#20: This is fine dot jpg

Actual Updates

Well, I had a pretty solid multi-year stretch going, but last weekend I broke both the streak and a toe. I used to break them semi-often; our old bed was a major culprit, and then once we moved and got a new bed, I didn’t find it as easy to slam my toe into the leg of it in the dark. I think my toe bones might be made of balsa wood. But this time, I was walking back down the hill from the CVS, pushing Hap in his stroller, and we took a corner, and my right foot kicked the left wheel of the stroller and I heard a snap.

ME: hahaHA I hope that was just a toenail!!!MY BODY: you know very well that it was not

Toes are the most bullshit of broken bones; they just sit there and hurt and unless you’re unable to walk, a doctor will just tell you to knock back a couple Advils and run/hobble along. If you are unable to walk, they’ll tape it to the neighboring toe (and probably charge you a mortgage payment for the privilege). If you’re thinking “But I could tape it at home for pennies on the dollar,” you’re right! So you just kind of truck along and try not to whack it on anything else (surprisingly difficult!), or to make the kinds of movements that make it scream (same), or to get it stepped on by an entire preschooler (so far only once, but he has 0 body awareness and I’m always on high alert around him).

But never mind my trash garbage body and its adventures in falling apart - the Olympics are on! People whose bodies are finely tuned to excel at their own specific sports are doing stuff! Having it at all this year is a very bad idea, especially in Japan, whose vaccination efforts are not exactly crushing it! AND YET I remain a complete hoe for the Olympics and I will watch coverage of it all day long if I can (I can’t, we dropped cable and I don’t want to pay for another service so I’m making do with occasionally watching live events if my schedule coincides, whatever recaps Peacock makes available on their free version, and Leslie Jones’ videos on Twitter). Have I cried? Yes, immediately. I watched an athlete profile and was surprised to find tears running down my face (and it wasn’t even a Tragic Backstory profile). Have I cried at commercials? You know what, mind your own business.

Obviously the major story of the games is Simone Biles withdrawing, obviously the criticisms being leveled at her are spurious, unfair, and racist, and the amount of entitlement these armchair experts have to her destroying her body for their entertainment is sickening. Like most of us who don’t do flipping, spinning sports, I just learned what the twisties are this week, and they sound horrifying but also very understandable - even watching people compete in gymnastics or diving or aerials or halfpipe snowboarding or anything else where there are tricks with certain amounts of rotations, I can never ever keep track of how many someone has done, especially if they’re spinning in two different dimensions at once (i.e., flipping while also twisting, etc), and I am just watching from my couch! So I can only imagine the terror and disorientation that must come over you if the muscle memory it takes to actually perform these moves suddenly is not accessible to you.

One thing that I did notice, watching some coverage of other events the next day, is that it seems like some of the announcers have taken some of the discourse to heart - there was a swimming event on, and the announcers were spending some time talking about how important it was for Katie Ledecky to be mentally and emotionally present as she headed into this big race regardless of whether she had done well or not so well in the last race, since either thing would mess with her performance. And I felt good about this in the sense that it’s being discussed as part of the standard commentary on athlete performance and preparation, but at the same time, who’s getting given that grace? Will the same “they’ve got to make sure their head is in it or else it isn’t safe for them to compete” narrative be allowed to Black athletes1, and other athletes of color? What about men, who have that extra “be a tough guy” societal horseshit to overcome? That remains to be seen, I guess. Well, maybe it’s been seen, by people who are watching more coverage than me. Let me know if you have seen any encouraging evidence that more athletes are being considered as whole people who have real needs both physical and mental. God, that tweet that Biles posted where she was like “All this support has made me realize that I have value beyond just what I can do gymnastically” - phew, my heart. Imagine what went into her feeling that way. It makes me want to eat someone alive, but the person to blame is everyone.

A bright spot in Olympics coverage, though, is following the Team Canada Facebook page, since they get equally as congratulatory and starry-eyed with pride over a Canadian athlete who finishes 4th (which happens a lot, for some reason) or who beats a Canadian record or even just tries really hard. Huge “it’s an honor just to be nominated” energy, which I always find endearing. And good for them! Why shouldn’t they? Can recommend.

Speaking of Canada, we’re technically able to go there as of a few days from now - the border’s being opened to fully-vaccinated Americans on the 9th - although of course I can, theoretically, go there any time as a Canadian citizen. I can’t on paper, since I’m still waiting for my renewed Canadian passport to arrive. And then there’s the question of Hap, since I haven’t gotten a passport for him yet for either country. Up until about 2 minutes ago, I thought children under a certain age were allowed to travel on their birth certificate rather than needing a passport, but because this is a meticulously fact-checked newsletter2, I just re-examined that understanding, and it turns out that that’s just to fly, i.e. it would be accepted as ID to board an airplane. Crossing a border requires a passport no matter how young you are. So we’ll have to get that sorted out sooner or later. Ideally sooner. And the reason is that we had thought we might try going to visit my family at the end of this month, when Hap’s school is closed, but there’s obviously not going to be enough time to get things in order. So… later, then, I guess. Dual citizenship is totally cool and sweet but it really is twice the paperwork.

Some links

I don’t know if everyone just wrote/shared more cool stuff in the month of July than usual, or if I was just less selective or more starved for interesting reads than usual, but I hope you have some time on your hands because this section is STACKED this month.

