Knothead Loop is a seven-mile hike that rewards you with Indian petroglyphs, gorgeous views, and plenty of wildlife—and it’s only a half-hour drive from downtown Spokane. This time of year the lupine and wild roses are in bloom in the valleys; wild irises are blanketing the marshy area around the Little Spokane River. Check it out.
Terry Teachout reports on a “trivial little exercise in inter-generational trolling” he undertook on Twitter last week. The results are predictably vile (and, to be honest, depressing). Turns out that “a total stranger’s expression of tepid distaste for a now-commonplace conversational mannerism” is enough to get some people really fired up. Least surprising? Millennials were the angriest. WARNING: Lots of naughty words at the link.
Speaking of social media, how’s that whole slacktivism approach to solving all the world’s problems working out? Not so well, perhaps.
Tomorrow (June 6) marks the 73rd anniversary of D-Day. Rather than wait until then, go ahead and check out the Atlantic‘s cool “Then and Now” feature, which they published back in 2014.
Martin Scorsese defends film as art. Seems odd that such an argument would be necessary, but, well…these are the times in which we live. (Bonus! A 1980 review of The Shining, from the same publication, that underscores at least a couple of Scorsese’s points: “It would be tempting to call it metaphysical…if the story on which it was based were less of a mail-order catalogue of fashionable—not to mention profitable—occult notions. There is not much metaphysics in The Shining, but it is as fine a piece of cinema as Kubrick has produced.”)
“Robert Rauschenberg,* who once said that he wanted to make the biggest drawing in the world, also created one of the twentieth century’s smallest art works.” Read Calvin Tomkins’s charming piece on Rauschenberg’s Self-Portrait [for The New Yorker profile]. (C’mon. It’ll only take you three minutes.)
*Being something of a Philistine when it comes to art, I had to ask CK whether Robert Rauschenberg was cool enough to blog about. Yes, he assured me. Yes, he is.
If you ever find yourself in Dillon, Montana—and really, why wouldn’t you?—do yourself a favor and stop in at the Taco Bus for a quick bite. Seriously, these are the best tacos in the history of tacos.
While you’re in the area, hit up the Patagonia Outlet, try your hand at some blue-ribbon fly fishing, or visit historic Bannack. Or heck—go just for the tacos. Sure, it’s a five-hour drive from Spokane. But it’s worth every minute.
A friend alerted me to John McWhorter’s delightful essay “English is not normal” over at Aeon. Here’s how it begins:
English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.
You’ve heard it all before, I’m sure. The thing is, though, McWhorter goes on to explain why. So do yourself a favor and read the entire piece. And if you find this sort of thing fascinating (as, of course, you should), check out Kevin Stroud’s History of English Podcast.
The correct answer to this question, of course, is “Yes.” #SavedYouAClick
However, since reading “calms the nerves, increases language and reasoning, and can even keep you mentally alert as you age”—while watching TV pretty much does the opposite—we recommend clicking anyway. Not only that, but it appears to be the nature of the activities themselves, rather than differences in quality between the two, that accounts for the difference. So, basically, reading this beats watching this.
With that in mind, I’m a-gonna throw caution to the wind and take a copy of Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Five Classic Novels 1956–1958 into the woods this weekend. War and Peace can wait.
As usual, I’m late to the party on this. But I just discovered Open Culture, “The best free cultural & educational media on the web.” Now I’m exhausted.
See, I got there by way of a link to this story about Paul Klee’s notebooks. I didn’t even read the article, though, because I got distracted by this and this and this. And especially this. And that was before I discovered the 1,150 free movies. You can watch Why Man Creates, the 1963 animated short by Saul Bass. Or The Phantom Carriage (1921), “one of the central works in the history of Swedish cinema.” Or any of half a dozen Sonny Chiba flicks.
Sorry, CK. I accomplished nothing today. Which I can guarantee you is more than Courtney got done, but still.
