Head Rattle

I.Mapquest GPS lady on my iPhone, your directions are appreciated but occasionally puzzling. Do you know a shortcut? Should I trust you?

II.Is it cooler upstairs or downstairs? Restaurant workers don't want to answer this question on a hot day. They are not thermometers.

III.When everything about the decor of a doctor's waiting room has a blandly neutral, quasi-"Japanese"/Zen vibe, and they have a gurgling white-noise generator going while you're sitting there reading an old copy of The New Yorker, you have to wonder what this particular interior decorating strategy signifies. Is it a palliative to the inevitably distressing issues discussed behind all those closed doors?

IV.They don't make French doors like they used to. Now they have grill inserts to indicate the idea of panes, rather than separate panes. This is another example of how more and more things are "meta" these days: an abstraction to indicate the idea of something, rather than the thing itself.

V.The "secret" of Gertrude Stein's peculiar writing style The New Yorker says is that she rarely used commas and that makes her prose sound both deceptively simple and profound in case you were wondering.