🥦 I was tasked the other day with putting away leftovers, one of which was a serving of Brussels sprouts. Now, I’m not a big fan of Brussels sprouts, or even a medium-sized fan. So when one of the sprouts escaped my spoon and fell into the sink and rolled around and went down the drain, I said to myself, “Oh well,” with little more remorse than when a piece of popcorn falls out of a bag at a baseball game. “It made its choice.”
😟 Astute readers will note that I finally got emojis to work on this site. We might 🫒 to regret it!
💕 Facebook and other social-media sites allow their users to deploy likes (expressed by those beloved emojis!) as fast-food substitutes for more fully-formed responses. But likes are so vague that they may unintentionally convey any number of ideas:
• I have read your post and I agree with it.
• By clicking like, I join thousands of other social-media clickers who want to belong.
• I read your post and you struck a sympathetic chord but not much more. Good luck!
• I have read your post and wanted to let you know I did, but I have no time or interest in formulating a response to what you just shared.
• I saw your post and then I read the first few words. I clicked the thumbs-up icon so that The Algorithm will direct people who read your posts to my own posts.
• I read your post and I really don’t agree with any of it. But luckily, I can click an icon that lets you know I read it, even if it only took a second, and now I can move on to my next friend without you or I feeling like I totally dismissed you.
• I see you. If this were the 1970s, my like would say, let’s meet up for a coffee.
Bottom line, I wouldn’t dwell too long on picking the perfect like emoji, as the recipient may have little idea what you really have in mind.
🦀 There must be an evolutionary reason why our third finger is our longest. Maybe it’s as simple as “one finger has to be longest.” Or perhaps there is a tree-grappling advantage to have a finger just a bit longer than the rest, so it can sense the branch just a fraction of an inch earlier and let us grapple it sooner, thereby escaping that panther. Only our ancestors and predators knew for sure.
❣️ Who have you assigned to be your reality checker? By this I mean, the person you are most comfortable sharing your first-draft thoughts with, the person from whom you want to hear, “Hmm, are you sure about that?” We should all be so lucky to have one.
🔎 As one who appreciates a good science article, I wish to register a formal objection to almost every piece of science journalism I’ve ever read in the New York Times. Not that this indictment spares other prestigious periodicals, but why not start at the top?
I am invariably frustrated by the dumbed-down, off-the-mark analogies that NY Times science writers routinely deploy, as if the paper’s readers cannot possibly be trusted to grasp physical facts on their own terms. It is condescending for a publication of its stature to feed its readers scientific baby food, and mostly empty-calorie baby food at that.
An October 2023 article by freelancer Robin George Andrews about the planetary core of Mars is an excellent example of the crime in question. His very first sentence tips us off that this will be one of those kind of science articles: “In 2021, it seemed as if Mars had a surprisingly big heart.“
No, Robin. Mars does not have a heart — it has a core. Mars is a planet. It is not a dog or a Salvation Army volunteer or a tin-man whose dream has been realized.
Nonetheless, Robin George Andrews, like a bulldog on a mailman’s leg, will not let go of the heart-core analogy in his article, even though planet cores neither beat nor fibrillate. Instead he takes his strained analogy to the next level: “[Teams have] concluded that Mars’s core is more like our own world’s heavy metal heart than previously suspected.”
Would Earth’s heavy-metal heart belong to Ozzy Osbourne, Man-O-War, or Tony Stark? (Dare I suggest Freddie Mercury?) This is not scientific inquiry but science devaluation.
When a writer decides to sow cheap cultural references throughout a science article, it only serves to de-focus the reader’s attention and create a fuzzy mindless space, when focus is exactly what the reader needs to appreciate the science being presented. But the editors of the NY Times don’t see it that way. They would rather their readers consume, comment, and move on to the Style section, even if calls for the writer to sabotage the seriousness of his/her own work.
Lest you think the Heart-of-Mars article was just a one-off example, may I direct you to the January 2024 NY Times article, “The Early Universe Was Bananas.” I would have posted a banana emoji here, but even that doesn’t convey enough satirical contempt.
♨️ After doing this blog for 13-plus years, I have often been tempted to recycle jokes and other bits that I feel were under-appreciated in their time. (Here’s a link to one of them.) But that would be like The Archies re-issuing Sugar Sugar and hoping to revive that sweet bubblegum wonder of it all. I… must not… gasp… stoop so low. (Here’s that link again.)
💲 I have a love/hate relationship with capitalism. Businesses rise and fall, and when they do fall, their workers usually fall before them. The only reason I could retire at age 57 (which still seems unreal) is that I worked for a company which made tons of money selling photographic products and which had a good pension plan but a bad business plan, and so they offered employees like me a golden fire escape (golden parachutes being reserved for the bigwigs) before Kodak’s house-of-prints finally collapsed.
