USA. Summer. It is 95 degrees outside, and I am shivering inside a sandwich shop.
I have discovered how Americans forge strong souls.
Outside, the sun is trying to kill everyone. Inside this small restaurant, it is winter. My breath does not fog, but it is thinking about it. A man near me is eating a cold sandwich while wearing a jacket. In summer. Indoors.
In Japan we would simply turn it down. Americans do not turn it down. And now I understand them better than they understand themselves.
This cold is not an accident. This cold is a gift.
The owner has built, inside his shop, a second season. He invites you in from the brutal heat and hands you the one thing the sun has denied you all day: a reason to be cold. To endure it is to be tempered. You walk in soft and sweating. You walk out sharp and clear, a slightly stronger person than you were.
So I did not complain. I removed my outer layer and offered it to the woman at the next table, who was hugging herself. She said, "Oh, no, I'm fine, thank you." She was not fine. Her lips were blue. But she, too, understood the training. She would not break first. I respected her deeply.
The owner asked if everything was okay.
"It is perfect," I said, through my teeth, which were chattering. "Thank you for the winter."
He said, "...I can turn the AC down if you want?"
I told him no. A man does not ask the mountain to be shorter.
I stayed two hours. I ordered a hot coffee to survive. Then a second one, to hold. By the end I could no longer feel my hands, but my spirit had never been clearer.
So now, on the hottest days, I seek out the coldest rooms. I sit. I shiver. I sharpen.
And when I finally step back out into the summer heat, and it wraps around me like a warm bath, I feel it.
Reborn.
A man who has survived the winter, in August, indoors, for the price of a sandwich.
Crazy story out of Qatar:
A British couple honeymooned in Doha, where the wife was harassed at the Ritz-Carlton pool by two men who told her she'd "fall in love" after he slept with her.
The hotel gaslit her, with management denying the CCTV backed her story despite their own WhatsApp messages saying the opposite.
Her husband posted a TripAdvisor review calling the hotel "unsafe for women." The hotel got it pulled, then a hotel employee filed a defamation complaint against him under Qatar's cybercrime laws.
Nearly a year later, when he returned to Qatar for work, he was detained, informed he'd been tried in absentia and fined, and then held for four nights in a deportation centre. The deportation order lasts five years, which severely hurts his career as a Middle East healthcare consultant.
In other words, Marriott International, an American company, used Qatari law to silence a complaint about a woman being sexually harassed at their property.
Shoe company Allbirds just announced that it's planning to
- Sell all of its brands and footwear assets
- Rebrand the company to Newbird AI
- Use a $50M convertible financing facility to "acquire high-performance GPU assets"
@WiseGuyInc97 @flugenhof The proposed desal plant would dump the brine into the CC bay. This would impact the wildlife throughout the bay and potentially ruin the fishing, which impacts tourism, oyster ind. , the people’s main recreation. If the oil folk paid to pipe it offshore instead, would’ve passed.
@astupple@Simon7Holmes How is playacting not coercion? Would you embellish your enjoyment of doing laundry to convince your wife to do it? I'm not fully bought into TCS but this seems to violate the principles.
exaggerated dislike of tex mex was a popular affectation in the 2010s because many people thought it was some gringo appropriation of a more “authentic” cuisine, which is of course a mistaken and arguably sort of racist assumption but most regional food arguments are like this
I’m the CEO of a hot dog company. I’ve worked on hot dogs for 10 years. And *I* wasn’t prepared for what I’ve just seen. Your life is about to change.
So what can you do?
Buy as many hot dogs as you can. Buy stock in hot dog companies.
"Photo of an oversized grizzly bear dressed like a hipster wearing sunglasses during summer and getting a brain freeze from eating too much ice cream in front of a marina" #dalle2#dalle
"Photo of a confident oversized grizzly bear dressed in an abstract high fashion outfit wearing sunglasses on the fashion runway at Paris fashion week" #dalle2#dalle