Friday Links!
Leading off this week, an excellent read: ‘Secret Lowry’: the ex-gravedigger who painted northern life, from factory to fuggy pub.
From C. Lee, and boy, how things have changed: Can you read cursive? It's a superpower the National Archives is looking for. What a joke: Walgreens Regrets Replacing Fridge Doors With Smart Screens, Creating Techno-Dystopia Vibes. Incredible: MasterCard DNS Error Went Unnoticed for Years. This is horrifying: Girl strangled by her own wheelchair as bus monitor texted, checked Instagram. Is anyone even surprised? Revealed: US hazardous waste is sent to Mexico – where a ‘toxic cocktail’ of pollution emerges. That would explain it: Biofilms, unwashed hands: FDA found violations at McDonald’s ex-onion supplier. And it's going to get worse: Threats of SpaceX Rocket Debris Forcing Flight Delays Over Indian Ocean Routes. An incredible story: Japan’s elderly are lonely and struggling. Some women choose to go to jail instead. Now we know: The Invention that Accidentally Made McMansions.
From Wally, and my initial reaction is "ugh," but if it gets people reading, so much the better: Thousands of romantasy fans make midnight dates with new Rebecca Yarros novel. This is in an annoying format, but it's also extremely clever and fun to read: The Cube Rule of Food Identification. An excellent read: Restoring the Museum’s V-1 Missile. Tom the Dancing Bug is predictably amusing: Copyright Combat. I had one of these: An Imagined Conversation Between the People Who Designed Urban Apartment Balconies. He designed some absolutely fantastic games: Obituary: Alan Emrich, game designer and writer, has died.
From Meg McReynolds, and it's an interesting read: How Early ‘Law & Order’ Lets Us Relive New York’s Gritty Past — And Explains America’s Future. This is fascinating also counter-intuitive: The Comfort of Dogs. C and I watched this last night and it was fantastic! Ladies & Gentlemen... 50 Years of SNL Music | Official Preview. Most of these are stunning: The 2024 Dog Photography Awards Showcases Ace Pet Photographers.
Just a Normal Thursday
Eli 23.5 had a conversation today with Theresa May after attending a forum where they'd both been invited.
I refuse to be surprised anymore.
I Do That to People
I often play gin rummy with C around dinnertime.
My strategy could best be described as "nonsensical." I'll try to have a hand with only one color, or nothing above a certain card value. All straights. All three of a kinds. My favorite is picking up every card C discards, regardless of value.
In case you haven't picked up on it, C has a very dry wit.
We started playing earlier and after a few turns she said, "I don't know what kind of nefarious strategy you're using, but it already bothers me."
Astonishing
C is a medical Wikipedia and occasionally mentions an oddity that blows my mind.
This morning, she told me about the relationship between latitude and the incidence of multiple sclerosis. Wait, what?
That's right. The further you live from the equator, the more likely you are to develop multiple sclerosis.
This was originally discovered in 1923, and a
meta-analysis published in 2019 confirmed the risk:
This new meta-analysis confirms that MS prevalence is still strongly positively associated with increasing latitude and that the gradient is increasing, suggesting that potentially modifiable environmental factors, such as sun exposure, are still strongly associated with MS risk.
I don't know if anyone has ever focused on the cloudiest cities (Grand Rapids is one of the cloudiest cities in the country) to see if the incidence of MS is higher compared to other cities in the U.S., but it seems reasonable to try.
No one has proven what causes this relationship. The strongest theory involves Vitamin D levels. Here's a
study offering a possible explanation:
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), another illness for which latitude is a risk factor, appears to be related to the decrease in ambient light during the winter months, and offers some relevant insights into the geographical distribution of risk for developing MS. Researchers have found a relationship between degree of reported seasonal difficulties in a population sample and altered immunological function. Furthermore, the effects of bright light on mood have been shown to be regulated through the eye. We hypothesize that the risk of developing MS is related to impairment of the immune system caused by light deprivation prior to adulthood.
There's your bizarre but true medical fact for the day.
A Social Butterfly, of Sorts
I swam today and saw someone I talk to on a semi-regular basis in the locker room afterwards. He's a bit older than me, probably in his early seventies, and both he and his wife have had significant health issues in the last year. He may have to have surgery soon (and it's worse if he doesn't), and we chatted for a few minutes about how difficult it can be when you do everything you can to stay healthy and something hits you out of the blue.
