How I excised dessert forks from my life and from my memory

I was recently pondering why a standard silverware set has two sizes of spoons, but only one size each of forks and knives.

Googling around the idea, I discovered that commercially-available silverware sets do in fact have two sizes of forks - regular forks, and smaller dessert forks.

But why doesn't mine have those?

Then I remembered why I swore off dessert forks...

Once upon a time, back when we were small children, my sister was setting the table. She put a regular fork at every place setting except mine. At my place setting, she put a dessert fork, saying it's a smaller, baby fork because I'm a baby.

I didn't want to be a baby! I didn't want the humiliation of eating with a small baby fork when everyone else is eating with proper grownup forks!

So I stopped using them.

When one appeared at my place setting, I'd swap it out for a normal fork. When we were having cake, I'd use a normal fork. I never once touched or even thought about dessert forks.

 

Fastforward 15ish years.

I was preparing to move into my own apartment by appropriating kitchenware from my parents' kitchen. I took some forks and some knives and some big spoons and some little spoons, and didn't take any of the other irrelevant objects in the cutlery drawer.

I start out with what I appropriated from my parents, building my cutlery drawer over the years with a trip to Kitchen Stuff Plus whenever I ran out of something before the dishwasher got full. I never sought out new types of cutlery because I never had any reason to, just kept buying more of the same.

 

 

And after approximately 20 years of proceeding this way (and, perhaps, with the help of a head injury), my brain at some point deleted and overwrote the very existence of dessert forks.

All because one time my sister wanted to mock me via the medium of silverware.

Hotel Hollywood (elementary school play)

When I was in elementary school (so sometime between 1985 and 1990), my school put on a school play called Hotel Hollywood.

I wasn't in the play, but it really stuck with me - I even mentally wrote what I didn't yet know was called fanfiction about it.

However, I'm not able to find any evidence of its existence on the recorded internet.

So here is everything I can remember about the elementary school play called Hotel Hollywood, which I encountered in the 1980s, but might be older than that.

- There was a character called Quiggley and a character called Quiggy. I remember them as being unaffiliated with each other, although in retrospect that seems less likely. (Although I also remember experiencing the emotion of being surprised that Quiggley and Quiggy were unaffiliated with each other, so perhaps it was a deliberate red herring.)

- One of the characters was a Shirley Temple expy with her hair in ringlets.

- One of the characters was a girl whose father made her dress up as a boy so she could be a partner in his business. (The play was set in the non-specific (to my child self) Olden Days when a girl couldn't be a partner in a business.)

- When the girl dressed as a boy comes out as a girl, she sings a song that starts with "I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm gonna let my hair flow free."

- The only other song I remember from the play:

We're gonna be in the movies

We're gonna be in the movies

A Hollywood motion picture show

We're gonna be in the movies

We're gonna be in the movies

A Hollywood star that everyone will know

I want to sing the latest love song

Step the latest dance

Be a hero! Be a clown!

Comedy or romance

We're gonna be in the movies

The glitter glamour movies

A Hollywood motion picture show!

"Movie star, gonna drive around in a fancy car"

 I have a song in my head and the internet is failing me. 

The line I remember is something very similar to "I'm gonna be a movie star, gonna drive around in a fancy car"

I've made an approximate rendering of the tune here, although it doesn't make sense from a music theory perspective so one or both of the higher notes might be a semitone off.

I remember first hearing this song in childhood (so sometime between 1980 and 1990, although it's possible it's older). I remember the singer as being female. It may have been a song in a cartoon.

I have a vague impression that it's from Jem and the Holograms, but none of the titles on Wikipedia's list of songs from Jem and the Holograms match this song.

 

It is not "Drive my Car" by The Beatles or "I’m Stoned in Love with You" by The Stylistics (or any cover thereof).

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

Wanted: a shared experience that makes it feel like life is getting better

When our library accounts finally came back online, I could feel a frisson pass through both Internet Toronto and Real-Life Toronto. The news ricocheted through the city, we all dropped everything and ran to be reunited with our holds lists...and promptly crashed the site!

Still, the spirits were high - "We hugged it to death!" squeed one redditor - and millions of Torontonians spread the news, rejoiced, and did a happy dance while they waited their turn for the 503 error to go away.

I hadn't felt that very specific emotion in quite some time, and, after some thought, I realized what it reminded me of: vaccine hunting.

