sky, the alley is casted by dim post lights just like the other districts of the town. At the side of the alley sits a young Chinese teenager, Lon. His two gangsta buddies, Ping and Pong, are sitting on each of their own box chair and having fun chatting with each other. Lon’s distance between the two is somehow awkward.

Lon:        Damn! I’m out… Ey Ping.

Ping:    Yea.

Lon:        You got some stocks? Luck out. I’m out of shells.

Ping:    Naw.

Pong:    Sorry dawg, I’m out too.

Lon:        Miss me wit all dat. We’re in college, boys! Who else ain’t smokin’?!

Pong:    Lon. Straight up I ain’t got any deal with my peeps anymore. I beat fo tha yolk everyday. Why don’t you go look for a new dealer on your own?

Ping:    Yeah… go look for a new dealer on your own!

Lon:        Aight, aight. It’s all cool in tha hood. I got friends yo know that? Benjamins follow me everywhere I go. I’ll get a new bill collecta in no time, you see.

Ping:    Dat’s tight!

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Shameless Promotion

Image

For some reason, you read this blog more than you know me. I don’t know why or how that happened, but somehow, you are looking at this. Although that inexplicable situation has come about, there is something you can do to make things better: go to this link and watch this fairly preposterous commercial entry featuring yours truly. Then “like” it. We are in a contest that is based on how many humans like it. I don’t frequently tell people to do things—usually, when it comes to blogging and whatnot, I tend to just write things for years, for free, and then send it into the electronic void and ask nothing in return. Nonetheless, if any of you humans wanted to watch me embarrass myself for the sake of a local ad campaign, please do, and shoot a ‘like’ in our direction since that is the currency of our brave new world, and our brave entry is in a tight race for first.


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Two Seconds Hate: The Myth that you can see the Great Wall of China from Space

Expedition 10 photo showing Great Wall of China

View from the ISS, with a 180mm lens

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the Great Wall of China is “the only man-made structure visible from space.” Why on Earth does that thought escape anyone’s lips? It takes less time to realize how stupid it is than it does to actually say the sentence aloud. The important, and impressive, fact about the Great Wall is how long it is, not how wide, and why would length alone ever be a factor in determining whether or not you can see something from a great distance? It is clearly less wide than any major highway (most of which also tend to be pretty long), and basically the same color.

This is the kind of thing I could only imagine becoming a myth before we could go into space and see how stuff looks like from orbit, (even though, for the extremely obvious reasons listed above, it would still be a stupid idea), and in fact, it does appear to date to at least the 1930s, in the form of “the GWoC is visible from the moon.” What?! Continents are barely visible from the moon.

This obviously completely wrong fact is even printed in Chinese textbooks. There have been many complaints about the lousiness of our textbooks, but at least our nationalistic garbage is vague and hard to convincingly disprove (to about 30% of people anyway). This obviously completely wrong fact is so ingrained in culture there that when their first astronaut was unable to spot it, panic ensued, and it took a second, American, astronaut taking the really indistinct picture above, to satisfy everybody. Seriously, that picture was plastered all over Chinese newpapers as evidence that this idiotic myth was true. Even though it was through a magnified camera lens and is still almost impossible to discern. I doubt it would have mattered, people everywhere else in the world already reflexively believe it to be true with no evidence or second thoughts in the first place anyway.


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Today in History: September 14th

1501: Michelangelo’s second day of work on the statue of David. This is the day he started working on a certain part of the statue that you are probably very familiar with. You know the part I mean.

More Papal Bullshit

A Catholic plot to get us to not have a stupid calendar

1752: The Gregorian calendar is adopted by Britain, finally ceasing the slipping of the equinoxes due to the imprecision of the Julian calendar. The transition requires skipping 11 days, meaning that Sept. 14th followed Sept. 2nd. Under the rules of the old system, years were 365.25 days long, with a leap day every forth year, but because the year is actually shorter, 365.242 days, the extra leaps had pushed equinoxes earlier and earlier since Roman times. The solution was to jump forward by length of this accumulated error, and to abolish leap days on years ending in 00, unless they were evenly divisible by 400. Because the new calendar was decreed by Pope Gregory, it’s adoption was viewed as controversial throughout the non-Catholic parts of Europe and only gradually came into effect. Irish rebels, for instance, took on the calendar as an act of anti-English defiance, celebrating Easter on the new date, switching back after being conquered, then finally re-switching back once Britain itself adopted the calendar, thus coining the term ‘Irish Easter’ to mean a breakfast of scrambled eggs with a side of rabbit bacon.

