Behind the Cherry Pie & Chai

In "The Life Cycle of Moroccan Lefftovers", in addition to offering a glimpse of authentic Moroccan home cooking and a tutorial in my leftover reheating philosophy, I offered a whimsical tour of my kitchen clutter. I will now do likewise for my TV room coffee table clutter in the background of yesterday's photo of Cherry Pie & Chai.

• 1: "The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray". I watched these movies once in DVD, but now I have a much better TV, plus, many people don't know that the first film was shot on a tight budget and really doesn't look that great, but Peter Jackson did a lot of clean-up work for this release. This set has none of the extra scenes or special features, just the movies, so it's cheap (especially used...I always buy movies/cds/books used).
• 2: "The Middle East Crisis Factory" by Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash. Back in February, El-Baghdadi invited questions on Twitter. I asked, he answered, and this is the book he referenced. I haven't read it yet.
• 3: "Dwarf Caiman Crocodiles as Pets", which looked great on Amazon but I should have read the reviews, which point out that the "author" just compiled stuff she found online. I was horrified to discover this when the book arrived, but then I thought about it: she freely disclosed her method and credited the online material, and I can't deny that there's value in a "researcher" gathering such data and organizing it into a softcover book. So I didn't return it. She deserves to make a living.
• 4: AppleTV remote
• 5: Theratears. Nobody raves about anything anymore, because 1. we're bored, jaded aristocrats (many of us monotonal from antidepressants, to boot), and 2. nobody wants to seem unhinged. That's why you've never heard of Theratears, even though a great many people suffer from dry eye (often without realizing it), and a slim minority have discovered that these eyedrops offer deeper comfort, relief, and consolation than the freshest black tar heroin.
• 6: White Athletic Sports Tape, leftover from my year-long food injury recovery.
• 7: Perry Ellis Men's Park Avenue Trifold Wallet
• 8: Honduran tourist souvenir mug (I've never been to Honduras)
• 9: Brutalist Calendar 2020 from Blue Crow Media which I wrote about here
• 10: Pill case. I have a lot of prescriptions. It's popular to feel deeply uneasy about such a scenario, but I get no side effects and they keep me alive. So I eschew the impulse to feel old and frail when I take them, and have flipped my perspective into delight at my good fortune to possess life-giving magic pellets, which I gobble eagerly.
• 11: Printout of a Financial Times article, "Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘I never thought ideas were about signalling allegiance'"
• 12: Trader Joe's Dried Pitted Tart Montmorency Cherries
• 13: Iconic Trader Joe's Organic Gingermints
• 14: Nuraphone headphones (which learn your hearing deficit and compensate).

For those keeping score, that's:

• 35% Media
• 26% Old Dude Health Stuff
• 14% Food
• 7% Art
• 7% Banal Crap
• 7% Oddly Random

....which is a precise encapsulation of me.