I was already aware that bog bodies are cool as hell, but what I was not aware of is that the level of preservation led people to, upon finding them, think they were recent murder victims. In fact, one guy got questioned about a (bog) body found near his house, thought he was busted, and confessed immediately to the murder of his wife a few years earlier. Turns out the body that had been found was from the Iron Age, but too bad for this dude, that bell could not be un-rung.3 Anyway, here’s some science: Europe’s Famed Bog Bodies Are Starting to Reveal Their Secrets 

Well, this seems aggressively fine!!! Also, I would say that “Radioactive Terror Pigs” sounds like a band name, but let’s be honest, we already know that the band would be terrible. Radioactive Hybrid Terror Pigs Have Made Themselves a Home in Fukushima's Exclusion Zone

It’s like the seed vault, but for tunes! Just by the name of it and the location, it sounds like it’s all going to be metal, but obviously I know that that’s not true… probably. But in all seriousness, I love this idea and it also gives me a creeping horror thinking about the situation in which it would be useful. Doomsday Music Vault to Be Constructed in Arctic Island Near North Pole 

Speaking of … things that last a long time, I guess? Look, not every segue is going to be good. This thread, however, is! You know the Appalachians are old, very old, even on a geological timeframe they’re old, but this thread really wraps your head around it:

Big fish: People Dumped Their Pets into Lakes, Officials Say. Now Football-Size Goldfish Are Taking Over

Meth fish: Methamphetamine in Waterways May Be Turning Trout into Addicts

I love William Gibson, and whether that’s just because he’s lived in Vancouver for as long as I can remember and therefore counts as “ours,” who can say, but I’ll read just about anything he writes. If you’ve read The Peripheral and/or Agency, you know he’s currently writing about a world after “the Jackpot,” which was a series of catastrophic events that drastically reduced the population of the earth, but in an ongoing way, so this rings very true. And if you haven’t read The Peripheral, get on that (Agency is next up in my to-read pile). William Gibson on the Apocalypse: “It’s Been Happening for at Least 100 Years”

Related: The Interminable Catastrophe

Speaking of interminable catastrophes!! Ha ha!!! But in all seriousness, this rang very true for me as well; I’ve been various sizes but my standard one is larger than the preferred societal dimensions for someone my height, and then I got really sick in college and lost a lot of weight, and suddenly people had nice things to say about me. It’s like they thought I wouldn’t connect the dots. But they got in under my skin anyway, and I tried to keep myself that way for years afterwards. Spreadsheets were involved. That’s generally a bad sign. Anyway, if I suddenly lose weight again: Please Don’t Compliment My Body

Aggressively fine!!! part 2: How damn big is your yard?? edition: Man Finds 18th Century Ornamental Building Made of Teeth at Bottom of his Garden – 25 Years After He Moved In

Love to live in the age of consequences!! Just How Historic Was Western Canada’s Heat Wave? “Nothing Can Compare”

But not in the way you think! Or maybe it is, I don’t know. Leave me alone and go read the article! The Internet is Rotting 

As one does. He Found 158 Bowling Balls Under His House. Now He Has to Figure Out What to Do with Them

I feel like this headline makes a lot of assumptions about people’s level of lizard nest imagination! No One Imagined Giant Lizard Nests Would Be This Weird

Me if I was a runner: Just Say Cheese: One of My Favorite Olympic Trials Post-Race Interviews Happened at the Local Grocery Store

Fellas…: Welcome to the Summer of the Power Bald

As ever, subscribe to ¡Hola Papi!: Recreating the “Left Behind” Books from Memory

As ever, subscribe to The Chatner (also, I am not someone who is in the tank for Jude Law per se but I can understand the idea that his power, in the movie, was simply being Jude Law, because I was alive in 1999 and am aware that he was, at that time, almost supernaturally handsome. No I know this movie came out a little later but I feel like he was still riding that wave, in terms of casting). A Survey: Did Women Love Alfie in 'Alfie' Just Because He Was Handsome Michael Caine/Jude Law, Or Was I Right To Have A Vague Sense That Magic Was Involved Somehow?

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

The amount this song gets quoted in our house. Like, yes, the chorus is extremely singable, but we are also constantly paraphrasing “the Dali Llamas… whatever, Salvador Dali and the animal HOW CLEVER” to “whatever, how clever.” So yeah here’s a nice little song about a bro-y band who had one good song and when Atom and friends heard it, they decided to turn it into their own and make up a song about the other band stealing it from THEM.

Future karaoke jam: yes. Haha, just kidding, karaoke’s never coming back. Also, I thought I just knew this song and the others on this album because I heard them a lot, and then we got a new stereo with a functioning tape player, so I hauled out my old box of tapes, and what do you know, there’s a commercial tape of this. And by “commercial” I do mean a bootleg that I got in Hong Kong.

I keep walking around singing the verse about the bad band she goes and sees, and one day I’d like to cover this song but I really just can’t countenance singing a line like “if they’re musicians, I’m a magician” if I do not personally have Allison Russell’s pipes. Which, for anyone keeping track at home, I do not.

This month’s top 5: Olympic sobfests

1. The Refugee Team’s existence (I know it isn’t new) and how 3 of the athletes competing on this team this year will be competing on Team Canada next time

2. Caleb Dressel saying “it’s just been a hard year” while breaking down into tears

3. Tiny baby skateboarders!!! Some of them far away from their families!!

4. The two best friend high jumpers sharing a medal!!

5. Katie Ledecky doing a press conference right next to Katie Grimes, who is an infant child of 15 and who has looked up to Ledecky her whole life, after coming in first and second respectively in a heat, and Grimes talking about how maybe in 8 years she’ll be sitting next to some other young kid doing a press conference together and WOW I’m welling up again just writing about it

Well, back to my day’s work of trying to get a damn COVID test appointment for the other members of my family (I may have been exposed? But it seems unlikely? But we’re doing better safe than sorry). I just want to be able to get us all tested at the same time on the same day, and that is apparently asking too much.