Hack Mule Notebook #7

September 13, 2026

Welcome to Hack Mule Notebook #7!

It’s been quite a week here at Hack Mule, as you will read. In addition to my adventures, this week I’ll be responding to several reader requests. I’m delighted to get questions and requests, so please keep them coming. And I always enjoy reading lots of comments at the bottom of the post—I’m eager to hear from you!

Review

Coyote vs. Acme gets a little too real

Several friends had told me how much they’d enjoyed seeing Coyote vs. Acme, the combined cartoon/live-action film where Wile E. Coyote sues Acme Corporation for selling him the hundreds of faulty contraptions that backfire and injure him as he chases the Road Runner.

I loved the Road Runner cartoons when I was a kid, so armed with a Coke and popcorn, I marched through the movie theatre, eager to take my seat and watch poor Wile E. seek justice after decades of being wronged.

But faster than you can drop an anvil off a cliff, my foot caught on the carpet, and I went sailing through the air. The Coke and the popcorn exploded from their containers, and everything—including me—landed with a thud. I literally heard my internal organs go “splat.”

I would not be surprised to learn that there is a Kristen-shaped dent in the theatre floor, just like the ones Wile E. made at the bottom of every canyon.

I tried to bounce back up from my now-flattened, two-dimensional form, but I don’t have the cartoon springiness I used to enjoy, so I just slumped there contemplating the carpet pattern until a very kind gentleman helped me to my feet.

Ever the Wile E. fan, I soldiered on, despite being badly shaken and in considerable pain. I walked into the theatre, found my seat, and watched the movie.

Well, I attempted to watch the movie. I mainly kept testing my aching arm to see if everything was still working. It was—basically—but as the adrenaline wore off and the swelling kicked in, the pain ramped up. And the movie got harder to watch.

As the credits rolled, I stood up and realized I was much more injured than I’d thought. A trip to the emergency room revealed that I have two fractures in my arm. I hope to learn what became of my shoulder and knee when I see the specialist next week.

So, I don’t have much of a movie review, despite a lot of drama and action. I’ll try again when it starts streaming.

One funny note: As I left the theatre, still reeling a little, I noticed the theatre’s logo reflected in the glass on the front door. For just a second, I could have sworn it said “Acme.”

I’m still suspicious.

Gripes

Eventually, the hospital discharged me—limping, whimpering, and with my arm immobilized—into the night. Along with my discharge papers, they also gave me a little bottle with four oxycodone pills for pain.

I thought this was a great idea—no driving around to find an all-night pharmacy—until I got home and tried to take one of the pills (as directed).

The bottle was shrink-wrapped in a hard plastic cover that would’ve been difficult to open with two functional hands. With just one it was absolutely impossible.

As I tried to figure out this riddle, I noticed that the pill bottle was unusual. To open it you needed to squeeze the bottle while pressing down on the cap and twisting—yet another action that’s impossible one-handed.

So in true Wile E. Coyote style, I grabbed a rubber mallet and slammed it, cracking open the plastic shell and shattering the bottle.

Out popped a shrink-wrapped blister pack containing the pills. I tried using a pair of scissors to get to them, but with just my left hand available and no way to anchor the blister pack, I didn’t have much luck. So I picked at it for about 45 minutes with an iFixIt kit.

By the time I liberated the pills, I definitely could’ve used a few more.

Sadists. Must be another Acme product.

Discoveries

This week I’ve learned exactly how right-handed I am. The verdict? Pathetically and completely right-handed.

Here are some of the things I’ve discovered are nearly impossible to do one-handed:

• Buttering bread. It sounds so simple: Take a knife, cut a piece of butter off the stick, apply the butter to the bread, and spread it around. Ha! Turns out it is a minefield of one-handed disaster. You need two hands for the butter — one to hold the butter and one to hold the knife. If you attempt to do this one-handed, as I did, you will send the butter, the bread, and the plate flying across the kitchen. So much for sandwiches.

• Eating. As an American, it is my constitutional right to hold my fork tines up in my right hand to shovel food into my face. I exercise this right so diligently that I can barely find my mouth with a fork in my left hand. Fortunately, the doctor says the puncture wounds on the side of my cheek should heal nicely.

• Wearing socks. They’re dead-simple technologies: basically fabric tubes with a hole on one end and toes on the other. But what I never realized is that you actually have to hold the hole open with two hands to get your foot into one. I’ve devoted an inordinate amount of time this week to watching YouTube videos about one-handed sock installation.

