Fragments

When picking topics to write about on this blog, I find myself tending towards already having an expanded enough take to get at least the first few paragraphs down. Unfortunately, this leaves some topics doomed to fall through the cracks. What I thought I’d do this week is just throw out three of these not-completely-formed ideas just to give an idea of what I tend to think about. And who knows? Maybe I’ll come back to one of these in the future.

There’s a lot of online discourse about how some adaptations and remakes shouldn’t be made. For the former, there’s generally some sort of “unmakeable” label attached, like Watchmen (until 2009) or the philosophy of Alan Watts (until the video game Everything), and for the latter, people tend to ask, well, what’s wrong with the original? But in both cases, like the parentheticals already implied, aren’t there enough counterexamples to shut down these arguments? I even wrote about the two Suspiria movies on this very blog and talked at length about how they could be considered companions to each other.

After years in the foodservice industry, I came to the realization that restaurants very rarely operate at one hundred percent of their capability. Especially the chains and fast-food places. It’s a meme, for example, that the McDonald’s ice cream machine is always broken. It’s the same where I work. Sometimes the problems are more hidden, like, nobody needs to know that the ice machine gets in moods where it just won’t make ice, but sometimes you just need to tell customers, “There were actual bones in the meatballs so you can’t have any. No, I don’t know when we’re getting more” (for the record, that particular problem has since been resolved).

I just talked to someone who didn’t have a snow brush for their car. Who doesn’t have a snow brush? I wondered how they were going to get home in the blizzard that was going on at the time if I hadn’t been there with mine. But their car was newer, so maybe they just hadn’t gotten one yet?

-F