The phone’s been ringing off the hook since the latest issue of The Independent – “Serving Chewelah and Stevens County since 1903” – dropped last week. Readers of the “Remember When” column are wondering: Is Chuck Anderson…CK Anderson?
Yes. Yes, he is. Before he was the design mogul we all know and love – and fear – CK was a star athlete in high school and a diligent pupil in college. Come on: you’re not surprised, are you?
It’s been nearly ten years since I patiently explained that one doesn’t “hone in on” anything. And yet somehow none of the writers, editors, and proofreaders over at the Spokesman-Review were paying attention. I mean, check this headline out.
Fine. You don’t want to listen to me, a hack writer with no credentials whose sole qualification for the job is that no one else wants to do it? Then at least pay attention to Paul Brians, retired professor and “national authority on English grammar,” whose Common Errors in English Usage ought to be required reading for aspiring writers everywhere.
“You home in on a target (the center of the target is ‘home’),” writes Professor Paul. “‘Honing’ has to do with sharpening knives, not aim.”
Told you so.
Apropos of my previous post, in which I wax rather Eeyore-ish on what Big Tech has wrought, allow me to point you to the latest album by the Maria Schneider Orchestra.
On paper, Data Lords sounds almost comically un-hip: a double-disc concept album performed by an 18-piece jazz band that includes accordion and contrabass trombone—until you realize that two of its members, Ben Monder and Donny McCaslin, backed David Bowie on his final album Blackstar, while Schneider herself cowrote one of the tunes.
Comprising two thematic halves—”The Digital World” and “Our Natural World”—Data Lords explores our relationships with both while “searching for sonic beauty in all of it.” Here’s how Schneider explained it when she launched the project:
In the digital world, data lords, who are in a race to amass the entire world’s information, hypnotize us with conveniences, endless information at our fingertips, limitless entertainment, “curated” content, and endless other enticements. While many of those things offer us wonderful tools that enhance our lives and societies in mind-bending ways, a vast number of the enticements numb our minds and lure us into submissiveness. And almost without fail, the enticements, tools and conveniences delivered to us by these data lords, force us into a Faustian bargain of bartering our personal privacy and individuality for these often fleeting benefits. With the additional consequence of less and less face-to-face contact and no real accountability, humans’ internal compasses that measure empathy, along with their sense of self and purpose, are often hijacked. Fueled by silicon chips, rare earth metals, energy-hungry server farms, this digital world often feels right out of a science fiction novel.
In the natural world, magic is revealed if we intentionally divert our attention away from the virtual world long enough to embrace silence. Not long ago, the natural world was our only world. With a brain much freer of clutter, our minds could coast and daydream – a state of mind that produced many of our world’s greatest ideas. This space also left our senses keenly alert. Our eyes and ears were truly hungry for absorbing new artistic creations. And while far less music was instantly available literally at our fingertips, I think most of us remember longingly how intentional and deep our listening was. Many more people reveled in nature, and the myriad of mysteries one would encounter there, ignited questions and a search for meaning and purpose. A vacuum of space in our lives left humans reaching out to others for discourse and real connection. In this organic, analog world, we feel rooted to the earth as unique beings. Fueled by sunlight and oxygen, along with 117 other elements, this mind-blowingly complex and bewildering world, inversely, offers us a centering simplicity as well.
It’s an intense yet gorgeous work, almost Ellingtonian in its grandeur; the kind of music that can raise the hair on the back of your neck while simultaneously bringing a tear to your eye. I’m honestly not sure I’ve heard anything quite like it. Highly, highly recommended.
“Technosolutionism is a way of understanding the world that assigns priority to engineered solutions to human problems” writes Christine Rosen. “Its first principle is the notion that an app, a machine, a software program, or an algorithm offers the best solution to any complicated problem.”
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. In fact, it’s made things far, far worse, according to Alana Newhouse:
Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago….
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a millennial a few years ago. I was making fun of her generation—I know, I know, shooting fish in a barrel and all that—when she rather indignantly pointed to the creation of social media as an example of what her peers had done to contribute to the greater good. And then she threw down the gauntlet: “What’s your generation done?”
