Measuring Tape Tape

This yellow and black self-adhesive measuring tape is used in the theatre and film industries to block off sets and stages.

Innumerable other uses and functionalities.

Think outside the inches.

1"-wide x 13.9-yard long roll.

$12.95.

'This blog currently has no followers!'

I happened on the declaration in the headline while browsing around in bookofjoe's statistics pages.

I must be crazy 'cause it made me really happy!

I have no idea what a blog follower is or how you become one but clearly I'm not alone — I mean, there are over 8 billion people not in the least interested.

In the Bizarro World bookofjoe World Headquarters©®™ they're doing the happy dance.

FunFacts: After I moved boj here from Typepad on October 1, 2025, I averaged 300-500 pageviews/day for a few months. Since then the numbers have steadily increased, such that for the past two weeks I've been getting around 2,000/day. I find that a pleasant surprise, since boj on Typepad for the years before it went defunct on Sepember 30 of last year was averaging 500 pageviews/day. 

Once upon a time in blog supremacy days (2010-2012) 15,000 pageviews/day was the average, with occasional peaks up to 100,000 when a major website would pick up something I'd posted.

Helpful Hints from joeeze: Jean-Luc Godard on where to place your TV

The legendary French director said in an interview that the difference in how people perceived movies and television resulted from the placement of the screen.

Godard noted that we generally look down at the TV screen (remember, this was back in the day, when screens were much smaller) and up at a movie screen.

He believed the supplication-like nature of looking up created a sense of worship, making us more likely to imbue what we see with greater meaning and force.

Gazing down at the TV screen did the opposite, making us spectators rather than participants.

With the advent of large flat screens, it's now possible to come closer to the cinema experience by placing the screen up rather than at eye level or lower.

'The Recordist'

This 2007 23-minute-long film features Brit Marling in her first role.

I stumbled on it last week while compiling a list of movies I really liked, a number of which feature her, including "Another Earth" (2011),  "Sound of My Voice" (2012), and "I Origins" (2014).

Like her subsequent full-length films cited above, "The Recordist" tilts the world such that an unlikely but possible premise gets introduced into the mix of events and drives them.

Watch it free, the way we like it.

N.B. I'm not sleeping on her fantastic "The OA" — two seasons on Netflix, in 2016 and 2019, popular and acclamied, then abruptly cancelled as Netflix decided to move on to something new.

Post-it Super Sticky Graph Paper Notepads

These occupy a liminal space in my array of writing implements and accessories: I only learned of their existence a month or so ago and immediately took a flutter.

Turns out these 4" x 6" notepads are very useful for any number of things and their killer app is that they have a double life as real Post-its.

I stick them all over the place, wherever/whenever I want to remind myself of something that I'd rather not add to a lengthy to-do list.

As David Bowie said in the lead-in to "Modern Love": "Get things done."

2 50-sheet pads will set you back $6.57.

How NOT to use Ace Wrap/elastic bandages/adhesive tape etc.

In the video above you will note how the "expert" unrolls the elastic bandage.

Look closely.

Now watch below as a real expert demonstrates the correct way to unroll and apply the bandage.

Long story short (which I learned on the first day of my orthopedic surgery rotation in my third year of med school): unroll the material away from your body as is demonstrated in the lower video.

Lagniappe: the correct technique is faster and yields a more professional appearance.

Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is...

... do you Mr. joe?

In recent years my daily pageviews averaged 300-500/day, down from the halcyon days of 2010-2012 when 15,000 daily views was the norm.

When Typepad shut down on September 30, 2025, and I shifted boj over to Blogger starting the next day, there was an initial spike of interest followed by a reversion to the longtime norm up until the end of July, when a steady increase in views started and has continued to the point that for the past 10 days there've been an average of 2,000 pageviews daily (above).

I have no idea why but being clueless is pretty much the norm here at boj World Headquarters©®™.

You know what song I'm hearing....

'ALPR is going to revolutionize the way we police in North America' — Blast From The Past

Above, my January 7, 2007 12:01 pm boj post.

ALPR stands for "Automatic License Plate Recognition."

As Flock cameras rapidly proliferate throughout the U.S. now, some 20 years later — sometimes destroyed soon after installation —Sgt. Stewart's prediction has been borne out.

I ❤️ This Doormat

I featured it back in 2007: it cost $18.

