i really love bats

First pick a fake name, I use Jessica, then download the Google Voice app, hook it up to your email, pick a number, and set up a fake greeting with your fake name. You can set it to ring your actual phone like a normal call or text but they don’t have real info on you.

See how the slyly worded, rather weaselly marketing claim for CityTrees claiming that these panels of moss contain “The cleaning power of 275 trees” got changed, in people’s minds, to “each panel of moss ABSORBS AS MUCH CARBON DIOXIDE as 275 trees”, a completely ridiculous and impossible claim?? And then see how people immediately decided that moss is therefore somehow more “eco” than trees and that “moss lawns” will magically solve global warming? See how everyone did that, by themselves? The important facts, like ‘when plants absorb carbon dioxide, they release the oxygen and use the carbon for their own construction; therefore, plants only absorb as much carbon as they physically need to grow’ have been utterly discarded in the rush to believe something more viral and exciting.

One sly bit of marketing that the public has been widely encouraged to misinterpret, verbally repeated from a random person to a random Guardian blogger at a garden show, who blogged about it as if it was a fact, has now gotten so scrambled that people on tumblr honestly believe that 12 square meters of moss absorbs as much carbon dioxide as 275 trees.

These screencaps show the actual claims about the CityTrees, which are that the moss, having a lot of surface area for its mass, can filter the particles in air pollutants more efficiently than equivalent-sized plants that are smoother.

Last weekend, a guy that at that point I’d known for about 24 hours called me “darling“. I could tell he didn’t mean anything by it, but I (politely) asked that he not do that because I don’t like it. He looked surprised and got a little defensive - “oh, I call all my friends that!“ “Okay, well I’d still rather you didn’t“ “oh well harumph harumph sorry”

whereas the exchange should have gone

“blah blah blah, darling“

“oh please don’t call me that, I don’t care for that“

“oh I’m sorry, I won’t do that“ CONTINUE CONVERSATION

so many of my followers are minors, and i use pet names such as “kiddo, sweetheart, sweet pea, darling, honey, etc” all the time

Waffle House is one of the few chains in America that’s open 24/7/365, and where you can get both breakfast and lunch/dinner options at any time (I have had so many Breakfast Cheeseburgers at Waffle Houses). The food is really good, and people eat there at all times of the day or night, but it’s particularly popular as a late-night post-drinking spot because it’s all that’s open and it’s the kind of food that tastes especially good when you’re hammered.

Part of Waffle House Protocol is that all the servers and cooks greet every single customer as they come through the door. It sounds lame, but I’ve never been to a Waffle House where that greeting didn’t feel completely heartfelt. My mom is a health nut who could barely find anything on the menu she was willing to eat and yet she describes the Christmas Day lunch we had there one year as one of the nicest meals she’s ever had because everyone was so warm and welcoming. That sense of camaraderie gets turned up to 11, of course, at 2 a.m. when everyone’s shitfaced.

The jukeboxes have Waffle-House-themed songs on them (once you have heard “Raisins in my Toast” you will be earwormed forever) and there is an arcane system of hash brown ordering: scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, diced, peppered, and/or capped. The hot sauce bottles say “Casa de Waffle.” 

Once, in Oxford (UK), my husband and I walked past a kebab van very late one night and he said “why do I smell Waffle House”

The location of most Waffle Houses means there’s some… classism that tends to get tied up with Anti-Waffle House Discourse, which is probably lending itself, in part, to this being such a fraught topic. (I’m looking at a map and apparently I was born and raised right in the middle of the Peak Waffle House Density Zone)