Incredibly, instead of making the change all at once, Sweden made the bizarre decision to push the calendar forward gradually by simply not having leap years between 1700 and 1740, then immediately forgot this plan in 1704 and 1708, and had leap years anyway. This all means that Sweden would spend 40 years completely out of sync with either calendar, and then still end up 2 days off their intended target. Having acknowledged the plan’s failure after having forgotten to implement it, the Swedish King Charles XII decided to give up entirely, and go back to the Julian system in a royal decree titled “Fuck the Flow of History.” Since the Swedes were now 2 days off, this was accomplished by extending the month of February by 2 days instead of 1, and meant that for the first and only time, there was a February 30th, the most depressing date in history.

Although the pre-United States adopted the new calendar as the same time as the rest of the Britishish people, the territory of Alaska experienced it following its purchase from Russia in 1867. Additionally, the International Date Line, which had originally been on the Eastern side of Alaska had to shift over the proto-state. This was accomplished at great expense and difficulty by teams of oxen, steamer vessels, and loggers, who freed the line when it became stuck on tall trees. The expense incurred by the operation is known as “Seward’s Folly” and it’s costly example is the reason that China uses only one time zone.

Remember The McKinley

Fooled by the classic “gun under the handkerchief trick”

1901: US President William McKinley dies, having been shot one week earlier by Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz is commonly referred to as an anarchist in accounts of the assassination, however he did have some specific demands. Among them, an increase in vowel shipments to Eastern Europe*. It is an historical curiosity that Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was present at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo where the shooting took place, at Ford’s Theater when his father was killed, and an eyewitness to the assassination of James Garfield, while serving as Secretary of War. His attendance at a third shooting gave him the rare ‘Presidential Assassination Hat-Trick’ allowing him to retire from the exhausting task of following presidents around hoping someone would kill them.

1987: The Toronto Blue Jays hit 10 home runs in a single game, setting a new record. This is partially due to the fact that Canadian baseballs have an oval shape to make them more aerodynamic, as well as the field having shorter right and left field walls to accommodate the rounder, five-base Canadian baseball diamond. Interestingly, due to the metric system, the Jays only managed to score 8.5 runs in the game, due to the fact that a homer only counts for half a run throughout the Dominion.

* The recent acquisitions of Hawaii and Guam in the Spanish-American War provided the US with a surplus of vowels which it was leveraging for diplomatic favors around the turn of the century.


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Today in History: September 10th

1306: St Nicholas of Tolentino dies. Today is to become his feast day, an annual remembrance of the times he resurrected hundreds of dead children, (they were confused and hungry, and their parents barely cared because it was the 13th century), and the time he saved a burning palace by throwing some “blessed bread” on the flames. Firefighters in subsequent years attempt to understand and replicate the ingredients of ‘blessed bread’ with little success. Most inquiry focused around getting the essence of Catholicism into the yeast. The last notable attempt is made by a 15th century fire brigade, found to be responsible for grinding up the preserved hand of St Benedict to bake a loaf of this so-called ’emergency bread.’ Because the authorities successfully manage to burn them at the stake, St Nicolas’s feat goes unrepeated to this day.

Prior to 1974, all Canadians wore this hat all the time1823: Simón Bolívar becomes President of Peru. He sighs heavily— it wasn’t the one he really wanted.

1858: George Mary Searle, overcoming a childhood of taunts based on his middle name, discovers the asteroid 55 Pandora from an observatory in Albany, NY. Little does he realize that nearly 300 years later, Marines from the Space Expeditionary Command, Ultra-Capitalist Division, will land on the rock and prepare to begin mining blue-skinned metaphors for living in harmony with nature. They will be disappointed to find that the barren, airless environment supports no life whatsoever, and leave before discovering that the object contains an untold wealth of Unobtainium, one of the MacGuffin Series semi-metals from the Fictional Periodic Table.

1939: Nine days after the outbreak of hostilities against Poland, Canada declares war on Nazi Germany. Having prepared for this eventuality, Himmler reports back to the Führer that the Germany’s stocks of maple syrup, beaver fur, and Labatt Blue are in full supply and they decide to proceed with their planned genocide and world domination.

Monkeys are known to have monarchist sympathies1967: Gibraltar holds a plebiscite on whether to remain a British territory, or be ruled by Spain. Although voting to remain under UK control by a margin of 99%-0.36%, the possibility of voting irregularities were never conclusively disproved. If Gibraltar had required voter ID there is no telling how many Barbary macaque monkeys would have been prevented from subverting the true will of the people.