In my last few years at Kodak, I heard and observed attitudes and practices that seemed predatory and/or disingenuous rather than competitive, and I started to see the people at the top as testosterone-driven males who saw business as a “tough fight” rather than a race to deliver the best goods at the lowest cost. I lost my innocence about what corporations (not just Kodak but Microsoft, Google, Apple, Sony, Big Pharma, all of them really) will do to make a buck. It was discouraging to see my own naivety and look past my complicity.
In retrospect, I might have felt differently about myself if I had worked for a non-profit or a newspaper. I would have earned less money and no doubt retired far later. But I’ll never know! And that will have to do. I married capitalism right out of college; 36 years later, we had a friendly divorce with a fair settlement. One can’t question things forever.
Or The Biden That Would Not Grow Old
[This is a slightly-altered excerpt of Chapter 13 in the Peter Pan novel by J.M. Barrie, where Tinkerbell visits Peter and warns him of the poison Captain Hook added to his medicine. Tinkerbell intervenes and drinks Peter’s medicine instead. I’ve changed a couple of names and details but left most of the original prose intact.]
Then at last the visitor spoke, in a lovely bell-like voice.
“Let me in, Joe.”
It was Tink, and quickly he unbarred to her. She flew in excitedly, her face flushed and her dress stained with mud.
“What is it?”
“Oh, you could never guess!” she cried, and offered him three guesses. “Out with it!” he shouted, and in one ungrammatical sentence, as long as the ribbons that conjurers pull from their mouths, she told of Trump’s capture of the fabled American Working Men and Women.
Joe’s heart bobbed up and down as he listened. Everyday God-fearing Americans bound, and on Trump’s pirate ship; they who loved everything to be just so!
“I’ll rescue them!” he cried, leaping at his weapons. As he leapt he thought of something he could do to please her. He could take his medicine.
His hand closed on the fatal draught.
“No!” shrieked Tinker Bell, who had heard Trump mutter about this deed in many of his ranting speeches.
“Why not?”
“It is poisoned.”
“Poisoned? Who could have poisoned it?”
“Trump.”
“Don’t be silly. How could Trump have got down here?”
Alas, Tinker Bell could not explain this, for even she did not know the dark secrets of the captain’s cabin. Nevertheless Trump’s words had left no room for doubt. The cup was poisoned and Trump was immune.
“Besides,” said Joe, quite believing himself, “I never fall asleep.”
He raised the cup. No time for words now; time for deeds; and with one of her lightning movements Tink got between his lips and the draught, and drained it to the dregs.
“Why, Tink, how dare you drink my medicine?”
But she did not answer. Already she was reeling in the air.
“What is the matter with you?” cried Joe, suddenly afraid.
“It was poisoned, Joe,” she told him softly; “and now I am going to be dead.”
“O Tink, did you drink it to save me?”
“Yes.”
“But why, Tink?”
Her wings would scarcely carry her now, but in reply she alighted on his shoulder and gave his nose a loving bite. She whispered in his ear “You silly ass,” and then, tottering to her chamber, lay down on the bed.
His head almost filled the fourth wall of her little room as he knelt near her in distress. Every moment her light was growing fainter; and he knew that if it went out she would be no more. She liked his tears so much that she put out her beautiful finger and let them run over it.
Her voice was so low that at first he could not make out what she said. Then he made it out. She was saying that she thought she could get well again if Americans believed in democracy.
Joe flung out his arms. There were no American voters there, and it was night time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: men and women in their sweatpants and loungewear, workers taking showers after twelve-hour shifts in the warehouse.
“Do you believe?” he cried.
Tink sat up in bed almost briskly to listen to her fate.
She fancied she heard answers in the affirmative, and then again she wasn’t sure.
“What do you think?” she asked Joe.
“If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.”
Many clapped.
Some didn’t.
A few beasts hissed.
The clapping stopped suddenly; as if countless mothers had rushed to their nurseries to see what on earth was happening; but already Tink was saved. First her voice grew strong, then she popped out of bed, then she was flashing through the room more merry and impudent than ever. She never thought of thanking those who believed, but she would have like to get at the ones who had hissed.
“And now to rescue democracy!”
The moon was riding in a cloudy heaven when Joe rose, belted with weapons and wearing little else, to set out upon his perilous quest. The crocodile passed him, but not another living thing, not a sound, not a movement; and yet he knew well that sudden death might be at the next tree, or stalking him from behind.
He swore this terrible oath: “Trump or me this time.”
Now he crawled forward like a snake, and again erect, he darted across a space on which the moonlight played, one finger on his lip and his dagger at the ready. He was frightfully happy.
______________
Note: Both the 1911 novel and the 1928 play script for Peter Pan are now in the U.S. public domain.