When COVID vaccines first became available, everyone rushed to sign up and promptly crashed the site. But we spread the news enthusiastically, shared tips for finding an appointment, and squeed at each other as we got in.

It's a very specific emotion: a shared experience that makes you feel like life is getting better.

I haven't felt that in so long - not since I was queued up for a mass vaxx clinic at the community centre - and I didn't think I'd ever feel it again.

In the first year of the pandemic, I was confident I'd feel that feeling again. Everyone was working to make things better, we were all in this together, surely one day we'd delight in the shared experience of things being better again!

Except...they never got better again. Those in power just stopped addressing it, and in fact took away some of the tools we can use to address it individually.

So I wasn't expecting to experience this solidarity of life getting better ever again, which made it a particular delight to experience when the library came back online!

But...the only reason we got to experience this feeling of something getting better is because someone did harm by cyberattacking the library!

Is there any hope for things to get better for everyone without getting worse first??

***

Some people are able to experience this feeling of a shared experience of life getting better through activism, but that just doesn't work for me and hasn't for a long time. Activism seems more and more about desperately fighting to stop things from getting worse. It feels like victories aren't even improvements any more, just temporary respites.

When I try to think of examples of activism resulting in things actually getting better rather than just stopping them from getting worse, the most recent thing that comes to mind is the legalization of same-sex marriage, which was over 20 years ago.

Is stuff getting better for everyone without first getting worse even a possibility any more? Because I sure wouldn't mind experiencing that emotion again!

How to open the pump on Dove Advanced Care hand wash

Dove Advanced Care Deep Moisture hand wash has been a lifesaver as the eczema on my hands has gotten increasingly sensitive since this past summer. I'm no longer dreading washing my hands! (Although I still do have to be diligent about moisturizing after each and every wash.)

However, I find the pumps nearly impossible to open! I rotate and rotate and rotate them, but they just don't open like every other pump bottle I've ever owned has.

So after extensive trial and error, I've discovered how to actually open these bottles.

 

Where to grasp the pump

1. Unscrew the lid and pull the whole pump and tube out of the bottle.

2. Grasp the tube under the lid, where you can see a spring inside the tube.

3. Twist the top of the pump counterclockwise as directed.

4. Once the pump pops up, you can put it back in the bottle and put the lid back on.

 

 

Somehow, with this specific kind of bottle and pump, taking it off the bottle and grasping the part lets it open easily where my usual ways of opening these kinds of bottles don't work.

However, it would be better if the Dove corporation could adjust the kinds of pumps they use so they open like normal bottle pumps.

Firefox's translation feature needs to be suppressed on pages that already have an official target language version

Recent versions of Firefox have a "translate this page" function that pops up if it detects that the webpage is in a language other than the preferred language indicated in your settings.

They need to figure out a way to stop this from automatically popping up when an official version of the page exists in your preferred language.

 

For example, if I, with my default English settings, end up on the French version of the federal government's COVID wastewater monitoring dashboard, a conspicuous "Translate this page" bubble pops up front and centre. 

This is a problem, because an official English version of the page exists. You can access it by clicking the English link on the top right. And the automatically translated version is never going to be as good or as authoritative as the official English version.

Screenshot of linked page, with the English link at the top right highlighted

 

People outside of translation/language intersection spaces don't always know that pages with multiple language versions exist, but they are common, especially in institutional (government, education, etc.) spaces that provide official information.

 

Firefox's translation feature needs to avoid distracting these uninformed users from the existence of the official multilingual versions that they may not even know to look for.

So how do you do that from a programming perspective?

Preliminary idea to build on: what if the translation feature could detect the name of the target language in the target language? If the user has English set as their default language, it detects the word "English" on the page. Perhaps it could highlight it? Perhaps the translation feature could say "An official version may exist"?

This wouldn't catch every instance. Some websites use abbreviations (en, fr, de, es, pl) and some websites use flags. However, there may be a finite number of ways that these are coded, or commonalities to the scripts used to switch the language, or indicators in the metadata.

Another possibility would be to have the pop-up appear elsewhere on the page (maybe towards the bottom left of the visible portion?) so it's less likely to cover the link to the official version. 

In any case, however well-intentioned this automatic translation feature is, it needs to avoid making it difficult to find the official version of the page in the target language.