I stopped at Jimmy John's on the way home for a soda pop. I do this whenever I swim as a treat to look forward to, and sometimes it's all I think about for the last 10-15 minutes. I usually get comped for my drink because the people there all know me and I always ask how they're doing. One woman moved in with her grandmother after her grandfather died. Her grandmother has early-stage dementia and it wasn't safe to live on her own.
On the way home I realized that, in my own weird way, I'm very social. It's the way an introvert would be social, because it consists of many five-minute interactions, but they're all genuine. I find out all kinds of things about people because I'm willing to listen.
I always thought I was a huge liability socially, due to my introversion, but I'm realizing that I just had to be social in my own way. It's not the way other people do it, but that's okay.
Friday Links!
From the frosty north, enjoy this selection.
Locally
The roads were hilariously bad this morning.
We've had about a foot of snow in the last four days, combined with sub-zero low temperatures for two of the nights. The result was a road of packed snow over the pavement, and yesterday and last night it started melting.
This produced slush that is comically deep in intersections, both because of the packed snow depth and how snow plows push the snow when they turn. You could just sit near an intersection and watch the carnage as every single vehicle did a power slide. It's forced, because the slush is so deep you can't stop or you'll get stuck.
Everything you do has so much more friction in winter, even walking. I tried to use running shoes as long as possible this year, but it had gotten to the point where I was slipping on the snow constantly. I dove into the rabbit hole of hiking shoes (that could also be used in winter as well) and found a pair of mid-top Hokas that have been discontinued but consistently ranked as the most comfortable. Plus the sole is Vibram and has fantastic traction.
When it's been snowing for four days, the little things are game changers for your mood.
Also, for Garret in Winnipeg, it must have been -20F those two nights, at least. As bad as it feels here, he has it much, much worse.
Memorial Coliseum, January 28, 1974
When C told me her story about the Monkees concert yesterday, I remembered that Mom 93.10 had done a similar thing for me in 1974.
In the leadup to the second Ali-Frazier fight, I pestered my mom about going to the closed circuit broadcast of the fight. The fight wasn't on regular TV, and it wasn't being shown in my town. Instead, it was being shown in Corpus Christi, the "big" town twenty minutes away, at Memorial Coliseum (capacity 3,000).
I'd been there before with Mom, to see the Harlem Globetrotters. It seemed huge to me.
To say that boxing wasn't Mom's thing was a huge understatement, and I didn't really expect to go. Plus, tickets were $10, which was not an insignificant sum in 1974. So I was stunned when Mom told me she'd talked to my seventh grade history teacher, Mr. Matula, and he'd agreed to take me.
Mr. Matula was a hardass, but he liked me. He was also a coach, and was the only coach who ever showed a genuine interest in me. He was also a boxing fan.
I had an enormous amount of respect for Mr. Matula, so talking to him casually on our way to Corpus Christi was both fantastic and bizarre. We were just two guys going to a fight, and he was as excited as I was.
What I remember first when we got into the Coliseum was the size of the screen. I expected a movie theatre-size screen, not understanding how impossible it was to bring one of those in. Instead, it was a screen that seemed so tiny comparison. We had good seats, so we could still see clearly, but people in the back couldn't have seen much, and there were easily over a thousand people there.
I also remember that there were hardly any other kids there. I'm not sure I saw a single one. It was just me and a bunch of grown-ups.
I wanted Ali to win, while Mr. Matula was rooting for Joe Frazier. It was a close fight, and I thought when it ended that Ali had lost, but he won a unanimous decision on the scorecards and I cheered my lungs out.
I didn't understand it at the time, but one of the ways people show love is in acts of service, and my mom did that repeatedly. It took me a long time to understand what it meant.
Albuquerque Civic Auditorium, May 9, 1969
I found out today that C's mom took her to see The Monkees in 1969.
C was in fourth grade at the time. It was the perfect age to see them.
I found this out because she kept the program. She just showed it to me.
It's amazing, and even better that she kept it all these years.
I found the set list online, believe it or not, which is how I found the date. I can't think of anything happier than listening to this setlist (which you can here, and it's
quite convenient:
The Monkees Setlist.
