I’ve really fallen out of the habit of compiling these minutiae articles; multiple times every day I think, “Hey, there’s something I should put into a minutiae article!” and nearly always I immediately forget to actually do so.  But here are three items from each of the past three months.

February

• “Fill the Crown” isn’t my favorite song off Poppy’s new record⁠—I currently have it fourth, which places it #30 overall.  (I really like that record.)  Nevertheless, it is the song with which I’ve started pretty much every solo car trip I’ve taken since the record came out: the opening squall makes for a great startup sound, and the crunchy guitars tend to come in right as I reach a spot where I can hit the gas.  But I noticed something weird: when I found myself singing the song to myself, I wound up hitting different notes from those I hit when I was singing along to it in the car.  Without the music to reinforce the actual melody, my brain was autocorrecting it!  Here’s what I mean.  I can’t write musical notation, but I programmed the song into trinket.io and this is an excerpt of what it produced:

I am musically pretty backward, but my understanding is that the Western music system uses twelve notes, of which a standard song uses seven.  That is, you have a root note, from which you build a scale, and that tells you what key you’re in.  The melody to “Fill the Crown” starts with an A, and most of the notes that follow gave me the sense that it was in A minor: A minor contains the same notes as C major⁠—the white keys⁠—and sure enough, there they all are.  Except we also have a couple of interlopers!  Those two green notes?  I was automatically singing them as F-E to stay on key, but in the actual song, they’ve been flattened down to an E-D♯, as shown above⁠—which makes the song more interesting!  Oddly, I had no such inclination to “fix” the other interloper, the D♯ over to the left there.  I poked around to see whether there was any term for a key or a scale that contained all the white keys plus a D♯, but couldn’t find one.  So, a couple of questions for those who know more than I do about music (i.e., basically anybody): is there a term for that trick of flattening a portion of a piece of a song to make it sound more interesting, as happens with the green notes?  And on the flip side, is there a term for adding a note that’s not in your scale, not to make it sound interesting, but because it seems completely natural⁠—because actually sticking to your scale is what would sound weird?
• Ellie and I went to Tony’s Pizza in San Francisco town, and we wound up with a couple of slices left over.  I was carrying the box of leftovers back to my car when a woman heading the other direction started to approach me.  I assumed she was going to ask me for change.  Instead she just grabbed the pizza box and started trying to wrestle it out of my hands!  Purely out of instinct and astonishment I held onto it and managed to yank it free of her grip and move on.  You ask me, that social distancing business didn’t get implemented soon enough!

• Here’s a license plate I spotted in San Diego:
  

  Gadzooks!  That’s quite a drive!

March

• In the days before the lockdown was announced, but when people were already feeling the urge to hoard, a couple of times I went down to the grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner and found myself in a line stretching all the way to the back wall of the store, surrounded by people who were preparing for the apocalypse.  And I get buying twenty boxes of pasta, I guess⁠—if you really think you’ll be forced to live for an indefinite period off what you have in your pantry, either because the stores are all empty or there are armed soldiers patrolling the streets, then sure, maybe you try to nail down a few months’ worth of meals in one go.  But the people buying cases upon cases of bottled water… like, are you expecting society to break down to the point that the faucets no longer work?  This isn’t Flint, Michigan⁠—our tap water comes from Sierra snow melt.  Get a Brita pitcher if you want an extra layer of filtration, and save yourself the hundreds of dollars you’re paying for municipal water with a label slapped on it.  And then the people with shopping carts filled over the brim with cases of La Croix…!  Like, I can’t stomach that stuff without some Torani syrup, but even if you can, surely that’s an occasional treat, right?  The idea that there are people drinking only soda water, never still… I mean, do you also make your sandwiches with slices of chocolate cake, or…?

• Sign of the times: my year in Evanston, Illinois, was miserable overall, but one of the few things the town had going for it was a bookstore right near my residence hall called Great Expectations.  Whether it was literature or scholarship, no matter how obscure the book you were looking for was, Great Expectations nearly always had it.  Professors said it was probably the best American bookstore outside of a coastal state.  I’d heard that it had closed down a few years back, but only just recently did it occur to me to wonder what had happened to that space.  What sort of business was being conducted within those walls that had once housed countless tomes of wisdom and erudition?  And…

• Here’s a site with a fun premise: click on a city and get a pop-up listing other cities around the world with similar climates.  Get a sense of just how liveable you might find that spot you’ve chosen to ride out the next apocalypse!

April

• When word came down that henceforth masks were going to be required in all publicly accessible facilities⁠—meaning, mainly, that you could no longer get groceries without a mask⁠—the news was full of reassurances that, no, you didn’t need a surgical mask or anything official like that⁠—a plain old bandana would be plenty!  Here, watch this tutorial about how to make a mask out of a regular bandana like the ones you have lying around the house!  And I thought, buh?  Who owns a bandana?  Then I went to go stand in one of those two-hour-long grocery store lines, and it turns out that the answer is apparently that everyone except me owns a bandana!  So, uh… why do all y’all own bandanas?  Where do you even get a bandana?  Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent my whole life living in an alternate universe.

• This gave me far too much amusement:

I just love the idea that at a deserted Disneyland, amid a lonely, whistling wind, a single churro vendor is standing behind a cart, calling out to the empty courtyards, “Churros! Get your churros here, available for takeout! …Dang, slow day today…!”
• For those who missed it: at the beginning of this month I put up a new visitor recommendations page, so please do swing by if you haven’t already.  Enough people have already contributed to keep me plenty busy for the rest of the 2020s, but I’ll still try to squeeze in as many of the books people recommend as I can.  (Exception: the 700,000-word philosophical treatise-slash-fanfic based on a 1,100,000-word fantasy series that I haven’t read… I’m afraid I might have to give that one a pass.  Sorry!)

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