The Reverend Sydney Smith to Lady Holland, May 23, 1811:
How very odd, dear Lady Holland, to ask me to dine with you on Sunday, the 9th, when I am coming to stay with you from the 5th to the 12th! It is like giving a gentleman an assignation for Wednesday, when you are going to marry him on the preceding Sunday—an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with the security of connubial relations. I do not propose to be guilty of the slightest infidelity to you while I am at Holland House, except you dine in town; and then it will not be infidelity, but spirited recrimination.
From The Folio Book of Days (The Folio Society, 2002)
I’ve been mildly annoyed by REI’s #ForceOfNature social media campaign, if only because they seem to be trying really, really hard to convince me that…come to think of it, I’m not sure what it is they’re trying to say, other than that is has something to do with sexism. Am I sexist for being a male and enjoying the outdoors? Or is it the outdoors itself that’s sexist? Whatever it is, it’s definitely a Bad Thing.
So they post pictures to Instagram with lines like “They might say, ‘you should be quiet.’ But out here, we’re not going to listen to the stereotypes.” Deep, huh? (Just two days before that, it was “Somewhere they might be saying, ‘you should be more feminine.’ But up here, we can’t hear the stereotypes.” They’ve already run out of ideas.)
Apart from the cheesiness of it all, it just seemed so improbable. I mean, are there really insufferable a**holes out there who say such things to women? And if so, is it a quantity sufficient enough to warrant a lame social media campaign? I follow REI on Instagram to look at cool gear and gorgeous photography, not be lectured about the purported inequality of the sexes – especially with obviously staged photos and woefully forced copy.
Then Skooch sent me this story.
It made me realize that, if people like D. Marble exist, then yes, the aforementioned insufferable a**holes surely must exist as well. Just when you think you’ve got the world figured out, it throws you a curve ball.
This is a big moment for you. For a long time, you’ve stood in the margins, watching friends and coworkers play a mysterious game with their words—but no longer. You’ve decided you’re ready to start caring what your language looks like. It would be so easy to brush this off and act like it’s no big thing, but deep down, you know it took guts getting to this point. And for that, you deserve to let a little pride drip out of your inner tap. So go ahead and indulge yourself a little. You’ve earned it.
However, it’s also important to appreciate the gravity of the situation you’re in. Maybe you thought choosing a font was as simple as picking out a pair of socks. If that were the case, you failed to appreciate just how badly this could go for you. You’re about to enter a minefield, littered with the carcasses of past font choices gone wrong. People are going to be talking about this for a long time, and you’re either going to be a raging success or the flop that people, whispering, point out in the supermarket aisle. I wish it weren’t too late to convince you to abandon this decision, but now that you know it exists there’s no turning back.
The first thing you need to figure out is where you stand in the perennial dispute between serif and sans serif. This is your Montague-Capulet kind of situation, only where Romeo and Juliet are pretending to be into each other so they can one day poison the other person’s whole family. It is here where humanity parts into two ideologically opposed groups. Underlying this conflict is a history far too complex to explain before you make your decision, so you just need to ask yourself: would you rather wear a black turtleneck or an decorative neck scarf? This will tell you on which side of the conflict you land.
Next, you’ll want to consider serious things like aesthetics, audience, mood, legibility—blah, blah, blah. Look, it’s mostly a gut thing and remember, it was your guts that got you to this point, so don’t be afraid to trust them. Really, making the right call is mostly about avoiding the wrong ones. Here are some of the biggies:
– Avoid trite correlations, e.g. don’t choose Gotham just because you’re writing Batman fan-fiction and or wearing Batman pajamas.
– Certain fonts like Comic Sans and Papyrus have become the lepers of typography. Try not to touch them.*
– Like the popular kids at school, some fonts lose their style after a few years. Don’t let fashion intrude on your decision-making.
Let’s not sugarcoat it; this is huge decision and one that you haven’t come to lightly. But don’t worry, you’re only risking a life sentence of passive-aggressive judgment from your peers. So, relax. You’re going to be fine, just fine.