Given the choice of doing nothing and unleashing Facebook on the world, I told her, I think I’d rather be known for being a slacker.
If any doubt remains as to whether we are, in fact, living in the End Times, please take a gander at the following headlines, courtesy of the inestimable New York Post:
Colombia’s ‘cocaine hippos’ must be stopped, scientists warn
Rapper A Boogie Wit da Hoodie sued for allegedly clogging toilets at NJ mansion
Video shows knife-wielding squirrel in woman’s backyard
Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘vagina’ candle reportedly explodes in UK woman’s home
How to get a free bag of marijuana with the COVID-19 vaccine
At least we can talk about something other than politics.
ART
Herman Melville
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.
Benjamin Robert Haydon, in his diary entry for January 14, 1825, offers up some advice for the aspiring artist: “The nipple should always be a little above the centre. In Rubens and common nature it is below, which gives a flabby, infirm look.”
Then again, Charles Dickens considered Haydon’s art to be “quite marvellous in its badness,” so…grain of salt and all that.
You’ve heard talk of the multiverse, right? The idea is that the astronomically low odds of a universe like ours being compatible with life—something like 1 in 10 to the 229th power—is proof that “our universe is just one of a huge, perhaps infinite, ensemble of worlds.” The physics of such a problem are too mind-bending to even consider. (Well…for me, anyway.) But probability theorists have poked a hole in the argument. And it’s a pretty big hole.
Speaking of science-y things, John Horgan reminds us that “the equations embedded in Newton’s laws of motion, quantum mechanics and general relativity are extraordinarily, even unreasonably effective. Why do they work so well? No one knows….”
So, in other words, we don’t know what we think we know. Or even what we don’t know. Or much of anything, really. And that, my friends, is strangely comforting.
“Today, one of the world’s largest collections of Nazi propaganda sits in a climate-controlled warehouse at Fort Belvoir, in northern Virginia. Much of it is virulent; most of it is never seen by the public.”
“Speakers take a lot for granted,” write David I. Beaver, Bart Geurts, and Kristie Denlinger in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “That is, they presuppose information. As we wrote this, we presupposed that readers would understand English. We also presupposed as we wrote the last sentence…that there was a time when we wrote it, for otherwise the fronted phrase ‘as we wrote this’ would not have identified a time interval. Further, we presupposed that the sentence was jointly authored, for otherwise ‘we’ would not have referred. And we presupposed that readers would be able to identify the reference of ‘this’, i.e., the article itself. And we presupposed that there would be at least two readers, for otherwise the bare plural ‘readers’ would have been inappropriate.” It goes on like that for several thousand words. Philosophers ain’t what they used to be, I reckon.
Bugs Bunny turned 80 last year.
Random fact of the day: There are roughly 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s 169.518 octillion) possible ways to play the first 10 moves in a game of chess. Which explains how I keep finding new ways to lose.
“I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society—both good and bad—is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.”
“It’s just a tool, though, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not. No. No, it’s an alien life form.”
The Prophet David Bowie (peace be upon him), who would have turned 74 today, is interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight in 1999:
Is the McRib—that heavenly handful of sticky, porky goodness—just an arbitrage strategy on the part of McDonald’s? That certainly explains it elusiveness, argues Willy Staley.
“At both ends of the product pipeline,” he writes, “you have a good being traded at such large volume that we might as well forget that one end of the pipeline is hogs and corn and the other end is a sandwich. McDonald’s likely doesn’t think in these terms, and neither should you.”
Something else I hadn’t thought of: When the article was written—10 years ago—the McRib was “the only pork-centric non-breakfast item at maybe any American fast food chain.” In other words, if pork sandwiches were profitable, everyone would be selling ’em. Year-round.
Staley may be on to something.
“One of the paradoxes of research, writes Dr. Thomas Fink, “is that, time and again, the most far-reaching discoveries are made not by focusing on the practical problems of the day but by following your curiosity.” Breakthroughs come, he explains, “when your work, and what you do to avoid it, become the same thing.”
