I fell asleep watching the Willful War Show over the weekend, then woke up after midnight and saw this on-screen.

MS NOW (nee MSNBC) is so ashamed of the Iran bombing that they have swapped out the patriotic red / white / blue color palette and replaced it with yellow, universal color of cowardice.

That’s what I thought at first anyway. A few moments later I saw that the MS NOW logo flipped to a Sky News logo. Sky News, UK company. Does yellow have the same connotations overseas?

I suppose they might be suggesting “use caution” like a traffic light. “Whoa,” Sky News says. “We thought Trump was just running his mouth. Use caution.”

They pulled me in with “DTF” and lost me at “cyclone”.

An early scene has a news team broadcasting outdoors from a severe weather event. The news crawl says it’s a tornado. News teams don’t broadcast from a tornado. News teams hide under their desks in a tornado. The National Weather Service abandons their posts during a tornado. Some news teams might drive about in a tornado but they don’t get out of the KSTL StormTacker reinforced SUV behemoth.

Then they referred to the storm as a cyclone, which is the name for a tropical storm. Typhoon = hurricane = cyclone depending on the nearest ocean.

All I can guess is that HBO filmed it last year, and given that a swath of the downtown community hasn’t recovered from last year’s tornado, maybe they thought it would be in bad taste? So they thought they could doctor the audio and forgot about the news crawl?

I actually stuck with it until some unhappy child was throwing rocks at his stepfather’s house and I thought, we’re done here. I imagine it might have said a lot about what happens when you’re awkwardly thrust into an intimate relationship with a stranger (Down to Fuck, Down to Stepfamily, Down to Die in a Tornado/Cyclone), but I was not down for it.

I think we all know that gas energy will sometimes leak, and sometimes make a random house explode.

So we are cautioned to smell for gas, and because gas has no scent, they add a chemical that “smells like rotting eggs.”

Twice in the past month I have smelled a strange odor in my neighborhood. I wondered if it smelled like rotting eggs. I realized that I have never smelled any egg in any stage of rot in my life.

Well, guess what. I found you can order a scatch and sniff card from the gas company.

I anticipate that “smells like rotting eggs” is a polite way to say “smells like farts.”

In my heart the daffodils always come up the last day of February.

So this is the previous…

This is the progress …

And this is the goal.

I’m glad I noticed it needed a yellow glaze. I still need the petals in the bottom left, some details on the birds, and maybe a petal here or there and It’s actually done.

Friend Anne recommended a British show: Taskmaster. Anne is my symphony and opera-going friend, so I was surprised when the first episode involved vomiting. I was not interested after that point.

The premise is that a very tall snarky man invents tasks that the season’s panel of comedians must perform. Afterward they are judged, often unfairly. There is a shorter male assistant who is regularly insulted, who in reality is the brains behind the operation.

One of the tasks in the vomit episode (Season 1, episode 1) was to eat as much watermelon as possible (hence, vomiting). Anne assured me they worked out the kinks by season 14, which features the bawdy beloved Sarah Millican. Even the credits are better. Opening credits in early seasons have the taskmaster grimly typing the tasks, while in later seasons he types more maniacally. Plus, later seasons rely more on contestants’ divergent-thinking abilities. I enjoy that.

I went rogue and watched on my own what was said to be the “best” season, season 7. It seemed to me that one broke a bit out of the mold. Contestants rebelled against the Taskmaster. People seemed legitimately angry. One had to be whisked off stage and mildly scolded by a concerned Taskmaster.

So, IMDB says that’s one thing to watch out for: the quality of the show depends on that season’s contestants. Of the two I watched, I preferred Season 17 over 7.

Also, as a result, I refer to all tall men as “Taskmaster” now.

It sounds like the fear of sitting, doesn’t it? But no, sitophobia or cibophobia is the fear of the pains that eating might cause. Pains like nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and one might imagine, fear of an oozing red rash.

I don’t know if Gary has sitophobia. He discovered the term when he found himself cooking his sweet potato/chicken/squash/ apple juice concoction but then refusing to eat it until it had been refrigerated overnight. I thought, “Sure, the flavors have to meld, like a chili or stew.” But no, he was having irrational thoughts that a freshly made mixture might kill him if it didn’t get a chance to … settle.

Right now he has three tubs of it in the fridge, settling. He eats a tub every other day, and I think that’s a while to keep chicken in the fridge, but it is possible he will cook the chicken and add it separately.

He did pass Structural Organic Chemistry, so maybe his subconscious knows about some dangerous time-delayed chemical reaction.

It is concerning, though.