MLK Day 2025
I started making this post over a decade ago, and I'll be making it every year for as long as I do this.
I'd also like to mention that while we can all feel angry for what is happening in Washington today, history is long. Many bad moments seem long-lasting and inevitable, but they will all be overcome.
__________
Today is a national holiday in the United States to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
It's easy to forget the kind of hatred and stupidity that King was fighting against, but a good place to start is here: What was Jim Crow. The Wikipedia entry for Jim Crow laws also has detailed information. And the Wikipedia entry for King is here.
We're still fighting against that hatred and stupidity today.
Also, here's a link to a 2006
post when Eli asked me about Martin Luther King for the first time. It's still one of my favorite posts.
Ugh Design
I've had a PS5 for a while so I could eventually play Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024 (the best baseball series, by far) after I imported it.
Here's the annoying thing about the PS5: the design.
Sure, it's all swoopy and Sydney Opera House and whatnot, but you have to install two plastic pieces just to make the damn thing stay level when it's in the horizontal position. They look like an "A" and are utterly ridiculous.
Then there's the disc drive.
It's optional, and there's an incredibly easy way to do an external optical drive: use the USB port. Did Sony do it that way?
Nope.
To install this drive, you have to take the cover off the system (which requires a surprising amount of effort), put the drive in place (the process is not intuitive in the slightest) and ensure the interface slot is connected properly, then put the cover back on.
Does that sound easy? It's not, really.
Finally, though, the drive is installed, including two DIFFERENT sized plastic clips to keep the system balanced. You turn on the PS5--and nothing. It doesn't recognize the drive.
Now, if this was done with a USB connection, no problem. You just unplug the drive from the USB port and try it again.
What Sony did, though, requires you to remove the "A" pieces, remove the system cover (again), and pop out the disc drive. Then you put it back in, reinstall everything, and reboot the console.
In other words, something that should take 30 seconds to check takes 10-15 minutes, at a minimum, because of all the unnecessary labor.
Terrible design. Truly awful. And it doesn't work, which took me an hour to find out instead of 10 minutes.
Strange But True
1. Eli 23.5 flew from Bogota to Houston to London yesterday. The customs official in Houston was a typical old Southern guy. "Where are you coming from he asked?"
"Bogota," Eli said.
"Where are you flying to?"
"London."
The customs official looked up. "Son, where do you live?"
Eli laughed and said, "Good question."
2. He woke me up at 6 this morning and asked me to send him $50. "Dad, my bank account here is frozen because I went to Bogota, bought food in the Houston airport yesterday, and I'm going to Switzerland tomorrow. They must think I'm a smuggler," he said, laughing.
3. C knew two people who were killed by hippos. In separate incidents.
On Writing
Everyone writes a first draft with varying levels of skill.
Mine are ass, generally. A skeleton story told all the way through, but with little supporting detail. I've mentioned this before, but I write in a similar way to musicians who lay down sound in layers, adjusting the level of each instrument as they go.
I always thought that other writers did much of this automatically, without so much conscious intent, but now I'm doubting that. All the symbolism and interlocking themes of your favorite author? It's methodically put into the manuscript. It doesn't happen in the first draft, or the second. It takes a long time.
I once casually dated a writer/audiobook recorder/D-list personality. She was a fine writer, and almost a great one. She claimed to write her novels in one draft, which was inconceivable to me. I could see cracks in her work, though, where another few drafts would have made her text airtight, so maybe she was telling the truth.
For most writers, though, interlocking a story with the accompanying symbols is a painstaking, lengthy process.
I'm going through this in the second section of the book now. I see connections and also where it's lacking connections. Anything that doesn't get used more than once gets thrown away, and I'm sewing together everything that's left.
Charitable Colonialism
I was walking through downtown Grand Rapids last week.
It wants so desperately to be a cool city. It has places in it that are cool, but overall, it's always felt like more of a 2D facsimile of a cool city than a real one.
As I was walking, I think I finally figured it out.
Western Michigan is quite conservative, and the course of Grand Rapids, in this era, has largely been determined by two families: DeVos and Van Andel. These families have spent tens of millions on charitable projects, but also are so far right politically there's no room beyond them.
