#54: Northern Spites

Actual updates

Oh, like you’ve never stopped in your tracks coming back in from taking the trash out one night and just stood on your porch and cried at the moon in the rain. Sure.

But it’s actually a different feature of the night sky I want to talk about; no disrespect to the moon¹, of course!

Earlyish in the month, a major solar storm occurred, resulting in a solar wind that reached Earth and interacted with our magnetic field, resulting in a class G5 geomagnetic storm², which manifested as impressive auroras visible surprisingly far south, including right here.

For everyone else.

I didn’t see anything, from any direction, although I didn’t go outside and stand on a stump in the yard, which is how we have a “view,” and I didn’t walk over to the street that runs up and over the hill we live on to peer out between houses and get an actual view (which might or might not have been in strictly the right direction, but I’d have a much broader field of vision). But I couldn’t get even a hint of anything from the windows, and I didn’t do the phone trick (the trick is literally “take a picture of it with your phone”) because I thought there would be a little bit of colour visible to the naked eye. And there was, for some folks, I believe! But there was more when they would take a picture.

This shouldn’t have bothered me much. This shouldn’t really have bothered me at all, because we’re only a few years into the 11-year solar cycle and not at its peak yet (probably), and presumably I’ll get another chance. But the thing is this. This is the thing: it’s not the first time this has happened to me.

Once upon a time, I went up north, to a place where the aurora is not at all uncommon and definitely not something you’d make a big fuss over. I was 10, my brother was 7, and with our parents, we went up to my aunt and uncle’s lodge in the Northwest Territories. If you click through, by the way, you’ll see exactly what it was like, even 30+ years on (I mean, those photos are not new, but they’re not that old either). So: beautiful! Austere! Dramatic! And, not for nothing, the lodge is on a bit of a hill in the middle of the largely flat MacKenzie Mountain Barrens, so it’s got a nearly 360° view of the surrounding area… and of the sky.

We were up there for, I want to say, a week³? And one morning, everyone was talking at breakfast about the beautiful northern lights they saw the night before. Shifting, shimmering colours, big sweeps and swags of light, the full show. Our family’s reaction was pretty much to blink blankly at them; we had slept like logs all night long and knew nothing about any celestial light show. Oh, they said, we didn’t want to wake you, since you’ve got two small kids and all.

Now, I don’t know if I gave them a piece of my 10-year-old mind - a thing I would definitely have done, let’s be honest - or if my parents rather more calmly said please do go ahead and wake us up if there’s another display, but the message was received and taken to heart, and they woke us up the next night.

And, okay, there were three white stripes across the middle of the sky - it looked like nothing so much as a chipmunk’s markings, I remember thinking - and it was impressive to us as people who had never seen it at all before (other than my dad, who spent some time up north with his brother in his younger days), but knowing that the night before had been really cool and this was colorless and motionless and a letdown by comparison… well. That was 32 years ago and I still remember every detail, if that tells you anything.

So I was disappointed to an outsized degree that I had once again missed the cool one, and it was worse this time because it was entirely within my control. No one told me I couldn’t go look at it; no one neglected to tell me about it (indeed I was shouting about it to all and sundry ahead of the event). I just didn’t try enough, and I paid the price.

And you are not mistaken: if age 10 was 32 years ago, that does mean my birthday has come and gone - my Meaning of Life birthday, my Life, the Universe, and Everything birthday. Enlightenment, surely, is at hand.

But I think I’m all set now. I’m birthdayed out. We don’t need to do any more of these.

Oh. And? Now the cat has a heart murmur.

What am I reading right now

I’ve never watched Spenser For Hire. Now. This might be because it was on when I was a little kid, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of a show a little kid would be watching. But I never watched it in the reruns I’m sure it had, either. Matt never watched it either, but he got a couple of Spenser books at the library book sale anyway, to see what all the fuss was about 40 years ago. Or, in the case of this particular book I’m just about to get to the juicy bit of, only 20 years ago. Yeah - apparently new Spenser books were still coming out as recently as 2004. Who knew.

So, this one is called Bad Business, and it starts out with Spenser getting hired by a rather offputting rich woman, to tail her husband, who she thinks is having an affair. Standard stuff. But it quickly becomes nonstandard: multiple PIs trailing multiple people, all connected by an energy-trading company and a radio host with a sleazy take on polyamory.

It’s fine as a detective story! I wish Robert B. Parker didn’t think having his characters do jokey racial stereotype voices was so funny, because he did it both in this book and the other one I read, and it’s off-putting. That seems to be the price of entry to these stories, though. That and noticing how Susan, Spenser’s girlfriend, is always barely eating and drinking. She nibbles, she tastes, she sips; she declares herself finished when she’s eaten one-third of her bagel half. A value isn’t explicitly applied to this behavior, but we’re told constantly how hot she is, and the connection is left up to the reader.

This book in particular really leans into the trappings-of-success thing - one character even lists out the puzzle pieces you have to put together to “have it all,” and it’s the right suits and cars and offices and a Montblanc pen, stuff like that. Seems old-fashioned, even for 2004. Maybe I just don’t hang around the right (“right”) people, but I’m very glad I don’t know anyone who marks success that way.

