IT'S A BUG!

The weather yesterday was moist. Not wet. A light semi-drizzle at times. After spending far too much time fussing around with micro-fibre pads I did laundry and headed off to get some dumplings. All encounters with humans seemed a little odd. Possibly the strange climactic conditions were throwing people off, or the humidity was interfering with their synapses.

One thing I've noticed is that fewer people are wearing masks.
Naturally I still wear a mask, because I don't like getting sick.
But much of society seems to relish the prospect of illness.

One thing fun was reading about epidemics for two hours. Some truly fascinating stuff there, including encephalitis lethargica, which affected about a million people in the years immediately following World War One. Wonderful! I had never heard of it.
Epimediology should be taught in grammar and high schools.


There is NO reason that children's imagination should be bound strictly by happy subjects. When I was still an adolescent I already knew the symptoms of many ailments, almost accidentally. The Merck Manual, as well as encyclopedias and biology texts, made for truly fascinating reading. The plague of Justinian was a good one, so was the Antonine Plague. The Third Cholera Pandemic was a doozy. No, I am not a connoisseur of massive disease outbreaks, but I know about them, and am glad that medicine has made great strides.

It's a very great pity that there is no social club, bookstore, or library café where one could spend the afternoon off by oneself reading and smoking one's pipe, disturbed occasionally by the creaking of rattan chairs and the cheerful tinkly sounds of nurses from the local hospital discussing emissions, antibody counts, and psychotic episodes caused by fever. There have, by the way, been wonderful advances in blood tests. It's almost like a new frontier.

Rattan chairs in public places are unfortunately rare in San Francisco.
I fondly remember them all over the place in the Netherlands.
As well as reading rooms in drinking establishments.
No speaker system, no music. Coffee.



One thing I also did yesterday was give some of my rims narrow chamfers, which makes the bowl openings seem more perfectly round. Over time lighting pipes with an exact ninety degree edge between top and inner wall of the bowl leads to minor distortion, a slight chamfer corrects that nicely without being significantly noticeable.
Over time it becomes something that you cannot see
But the visual effect still holds.


The typical Comoy bevelling is of course quite evident to the eye.
Deliberately so. They did that to prevent rim-scorching.
Force the smoker to not load to the top.
A perfect neurotic design idea.
So that too.



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