Van Andel and Devos founded Amway, the pyramid scheme-adjacent business that made them billions. The DeVos family is also (through marriage) connected with Blackwater, in case you need any black ops run for you (I'm joking, but barely).
Because of the money they've contributed, they have a disproportionate effect on the city's future. In effect, it's colonialism through charity.
They also own an enormous share of the city's business.
The truly creative, hip cities are almost always progressive. It's an environment that allows creativity to emerge. This city, though, is tightly controlled, and "hipness" is a top-down imitation instead of bubbling up from a multitude of sources.
In other words, not cool.
Investment
I'm watching the College Football Playoff semifinal and I just realized why the twelve-team format is so much more fun.
I watch a ton of college football (ask C). What I don't usually do, though, is watch full games. I've seen all twelve teams in the playoff during the regular season, but only watched a full game for a few. For the rest, I'm only vaguely familiar.
By the time the semifinals of the playoffs roll around, though, I've seen all these teams for at least one full game because I saw them in the previous rounds. That's different from other years, when I'd come in cold on some teams in the semifinal.
Because I've seen everyone already, I'm more invested. I have more likes and dislikes. I have theories about what will happen, and reasons why I want it to go one way or the other.
In other words, I'm invested, and anything is more fun when you're invested. Well, unless it's one of your kids playing sports, when that investment can become a mild form of torture.
Otherwise, though, it's great. And it's great here.
Wildfires
I hope that any of you affected by the California wildfires are safe and have minimal property damage. It's tragic that one of the most beautiful places on earth is destroyed annually by these horrific fires.
I'd like to say something heartwarming, or clever, but the harsh reality is far beyond my ability to make it better.
Surviving the Doubt
Eli 23.5 and I had a long conversation about learning and creativity.
To paraphrase, he said that learning how to interview people effectively was hard. Especially when you're interviewing people about a deeply traumatic time in their past.
He's doing groundbreaking research in Columbia. At least, it seems that way to me. He's getting unbelievable, intimate information from the interviews he's conducting, and he said it was because he was willing to get into a situation where he wasn't exactly sure what he was doing and survive the doubt until he figured it out.
Surviving the doubt is such a great description of what gets in the way of learning anything. There's always a point where the degree of difficulty looks like a high wall, and you can't ever imagine scaling it, and that's when you have to put your head down and keep working. You can fail, too, because failure is part of the process of learning when you understand how learning works. If it's not difficult, and there's no chance of failing, you're not pushing yourself hard enough.
I could bemoan not understanding this when I was younger, and I have (in this very space), but I'm glad I understand now. More importantly, I'm glad he does, too.
He taught me, really.
Good News
My cardiologist said today that based on my various recent test results and scans, my arteriosclerosis appears to be reversing.
It turns out lowering your LDL to <60 and total cholesterol to <120 in conjunction with 10mg a day of Lipitor is a powerful combination.
I don't enjoy eating nearly as much anymore, since so many things are excluded (basically zero dairy and zero red meat except bison and forget cookies and pastries, etc.), but I can't complain about the results. It's a significant change from two years ago.
2024 Top Five PC Games (and a bonus)
As a follow-up to yesterday's post, here are my top five games of the year. I've written about each of them during the year, so this is just a simple list.
5. Wartales
4. UFO 50
3. Football Coach: College Dynasty
2. Hero Emblems II
1. Our Adventurer Guild
All five of these games are phenomenal and would have been a top five selection in any year. Oh, and a note on #1 and #2: if you have a pen tablet, you can use it for both of these games. Instead of many, many mouse clicks, it's just easy tapping. I use a pen tablet whenever I can now, as it puts exponentially less stress on your hand.
Bonus Console Pick: EA Sports College Football 25.
It took four major patches, and it has all the limitations inherent in an EA Sports game, but it's still great fun to play.
Happy New Year
The first thing I heard when I walked into my gym today was, "You are officially banned from this location."
That's quite a way to start the year.
They weren't talking to me, but a strangely tan, lanky guy wearing shorts when it was 30F outside. Following a long discussion with the employee, he left, and I wondered how much of a tool you had to be to get banned from a gym.
I mean, it's not hard. You go in, work out, and leave. You're polite. You don't bother other people. It doesn't seem like an Ironman difficulty situation.
I finished working out and didn't get officially banned. Achievement activated.