2001: Conspiracy theorists wonder to themselves about why they haven’t had a good conspiracy for a while. Sure, there was the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Queen getting those fake paparazzi to kill Princess Diana, but neither of those had the same panache as those really great ones from the 60’s. JFK, RFK, the Moon Landing. The sixties had it. Don’t get them wrong, there is nothing wrong with Elvis sightings, Big Pharma creating AIDS, and the Challenger explosion, but back then, the secret one-world government knew how to make an impression. Killing Paul McCartney and replacing him with a robot? Fluoridating everyone’s water? Classics. While brushing their teeth, they wish to themselves that something terrifying and significant would happen that could make them feel that way again— then sigh and go to bed.


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Monday Linktopus

Congratulations! You are the first person to read this alt-text!

The Linktopus is tired of trying to reason with you people

Boom! There are more things.

\scriptstyle\Box   “I’m Comic Sans, Asshole

Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.

You don’t like that your coworker used me on that note about stealing her yogurt from the break room fridge? You don’t like that I’m all over your sister-in-law’s blog? You don’t like that I’m on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I’m pedestrian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don’t all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros.

\scriptstyle\Box  The Register is some kind of British tabloid specializing in science and technology news. And like other tabloids it presents the news in a crazed, sensationalistic fashion that sounds as though it’s competing for your attention against the inside of a frantic Chuck-E-Cheez. Yet they are actually covering legitimate science stories, and not necessarily getting it as badly wrong as most traditional sources—they just happen to be throwing in strange, aggressive prose, and using the term ‘boffin’ no less than 3 times a story. Example, this story about the recent study proposing a link between autism and the age of the father:

We’re raising generations of MUTANT KIDS, says Icelandic study

The trend for women to have children with older chaps than of yore is causing many more mutations among children, according to a study of the genetics of Icelandic families. […]

The new info comes in a wide-ranging study carried out by boffins at Reykjavik firm deCODE Genetics, which holds DNA info on a high proportion of Icelanders. The results have been deemed important enough to be published in headline-birthing boffinry mag Nature this week.

It seems that the greater number of mutations produced as dads become older is down to the fact that a chap’s wedding tackle continually manufactures new sperm by dividing old ones, which naturally means that as the years go by the ready-use sperm in his firing chamber will be the result of more and more divisions in the past. Each division is another chance for a mutation to occur, so that sperm from an older man will always contain more mutations than sperm from a whippersnapper, and these mutations will naturally be passed on to any children he may have. Ladies, by contrast, are issued their entire load of eggs at a relatively young age, and so have many fewer chances to produce mutant ones.

See what I mean? It isn’t wrong, it’s just really weird, and really British. Having accepted these facts, it’s pretty much the greatest news source on Earth. Here are a selection of insane headlines:

China could penetrate US with new huge missile Uh oh…
LOHAN sets clock ticking for explosive climax
Boffins: We are VAPORISING the Earth… for science Supervillainesque move helps them learn about super-earths
Hubble spots ancient spiral galaxy that SHOULD NOT EXIST Milky-Way-like shape ‘should be space train wreck’
Undead galaxy cluster spews 700 zombie baby stars A YEAR IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALIVE!

\scriptstyle\Box   Retronaut unearths the creepiest magazine ever published: Girl Watcher. Literally a fun, fresh, non-judgemental look…at stalking. 1959 was a different time.


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Two Seconds Hate: The Nerdist

I am going to inaugurate a recurring segment, by taking a page out of a blog I really enjoy called I Hate Everything. She is essentially compiling the enormous list of everything that is wrong with the world, one paragraph at a time. And when I say everything that is wrong with the world, I mean that in the sense of “Why would ‘Glee’ covers ever come up in iTunes searches before the actual songs?”rather than “Why do African warlords have to be such assholes?” The size of the complaint isn’t significant, nor is whether it is something that most people are likely to know about. It just has to be something that one of us knows about, and if you don’t, deal with it. It seems like a cathartic pastime. Today’s subject: The Nerdist Podcast.

Faux nerds. Ferds.

I don’t think they know anything about actual lasers.

The Nerdist is one of those things that seems to inhabit the same internet world as many other tech-savvy, geeky, science-interested things, like Boing-Boing and Wired. They describe themselves as being obsessed with “nerd-culture” and sci-fi and stuff, and the show revolves around them having meandering interviews with guests who have some importance to pop-culture. And many of their guests are legitimately nerdy, like people from Mythbusters, or Futurama or whatever. But the other more than 50% are simply comedians or normal actors. There is nothing wrong with this, (and you know, it’s free, so it isn’t like they owe anyone anything) but they are constantly banging on about what geeks they are, and professing this devotion to sci-fi etc, while never actually discussing anything beyond the mechanics of show business. It is not more interesting to hear Brent Spiner talk about auditioning for movie roles than any other random actor. And it is definitely not interesting to hear the hosts, who are comics, talk about what mutual people they know from which obscure LA comedy club, or who they met at some convention that I’ve never heard of.

