Today when I ordered an iced tea at Dunkin the person taking my order said, "Iced tea? You want iced tea and not iced coffee?" In a tone of disbelief. Because I don't drink coffee, it always startles me to realize how unusual tea apparently is as a drink of choice.
Beautiful day for an art law conference!
And this turned into a good teachable moment about contracts: What's obvious to you about a contract's wording might not be obvious to the person across the table from you, *and it might be SO obvious to you that it doesn't even occur to you to clarify.* We had a good discussion about that.
Smartphones worry me because I think we're addicted (can't believe how often I pick mine up for no reason; how often I'm talking to someone and I look over and they're not even paying attention but scrolling their phone; how often I watch drivers driving while watching their phones) -- BUT
undeniably useful feature is being able to zoom in on all the tiny print (which has gotten more as I've gotten older!). I just used my phone to read what I thought were instructions on the dryer bit of my fuse box (turned out to just be the manufacturer's name, so useless in fixing the dryer)
Weathervanes as art at the MFA. Useful article doctrine in action
I am researching artificial scarcity as it relates to barriers around accessing information and my whole paper should just be screenshots of the various screens denying me access to scholarship on this topic. (And I am conducting research through a research institution with database subscriptions!)
But I was shocked how the vast majority of my students didn't even realize that "black" tea and "green" tea were things! I'm so steeped in tea (see what I did there?) that I assumed a level of baseline knowledge that they definitely mostly didn't have.
Today I failed a captcha so I guess that proves I'm a robot
It makes me think of how I crafted a hypo for my Contracts class's unit on mistake that asks whether green tea is different in substance from black tea. My opinion as a tea drinker is VERY MUCH YES. I get annoyed when that substitution gets made without asking me first.