Today my Crack Research Team©®™ spent a lot of time and effort trying to source it but alas it's nowhere to be found in our particular world.

Maybe one will turn up in yours.

'Coyote v Acme'

Can't wait to see it!

Long story from Wikipedia condensed:

Coyote vs. Acme is a 2026 American live-action animated comedy film directed by Dave Green, written by Samy Burch from a story by Burch, James Gunn, and Jeremy Slater, and starring Will Forte, Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Luis Guzmán, Martha Kelly, P.J. Byrne, and John Cena. Eric Bauza, Kenneth Choi, Candi Milo, and Jim Cummings provide voice roles for the film. The film is based on the 1990 New Yorker magazine article "Coyote v. Acme" by Ian Frazier (itself using elements from the Loony Toons franchise), and follows Wile E. Coyote as he enlists a billboard attorney to sue the Acme Corporation for repeatedly selling him alleged faulty products.

Development began in August 2018 with Chris McKay as producer and Jon and Josh Silberman writing the screenplay. Green was hired to direct in December 2019, and Burch, Slater, and Gunn joined the following year. Cena, Forte and Condor were cast in early 2022. Live-action filming took place in New Mexico from March to May 2022. The film was produced by Warner Animation Group, Keylight Pictures, and Gunn's production company Troll Court Entertainment.

Warner Brothers Discovery initially shelved Coyote vs. Acme in November 2023 to obtain a tax write-off, but later reversed its decision and allowed the filmmakers to seek other distributors following public backlash. After several unsuccessful negotiations with various distributors, Ketchup Entertainment acquired the rights for $50 million in March 2025, after previously doing so with the North American distribution rights to Warner Bros. Animation's The Day The Earth Blew Up (2024).

Coyote vs. Acme was screened at San Diego Comic-Con on July 25, 2026, and is scheduled to be theatrically released in the United States on August 28, 2026.

The second best* non-fiction book I've read so far this year

It's "Atlas of the Roman Empire" by David Potter.

As soon as I read the rave review in the Wall Street Journal last month I took a flutter on it.

OMG, to someone like me who's been fascinated by the Roman Empire since I was first exposed to it in Miss Shaw's Latin 1 at Washington High School, which consisted of reading Julius Caesar's magnificent "The Gallic Wars" in their original Latin, this book is pure heaven.

Unlike Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," all six fat volumes of which I read 10-15 years ago after shying away from its immenseness for decades (full disclosure: I loved the first four volumes but it was a real trudge through the last two [you can too, right here!]), the current treatment is a lavishly illustrated 305-page oversized tome which is beautifully written and organized such that I can't wait for each day's session with it.

*The best one was David Pogue's "50 Years of Apple" — fanboi heaven.

13 Hour Clock — For those who never seem to have enough time

From websites:

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13 Hour Clock

This clock will appeal to those who never have enough time in a day!

Humorous wall clock brings a different spin to the dial markings we're used to, with creative time-telling that "adds" an extra hour: Lucky 13!

Quartz clock with blue plastic housing has a built-in hanger and uses 1 AA battery (not included).

10" (not 13"!) Ø.

$9.99.

CountryDraw

Res ipsa loquitur.

Eilish Rothney shares her office with a giant wasp nest

From the Guardian:

..............................................

‘I Feel Motherly Towards Them’: The Nature Reserve Manager Sharing Her Office With A Wasp Nest

Eilish Rothney’s first instinct was to get rid of the wasps entering her converted shipping container in Norfolk. Now she enjoys their constant hum.

“They just built the nest inside my door,” she says. “My first thought was: ‘Oh no, I have to get rid of that now.’ But then I realised: ‘Wait, why? Why do I have to do that?’”

Two months on, Rothney is in a co-working arrangement with the nest, which is now more than a metre tall and swallows an entire bookshelf of ring binders. It has papered the inside of her office in what she calls “lovely layers of colours”, with thousands of chewed wood pulp cells stacked like the world’s strangest filing system.

Rather than evict her new colleagues, Rothney adapted. She opened the window to give the wasps a clear flight path. “I just stroll past like I’m a browsing cow, calmly going about my day,” she says. “The wasps were fine with me being there. The longer I was there, the more I felt relaxed being alongside them.”