There is one thing, though, about these Spenser books. I don’t actually want to take up smoking, but the way authors who know their way around a cigarette describe smoking? It kind of makes me want to start smoking. God, they kill you but they’re poetry on the way there, huh? For another, equally good, take on describing smoking, have a listen to Ivan Coyote’s story “Weak Nine.”

Some links

A few artists lived in a lunar pod simulator to get the idea of how they would make art on the moon, which is great - this article presupposes a lunar colonization project, which is a big jump, though. But we should definitely be making art in space! Of course it will be different than art made on Earth! I’m excited to find out how! And this also reminds me to punch up that little space story I wrote and submit it to another outlet. Inside the Movement to Bring the Arts to Outer Space

Do you like fonts? Do you like archaeology? Do you like people having a snit with their business partner and chucking their proprietary typeface into a river? This article is for you! Remnants of a Legendary Typeface Have Been Rescued from the River Thames

Okay, the title here gives you a lot. But the actual story is even crazier, if you can believe that. The California Man Who Hid for 6 Months in a Secret Room Inside Circuit City

You ever think about how planes were getting hijacked all the time in the 70s? Anyway, this one is particularly startling - people firing guns! inside a pressurized environment!! and one of the guns might have been smuggled onboard in someone’s hair! - and the title is right, I had never heard about it. Anatomy of an Absolutely Wild 1970s Hijacking You’ve Never Heard Of

If you’d like to distract yourself from the other existential threats we have to worry about⁴, how about some good old nuclear war? 72 Minutes Until the End of the World?

This one’s from 1996 but it’s still interesting, especially in light of what has changed and what hasn’t. Apparently there’s a huge garbage pile at a dump outside of Miami, big enough to have been dubbed Mt. Trashmore, and this writer climbed it. Our Garbage, Ourselves

This article thinks it is cool because of the technology used to salvage ships, but it’s actually cool because it’s about the SS Pacific sinking, a ship that had already sunk once, but got revived because there was gold to carry around - and about the Graveyard of the Pacific, a truly bitchin name for a treacherous stretch of water that STILL sinks boats today. Seattle’s High-Tech Treasure Hunters

More shipwrecks! This article is hilarious because the whole premise is “Herodotos DID SAY this was here, but he made so much shit up that we didn’t believe him.” Nile Shipwreck Discovery Proves Herodotos Right - After 2469 Years

Can you believe I have a second “long-lost but now found” article that also has to do with the Nile? Well, I do! Found at Last: Long-Lost Branch of the Nile That Ran Beside the Pyramids

One more on the boat front! And this one’s about my friends the orcas! The salmon hat trend was the one that really killed me, but it’s hysterical that they’ll give up on trends when the grownups start doing them. The Facebook of the sea, if you will. Orcas Aren’t Attacking Boats - They’re Just Playful Teens, Scientists Say

Ok, as far as the question posed by the article title, we all know why, but this raises the point that I love to make around friends whose social circles are mostly cisgender, which is: cis people get gender-affirming care all the time and nobody even thinks about it. Plastic surgery! Hair replacement! You could make a case for getting your lashes done or even your hair. It makes you feel better in your body! It makes your body match the way you’re meant to look and the way you think of yourself! It’s just that it affirms the gender you were assigned at birth, rather than a different one. Gender-Affirming Care Gave Me a Life I Love. Why Do Pundits See It as a Tragedy?

Can you imagine renovating your bathroom and finding a stash of old love letters hidden in the wall? And not just love letters. SCANDALOUS love letters! You’re not going to hide your love letters between yourself and your spouse of 50 years in a wall, after all! Hidden Letters Reveal Love, Lust, Scandal in 1920s Baltimore Society

There’s a line in here that I read as low-key disparagement of socialized medicine, since the young man with the case that’s central to this article is Canadian, but propaganda aside, there’s no denying that these scientists are really cool and doing incredibly impressive work. Which is why it’s insane that their funding is in question. Meet the NIH Detectives Cracking Medicine’s Toughest Cases

I did not realize that as a country we’re basically doing “deregulation, but for college admissions,” but as usual that has not made anything better. Some of this makes me want to scream. I don’t want to clip the wings on Hap’s dreams or anything but I sure hope he’s into going to a Canadian school. This is Peak College Admissions Insanity

“When it’s on the internet, it’s there forever” is not really true, it turns out - well, it’s still possible to be true, so still be smart online, but: websites die and disappear every day, and the Wayback Machine can only do so much. Just the other day I was making a recipe I saved from a blog back in the early 2000s (in my food blogging era I kept a text doc of all the recipes I wanted to try sometime), and one measurement was missing: “1/2” olive oil? Half a what of olive oil? So I tried to visit the site I saved it from, but it was gone. Don’t worry, my salad dressing turned out fine, but that’s a mundane example - there are much more serious ones! When Online Content Disappears

Similar, related, but not quite the same. Also, horrifying! What Happens When a Romance Author Gets Locked Out of Google Docs

This could be me, except I wouldn’t get published in the Paris Review about it. Bad Dinner Guest

This article sent me into a lengthy Wikipedia rabbithole that culminated - so far! - in the stellar evolution page, which I’m still in the middle of. If that isn’t the mark of a successful article, what is? When Was Earth Last Struck by a Supernova?

