#27: A newsletter and a half

Actual updates

After that time that someone unsubscribed and I suspected it was due to my relentless complaining, I’ve been very mindful of just how glum each issue is; this one is half depressing, half optimistic, and half stupid. Yes, that’s three halves. You get your money’s worth with this newsletter! Short month, long post! I don’t know. Shall we get into it?

So, first, a bit of housekeeping. You may (or may not!!) have noticed that I’ve stopped sending the mid-month discussion questions; I kind of ran out of gas on that front, but I still want to do something in between issues. Not sure what yet. A song? A link? a picture of the cat? Various ephemera1? Any ideas welcome; in the meantime I’ll noodle on it and just surprise you with an email one day, I guess.

Okay. So. The Winter Olympics just happened. Dedicated readers of this newsletter (and any people who have met me at least once in real life) already know that I am, tragically, a complete sucker for the Olympics, and the winter ones most of all. I know they’re the worst and most corrupt organization, but I just can’t help always wanting to watch people be amazing at all these things I could never do, or could kind of do, poorly - but this year was really a test. You already know, I imagine, about the scandals wracking the figure skating world at the moment (if you don’t, in short, it’s a combination of a doping scandal, exacerbated by the fact that it’s by Russia, a country who was “penalized” for their state-level doping factories by having to compete for the “Russian Olympic Committee” instead of the actual country, which is no real difference and no real penalty, plus a monstrous coach who churns out disposable teenage jumping machines who can do quad jumps because they haven’t hit puberty yet, and inflicts eating disorders on them, and then discards them, riddled with injuries and psychological damage, when their bodies change).

But this year I had the dubious privilege of learning about other sports that wreak havoc on their participants. Ski jumping, for instance, is rife with eating disorders, both for men and women - the adage there is “fat don’t fly.” Sliding sports (skeleton, luge, and bobsled) are damaging to the brain, with constant jarring and occasional impacts that lead to a form of post-race brain fog known as “sled head,” and later repercussions similar to the concussion issues plaguing the NFL. Nordic Combined (that’s the one that involves both ski jumping and biathlon2, for some reason) still doesn’t allow women, in this day and age. And, of course, any sport can become super damaging when any one particular athlete has immense pressure and expectations placed upon them - god forbid if they don’t live up to those. Poor Michaela Shiffrin had a microphone in her face after every race and sometimes in between races, asking her why she didn’t do better, and her answers sounded downright worrying. I’m trying to think of a sport that doesn’t devour its participants, and I’m pretty much coming up empty3.

And now, from the bummer to the … dumber. Hey, that was a good segue, don’t @ me! Good by my standards, anyway! Which are low!

The other weekend, we got a chance to go to see our pals at Bone Up for what was, essentially, a make-up round for a tasting event we had bought tickets to and then had to cancel due to a Covid exposure at Hap’s school. The original version was a small group tasting of their various barrel-aged beers; this replacement event was billed as a “private tasting,” but what it really was was “us getting drunk together all afternoon.” Well, I don’t know if they got drunk. Probably not; they’re professionals. But we had an extremely fun time (and it was nice to just hang out together and talk and make bad jokes and pet a dog and just generally engage in friendship activities), and we were feeling no pain… up until we got home, when it abruptly went south on us. I put new sheets on the guest bed for Matt’s mom, who had been watching Hap for us, but it took me several minutes of first lying down on the bed before I could work up the physical and mental wherewithal to do it. Then I went into the bathroom and threw up. This was unpleasant in the way that throwing up is always unpleasant, and it did make me feel a lot better afterwards, but things were about to get much worse.

I flushed the toilet. It filled up. I regarded it with the extreme wariness of someone who knows she’s on her own if it overflows. Then it slowly subsided again, and I thought, well, this toilet has the two flush types, maybe I just need to give it the bigger flush and it will manage whatever the problem is.

Let the record show that I am a fool and a clown.

It overflowed. Of course it overflowed. It overflowed pukewater all over my bathroom floor and I had to sop it all up and clean the whole place, still feeling half like death. I have no idea how long it took. Time ceased to have meaning. I had entered the mop zone. When I finally finished, I was still faced with a clogged toilet that I couldn’t make any headway on. I shut the door, told everyone that the upstairs bathroom was off limits, and went to bed at 9pm.

Eventually I fixed it the next day, don’t worry; I didn’t just seal off the bathroom and write it off as a viable room of the house. But I guess I can update my “last got drunk” date from “the work holiday party right before becoming pregnant” to “last month.”

