Following up on my 4/11 posting “Variability in our mental lives”, about (a)phantasia and (an)auralia, having to do with, respectively, visual and auditory mental experience and their lack: having, or not having, a mind’s eye or a mind’s voice. Almost immediately, it becomes clear that there’s an enormous amount of variability in the way mental imagery and mental sounds work, in different people and for different purposes.
A host of voices
April 13, 2026Triplefruit trail mix, the musical score
April 13, 2026A couple days ago, with my helper Isaac, I was preparing triplefruit trail mix: a large pouch of commercial trail mix — of almonds, cashews, and (dried) cranberries — with added packs of (dried) blueberries and cherries. (A couple handfuls of this trail mix is then added to some granola — rolled oats with almonds, raisins, cranberries, and pecans — to make a bowl of my breakfast cereal, which is, finally, moistened with yogurt and milk. Fiber, fruits, nuts, probiotics, and yumminess.
Assembling the trail mix involves dumping the pouch of commercial mix and the packets of dried fruits into a large plastic container, fixing the top firmly on the container, and then getting its contents thoroughly mixed, by turning and shaking the container briskly, over and over.
Trail mixing is noisy, energetic, and surprisingly entertaining. You are moved to treat the stuff in its container as a percussion instrument, to sway your hips a bit, and to contemplate breaking into song. This time, Isaac and I had the very same inspiration:
Shake it up, baby … Twist and shout … Come on and work it on out
Oh yeah! There’s a musical score for trail mixing, and it’s glorious.
The pleasures of Pittsburgh
April 12, 2026From the Visit Pittsburgh site, for 4/12’s occasion, “How to Celebrate 412 Day in Pittsburgh”:
We love celebrating Pittsburgh every day, but 412 Day is an extra excuse to honor all things Steel City.
Whether you live in the 412 or outside of it (maybe the 724 or 814?), people far and wide come to Pittsburgh to celebrate 412 Day every April 12th. The city comes alive in fun festivities and Pittsburgh pride
The coconut-oil temperature gauge
April 12, 2026The background. In two postings on this blog.
— on 8/9/23, in “The states of matter: coconut X”: the spreadable coconut fat (a semi-solid cream I use for daily treatment of my feet, legs, hands, and arms) melts (at around 77F) to to a free-flowing liquid; when cooled in the refrigerator, it’s transformed into a firm solid that you have to deal with in hard chunks.
— on 3/20/26, in “Coconut X revisited”:
Today is March 20th, the first day of spring — the vernal equinox — here in the northern hemisphere. But also another day of record-breaking heat in the southern SF bay, set to soar once again to over 90F. When I went to oil my legs and feet at 6:30 am, it had already melted to a messy liquid.
Variability in our mental lives
April 11, 2026Variability in language — from person to person, and for any particular person, from context to context — is all around us. It’s a routine aspect of our mental lives, amazingly complex in its details, but in no way surprising as a phenomenon. Similarly for variability in factual and procedural knowledge: impressively intricate, but familiar.
But now it turns out that more and more of our mental lives is open to variation. As a way into the topic, consider an NPR Radiolab segment from 2024 that came by me on KQED-FM a while back, on the phenomenon of aphantasia.
Welcome to the t-room
April 10, 2026(about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Welcome to the t-room. The noun t-room (now my favored term; also tearoom):
a public men’s room (restroom, lavatory, toilet, etc.) frequented by men for (typically anonymous) sexual encounters; these encounters are clandestine, kept secret from other users of the facility
More TMR goofiness
April 9, 2026(about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Continuing my laborious examination of the 2026 MEN.com 5-part DVD The Men’s Room (TMR). So far, two postings on the goofy “human urinal” segment (#1): 4/8 in “human urinal” and 4/9 in “human urinal, the photo album” (nobody expects a porcelain pissoir to have human bodyparts and a fierce desire for sexual relations with men).
Contrast TMR with Joey’s Surf Vacation from the same source — see my 4/5 posting “Travels with Joey”, where I note how carefully designed JSV is. TMR, however, seems have been thrown together from five scenes: the pieces of two previous videos, from 2022, reordered, plus some new material (in “poking the bear”, now #4) — see the appendix for the sources and their ordering in TMR — and some of it is definitely goofy: “human urinal” (#1) and, notably, “porta pounder” (#3), which involves a toilet but one not in a men’s room at all (instead, in a porta-potty).
human urinal, the photo album
April 9, 2026(raunchily entertaining but utterly unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
To the photo in my “human urinal” posting yesterday — Tony D’Angelo reacting in surprise to Edward Terrant’s half-man half-pissoir (in a scene from The Men’s Room DVD from men.com) — two further images:
human urinal
April 8, 2026(a brief note about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
The hybrid. From “The Human Urinal” episode of MEN.com’s The Men’s Room DVD (the first scene (of 5) on my recently arrived copy of the 2/26 DVD: