MR WRONG: News splash!
Indignity Vol. 6, No. 48
BEFORE WE BEGIN DEP'T.
Tom Scocca
The next chapter of Tom Scocca's serialized work of fiction appears Friday, which means now is a great time to get caught up on THE STAIRS!
COLUMN DEP’T.
MR WRONG: My Above-Ground Pool Has Me Floating on Summery Bliss
TODAY IS HAPPY news from the Mr Wrong column: I have opened my swimming pool! Yes! Begun, Summer has! In celebration of that, I will pass the Joy on to you, the Gentle Reader, because I figure, hey, for once, today, type a Mr. Wrong Column where I’m not complaining about a buncha crap, you know? A Special Edition of the Mr. Wrong column, if you will: Not complaining about stuff!
Yeah, baby, the MICRO POOL™ is open! All three thousand gallons, which means it’s slightly smaller than a big fish tank at a millionaire’s house, but when I’m in it up to my chin on a hot summer day, it’s an ocean of delight!
Yesterday I took the scuzzy cover off and went about the business of de-scuzzing the water that’s been sitting there minding its own business for almost a year, but also hooking up the tubes and stuff that the water goes through, outta the pool, past the weir, into the skimmer, down a tube into the pump, which puts 1 HP of accelerated water into the filter, exiting through another tube, and the now-filtered aqua-poola blasts outta the return jet eyeball back into the pool! I can recite that path in my sleep in the manner of the famous “This is my rifle” creed, because I have been plunged into the watery crucible of Aboveground Pool Ownership, and I have struggled and labored and lost sleep to learn The Way of Water! Glub!
Every year I vow to open the MICRO POOL™ before the actual-June-21 start of summer, and sometimes I’m lucky if I can get it operational by the Fourth of July. There’s all sorts of obstacles. The weather, for instance. Sometimes you can’t get a dry coupla days in a row to work outside, or else here in Baltimore, Maryland, there’s overwhelming heat—it can get around 90, a hundred degrees, which limits the time I can spend messing with all the screws and clamps and hoses before my brain gets cooked, or at least more cooked than at regular room temp. Plus sometimes I just am slothful, and I ain’t gonna lie, lying around on the sofa watching my stories and eating bonbons sometimes delays pool opening, but not this season!
I am not gonna bore you (further) with the details of getting the MICRO POOL™ up and running, but this year everything came together! Perfect weather, no critical equipment failures, and all the water stayed in the pool when I turned on the pump!
Yes!
Some years there’s an expensive thing that breaks, like the pump, oof, those things are not cheap. Or else a sorta inexpensive thing blows out, like a hose, which can suddenly decide to rupture, depleting the pool’s precious bodily fluid, damaging the goddamn pump I just spent eight hundred bucks on! The pump ran dry and overheated and it’s dead! Warranty voided!!! Aieee!!!
Any kinda hardware malfunction usually means a time-consuming trip to the pool store, but the only thing that failed and required a trip to the pool store this year was a confusingly-named accessory called the skimmer—not the thing I mentioned before, this kinda skimmer is the thing to scoop leaves and dead bugs outta the pristine and sparking waters of my urban oasis, and it is also important, because it won’t tear the delicate vinyl lining of the MICRO POOL™.
It takes very little to rip a hole in the liner! Then we’re back to losing the Active Ingredient of the pool! You don’t want to get anywhere near the inside of the pool with anything that has any sorta edge on it if you’re trying to get surface debris outta the pool, you’re gonna touch the liner and rip it, be careful!
OK, sorry, I didn’t mean to get all worked up about the liner. I have a bad memory of dropping a garden hose into the MICRO POOL™ a few years ago and I didn’t take the squirter-part off the end of the hose, and it hit the water, went down to the bottom and ripped a hole in the liner, which meant I had to do an underwater repair with special glue and it took me five tries to get the stupid patch to stick, but anyway, today is a wonderful day, and the MICRO POOL™ is full and in a day or two the chlorine level will be down low enough so that it won't melt anybody’s bathing suit, and it’s gonna be great, and since this is now the official beginning of Summer, please have a good one in this economy. Thank you.