And, in a small bit of good news, I finally was able to write a song again. I haven’t been able to in 2+ years. Segueing like that makes it seem like it was related to The Barfening, and honestly that assumption wouldn’t be wholly wrong; the line “run over by a city bus” may or may not refer to my physical state that evening. Anyway, maybe you’ll hear it one day.

Some links

This is an excellent idea. Who better than the people who look at it all day every day to curate an art exhibit? Meet the Security Guards Moonlighting as Curators at the Baltimore Museum of Art

I bet you didn’t know about the women who invented the whooping cough vaccine! Also, this article has a real “just gals being pals!!!” moment in it, but it’s immediately and hilariously defused by a quote from one of their contemporaries. The Unsung Heroes Who Ended a Deadly Plague

Further in “women you didn’t know enough about”: The Radical Woman Behind “Goodnight Moon”

This could stand alone as this month’s entry in the “title says it all” category, but that would do a disservice to the brave souls who decided to piss off the trucker convoy dipshits by blasting this song everywhere possible. But for real, those truck guys were ruining the lives of entire neighborhoods for weeks because they were fussy babies about having to be vaccinated. They should be so lucky as to get to hear a cowboy orgy song. An Ode to Gay Cowboy Orgies is the Anthem for the Ottawa Resistance

Lest you think the only way to fight racism and be more inclusive in the world of computers is by trying to free algorithms from bias, here’s something that should be replicated for languages all over the world. Plenty of indigenous languages have particular scripts that may not (yet!) be part of Unicode, and it’s great to see this happen for Nattilingmiutut; also, it’s important that native speakers of the language were involved in codifying it, which was not the case before. Special Syllabics Developed in Nunavut Mean Nattilingmiutut Can Now Be Read Anywhere in the World

This is deeply interesting to me. There are lots of arguments against having an Olympics in your town - Boston made a bid behind the backs of its residents, and when we found out, we raised a commotion and forced the bid to be withdrawn, and rightly so because an Olympics would be INSANE in this city - but Vancouver/Whistler already hosted in recent memory and still has all the infrastructure in place (most importantly, the highway up to Whistler has already been refurbished and is now no longer a picturesque deathtrap), so the expense will be less and we already know there’s enough space. The fact that it’s led by indigenous groups is also a big improvement on the way colonial nations offer up people’s ancestral lands for other people’s recreation without permission. Plus, I’m curious to see how the IOC responds to a bid from an indigenous group. First-Nations-Led Olympic Bid Moves Forward - But Will the IOC Accept It?

Speaking of the Olympics. I feel like this article does not give quite enough time to how prepubescent kids are more likely to be able to do these insane jumps, and specifically to how that opens the sport to an abusive culture, but the physics of how jumps work are undeniably cool. How Olympic Figure Skaters Break Records with Physics

This is so cool: Final Moments of Planetary Remnants Seen for First Time

This article starts with the largest underwater mountain in the Arctic and just gets more interesting from there. Riotous explosions of life where it should not be! Tubes! Biological ruins! Farts!4 Read it!! These Animals Are Feasting on the Ruins of an Extinct World

Dicks! How the Sausage Gets Made: Inside Hollywood’s Prosthetic Penis Craze

I know, it isn’t exactly groundbreaking to compare the bubonic plague and the societal and labor upheavals that followed it to our current situation, but it’s a good exploration of it. In Medieval Europe, a Pandemic Changed Work Forever. Can It Again?

I’m not sure how they got all the way from “there’s brain activity after blood stops flowing to the brain” to “it’s the person’s life flashing before their eyes,” but I’m always at home for any brain content. Does Life Flash Before Your Eyes? Brain Scan of Dying Man Suggests It’s Possible

Freaky spy shit! An Optical Spy Trick Can Turn Any Shiny Object Into a Bug

First of all, what a delightful title. But second of all, this is just a really lovely piece and her joy and excitement absolutely shine through it. A worthy counterpoint to the horrible-fancy-restaurant story from the other month. I’m Common as Muck and Spent £150 in a Michelin Star Restaurant to See if It Was Worth It

What am I reading

I opted out of a Stephen King book this morning (short stories, so at least a little bit different this time and not bad, but I can’t talk about him anymore, I really can’t) when it got too similar to another book of his, and that means I have now hopped into The Wind in the Willows. Would you believe I’ve never read it before?

