Hello!
You know, now that I’m off any kind of social media (as much as you can be, these days, because sometimes Facebook is the only game in town. That, or becoming a complete shut-in. (Although the latter option is looking increasingly likely, regardless of your personal tolerance for social interaction.)), I’m finding myself developing weird phone habits. When you’re out of free chess puzzles and not in the mood for Instapaper articles, what else is there to do with this thing?
Well, apparently, you can open the Wikipedia app and scroll through the On This Day section. Which is how I discovered the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition, in which a Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl and his 7 companions sailed an un-steerable raft for 101 days from South America to Polynesia. “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea”, wrote Samuel Johnson, and having been neither I am of course immediately jealous of them.
That is, until I get to the Anthropology section of the article and find out the “why” of the expedition — to prove Heyerdahl’s pseudoscientific theory that “the original inhabitants of Easter Island (and the rest of Polynesia) were the ‘Tiki people’, a race of ‘white bearded men’ who supposedly originally sailed from Peru”, and who were “a sun-worshiping fair-skinned people with blue eyes, fair or red hair, tall statures, and beards”. The wheel spins and lands on racism. The wheel is three quarters racism.
I mean — literally. Can you picture a year in your mind? Do you have a visual “map” of it? What do the seasons look like, and what color are they? Where is the New Year on your “map”?
I know what mine looks like. I know, because when I was five and in kindergarten they were teaching us seasons, and to help the process along there was a Visual Aid.
Imagine a clock with only the hour markings, no digits, and only the minute hand. Got it? It should look like a circle with twelve little notches around the circumference all pointing toward the center. The minute hand is wide, with an arrow tip, and painted bright red.
At the top, where the midnight/noon used to be, is the New Year. The top notch would mark the start of January, except there is no text anywhere on our “clock”. But there are colors. Winter is bluish white, and everything is covered in snow. You can see the heavy paws of pine trees bending under the weight. The image takes up the Winter’s region, and so it’s off-center — a third of it is to the left of “midnight”, for December, and two thirds to the right.
Spring is green, of course, and the first flowers are breaking through the melting snow, around the running streams. It’s taking up the whole right side of the “clock”. After it, at the bottom, is the yellow Summer, sunny and hot, followed finally on the left by the deep orange Fall, full of fallen leaves and chilly wind.
I am now in my third decade of imagining a year like a multi-colored clock. I’m fairly certain my brain is now incapable of imagining it any other way, and honestly, the other ways all feel “wrong”.
The arrow is now at the beginning of August, we’re almost through two thirds of the year. I always imagine it like a pendulum swinging down, reaching maximum speed at the bottom — which is why summers always feel so short.
Without You, There Is No Us: A Korean-American journalist — under the guise of an English teacher — joins the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a Christian-funded college in the North Korean capital. The university is in its first year of operation, and so there are cracks in the “wall” separating the western teachers from North Korea proper. The author has incredible access and the perfect background to tell this story, but all of it is unfortunately, heartbreakingly wasted. Suki Kim is unable to dig beyond the surface of what’s presented to her, or to analyze her own assumptions and preconceived notions as an American and a citizen of a democracy. Still, if you’re fascinated by North Korea like I am, it’s worth suffering through the other parts.
The Anthropocene Reviewed: I’ve been a fan of the podcast since day one, listened to the entire backlog probably twice over, and even got the mug. So I’m not exactly impartial here, but I will still tell you that either the podcast or the book (which share about 90% of the content, just in different forms) will be some of the most inspiring, funny, introspective, thoughtful, gut-wrenching, makes-you-cry-every-other-chapter hours of your life so far.
Skyfall, Spectre, Dr. No: In that order. What the difference of 50 years makes is this — Dr. No is “I’m a James Bond movie”, whereas Skyfall and Spectre are “Well, I don’t what else to do with myself, so I’m still a James Bond movie”. Except, now they’re two and a half hours long instead of a tight 110 minutes, and suffering from the Sherlock disease of trying to give you “the origin story” and “the overarching narrative”. Like Sherlock Holmes, or Batman, or The Generalized Idea of a Marvel Superhero, James Bond is a character that can be used a jumping off point to tell something new and interesting. The current era, though, is all paint by numbers. Once Daniel Craig’s successor is here, I hope they figure out what else can be done with James Bond instead of just retreading familiar ground.
I got a new mouse, it’s a Logitech MX Master 3. The only thing I want to mention here is this — it has a “clicky” wheel, i.e., you can feel the indents as you scroll. But if you scroll fast enough, the indents disappear as if by magic, and the wheel spins freely, letting you move through screens faster. F-ing magnets, how do they work? I keep catching myself just spinning the wheel absentmindedly, like a fidget toy, and feeling the wheel vibrate to a stop once the magnets catch it.
Hey. Thanks for being here.