If this is Wednesday it must be Nostrum

Four episodes are now in the can. (No, not that can, you tattie howker!) The new episodes are still mostly backstory. We’ve learned how the COC was created, and we’ve met Dearth Hannah, today’s director, who is also the SUCKy coach. We’ve met Jazz and Haley, who are in it to win it. Now we’re digging into the whole Free Willy phenomenon. Who is John Galt Willy Lubjut? What did he do that was so wrong? It will be a couple of episodes before we get to the Brotherly Love School for Highly Intelligent Teenagers, but for now, at least, you can contemplate the acronym. All of this, of course, is over at Nostrum Nation.

Meanwhile, this is a real poser: Yesterday morning I looked down and saw that my left shoe was coming apart. All I could do was hope to make it through the day without the whole thing falling to pieces. Thanks to a merciful God, I survived. But when I got home I noticed that somehow during the day my right shoe had started coming apart in the exact same way. How does one shoe know that the other has died? And more to the point, how does one shoe decide to commit sympathetic suicide at the loss of its partner? Until now I have always thought of my shoes as mute, unthinking companions on the sidewalk of life. And now it turns out that, apparently, they are not merely self-conscious but conscious at the very least of one another. Who knows the full reach of their grasp?

I will never look at my shoes the same way again.

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