First-Ever Link Roundup

Suggestions for future roundups should be sent to contactthestopgap@gmail.com. Either I've gotten worse at HTML tags over the years or there's a nuance to this CMS that yet escapes me. Flew too close to the sun!

Welcome to the second day of the Stopgap! Our comment section doesn't work yet – apparently our "Zapier integration is no longer working as expected." To be perfectly honest, I didn't expect we'd even have to have a Zapier integration. If you know what a Zapier is, or how to integrate it, or why that should keep anyone from signing up to leave a comment, won't you drop us a line?

"From my cold dead etc": Is It Time to Quit Coffee For Good?

For years, Bivens had been consuming close to 1,000 milligrams of caffeine per day, two and a half times the daily recommended limit and the equivalent of more than ten cups of coffee.

Who killed Jordan Neely?

"Hundreds of pounds of pasta were dumped in the New Jersey woods"

“You might say, ‘Who cares about pasta?’ But pasta has a PH level that will impact the water stream,” Jochnowitz said. “That water stream is important to clean up because it feeds into the town’s water supply ... It was one of the fastest cleanups I’ve ever seen here.”

The Great Saunter is this Saturday, May 6: "Each year on the first Saturday of May, the Great Saunter brings 2,500 walkers together to circumnavigate the shorelines of Manhattan." What could be simpler! If you're looking for a bathroom near 60th Street, look for me; I'll be the one in the yellow hat pointing towards the bathroom so saunterers don't get lost.

I've received a number of historical milk-and-toast recipes after yesterday's experiment with housemaid's coffee. There's "Velvet Cream" from Mary A. Boland's Invalid Cooking (gelatine, sherry, lemon juice, sweet cream; "As soon as it is about the consistency of molasses on a warm day, turn in the cream and stir regularly").

From Miss Beecher's Domestic Receipt-Book, we have Boy's Coffee:

(Also apparently an earlier translation of Colette rendered the phrase as "janitor's milky coffee," which doesn't sound anywhere near as appetizing.)

The "erasure poetry is not poetry" woman is baiting you. Don't fall for it!!

Something weird happens to consumer goods when you encounter them packed in a dingy brown box rather than plucked from a merchandized department store display and tucked into a shiny and embossed store bag. The glamor and vibe some branding company worked so hard to imbue is dulled by the cardboard and tape and shredded packing paper. How am I supposed to fetishize this wrinkled blouse torn only moments ago from a recalcitrant plastic pouch? I wanted to be a shopper, not a warehouse worker.

This is where the aesthetic decanting and TikTok restocking comes in. It’s a piece of theater that allows consumer goods to regain the appeal and shiny product-ness that wore off them in transit. Without the department store, we must stage our own closets. Without the supermarket to enable the child’s formative encounter with the object of desire (the cereal aisle, where Captain Crunch and Count Chocula call out like sirens from child-height shelves), it’s up to mom to reanimate the dead bulk Froot Loops by decanting and displaying them and bringing some spectacle back. When the warehouse is your house, you have to revive the commodity yourself, spank its cheeks a little and turn it back into a product.

"Merchandizing the Void," by Kelly Pendergrast at the excellent Dilettante Army

The Paris Waiter's Race, 1949 and 1997. Look at them go!