This weekend we were at St Tikhon’s Monastery in PA, whose cemetery hosts our grave plots and headstone (but not us, yet). Looking upon your own grave is a bracing exercise.
I had a doctor’s appointment today, realized that I’d never before seen my doctor without a mask, and that my mental image of her had been quite wrong. If she had the same experience of me, she didn’t say.
I’m thinking of going 100% sourdough for my (limited) bread making. It’s not that I especially prefer sourdough bread, just that the process feels more primal.
“The giving of thanks is not a moral activity: like communion, it is a mode of existence.”
And: “His death is not a payment within a world of payments … It is rather the trampling down of the whole world of payments.”
I enjoyed this Swiftian piece proposing that Harvard, the endowment fund, sell off its increasingly troublesome “university unit” to Purdue, which has shown that it can manage an institution of higher learning. @ReaderJohn
Attn @Miraz et al.: Foreign interference in NZ bird election. On the rigged election of the Puteketeke as Bird of the Century. .
Lovely bird; I have no problem with its winning.
Side note: This BBC article is the first I’ve seen to refer to That Site as just “X”, not “X (formerly known as Twitter)”
Uh oh, six books requested from the library. If they all show up at once…
The importance of physical media: If you own a DVD copy of Martin Scorsese’s fine Kundun, don’t lose it. The Chinese government got Disney to stop distributing or showing it years ago. You won’t see it on streaming media. You won’t find it on Amazon. An important work by a major artist can be disappeared without much trouble. We’re fortunate that our public library has a copy, which we’ve watched a couple of times.
We just updated our wills. Very simple, a couple of pages. As for bequests, donations, etc. we try to follow the maxim of the late Larry Burkett: Do your givin’ while you’re livin’ so you’re knowin’ where it’s goin’.
I’m reading The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. Yes, that was his real name. He’s something of a cult figure who died by suicide aged 26. He was a West Virginia native and all his stories are set in that world. Reading them makes me realize that though I grew up in New Jersey and now live in New York, I spent more of my life - more than 20 years - in the Ohio Valley, than anywhere else, so I feel sort of at home in the stories.
Post about a newly-recognized American saint
Craig Mod reflects on peace in his current “pop up newsletter”. Intense. I was moved.
I think you have to subscribe to the newsletter to read it. The episode is “Day 4: Tachikawa to Ome”.
Kevin Williamson lets loose with “Atheism needs better defenders.” I stopped reading Dawkins & Harris after they kept making silly elementary errors about their chosen prey. Read Hitchens a while longer because he was at least an entertaining writer.
Do you have a “filler book”? I often have a long novel going, one that I’m happy to drop to read something else, then return to. Right now I’m re-reading Tom Jones and Septology, and have no qualms about putting either aside when something else comes along. I know I’ll get back to them, enjoy them, and eventually finish them
Blog post: Kitezh.
Our low-FODMAP adventure has us consuming a lot more corn. Made arepas for the first time. Tasty!
From @ayjay on kids and social media:
My guess is that parents who continue to provide smartphones for their kids are, epistemically speaking, indistinguishable from those who declare that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. They cannot now back down; they have made themselves invincibly ignorant. Their sunk costs are just too great for them to consider evidence. They’ll keep doing what they’re doing, no matter the suffering their children undergo.
From @ayjay on kids and social media:
My guess is that parents who continue to provide smartphones for their kids are, epistemically speaking, indistinguishable from those who declare that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. They cannot now back down; they have made themselves invincibly ignorant. Their sunk costs are just too great for them to consider evidence. They’ll keep doing what they’re doing, no matter the suffering their children undergo.
I’d welcome recommendations of a good tabletop Bluetooth non-smart speaker. My new laptop’s sound is very tinny .
In 2021 Google spent $26 billion to be the default search engine on various platforms; of that, $18 billion went to Apple. Our personal data must be worth a lot of money.
A little post with a caution about “online Orthodoxy”, and online religion in general. Executive summary: Just Don’t.
One of us was prescribed a FODMAP diet, so things are pretty different in the kitchen. We eat mostly vegetarian, so meal prep usually means working outward from a base of pasta and/or beans. No wheat, no beans allowed! I’m trying to see it as a good spur to creativity in the kitchen.
Finished Privacy is Power by Carissa Veliz. Glad I don’t own any “smart” devices (watch, speakers, bed, etc.) so I don’t have to throw them out the window.
Q: If you were donating a Windows laptop, would you just follow the instructions to wipe the hard drive? Or would you take more severe measures? Some say the only safe thing is to remove and destroy the drive. But then who would want the laptop?
We watched Asteroid City. More than with other Wes Anderson movies, we came away feeling that we need to come back to it and work out some of its depths. As the main character says, “I still don’t understand this play.”