The ticker-tape parade ran out of ticker-tape before the Grand Marshall arrived at the judging table

Underground hooves meet above-ground paws

Rock musician Joe Strummer (of The Clash fame) was born in 1952 and originally named John Graham Mellor. He changed his name to “Joe Strummer” in his 20s “as a joking reference to his self-taught guitar style”, according to the internet.

I bet this was a really weird time for his friends. At first they’d be like “yeah man good joke” … “We get it!” … “because you play the guitar!” … “you’re a strummer, we get it, you strum” and so on. But then reality would settle in and they’d see that while it was indeed a joking sort of nickname, the guy had actually changed his name legally to Joe Strummer and he was going to keep this name both as a stage name but also for correspondence on legal documents.

Maybe after they sat on it for a week or two they’d start to come around and be like you know what despite my initial skepticism and reaction to this joke of a name, I’ve come around and this is actually a bad-ass name, and this guy is going to spend decades just straight up strumming things, so this is a great name. But that would probably be short lived. A couple days later you’d be like geez what the hell is this guy doing this is the dumbest name.

And so it would go for decades as he rose in prominence and fame. You’d start second guessing yourself. Maybe you could have stopped this dumb name when it was still in its infancy? But then — what if you had?! Maybe part of his success came from the confidence he got having this dumb new name. I’m not sure where you’d ultimately come down on an issue like that. You’d probably eventually just have to shake your head and breathe a deep sigh and sort of move on.

I’d like to see people in other lines of work start doing stuff like this. If your name is John and you work on a concrete sidewalk pouring crew but you don’t do the truck part or the mixing part or the pouring part — you’re just the guy who uses the broom at the end to give the sidewalk that nice textured look — maybe you could start calling yourself “Joe Sweeper” or something. The other guys on your crew would be like yeah I guess that’s technically what he does but it’s just a part of the larger thing we’re all pulling off here together, right?

The lines for the recital were easy to remember and hard to forget

I may have said this here before, but one thing I’ve realized living in the suburbs the last few years is how horrible a mistake it was to have created the suburbs. The trees were totally fine here! We didn’t have to screw it up with all these houses. There are people just constantly mowing their lawns and blowing leaves around. I get why they do it, but it feels so ultimately futile.

Your lawn is going to eventually defeat you. It is not a winnable battle. The leaves will keep piling up. A tree will like SORT OF fall down and then you’ll have to deal with that.

Anyway I think a cool business idea would be to start an UNLIKELY LANDSCAPING business. People would hire you to take care of their yards but you’d use exclusively unproven and esoteric methods to attempt to maintain things.

Maybe one week you bring some meditation gurus with you and they just sit on the customer’s lawn and try to will the blades of grass into cutting themselves. Another week instead of bringing a lawn mower you bring like a spork instead and see how far you can get with that as your only tool. In week three you do bring a full retinue of lawn care tools, but instead of using them on the yard of your actual customer, you go to their neighbor’s house instead and really just manicure the hell out of it, hoping to “lead by example” and get the other house to follow suit. The possibilities are endless here.