Welcome! We simply must talk about the dog dishwasher.

Pop Fly | Vol. 1 Iss. 1

Welcome to Pop Fly, a newsletter about arts, culture, and finding a little joy. I’m not talking big, meeting the love of your life joy. I mean more like taking a walk to get a drink of water. Or getting really good at Snake. Or reading off-the-wall real estate trends pieces in the New York Times.

And I’m not going to make you read a whole newsletter about Snake.

Here is my ode to the New York Times Style section, and to my favorite wildly out of touch pieces.

Exhibit A - The Plunge Pool

Let’s start off fairly tame, with something I can at least imagine existing. My grandparents have a pool. Is it a luxury? Yes. Is it accessible to upper middle class people in warm areas of the country? Sure.

So for the plunge pool, the theory goes: why have a regular size pool when you can have a tiny pool that’s too small for swimming. What if you just want to dunk yourself in water that’s been sitting outside where birds can poop in it? Not for exercise so much as the aesthetic.

The subhead on the article calls plunge pools a less expensive option, and sure, it is less expensive than a regular-sized pool, but the price tag they list starts around $40,000, which seems like a lot of money when you could just take a bath.

Exhibit B - The Back Kitchen

I’m ordering these by increasing absurdity. Honestly this one’s a pretty big jump from the plunge pool. The article posits that rich people, so enchanted with the look of their perfect HGTV kitchens, don’t want to get them dirty by actually cooking in them. So they’re building ENTIRELY SEPARATE KITCHENS FOR COOKING. One of the examples in the article is people hosting a middle school musical cast party (just go to Friendly’s like the rest of us?), and all the actual cooking and washing happens in the other kitchen, so there are no dirty plates in the photos of the MIDDLE SCHOOL MUSICAL CAST PARTY.

Here’s the thing. I went to middle school musical cast parties. And high school ones. And community theater and college and all the rest. People do not look good. They only managed to get half their stage makeup off. Their hair was in bad pin curls for the last four hours. They’ve got mic tape gunk on their neck. Maybe, for instance, their ex-boyfriend is texting them saying he’s going to burn their love letters in somebody’s backyard… The absence of dirty plates is not going to improve those pictures. Just let it go.

This article is less willing to nail down the price of plateless cast party photos, in part because it depends if you’re building the house from scratch or renovating, and whether you count just the back kitchen or both kitchens. But we’re definitely talking tens of thousands of dollars at least.

I keep saying back kitchen, but the article also uses the word “scullery” at least once. And it’s really just a matter of time before we get a NYT trends piece about people getting servants.

Exhibit C - The Dog Dishwasher

Let’s take a minute for the hero of all this, Lia Picard, who wrote about both dog dishwashers and plunge pools. She’s a freelancer for the Times, and I have so many questions for her. How do you find these trends? Did you ever get to see the dog dishwasher? What is it like to write things that improve my day this much?

Here’s the thing. Being a freelancer is hard. The default answer to your pitches is no, and you’re constantly working to overcome that. So Lia Picard, hero that she is, has to call some NYT editor on the phone and be like “okay so people are getting a smaller pool because they’re too fancy for a big pool,” and then the editor asked questions like “but how small” and “why would you do that you can’t swim in it,” and eventually, through perseverance and sheer force of will, the story is in the New York Times. Also, it seems very unlikely that as a freelance writer Lia’s making enough money to run in back kitchen kind of social circles, which means she’s doing the honest work of finding crazy rich people and their weird real estate trends through good old-fashioned shoe leather reporting. What a legend.

Anyway, the dog dishwasher.

I grew up with a pound puppy called Ivan, who looked great in hats and could open any tupperware container left in his reach. (RIP buddy.)

He zooms.

Ivan lived a good life. He had all the hats he could want (zero, please). He had time to run around outside. He had a loving family. He had half a pan of oatmeal bars when we forgot them on the stove once. He did not, however, have his own dishwasher. Or a refrigerator. Or a crate built into the wall of the master bedroom. (Joke’s on you, he could definitely escape that crate.)

One woman in this story says she got built-in house features for her dogs because she was pregnant with a human child and felt guilty about her “first babies,” aka, the dogs.

There’s one couple who had a contractor build a “pet playhouse” IN THE PETS’ BEDROOM. The bedroom alone was not enough. Now, of course, there are five pets in that house, and they all have to share a bedroom like peasants, but still. They couldn’t go without a playhouse with a built in catio that faces the window. Don’t be ridiculous. (The playhouse cost $14,000, by the way. Possibly more than my car was worth new?)

This one feels like a classic case of people with too much money. I think it goes to your head, eventually. You’ve been too rich for too long and you think “what if we had a dog shower with a door from the outside so then the dog won’t track mud into the front kitchen or the plunge pool,” and you’re surrounded by people who are like, “let me give you the number of the guy who did our dog dishwasher last year” instead of “what are you talking about.”

Up top, I called these pieces out of touch. To be clear, I don’t think Lia Picard is out of touch. The people in the stories might be, but hey, I don’t know them.

And I don’t want the pieces to stop, either. I’ve limited myself here to house design pieces, but there’s a wide world of kid’s birthday parties and railroad houses out there. (I’d forgotten the details of the railroad house. It’s not a house, it’s an office. And it cost $375,000.) I get a lot of joy from these glimpses into how the other way-way-less-than-half lives. Is there a small feeling of superiority about not spending my money on a tiny pool? Maybe. Are there people who would look at my city apartment and my nearly daily coffee shop visits with the same attitude? Yes, as is their right.

I do think the New York Times Style Section, even more than other publications, tends towards a bit of the ridiculous and a bit of “how much can a banana cost” bias. But that’s what makes it so enjoyable. Lia Picard and all the rest are exercising a legitimate skill: looking for moments of levity among all the darkness. And looking at the dog shower with a straight face. 

Reporting on bad news is hard too, but bad news is plentiful. It gets clicks. It’s right there, in your face, day after day. So I appreciate these writers’ efforts to go out and find something that will make people laugh. Here’s to them.

(By the way, if anyone has any tips for making my normal people dishwasher actually get the dishes clean instead of leaving weird dots of food that didn’t used to be there on all the mugs and then we have to wash them again, feel free to let me know.)

Stuff I Would Have Put on Facebook in the Old Days

Work

In my regular life, I write and edit for Just Security. If you want to read a little bit of that, check out this great piece from Ciara Torres-Spelliscy on the possibility of wire fraud charges against Trump or his allies.

https://www.justsecurity.org/87782/how-jack-smith-may-charge-trump-pac-with-fraudulent-fundraising-within-the-bounds-of-first-amendment/

Watch

I also watch too much TV. This week my series of choice is Lovesick on Netflix. If you like unrequited love and British accents, it has both in spades. (Plus chlamydia!)

Whatever

We’re now just a little over two weeks out from opening night of Into the Woods, which I’m assistant directing for The Arlington Players. If you’re in the DC area, come out and see a wonderful show! (For better or worse, I don’t think our Milky White is going to end up on this excellent blog.)