Oh! Well. That sounds fine. Ant Mega-Colony Takes Over World

THIS is NEAT. I had no idea there was a Barbie typewriter that could be used to do cryptography! In my youth I was very much Too Cool™ for Barbie - I had two, both bought for me by aunts - so I would never have tried to get my hands on this. Now it sounds like I should have. The Barbie Typewriter: Cracking Codes in Trademarked Pink

Hate this, though. I don’t care about massive runaway success, but if you go to the effort of writing a whole-ass book, I’d imagine you want more than just your closest friends reading it. Although I take issue with the title, because it’s more like why are debut novels failing to be launched. Nowhere in the article is it implied that this is the books’ fault! Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?

This seems kind of promising, though? It’s technologies like this that we actually need to pour money into, not The Plagiarism Machine That Is Also Always Wrong. I don’t know if “interestingengineering.com” is a reliable source, but even if this isn’t true, it’s the kind of thing we should be looking into: ways to reclaim the waste products and effluents from these polluting industries and turn them into something useful, to both create the thing and close the waste loop. Scientists Just Turned Toxic Red Mud into CO2-Free Iron

Another kind of inaccurate title - there will explicitly still be batteries, but they will be different, and they will be powered differently, and that’s kind of the point. But it’s very neat, and it calls back to the exciting and rather undersung fact that we’re seeing a huge increase in solar power generation even right now - and yes India is seeing heatwave temperatures that aren’t survivable to human life, so I don’t mean to be hope-poisoned here, but it’s possible that we’re making the kinds of changes that could combat that level of heat in the future. How “World-Changing” Solar Tech Could Mean the Death of Batteries

Colorized photos and their impact on society! Ok, bear with me here, I’m going to do a little parallelling. As an art form, they’re undeniably neat! I like looking at them! But part of their job was to sell “Americans” (i.e., white settlers) on America, specifically the “West,” as a place they should go - to visit or to inhabit. So I feel very similarly with these as I do to the Group of Seven⁵ in Canada: as art, I love them, but as part of the project to romanticize an idea of the land as empty, uninhabited, and available, I feel pretty iffy about them. In Living Color: The Forgotten 19th-Century Photo Technology that Romanticized America

This stove is AMAZING. The Marvellous Reappearing Act of the 1960s Frigidaire Flair Stovetop

Wait, is everyone Find-My-ing everyone they know all the time? That’s creepy as hell, don’t replicate the surveillance state in your personal relationships! Obviously if you think your sweetie is running around on you, that’s one way to find out, and if you’re going to be out alone and want your friend to keep tabs on you, that makes sense, but everybody, all the time? I am begging everyone to get a grip. I Know Where You Were Last Night

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

This is a good title; it’s not the heaviest thing this band has to offer, but it’s still solid. Had no idea about these cats until just recently.

And THIS is a REALLY good title (it’s cut off, but it’s “You Have Nothing to Lose Except Your Arms and Legs”). This is nothing like the album version, because the album version isn’t played acoustic in a park. You’ll get the original on the year-end playlist, though.

I cannot help singing that one chorus as “I have a friend who sleeps with danger” (instead of “with mercy”) because I have brain poisoning, but this song is actually not at all about the cult classic film Mother, May I Sleep With Danger, surprisingly enough. The more you know.

This month’s top 5: Reasons to give up on having birthdays

1. It feels kind of full of oneself to expect other people to make a fuss

2. Having to figure out what to do and what to eat that will still work for everyone else is a huge amount of pressure

3. Also, takes the pressure off anyone else who would have thought they needed to buy a present

4. Can’t be let down if there’s no down to let

5. For me especially, my birthday is in the middle of a slew of event-type days, and that helps space out the calendar more if we remove it

Ok, we’re wrapping this issue up with a donation match request and offer! I got this idea from my fantastic friend Scherezade, who did the same over Instagram: if you donate to one of the fundraisers on this vetted list of GoFundMes for families in Gaza, collected by Operation Olive Branch, and send me the receipt (and a link to which fundraiser it is, there are tons), I will match it. I can match up to $300, let’s see ‘em!

_{1 which i’m sure reads this. like, no one tell the moon, i wouldn’t want her to get offended. i need to become normal}

_{2 Big.}

_{3 and spent some time afterwards tootling around the Yukon and into Alaska before heading back home - ah, the luxury of having a parent with a school-year schedule}

_{4 personally, mine are climate apocalypse, not-at-all-creeping fascism/criminalization of dissent, and genocide, but your set may vary, there’s plenty to worry about}

_{5 wikipedia link to the Group of Seven page so as not to confuse the link to the actual article}