Get choosing.
*One precarious option I wouldn’t recommend to a first-timer like yourself—but that is still worth mentioning—is using your font choice to make an ironic comment on the popular tastes and distastes of a society. This might include choosing to use Comic Sans on the program for a design lecture, or branding your company as a pastiche of a certain font which, through historical overuse, has become the subject of insults and ridicule. Again, this is only for the advanced.
“Consider the Oreo cookie,” wrote Harlan Ellison. “Mealy. Chocolate only in the same way that an H-bomb blast-effect is a suntan. Mendacious, meretricious, monstrously mouth-clotting…it is anti-cookie, the baked good personification of the AntiChrist.”
He described the cream filling as “corpse-white adhesive,” as “bird doo-doo,” and, perhaps most memorably, as “loathsome diabetes-inducing spackling compound.”
What he really had a thing for was Hydrox: the “Stabat Mater of junk food.”
You remember Hydrox, don’t you? They were not only first on the scene—pre-dating Oreos by four years—but also, by most accounts anyway (or at least Ellison’s), superior in every conceivable way. Too bad about the name, though.
People tell me that a good name can make all the difference. Can it, though? I mean, it’s not like “Oreo” is a great name or anything—it’s that “Hydrox” is terrible. It’s like the difference between Ritz and Hi-Ho, another battle between Sunshine and Nabisco. Who wants to eat a Hi-Ho? Nobody, that’s who. I don’t care how much better they taste. Gimme a Ritz every time. And lest you think this is some sort of anti-Sunshine blog, we here at helveticka world headquarters—like the rest of the civilized world—are all about the Cheez-Its.
Over at Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson offers an impressive—and, to be honest, convicting—defense of liking stupid things. “Not everything that exists in the time of Donald Trump has to be a metaphor for Donald Trump,” he writes, “and not every silly trinket produced by capitalism is evidence of our decline in intellectual vigor.”
He’s talking about recent criticism of the fidget spinner. And he’s just getting started:
“I’m particularly irritated by this kind of cultural criticism because it embodies one of the most unfortunate tendencies in left-ish political thinking: the need to spoil everybody’s fun by finding some kind of problem with everything. There is enough serious human misery in the world for the left to point out; there’s no need to problematize the fidget spinner as well.”
Then there’s this:
“Fun is important, and sometimes people have fun by playing tiddlywinks or spinning a top or finding one of the myriad of other trivial diversions that keep us from having to face the full horror of our mortal existence.”
Robinson’s piece is a necessary corrective to the spate of finger-wagging we’re seeing lately. You should read the entire thing. Right now.
Check this out:
In 2009, Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele University, in England, asked a group of volunteers to plunge one hand into a bucket of ice-cold water and keep it there for as long as they could. Sometimes Stephens instructed them to repeat an expletive of their choice—one that “they might use if they banged their head or hit their thumb with a hammer,” according to an article he wrote about the study. Other times he had them repeat a neutral word, like “wooden” or “brown.” With few exceptions, the volunteers could hold their hand in the water for longer when they cursed—about forty seconds longer, on average.
So, if swearing makes you stronger (and clearly it does), then Shirlee must have the strength of at least a dozen men—while I, on the other hand, am a 97-lb. weakling.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and proclaim that this could very well be the coolest public sculpture project ever:
Of course, since it’s in Denmark, CK won’t let me report on the story on location—which means I have to make said proclamation based on the website and accompanying video. So, you know, caveat emptor and all that. But still…
(Hat tip: Courtney Sowards, who manages to find the most interesting things on the Internet. All on her own time, of course.)
hebdomadal (adjective) Taking place, coming together, publishing, or appearing once a week; weekly.
Arriving late to helveticka’s hebdomadal staff meeting, Aaron found his usual seat occupied by The New Guy, forcing him to sit between Skooch—who smelled of Red Bull and Cheddar Jalapeño Cheetos—and Courtney, whose otherwise winsome smile did little to hide her dark and sinister plans.