Also: NO DIVING.
The MR. WRONG COLUMN is a general-interest column appearing weekly. No refunds. Write Wrong: wrongcolumn@gmail.com.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, May 30, 2026
★★★★ The chilly breeze came through the window and buffeted the face, unsettling but intimate in the last stretch of sleep. The listed high of 72 degrees had arrived at midnight and had long since been carried off on the north wind. A thick gray cloud brooded over the walk around the corner to get milk, bread, and tea, and a clean blue sky beamed down on the walk back minutes later. The leaves out the window went from dancing merrily to thrashing in abandon. Deep cloud shade kept chasing clear and overpowering sun. The light and the remains of a cold creeping into the sinuses combined to make the eyes stream. Even after the height of the winds had passed, a gaze up at a sharply lit cornice found a big cumulus cloud hurtling into view.
New York City to Purchase, New York, to New York City, May 31, 2026
★★★ The air had warmed and thickened and the light was scattered and glaring. The blue-gray gloom inside the parking garage was almost pleasant after the flood of light on the pavement at its mouth. Heat lamps were still blasting down on the space for waiting customers outside the rental car booth. Collected unneeded ice scrapers lay lined up on the top of a low wall and piled at the foot of it. The clouds hanging over the way out of town were gray with dull purple beneath. Off the highway, along the empty back roads, there were fieldstone fences and gates and lawns so expansive that the dwellings were out of sight. The gymnasium was as overcooled as the garage had been overheated; the jacket, brought along mainly to provide more pockets for a handkerchief and a phone cable, had to be put on and buttoned up. Afterward, the sky had spread out and beautified until by the approach to Manhattan the clouds were gray and white and positively painterly. Morningside Park out the car window was full of people sensibly cooking out and enjoying being where they were.
New York City, June 1, 2026
★★★★ The blue brought on a near-involuntary exclamation. Up in its vibrant and measureless depths a minuscule airplane moved past a tiny hawk, hanging all but motionless, its plumage patterned in miniature. Spines and brambles reared up and out from the dense pathside vegetation in the Park; leaves including poison ivy thrust through the fencing. The shade was slightly chillier than cool but a patch of sun lay not too far ahead. A copper-tinted saxophone gleamed through the leaves off in a clearing and then it started playing. Blankets were spread all around the hilltop lawn and at least five games with ball or frisbee were going on, as if the first day of the workweek had not just advanced to the 5 p.m. hour but had never replaced the weekend at all.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of a sandwich selected from Consolidated Library of Modern Cooking and Household Recipes, Vol. IV, by Christine Terhune Herrick, Editor-In-Chief, author of The Little Dinner, The Chafing-Dish Supper, etc., and associate author with Marion Harland of the National Cook Book, and a list of contributors which includes many of the famous chefs and cooking experts of the United States, published in 1905 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Harlequin Sandwiches
Use for each sandwich a layer of white and a layer of brown bread. Butter the bread, and spread with a mixture of chopped nuts and cream cheese, or a layer of tart apple sauce sprinkled with nutmeg or cinnamon, and moistened with whipped cream.
Tutti-Frutti Sandwiches
Butter thin slices of white bread cut in rounds. Fill with lemon jelly that has been filled very full of chopped nuts, dates, chopped figs, sliced bananas, and any other fruit at hand, and made very firm. Turn the jelly out of the mould and slice and place between the slices of bread.
After making, they must be kept in the refrigerator until ready to serve, or the jelly will become so soft as to soak into the bread. They do not, therefore, lend themselves readily to a picnic lunch, but are a novel accessory to the Sunday-evening lunch on a hot day, and the jelly may be prepared the day previous and left on the ice until a short time before the meal.
Nut-Butter Sandwiches
Take a half cup of good nut butter, add a half cupful of rich, sweet cream, and mix to a paste. Add salt if needed, and a dash of cayenne or paprika. Spread between thin slices of white bread or thin, crisp crackers. Press together.
If you are inspired to prepare a sandwich inspired by our continued offerings, be sure to send along a description of your experience and a photo or three to us here: indignity@indignity.net.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
