• The national debt is gigantic. The Census Bureau sent me (and everyone else) a letter saying only that that the census paperwork would be forthcoming.
• One of my co-workers won our dead pool with Corey Haims. I had thought my choice of Mike Tyson was inspired, but he yet lives.
• My regular bridge partner is moving away sometime in the next month or so. I have learned an awful lot playing with him. I’m afraid I’ll lose ground after he leaves, all these nifty conventions wasting away in my bag of tricks.
• I liked the new Alice in Wonderland movie more than I thought I would. I saw it in IMAX 3D, it was visually spectacular but that might have just been the format. Anyway, I enjoyed it and I was glad that it was not a butchered retelling of the original but a riff on it.

My mother clipped the recent “Pearls in Wonderland” strips from their local newspaper and sent them to me. Last night I wandered off to Michaels craft store to find supplies to mount the strips.

In the past I have created a solution of club soda and milk of magnesia to neutralize the acid in newsprint, but that can be a tricky process and I didn’t have the liberty of being able to use test strips from the same paper. So one of the items I was looking for at Michaels was an alkaline buffer that could be sprayed on to the strips. I managed to find some horrifyingly expensive “archival mist”. On the bright side, this stuff is easy to use and I am almost sure to have other items that could benefit from it. I already treated one Alice in Wonderland themed advertisement that had been removed from a sixty year-old magazine. The ad is in surprisingly good shape for its age, which makes me wonder if it hadn’t been treated in some similar way previously. I didn’t think a second dose at this stage could possibly hurt though.

After Michaels I went to Barnes & Noble with no particular titles in mind. There I had a brief conversation with a man about bridge and chess. He suggested that one might put together a bridge club that met at the bookstore. I noted that I didn’t think most duplicate bridge players would be interested in a social game because they are “bloodthirsty”. He seemed to find that amusing and said chess players were much the same.

I heard “Leeds United” (link to music video on YouTube) on the radio the other night. That was a strange moment, as I’ve grown accustomed to hearing some songs I like more than others, but it really is quite unusual for me to hear a song I unreservedly like which is why I primarily listen to NPR.

I bought a different car this week. It is 1999 Chevy Metro and it reminds me of driving a go-kart, which is to say, it is fun. The interior of the car had obviously been recently cleaned, but, with time spent in the vehicle, I find it was perfunctory at best. For example, there was an abandoned, broken key chain left dangling off the hinge of the driver’s side sun-shade and this morning I found a mummified french fry wedged down along the edge of the driver’s seat. It strikes me as a notable feat to miss ones mouth with a french fry. Before installing my new floor mats I will need to clean the car more thoroughly.

Speaking of which, I found floor mats with the Cheshire Cat on them. It is the Disney version, but their depiction of that particular character was not terrible — indeed it was the highlight of the film. The only thing I’ve done to the interior so far is install an air freshener, because the smell of lubricant was a bit much so now it smells like lime, vanilla and lubricant — in that order. As for the exterior, I have yet to apply it, but I found the perfect mudflap girl. In the same vein, there’s this.

I don’t understand depictions of women or children or babies with over-sized eyes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them used in such a way that the image was enhanced; it always seems to me that the woman/child/baby would look much better with proportional eyes.

It is primarily for this reason that I do not understand the appeal of Precious Moments figurines to people like my mother and so I was deeply conflicted when I saw this “Alice in Wonderland” one in a Hallmark store:

Happily the price tag made me feel somewhat less conflicted. I can’t believe people spend that kind of money on those things.