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There are three Captain Nemo’s locations (check out their URL, it is . . . comprehensive) in Chicagoland, one of which is close enough that two coworkers and I went there to pick up lunch today.

Right after us, a harried woman with a toddler in a stroller came in and immediately began to talk.

“Have you been here before? Is it any good?” she asked, right in front of the, you know, staff members behind the counter. “Oh, the soup sample is good, it’s too hot though, and I was already warm anyway, it’s a little too much. Can I get my sub toasted? Can we take a sticker? It’s probably fine, you certainly have plenty. Do you have drinks here? Are there lids? This is to go, do you have bags? Can I get a bigger bag? Can we buy this extra cup since my son chewed on it? Where are the straws? Oh, the man said ‘hola,’ that means ‘hello’ in Spanish! We don’t speak Spanish. Can we set our stuff on this booth for a minute?”

She then prompted the little boy to say thank you. When he didn’t, she explained: “He doesn’t talk much.”

A friend of mine is having a serious family emergency, and that coupled with a migraine have made me a little tetchy and subject to sentimentalism. Do you know what the solution is? ANNE LAMOTT. My mom grabbed a copy of her novel All New People in a library sale at her school and passed it along. It’s short and wonderful with a lot of oomph. In it, Lamott tells of an adult Nanny Goodman looking back on her own childhood with a writer father and a not-doctrinaire-but-still-nutty religious mother.

One thing I know for certain is that my memories are not the same as those of my brother or mother or father; we all have our own version of what really happened, of how it really was. It is a Rashomon history. If you took our four versions and laid them one on top of the other in bands, as they do in sound mixing, you would end up with a song of my family.

• Billy Joel and his newest wife are divorcing. This aside on their ages made me chortle:

(she’s 27, he’s 60; if the age difference were a person, it would arguably still be too old for her)

• Sonia Zjawinski recently published one of the stupider ideas in recent memory: Trolling popular photo website Flickr, making and framing your own prints of photos you like for free. As the commenters (and the Nytpicker) point out, this is to photography what unauthorized downloads are to the music industry: Illegal.

People in the comments drew all kinds of analogies, but there’s no need: this is a crappy thing to do. You aren’t stealing from faceless millionaires or record label corporations, it doesn’t have any awkward nobility the way music downloading does, and many of these photographers would likely give you the permission if you’d only ask — they’d probably be delighted to know their work was in someone’s home. And if cheapness is the key here, hell, offer to PayPal each photographer ten bucks.

The real craw-sticker here seems to be that this blog post ran in the New York Times, which apparently has no common-sense regulation anymore.

• My new breakfast of choice: 1/2 cup Grape Nuts, 1 6-oz Dannon All Natural Nonfat Plain Yogurt, 4 packets of Truvia, and a few drops of pure vanilla extract. The yogurt and subsequent ingredients basically recreate the vanilla Dannon Light n Fit, with Truvia instead of a digestively caustic artificial sweetener, and straight yogurt instead of a long list of ingredients studded with chemicals. 280 calories, 1 gram of fat (0 saturated), 28% of daily fiber, 28% of daily protein.

This is my favorite xkcd ever and is drawing a strong reaction from me, since gossip is the one topic that unifies people who otherwise vocally dislike what their peers may study or pursue. Seriously, if one more person finds out I like math and says “Oh, god, I hate math,” I am going to sock that person. The same goes for the next person who says “Oh, jeez, an English major, what’s that good for?”

You know what it’s good for? Keeping your brain alive and connecting to humanity at any point in history and in any country or culture in the world, that’s what. Failing to draw sharp-sided lines in the sand by finding an objective definition for everything, failing to declare total certainty about life’s most unknowable concepts, realizing that sometimes phrases can evoke certain ineffable human feelings better than anything else, and drawing analogies to unify or illustrate, that’s goddamned what.

In a timely, uncanny fashion, I had a draft saved called “I’ll Be There” with a link to this YouTube video: State Farm’s I’ll Be There commercial.

This commercial is wonderful and makes me kind of weepy every time I see it. Its soundtrack features a remixed version of the Jackson 5 classic beginning with Michael Jackson’s voice, isolated a capella, singing this line I’d never really heard the words to:

You and I must make a pact, we must bring salvation back.