I mean, I’m not going to blaze a new trail here; it’s gentle, it’s bucolic, it’s a book for children about anthropomorphized animals, but sometimes it’s nice to read that instead of being An Adult all the time. Indeed it comes from a children’s lit course that Matt took back in the day, and once we’ve read our way through the book list they’re all going in Hap’s bookshelf.

One thing that did kind of jump out to me was the part about Badger’s den being built in the ruins of a much older human civilization. I know it was probably written about Roman ruins or something like that, but there’s no proof, so this could be ruins of a more modern human world. Or, if you want to be a bit darker, a story of animals taking back the earth after humans have made themselves go extinct. Apparently I can’t leave a sweet and gentle book alone.

Of course, not having read the book has not stopped me from making Toad of Toad Hall and “mucking about in boats” references all my life, and why should it. Also, I like that this book comes straight out of the gate with a strong anti-cleaning stance. The entire friendship that powers the book exists because Mole ditches spring cleaning to go out for a walk, and that’s how he meets Rat in the first place. And isn’t that true: if you stay in and clean your house, you’ll have a lovely clean house but no friends. Although I guess you might lose the friends when you invite them over and they see that you live in a dumpster. Relatedly, uhhhh… no one come over for a little while.

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

You get an extra one5 this month, for the reason of everything had a good argument for being included, and I’m tired. Besides, the last two months each had one song that couldn’t make it to the end-of-year playlist due to not being available on Spotify, so I guess I’m making up for it here.

I included this one because on the road to, apparently, totally packing it up6, my little peripheral cd player kept playing only the first song of the album I was listening to, which was this one. So this one makes the list on quantity. Not that it isn’t good! I sing that chorus all the time!

And now, the first one that was in my head due to the work in-house radio station. Someone was doing a set based on fruit, and while I suggested this Tangerine, the tangerine-related song I didn’t think of in time and am kicking myself over is this one:

Second one from the radio station! As I said at the time, I love a breakup song that’s very “get out of my face forever,” and this is, of course, a bop for the ages. Anyone who doesn’t join in on the “ooh-ooh-ooh”s is questionable, by the way.

And, finally, the other song that made it in on sheer volume (in the sense that there was a lot of it, not that the song was especially loud). Matt has reorganized his cd shelves chronologically and we just started working our way through them. There’s been a fair bit of Queen so far, and I feel like this song occurs at least 3 times across at least 2 albums.

This month’s top 5: Winter Olympics sports I could do (poorly) or at least not die instantly

Okay, yes, I did spend several minutes earlier excoriating the Olympics and sports organizations in general for being miserable for their athletes, but look: I still want to think about what if I was good at something. And at the moment I am medium at best at one of these, but at least nothing here would be IMMEDIATELY FATAL to me, unlike, say, ski jumping.

1. I can skate (some) - it doesn’t really translate from quad skates, but it’s better than having nothing at all, so I suppose I could learn how to play hockey. Badly. Let us not fail to stress here that what I would be primarily doing in every category would be sucking ass.

2. In a similar vein, although much MUCH less possible, I feel like speed skating would not be totally unthinkable. Look, they also keep all their muscles in their legs, like me! They just have way more of them! I am ignoring my fundamental slowness of running here and handwaving myself an ability to go fast when ice is involved, but I feel like I could learn to haul ass around a track on skates. Also, not for nothing but when I used to (roller)skate, my crossovers were really good, and I feel like that would be useful.

3. I do know how to ski and I’m decent at it, and I can go moderately fast (not racing speeds, but I could probably work up to it). I don’t have the kind of beautiful technique where people sigh as I go past them on my way down the hill, but I’m sure there’s a place for “doesn’t look pretty but gets the job done.” This is truly my most realistic option.

4. I’ve been reminded that “lead weight in the back of a bobsled” is an option, and if there’s a whole team all pushing together I can get away with being the slowest and weakest one, whose main (only) contribution is mass. Then again, all that traumatic brain injury kind of makes me side-eye it.

5. And, obviously, curling.

Okay, time for me to sign off with a note that it’s possible to oppose war and militarism everywhere while still supporting the Ukrainians who are defending themselves against the Russian invasion (this tweet says it quite succinctly, I think). And it’s possible to want to help the people displaced by this war while not turning into a steaming racist vis-a-vis all the other people displaced by wars and/or having their countries invaded all over the world. No one should be forced from their homes, and everyone who is should receive ample aid, assistance, and welcome.