We appear to have lost the instructions
I’m not a flag-waving American type; in fact I find nationalism to be an almost purely awful inspiration for anything. It’s tribal, it’s an expression of not even “us”, but of the desire to fear “them”. Inevitably it degrades into irrational hatred. It’s not good.
But it’s March in the United States, and the country – after a Covid break in 2020 – is watching college basketball, and I am enormously happy about it.
Continue reading “Hoops”A friend of mine once gave me a good rule of thumb for “getting over” bad relationships – you know, the ones you get dumped from, or worse, the ones you have to end because there’s no mutual way out. He said it takes exactly half the length of how long you were actually in love, and because I’m a heterosexual, he also said “with the woman in question”. But I think he was on to something more general, which has been on my mind recently. I think human tribes have a similar function. This isn’t to say that we’re all tribal; no, I think we’re slowly – preciously slowly, and probably too slowly – evolving to the point where rank tribalism isn’t part of our emotional and mental makeup. But for most of us, it’s still there.
Continue reading “Hangovers”I have a smallish refrigerator, and thus I try to make meals which won’t have many leftovers, but that also means I have to shop pretty regularly. Apologies to our readers in London or Paris or Singapore for pointing out the obvious, but keep in mind I live in semi-rural southern Maine, where most people have fridges the size of small SUVs, and thus cook roughly six months in advance. It shows both a kind of thriftiness which I find impressive, but also an unconscious faith in the stability of the electrical grid which I find touchingly naive.
Continue reading “The new normal”Our co-conspirator Vero posted her first essay in a very long while yesterday, which gave me an excuse to open a bottle of bubbly (not technically Champagne, but a California methode champanoise produced by a French house, which given the lingering effects of Trump era tariffs is an affordable and more than delicious substitute for the good stuff). Generally speaking, one need no more excuse to drink good Champagne than a day ending in “y”, but it is nice to reserve it for a special occasion.
Continue reading “Right”The other day I was for some reason reading about the early Egyptian dynasties and – Wikipedia being terribly well organized for these sorts of things – kept going back in time until I struck pre-history. The Egyptians started building monuments a very, very long time ago – call it, oh, six thousand years – and by “monuments” I mean spectacular creations which had to harness the productive output of some ridiculous proportion of society. The thought occurred to me “how much did these cost?” and immediately it dawned on me that they cost nothing. That is to say, the very notion of cost was totally irrelevant to ancient Egyptian despots. It likely didn’t even make any sense; what do you mean, something “costs” a certain amount? Amount of what?
Continue reading “Exchange rate”