It turns out the words I remembered were the more pop-tropey ones (“I’ll be there to comfort you,” “You know he’d better be good to you”), and not the well-crafted, interesting ones mixed in:

I’ll be there to comfort you,
Build my world of dreams around you, I’m so glad that I found you
I’ll be there with a love that’s strong
I’ll be your strength, I’ll keep holding on

Let me fill your heart with joy and laughter
Togetherness, well, that’s all I’m after
Whenever you need me, I’ll be there
I’ll be there to protect you, with an unselfish love that respects you
Just call my name and I’ll be there

I can’t think of anything more heartwarming than building your world of dreams around someone, of an unselfish love that respects that person! Jeez. No wonder the commercial chokes me up.

Now Michael Jackson has died, abruptly as far as the public is concerned. I am not a real Michael Jackson fan by any definition, although I do love the Jackson 5 and consider that his creative peak as far as music that appeals to me. (That said, at a dinner party last year, a friend’s fiance reenacted the entire “Thriller” dance in about sixteen square feet of apartment floor space while wearing a white wife beater and porkpie hat, and I loved the hell out of it.)

But really, what I will remember about Michael Jackson is that for whatever reason, what he saw and the world saw never lined up, and he destroyed his body and his life in pursuit of something no one else felt was rational. The man was clearly mentally ill and had personal problems that were never kept private enough nor made public enough to satisfy anyone’s curiosities, which made them last for decades. And since his choices didn’t make sense in any paradigm the public understood, this will prove to be his lasting legacy.

I haven’t been sleeping much, or well, for reasons unclear. The weather finally fell over into summer here so that could have something to do with it; I’ve started swimming again, but this week my work schedule is backwards and my body may just be screwed up. Either way, I don’t love this.

My new favorite late-night time killer is this Flash game on FreeArcade called Globs. (The site is loaded with ads and most of them have soundtracks, be forewarned.)

Also, I’m intrigued by TotalNetGuard, a Christian-themed ISP whose purpose is to block whatever scale of objectionable material you choose. Obviously I’m not religious and this isn’t a product marketed to me, but the internet is full of unavoidable inappropriate stuff. I like that people can make an informed decision to avoid what they don’t want coming into their homes.

Today’s Jim Mateja column (which unfortunately isn’t online yet) reviews some good-looking Bentley and then compares it to the classic Rolls Royce Phantom, the line’s most iconic vehicle with its equally iconic Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament.

One of the pieces of trivia Mateja reveals about the Phantom filled me with absurd joy at the expense of wealthy people: Apparently so many people steal the Spirit of Ecstasy that the newest model has a built-in security system to hide it inside the hood when it’s under threat of theft. How the hell this could possibly work? Well, I have no idea at all.

I love the YouTube video embedded in Organic’s post If Harry Potter Did Packaging Design. It is also appealing on a subliminal level to any child who ever loved the box better than the gift.

“Anonymous, Washington” asked Social Cues if he or she should feel guilty for taking the little shampoo bottles and other amenities from hotels. The answer made me laugh:

Do you have too much time on your hands or what?

Listen, I bathe in guilt and still manage to swipe those three tablespoons of shampoo and conditioner — in their cheaply-branded plastic bottles — without a pang of regret. It’s called marketing.

Last Labor Day I roadtripped out east and stayed in three different hotels, from which I still have tiny bottles of things that I am working my way through. They were much easier to transport than the quart of shampoo I’m lugging back and forth to the pool each morning.

Also, that quart of shampoo is taking longer than ever to use since I chopped ten inches off my hair. The transition from using handsful of cheap shampoo to a quarter-sized amount of the ‘spensive stuff is still a little discombobulating.

This morning at the pool, I complimented a fellow lap swimmer on his butterfly. Especially for a recreational swimmer, his form was excellent and very clean. Butterfly makes most people flail around and get nowhere fast.

“I can’t do butterfly,” I said. “I’ve got this rotator cuff thing that makes my shoulder kind of delicate.” (It’s true, I also can’t do pushups.)

“Oh, yeah, don’t hurt yourself,” the butterflier said. “You’ll screw up your major-league pitching career.”

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