Today's Three Weirdnesses

The Mrs. was at her internship today, so I went into Back Bay this afternoon to do a few things. The Orange Line was fairly empty, but I was joined in the car at the next stop by a group of three young people, one of whom was showing off his Pandora mobile app, which meant I was once again subjected to someone else's terrible music through a tiny, tinny speaker. In this instance, the night before I had just watched the season two episode of The League called "Ghost Monkey" in which two characters criticize the cheesy dance music a third is listening to in his car via Pandora, and the music this guy was playing was hilariously similar. Thankfully, there are still areas in the T tunnels where cell phones still don't work, so eventually the music died, to my great relief.

On my way home later in the afternoon, I got on the Green Line and immediately noticed an unpleasant, vaguely vomitish smell. Not even New Year's Eve yet, and the T already smelled like puke. Way to get the jump on the new year, T.

And later on, we stopped at a liquor store to look for something bubbly to take to our friends' house tomorrow night. This is a place we've never been, but it happens to be on the way to the restaurant where we'd decided to eat. As soon as we walked in, we both noticed that the whole store smelled like a gigantic ashtray. 20 or so years ago that might not have been so unusual, but workplace smoking has been banned for a long time; someone has obviously been ignoring this rule in this particular store for a long time. We quickly turned and left, and happened to pass another store on the way where we got what we needed.