The queen lays eggs continuously, while worker wasps forage and bring food back to feed the larvae. That, in turn, exudes a sugary liquid that the adult workers drink. Rothney describes a low purring sound rising off the nest, which she believes comes from thousands of wings beating to keep the colony cool. “It’s almost like the colony in itself is a living organism,” she says.

She says she isn’t worried about being stung – “it wouldn’t be a whole lot worse than mosquito bites” – and her advice for anyone less enthusiastic than her is: “Insects learn that certain individuals won’t harm them. Just keep calm, they will sense that and won’t feel threatened.”

Rothney traces her convictions about wildlife back to an ecology field trip at university, and to what she describes as “a kind of poetry and beauty in understanding the intricate relationships between everything”. She says she has become increasingly frustrated by how easily the label “pest” becomes a green light for extermination. “It’s fair enough if people don’t like wasps,” she says, “but we need to move away from things just being killed out of convenience. We cause a lot of damage with that approach.”

She is quick to defend the wasps which interfere with picnics every August, too. By late summer, the larvae stop producing their sugary secretion, leaving the adult workers suddenly cut off from their main food source, she says. “The poor things are starving. It’s not a battle between them and me. They’re desperate. Let’s provide them with that sugar and maybe draw them away from someone’s real ale in the evening.

“All I want is for people to be more tolerant of wasps, and of nature generally. I’m proud to be working where I am, and it’s our 100th anniversary this year – so maybe the wasps are celebrating too!”

As the weather turns this autumn, Rothney says, the queen will stop laying, the males and worker wasps will die off, and next year’s queens will leave to hibernate alone. By winter, the nest will be empty.

“It’ll be sad when they leave. I do feel motherly towards them,” she says. “It’ll be odd when they’re gone, because even the noise itself is amazing.”

And when the nest is empty? “I’m going to try to take it apart very carefully when they leave so I can see what it looks like inside.”

Until then, the shelves belong to the wasps.

Good Enough

Plumbers will tell you never use Drāno.

Furniture makers and antique dealers will tell you not to use Pledge.

Optometrists advise against over-the-counter reading glasses.

Some people insist on brand name drugs that cost 10x that of generics.

Professional window cleaners scoff at Windex.

Apple's cables (above left) cost three times more than the Amazon-certified house brand.

Sometimes good enough is just that.

Next slide please.

'Tron: Legacy' (Recording Sessions) — Daft Punk

Wrote Kottke: "This appears to be a fan-assembled album of the recording sessions for "Tron: Legacy" by Daft Punk and Joseph Trapanese."

I loved the first "Tron," which I saw in an old-timey movie theater in Los Angeles the month it was released in 1982.

Last year's "Tron: Ares" not so much, though I had high hopes for it on Vision Pro but alas, it was a letdown — kind of "meh."

On the other hand, there's a good chance that the lesser thrill of the last installment was due to the fact that I'm no longer as easily thrilled.

Helpful Hints from joeeze: How can you tell if a nut is rancid?

Are you sure?

Aristotle Onassis once remarked, "The secret of success in business is knowing something no one else knows."

Nowadays that's called insider trading.

But I digress.

Robert L. Wolke, longtime food columnist extraordinaire, addressed the topic of rancid nuts in his Washington Post Food section "Food 101" column.

Long story short: You can't tell by smell: you have to taste.

FunFact: The speed with which nuts turn rancid is in direct proportion to the amount of polyunsaturated fatty acid they contain.

Fastest to slowest to turn rancid, in order:

1) English walnuts

2) Pecans

3) Brazil nuts

4) Peanuts

5) Almonds and pistachios

6) Cashews and hazelnuts

Here's the column.

Cracking the Code

Q. I like to eat pistachio nuts, and I prepare dishes with walnuts and almonds throughout the year. In the holiday season I also use pecans and hazelnuts. How should nuts be stored? Why do they become rancid? When shopping for nuts, either in a store or from a catalogue, what are signs that they are rancid?

A. Before I get to your question, I must address the nomenclatural nonsense that pervades the world of nuts.

First of all, botanists have their definition of a nut and gastronomes have theirs. To a botanist, a nut is a whole, hard-surfaced fruit containing a seed. To a gastronome, the seed alone may be called a nut. Peanuts are neither; they're legumes. But before I drive you nuts, let's just agree that anything you think is a nut is a nut.