• Flossing. There are two kinds of people in the world: disgusting barbarians and people who floss. I’m in the latter group. But, as I learned this week, flossing is impossible one-handed. After two days of living like a toothless frontier woman, I called my dentist to find out what she recommends. She praised me for being a model patient (I’m pretty sure she used the words “my favorite”), expressed sympathy about my arm, and told me to get a Waterpik and fluoride rinse.

• Drying and styling my hair. Drying my hair is simple enough: Hold the hair dryer in my available hand and aim it at my head. But if I need to actually style my hair — say, curl it around a brush — forget it. So if you run into a woman who looks like she moonlights as a crash-test dummy at the Jet Propulsion Lab’s wind tunnel, stop and say hi, because it’s probably me.

• Dictating. Tech companies claim that speech recognition continues to improve and dictation is nearly flawless. Speaking on behalf of the temporarily disarmed, I have to disagree. Everything is coming out as, “The quick round hogs jumped overtly crazy logs.” Blame speech-to-text, not a previously undiscovered head injury.

Incidentally, if you were wondering why this week’s Hack Mule completely lacks punctuation, now you know. Let’s not call them typos. Let’s call them “immersive journalism.”

Listening

I found music in some odd places this week. You can enjoy the full Hack Mule playlist on Apple Music. Here’s what I heard:

• “Curious Subject,” Chaka Khan—popped up on my new music playlist while I was sitting at my desk. Thumbs up.

• “Roll to Me,” Del Amitri—hold music for Uber customer service

• “Jolloff on the Roll Off,” Sunbörn, Clap! Clap!—reading on the balcony

• “Break My Heart,” Dua Lipa—looking at refrigerators at Lowe’s, Gaithersburg

• “Jamaican (Bam Bam),” HUGEL, SOLTO (FR)—blasting out of a car on Bradley Blvd., Bethesda

• “Message of Love,” Pretenders—what I think the band was trying to play at the Leviathan end-of-summer party

• “1812 Overture”—song playing at the end of Coyote vs. Acme when I stood up and felt like my arm was going to fall off

• “I Had Some Help,” Post Malone—selection from the kid not using earbuds in the emergency room

• “Spanish Flea,” Herb Alpert—background music in radiology

• “Could Have Been Me,” The Struts—music YouTube randomly offered at 3 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep.

Milestones

Two readers reached out to make sure I covered this: Princess Astrid of Norway died this week at age 94, two days after the state funeral for her brother, King Harald V. (She even attended the funeral, which is nothing short of heroic at her age.)

Astrid lost her state salary and office when she married a divorced commoner over the Norwegian Church’s objections. Despite the demotion, she later acted as Norway’s first lady for the 15 years between her mother’s death and her brother’s marriage.

She also has a local tie—during World War II, her mother brought Astrid, Harald, and their sister Ragnhild to Bethesda to escape the war in Europe. They lived on the Pooks Hill estate, which straddles the property where the Marriott and The Promenade sit today.

A new apartment building opened on the property a few years ago called The Astrid. The community’s website doesn’t indicate whether it was named for the princess who once lived there, but it’s quite a coincidence if it isn’t.

Arrivals

Another reader request here: On Wednesday, Apple unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12, the iPhone 18 Pro and Max, and the iPhone Duo. Several of you are curious about whether I would recommend switching to any of these.

The short answer is: only if your existing iPhone or Apple Watch is more than three or four years old.

The new iPhones certainly look good, and they have faster chips, but the main changes are in their cameras, which now have adjustable apertures. That sounds enticing, but the truth is that unless you’re hiring Annie Leibovitz to photograph your three-year-old’s birthday party, you probably don’t need anything that sophisticated. (And besides, she’d bring her own equipment.)

And, frankly, you wouldn’t notice a difference in the casual shots you’re likely to take with an iPhone anyway.

The Apple Watch is a little more interesting because there are more actual hardware changes, particularly for health sensing. But some of the most intriguing features Apple demonstrated won’t arrive for months, so it’s too soon to tell how valuable they are.

The iPhone Duo is a big question mark, too. Although it’s compact as foldable phones go, it’s a brick—even heavier than last year’s very heavy iPhone 17 Pro.

Starting at $2,000 and going up to $3,200 fully tricked out with two terabytes of storage, it also costs more than most of Apple’s computers do. You could literally buy a MacBook Air, an iPad, and an Apple Watch for the price of the Duo.

It’s certainly a technological achievement—and some people do have a practical use case for it—but it’s not tempting me so far.

My best advice is hold for now, and let’s see what develops with all three.