Fink then goes on to illustrate the point with a story from Sir Roger Penrose, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity:
‘Someone had invited me to give a talk at London South Bank University and I was really overdue with my reply. Instead of replying, all I could do was stare at the university logo on the letterhead: a pentagon with five pentagons around it.’ What bothered Penrose was that there were gaps between the external pentagons. Unlike hexagons, pentagons don’t fit together seamlessly.
He began wondering what new shapes would be required so he could fill in the gaps, and then extend the pattern without new gaps arising. It seemed it wasn’t possible with just one new shape. After a while, he had worked out a way to solve the puzzle using six new shapes. But Penrose wasn’t satisfied with six.
‘I thought, I wonder if I can do better? So I got it down to four tiles. And I was really proud of that. Then I fiddled around and I got it down to two. But my reaction was disappointment. It was just too damn easy. I felt it couldn’t be new.’
But it turned out the result of his labours, known as ‘Penrose tiling’, was new.
Happy 2021, y’all!
Things have piled up a bit during our absence, so we’ll just start the new year by pointing you to Tom Whitwell’s 52 Things I Learned in 2020—the latest in a series that dates back to 2014, and that offers up such wonderful nuggets as “China has completed one large dam every day since 1949.” And “Taco Bell spent ten years trying to develop a cheese-stuffed taco shell, helped by a cheese promotion group called Dairy Management Inc, known as ‘the Illuminati of cheese.'” And “British clowns register their unique makeup patterns by having them hand painted onto chicken eggs. The eggs are then stored either at the Holy Trinity Church in Dalston or at Wookey Hole caves in Somerset.”
But if you’re too worried about the state of the world to cultivate any curiosity about it, Uncle Bill has you covered.
Since we’ll be taking a couple of weeks off from posting, here are some links to keep you occupied:
“[E]very new high-profile heist raises awareness of the fact that rare books are valuable enough to be worth stealing.” (The article gets bonus points for the punny title.)
A history of PEZ candy.
“Puzzle makers saw sales go up by 300 to 400%, and, due to the pandemic-related pause in production, quickly sold out of popular items.…The last time interest in puzzles spiked so quickly? The Great Depression….”
And finally—surprise!—it turns out that not everyone is defined by their generation:
See y’all in 2021…
There’s an interesting feature on Tom Voigt, founder and publisher of ZodiacKiller.com, in the December issue of Portland Monthly. As a kid who grew up in the 1970s just a couple of hours south of where the Zodiac operated—and who remembers when the San Francisco Chronicle published the last confirmed Zodiac letter—I’ve long been fascinated by the still-unsolved murders. But it’s not everyone’s jam. So proceed with caution.
However.
I feel like I need to point out something in the article unrelated to the horrors of true crime: the utter failure of the singular they if your aim is clear communication. Check it out:
Gaikowski was brought to Voigt’s attention by Blaine T. Smith, who has been known professionally and personally as simply “Blaine” or “Blaine Blaine.” Blaine was part of the Good Times newspaper collective alongside Gaikowski. Wildly intelligent and intensely complicated, Blaine appears trim, small, and wigged in photographs and rare film clips. They are still alive, 84 years young, and posting regularly to Facebook from a small town in New Mexico. I contacted Blaine but was unsuccessful in speaking to them as of press time—but not because they’ve gone silent.
I had to read that paragraph three times before I realized the author was deferring to Smith’s preferred pronouns rather than conventional English. Wait a sec, I thought. Both Gaikowski and Smith are 84 years old and alive?? I thought Gaikowski was dead…
Now, I don’t want to get into an argument around whether we need gender-neutral pronouns or whether it’s insensitive or transphobic or whatever to use he and him for someone who is biologically male but doesn’t identify as such.* That’s not the point. It’s that using a plural pronoun for a singular subject isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. And a better writer (or editor) would have come up with a workaround rather than simply cave to the woke zeitgeist.
*Benjamin Dreyer addresses this issue in a particularly thought-provoking—not to mention helpful—way in Chapter 6 of his masterful Dreyer’s English.