Second, a filbert is a hazelnut is a filbert. They come from two very closely related trees, and you have to be an expert to tell their nuts apart.

Now about rancidity and storage.

The oils in most nuts are chiefly the more healthful, unsaturated kind. But unsaturated fats turn rancid more readily than saturated ones, because the (double) bonds in their molecules are easily broken by oxidation. The resulting molecular fragments, short-chain fatty acids, are likely to taste and smell bad.

Roughly, the more polyunsaturated fatty acids a nut contains, the faster it can turn rancid. On that basis, we can expect the most common nuts to line up this way, in order of fastest to slowest: English walnuts, pecans, Brazil nuts, peanuts, almonds and pistachios, and cashews and hazelnuts.

Most nuts are harvested in the fall, so they're still fresh for our holiday party bowls or all those pecan pies. But containing as much oil as they do (40 percent to more than 70 percent), they eventually will turn rancid.

Unshelled nuts, protected by nature's armor, will keep for a year or even two, especially if refrigerated. Squirrels are able to successfully store acorns over the winter because the cold slows the two chemical reactions responsible for rancidity: oxidation and hydrolysis, which are caused by air and moisture, respectively. So if your nuts were fresh to begin with — that is, bought from a reputable, high-volume supplier — their shells might keep them fresh until next Christmas if the nuts are stored in a cool place. (Cashews, by the way, are never sold in their shells, which contain corrosive and poisonous resins.)

Shelled nuts, especially those that have been chopped or roasted, are more prone to rancidity. Secured in an airtight container, they can be stored for four or five months in the refrigerator and for up to a year in the freezer.

How can you tell if a nut is rancid? In the store, sneak a sample if possible. Smell is not reliable; taste is the best test. If it tastes sour or rank, shop somewhere else. When buying from a catalogue, you just have to trust your supplier.

....................

Now gimme that last cashew — and don't tell me you just ate it.

Fire Blanket

Especially handy when you first try your fire extinguisher only to find it expired years ago and is now a bright red doorstop.

Long story short: I'm getting one of these blankets.

You can too! 

Cheap at twice the $9.95 price.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

Who wants to join my "Talk on the Run" club?

The one thing I've hated about running ever since I took it up is the boredom.

I can deal with the heat and the sweat and fatigue just fine but the main reason I skip days and have trouble getting going pretty much every day is that it's so darn darn boring.

I listen to the same playlist of songs I've been listening to for decades over and over and over again.

No matter how loud I crank up the volume it doesn't eclipse the boredom.

I noticed from the beginning that when I have someone to run and chat with it's an entirely different thing: the time whizzes by without me noticing it and it's quite enjoyable.

Alas, I've rarely had a running buddy and now that I live in Podunkville and go at random times, it's pretty much unlikely I'll ever have one.

I found talking on the phone while running works great except the people on the other end can't stand the sound of my tired breathing and road noise and whatnot so that's a non-starter.

I mean, I can deal with a lot of extraneous noise on the other end but I seem to be the exception to the rule.

Anyway, here's my idea for the "Talk on the Run" club: I create a website that's live, sort of like streaming live on YouTube, but instead of peeps passively watching and commenting in the sidebar, they can chat with me in real time so that it's like I have virtual running buddies on the other end no matter where they are IRL.

Interested? Bueller? Anyone?

XREAL Glasses

I took a flutter on a pair of these last month because $299 with a promise of full-screen OLED HD video sounded fantastic.

I'm a sucker for stuff like that.

Long story short: these glasses are no humbug.

They're especially useful for connecting to your computer or phone to see a bigger, sharper, brighter image.

Read more about them here and here.

Things I like: Ultra-portable; no battery required; fantastic brightness and resolution, better than my phone or computer; connect to anything with a USB-C port; lightweight and comfortable.

Thing I don't like: You have to use the 4-foot-long proprietary USC-C to USC-C cable they come with. That's annoying because it gets in the way. I bought a 6.5-foot-long cable from Apple but it doesn't work. 

Like I said, $299.

Watchlist of Sisyphus

Yesterday at this time I remarked on my abject inability to distinguish films I'd like from the far more numerous ones of no interest based just on the brief descriptions and screenshots in the endless libraries of all the streaming services.

