Tab-a-lama-ding-dong!!!

Let’s close out some tabs!

::  To be fair, I didn’t even read this article. It’s by a woman who moved to Pittsburgh for a job, kinda liked the place, but quickly lost her job, didn’t like the place as much then, and moved to Los Angeles. All that’s, well, fine, whatever. No big deal. But what caught me on this one was the article’s insistence that Pittsburgh is in the Midwest.

Uh…no. Nope. Ixnay.

Now, admittedly, Pittsburgh is a kind of outlier, region-wise. It’s far enough west that calling it part of the Northeast doesn’t seem right. It’s not close enough to Lake Erie to be considered a Great Lakes city. Its best regional claim is probably the unfortunately-named “Rust Belt”, meaning, that group of industrial cities not in the Northeast but kinda-sorta around the Great Lakes, which fell on hard times starting in the 1970s when American manufacturing began its serious decline. Pittsburgh may be “Midwest-adjacent”, but it’s not “Midwest”. Harumph!

::  While on the Business Insider site looking at that Pittsburgh article, I saw another article about my least-favorite sartorial item of all: the golf polo. I don’t know what it is about them, but I despise polos in general, and the golfing variety in particular. There’s just something about polos that never looks right. For me, polos always scream out a weird half-stop between formality and casual, and they always end up looking frumpy. I’ve never yet seen a man who really makes a polo shirt look good. What especially annoys me is when I see hetero-couples oot-and-aboot and the woman is well put-together with a nice-looking, well-thought outfit, and the guy’s in crappy khakis and a polo. Ugh! (I’m on record as hating neckties, but that’s a functional dislike: I hate wearing neckties. I don’t question that they look good, though.)

::  Speaking sartorially still, a few years ago when I was starting to seriously add button-up shirts to my wardrobe, I noticed something curious that I never really thought enough about to dig into: on some of the shirts I acquired, the bottom-most button-hole is horizontal rather than vertical. I made a number of mental notes to look this up, but the problem with my mental notebook is that I don’t consult it as much as I should. But I finally did, and learned some stuff! Basically the idea is that particular button is most likely to shift and come undone, so making it horizontal helps prevent that. Amusingly, for me this turns out to be a non-issue since I wear overalls all the time anyway.

::  I saw some link somewhere this morning about one of our Techbro Overlords really wants to start using AI to help “prevent crime”. Sure, right. Meanwhile, in AI land….

::  If you have ever wondered what you might look like at the moment of impact while receiving a pie in the face, but you didn’t want to actually receive a pie in the face, apparently an interactive sculpture exists that will let you see exactly that! I am of mixed mind on this. Fun and whimsical? Absolutely! But if you’re gonna do a thing….

::  It’s interesting to note the way the social media algorithms serve up random stuff based on your “interests”. For photography, this manifests as links to articles on nearly every photographic subject, some of which are useful and some of which…aren’t. One stalwart is camera reviews. I get served up a lot of camera reviews. I’m not currently in the market for a new camera, and when I do get there I’m pretty sure what my front-runner is, but the algorithms keep showing me reviews of cameras I am almost certainly never going to buy. But keep trying, y’all! Meanwhile, this week I got served up an older review of…the very camera I’m using now! I’m glad to learn anew that when I bought Miranda two years ago, I got a nice camera indeed.

::  I saw a post on Reddit recently, on a board called “What is this?”, where you post a picture of something that you don’t recognize and ask, basically, “What is this?” The picture was of a large concrete enclosure, apparently on the grounds of the airport in Glasgow, with several enormous yellow helix-shaped objects inside. Now, as soon as I saw the picture I knew they were water-screws (one of the oldest mechanical methods of moving water up an incline in human history), but I didn’t know why there is a set of giant water-screws at the Glasgow airport. Now I can wonder no more! This is fascinating stuff. I love infrastructure. (The short version is that Glasgow’s airport actually has a stream running through it, so the water-screws are there as part of the airport’s flood mitigation mechanism.)

::  Finally (for today…I have a number of other tabs still open to essays that I still need to read before I link them), I thought it would be funny to open a post about clearing out tabs with a picture of a can of Tab, the diet cola from the 70s that my parents insisted on keeping around even though it mainly tasted of Coke where they forgot to put the sweetener in it and also submerged a penny, so it was maximally metallic and unpleasant tasting. I know, some people think Tab was the best thing evah, but I hated it and I have naught but bad memories of it. It was one of the weird instances in my child life where I’d ask for a thing I loved (a bottle of pop) and they’d hand me a version of it that I hated (a bottle of Tab). At the time this included things like mushrooms and tomato slices on pizza. (Mushrooms I’m on board with, but I’m still not a fan of tomato slices on pizza, and I love tomatoes.)

Anyway, I was looking for the photo of a can of Tab that now graces the top of this post (via!), and I came across this stunning image: 

Until just this morning I never thought Tab was anything other than a diet cola. Now I see there was an entire line-up of Tab flavors? Orange Tab? Tab Root Beer? Tab Ginger Ale? The mind reels! Here’s the source for that image. I’m fine leaving Tab to history, but I’m amazed that it was this much of a thing.

OK, that’s enough for now!