Completist

Michael Crawford's WoS collection

Today I ate cheese and chocolate and the end of the bag of peanuts in the cupboard and watched the rain try to make up its damn mind. 

The thing that often happens on a day like that is that by the end you find you've accidentally drunk too many cups of coffee and become weirdly and perfectly unnecessarily informed about some uh, things. 

(1) The World of Springfield line of Simpsons toys. It had playsets where you could plug in the little yellow Simpsons figures in and they would say things. Because sure.

(2) There were eventually more than 200 figures in the line. 

(3) I couldn't find an exact number.

(4) Argh.  

(5) Because "two hundred and thirteen" is an interesting thing to say and "more than two hundred" is a boring one, which is one of those things about how people are way more wrapped up in having a precisely detailed view of the world than anyone ever expects.

(6) Could be just me. 

(7) I'm hoping the number isn't out there because there's rabid collector debate about whether one or other figure really counts as a different one. Maybe it's strictly indeterminate.

(8) That would make a good philosophical paper on the identity conditions of enumerable objects. 

(9) Action-figure toy-collecting scene rabbithole. Which dude, I mean, of course you sort of already have a pop-cultural grip on this not least because you've been watching Comic Book Guy do his schtick since 1991, but damn.

(10) There is a Spanish guy who is producing furniture depicted in Dalí paintings. There is a taxidermied sheep end-table with little bronze hoof-covers and a drawer in its stomach. 

(11) Yes.

(12)  There are twenty white lamb end-tables, and a single black lamb end-table.

(13) Because of course.

(14) Cocoa programmers talk a lot about cursor hover behaviour, but no-one else does.

(15) Suzanne Farrell was twenty years old when she was made a principal at the New York City Ballet. Balanchine got a divorce from LeClercq who'd been taken down by polio fourteen years earlier so that he could marry Farrell but she was Catholic and gave him the big KB.  

(16) Holy shit.

Fortunately, you never know. Sometimes people say to me, how do you know that? And I think, there was this day I was eating cheese and chocolate and watching the rain.