On the last Saturday Night Live, Michaela Watkins, playing blogger Angie Tempura from Bitchpleeze.com, was critiquing movies, including The Haunting in Connecticut. 

Tempura snears,

"what's scary about Connecticut, losing your tennis racket at Pottery Barn?" 

A fine and pressing question.  I have also left a racket at J. Crew, and I'm honestly not sure which was worse.  Pottery Barn.  No, J. Crew.  No, Pottery Barn.  Both were scary.  Let's put it that way.  

We are a tidy people.  Many of us carefully sort our recyclables into paper and plastic.  We can see the man who collects them.  He pours both blue boxes into the same bin on his truck.  But we continue sort anyhow.  Because, well, not to distinguish what is distinguishable, this, next to a tragedy at Pottery Barn, is the scariest thing that can happen in Connecticut. Think of us as America's Switzerland.

Which brings me to two innovations in our kitchen.  We have a new sink soap and a new refuse container. 

The sink soap is a complete disaster.  Total nightmare (in Connecticut).  The soup (Clorox Green Works Liquid Dish Soup) accumulates at the mouth of the dispenser and seals it shut.  You have to run the thing under hot water to melt away the sludge.  And then of course the soup runs too freely.  Everywhere.  And there is a disaster of the middle range.  Just enough soap will accumulate so that you think you have to squeeze really hard and you do, and then bang, it's soap everywhere again.  We don't like this sort of thing in Connecticut.  Disorder is frightening.  Chaotic dishsoap, that's just not for us. 

The refuse container is another matter.  We used to have an open container.  This was because Grant liked to see if he could drop wadded paper towels in from the three-point range.  He could, pretty much at will.  (Or 2 out of 5 times, whichever came first.)  But we know have two kittens (Vivian and Zsa Zsa) careening around the kitchen, and they liked to pull the container down just to see what's inside.  And eat it. 

So now we had to buy a container with a lid and we got a metal thing from simplehuman.  And it is superb.  Everything fits and works and closes and stays upright and stays closed.  Hallelujah.  We invited our neighbors over to gaze on our good fortune.  And a shout of great joy rose from the assembled multitude and it spread (in a very orderly way) across the land. 

Still, while I am acknowledging the special obsessions of my countrymen, I can't help noticing that the SNL's Angie Tempera character appears aimed at discrediting that shocktrooper of the new media, the teenage blogger.  I would have thought an old media operation like Saturday Night Live wouldn't stoop to character assassination.  Unless of course SNL is suffering anxieties of its own. 

References

For the brilliant performance by Watkins on SNL, see the clip on Hulu here.