I was invited to someone's house which had a room with various Hindu deities. Among them, I spotted a little kite (it's at the bottom left of the photo below):
The kite had Pokémon characters, which I thought was a pleasing cultural reversal of Lakshmi Amidst Pindou.
Last month I wrote about habit stacking, which has helped me stick to a daily home-workout regimen.
Two years ago I tried maintaining a wall chart for daily exercise, which worked for a while but eventually failed. This was partly because I sometimes did my workout elsewhere, e.g. at work, while my chart was at home, and as the chart became a less accurate reflection of my habits, I began to backslide on updating the chart and eventually on the exercise itself.
I then tried a phone app called Loop Habit Tracker. I really like the app. It has a clean interface, all the features I need, and (almost) nothing more. But of late, habit stacking has been working well for me, to the point where I feel I don't need the app at all. Still, I like the app so much that I want to try and find some other use for it.
The Guardian has a reader-submitted series called The One Change that Worked. When it comes to daily workouts, habit stacking, for me, has been the one change that worked.
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Speaking of reader-submitted content, this is rather belated, but I was quoted in the Guardian liveblog for the Argentina vs Switzerland Football World Cup game. Screenshot below (the first post is for context; I omitted a few posts in between).
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Another 'change that worked' is an app called ScreenZen, which has helped cut down the time I spend on social media.
I only use one social media app – Instagram – but I was spending more time on it than I wanted to. Android phones have a native app called Digital Wellbeing, but it only allows you to set a daily limit. In practice, I found that I was often hitting my limit with several hours left in the day. This meant I had to either stay off Instagram for the rest of the day, or override the app which defeats its purpose.
ScreenZen allows you to set a per session limit (mine is 3 minutes). Each time I try to open Instagram, it shows me this screen, which makes me pause and consider if I really want to.
Then, after 3 minutes of use, the same screen pops up again, at which point I generally close the app and get on with my day.
While scrolling through social media, it's unfortunately all too easy to get absorbed and lose track of time. ScreenZen's reminder periodically snaps me out of that stupor and prevents me from binge-scrolling. Ever since I installed it, I have been staying comfortably within my Digital Wellbeing-imposed daily limit.
Earlier this year, a pair of spotted doves nested in a corner of our balcony. The location was precarious, and their nest was rickety. Still, they somehow managed to lay eggs, which even hatched.
Unfortunately, that was while I was away; otherwise I would have tried to somehow reinforce the nest. One day there was a storm, and both chicks fell out of the nest and died.
Now the doves have nested again, in a different corner of the balcony. The new nest was equally precarious, but one day while the doves were away, I put a piece of cardboard under the nest, and further reinforced it with rope and a metal clothes-hanger. I hope they have better luck this time.
Two years ago I wrote about mechanical keyboards which I use with my PC. But the OG mechanical keyboard is a typewriter, like my Japanese-made Royal 202 (previously featured here).
Wikipedia has several examples of English pangrams, as well as pangrams in other languages. Here are my four favourite pangrams and why I like them, in decreasing order of "perfectness":
Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz.
26 letters
My favourite perfect pangram. Wikipedia explains it thus:
cwm is a loan word from Welsh meaning an amphitheatre-like glaciated depression, vext is an uncommon way to spell vexed, and quiz is used in an archaic sense to mean a puzzling or eccentric person. Taken together, it means "Symbols in the bowl-like depression on the edge of a long steep sea inlet confused an eccentric person".
Although it uses obscure words and contrived grammar, I prefer it over other perfect pangrams which rely on abbreviations, contractions or proper nouns. And of course, it has the word cwm. One time I wrote a post about a cirque lake (as I called it), and Tommy commented, "I couldn't imagine posting a pic not just of a cwm, but of a cwm in Wales, and not using the word cwm in the accompanying text."
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!
29 letters
This is the shortest pangram I know of which, to me, still sounds sort of natural – like it could be worked into, say, a fantasy novel, without seeming obviously forced or out-of-place. And it scores high on eldritch quality (if that were a criterion), nicely captured by u/joabaldwin in this digital drawing.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
32 letters
Perhaps the most natural-sounding pangram on the Wikipedia list. At first glance it can even pass for a sentence that might occur in the wild, although if you stop to think about it, "five dozen" is an odd phrase. Unless the jugs come in packs of twelve, which is possible.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
35 letters
Longer than the other examples, but it's the first pangram I ever learned. It's popular for a reason – rolls nicely off the tongue, and scores high on whimsy.
My Chinese friend Muzi recently became interested in Hinduism. She says her favourite goddess is Lakshmi because she is "nonchalant" (Gen Z turns of phrase can be so amusing).
I gave Muzi a little terracotta figure of Lakshmi, and she put it on her dresser alongside various pindou characters. Pindou (拼豆) or Perler-bead craft is apparently trending among young people in China.
Coincidentally, while I was procrastinating over this post, my friend Beverley also posted an arrangement of a female figurine amidst (mostly) Chinese objects. I thought it pairs well with Lakshmi Amidst Pindou, so I asked Bev's permission to share it. A cute detail: the song playing on the iPod is Blink-182's All the Small Things.