Above and below, screenshots of my Watchlist just from Prime Video.

Why I stopped dictating to AI

A while back I when signed up for Perplexity Pro I was chuffed not only by its excellent and fast responses but also by the fact I could speak as I normally do and it would transcribe what I said and then get to work.

A few weeks ago I stopped dictating and returned to typing.

It became apparent to me that even though Perplexity rarely made a transcription error, my nature is such that I automatically checked what appeared on my screen for typos, misspellings, and their ilk.

The thing is, there's a lag of a couple seconds between speech and appearance onscreen. 

That caused me to stop thinking to check accuracy.

When I type I do that simultaneously with monitoring for errors such that there's never a pause except for thinking.

For the same reason I stopped using the excellent Wispr Flow (free, the way we like it) iPhone transcription app and went back to two-finger onscreen typing.

BTW, Perplexity's base model is free: give it a whirl and see what you think.

Wait a sec — what's that fantastic 2011 film that just came to mind?

If Blackout Curtains Aren't Enough, Go Big With a Blackout Tent

Wrote Tracy Allison in the Guardian:

...................................

This Pop-Up Blackout Tent Looks Like The Grim Reaper's Hood But This Personal Sleep Sanctuary Is My Secret To A Better Rest

A few months ago, I was out for my friend Blaise’s going-away drinks, and towards the end of the evening, the conversation shifted to a roundtable of sleeping habits. I tried to stay out of it; what was I going to do, bring up the tent again? Before I had time to decide, Blaise enthusiastically chimed in: “Tracy sleeps in a blackout tent!”

When it comes to getting a good night’s sleep, a sensitivity to light is my Achilles’ heel. The sun could peer through the edge of a blackout curtain, work its way up under my eye mask, and instantly, I would be awake, feeling as though it weren’t just my eyes, but also my skin sensing the light in a room. In my hunt for a cocoon of darkness I came across the zDen and was intrigued by the claim that it can block out 99% of light.

The zDen became part of my nightly routine in May 2025, after a short-lived attempt at taping up silver-backed blackout photography panels to my bedroom windows, which, as a neighbor pointed out, was giving my house a very distinct “a-conspiracy-theorist-lives-here” look.

Essentially, zDen is a pop-up sleeping tent made from non-toxic fabric, large enough to fit a queen-sized pillow and cover me down to the lower part of my ribcage. From my own testing, two people can squeeze in back-to-back, albeit with little room to move. The two front flaps can be pulled to the side like curtains or kept closed with Velcro. Its three mesh windows with flap covers can let air in, and it even has pass-through openings for CPAP users.

Of course, I have to address the big question: yes, it is a bit silly-looking. I’ve seen the reactions when I bring it up in conversation. A look washes over someone’s face that says: “This is odd. Have you realized that this is odd?”

There’s no way around this, other than to strive to become unembarrassed. I don’t think of the zDen as an indoor tent so much as a light-pollution blocker, one that looks no more or less ridiculous than a red light mask, a portable sauna, a cooking neck fan, or all the other gadgets that humans have dreamed up in order to feel and be well.

I’ve used the zDen nearly every night since I bought it. Its absence is a guarantee I’ll wake up every two hours with my neck at an ungodly angle, face smushed into a pillow and a blanket pulled over my head. Before, I had assumed I was a natural stomach and side sleeper, having never considered that my habits could be the result of unconscious attempts to shield my eyes from light. Perhaps the most unexpected benefit of sleeping in the zDen has been an easy transition into sleeping on my back and staying asleep throughout the night.

It has also been a lifesaver for traveling, where I never know how dark my accommodations will be. This past June, the zDen folded down into its included carrying case and joined me on a three-week road trip around Ireland, where daylight lasted up to 17 hours. It helped me stay asleep everywhere from a curtain-less B&B on a rocky island off the west coast to a treeless campground in the Wicklow Mountains (though the tent-within-a-tent setup was a little avant-garde).

There is one caveat: the zDen folds down into an 18in circle, but that was 3in too wide to fit in my carry-on luggage. According to Danielle Fujii, zDen’s creator, it can technically be folded further to fit, but that adds tension on its frame. Not wanting to risk any damage, I opted for the standard folding configuration and checked the bag, officially making the zDen the only thing I’ve ever justified checking a bag for.

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$109.97.