It is fine to do a podcast where you talk about comedy and television and pop-culture things. But just because the formerly pejorative term ‘nerd’ has been watered down to the point where Britney Spears says she was one growing up, doesn’t mean that it is an appropriate description for a show where you talk to Joan Rivers and Will Ferrell about how they got into stand-up. If you want to do those things, you have to not call your program The Nerdist.


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Weekend Linktopus

Congratulations! You are the first person to read this alt-text!

The Linktopus isn’t fucking around

BEHOLD! The multi-tenticled splendor of this blog’s ability to notice other things on the series of tubes— by reaching through them with its many tenticular arms. Or like an octopus learning how to open a jar to get at a crab. The funny link is the crab, trapped within in a sadistic experiment to test cephalopodular intelligence. Or maybe you, the reader are the crab. Hmm. I haven’t really thought this analogy through, but either way, Aitch-bar is the octopus.

\scriptstyle\Box   You know the Olympic Torch? How they always talk about “The Olympic Flame” in a way that implies it is a permanent thing, and how there are multiple stories regarding the many and varied methods they use to keep it lit while relaying it…the backups…the fuel canisters, etc. All of this has caused me to assume that there was some kind of fortified room in Athens where a permanent flame is kept alight. I always assumed that a continuous flame has been kept burning there, as it is at JFK’s tomb or whatever. And based on my non-scientific survey of nearly 3 other people, I wasn’t alone in this. How wrong I was.

At least it's parabolic

Celebrating the tradition of burying women alive if they violate virginity oaths.

The Olympic flame is relit every 2 years in a ceremony imitating Greek antiquity in the much the same way that Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas imitates ancient Rome. A group of eleven women representing the Vestal Virgins¹ have a little ceremony and then light it using a parabolic mirror, and hand it off to somebody, who runs away. (Fun fact: Vestal Virgins are Roman, not Greek. And they were dedicated to keeping a fire that was never to be extinguished, not one that is restarted and put out every 2 years.) It’s not a secret, they televise it and everything…just not in America I guess. The first awareness I usually have that the Olympics are about to happen are little blips on the news about so-and-so doing a portion of the relay, so the lighting with its weird fake toga ladies must not get much coverage.

Oh yeah, and the relay was invented for the 1936 games. By noted sports fan Joseph Goebbels.

\scriptstyle\Box   “Henri 2, Paw de Deux” won the first Internet Cat Video Festival. He and his human companion deserve it, the 2 min film is a masterpiece of feline ennui.

\scriptstyle\Box   Strange Maps points to a “Map of Physics” from 1939. A more current map would take up a tiny fraction, with the rest an inky darkness to represent the dark matter and dark energy that occupy so much of our thoughts and universe. Also, it would just be easier to draw.

What an unlikely landmass

No one is making a “Map of Chemistry.” Just Saying.

\scriptstyle\Box   If movie trailers were more honest with us, they’d look like this:

¹ When you are selected to pretend be a fake vestal virgin for this, but you’re in a relationship, does your role as a fake virgin enter your mind while you’re having sex? Do you think about whether you are less convincingly virginal? Do you try putting it on hold for a couple weeks while the ceremony is coming up and then go crazy once it’s over?


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This Week in Teak

I'm on (wooden) boat!

None of that fiberglass bullshit

Our local supermarket gives off an unavoidable essence of upscale-ness. It caters to the part of the city where all the Volvo drivers live, but isn’t so unspeakably epicurean that they don’t have normal food, or charge significantly more for those normal things–it’s just that they also have fine cheeses and 20 different kinds of gourmet cured salmon. This isn’t my natural environment, so I often find myself noticing things that denote this understated opulence, and the aspect that best expresses it are the magazines. So I’ve been noting down the best magazine titles around the checkout, and I think you have to agree that they are incredible.

Decanter
Chilled
Discover Britain
Harvard Business Review
Wooden Boat
Nantucket
English Home
English Garden
Wallpaper
Newport Life
Newport Living
Maine
Jewelry Artist
Wine Maker
Luxury Pools
Cruising World
The Affluent Traveler
Ocean Home

As stand in line to check out, I wonder how Luxury Pools sustains a readership between the people who already own a luxury pool, and the people who simply envy the luxury pools in the magazine. But then I just pay for my frozen pizzas and think about where I would go if I were an affluent traveler.