Driving home from Durham last Tuesday, I turned on my radio and heard the end of a riveting poem that seemed to describe many of my feelings about (not) having children.
It took a surprising amount of searching, but I found it on 1A. It’s surprising because this wasn’t in the 1A podcast, nor did a search of the website find it. I had to use Google to search the site for me, but I found it. It took some tricks to finally download the audio fie so that I could save it, but I succeeded. Then I extracted the section with the poem. (The whole interview is wonderful and should be listened to.)
The Reddit antinatalism channel has taken notice of this poem. I used their transcription to find the words. What’s written below is what I think I heard on 1A although the Reddit post has two additional lines.
Against Progeny
Period. Already, at last I complete my sentence & name myself the end
of me & any me that might be mirror drunk or legacy-sick enough to ask
for seconds or thirds. I bind this body against the wish to multi
ply my selves into an army of shoulda beens, a swarm of still might-bes.
I am the axe resting against this tree. here where the sea has already laid
claim to the coast and the fault lines have begun to grin. I want to quit
while I’m still ahead of all the hurts that come next: someone with my blues
in their brain or my dark circling their eyes, desperate to know why
Hard times make strong people, strong people make good times, and good times make weak people
- Xabier Ormaetxea, a dark-haired twenty-seven-year-old engineer at Spain’s amazing Mondragon worker-owned co-öperative. He meant that the co-öp spirit had been stronger in the mid-twentieth century, when Spain was haunted by the spectres of Franco and war.
Our daughter knows how hard I’ve searched for a good checklist for tasks like shopping, etc. Today she sent me this image, found on Twitter:
I decided to explain how I have finally made a shopping list that I find usable.
My primary gripe with checklist programs is that AFAIK the way you use them is to add an item to a list. When you check it off, it simply disappears. As a result, I have to write it again the next time I want the item. I want a permanent list whose items I can check when I need them and then check again when I no longer need them.
Checking an item to show I need it and again to show that I don’t need it is certainly possible but requires more programming than I feel like doing.
So my solution is to think this way, checking items that I don’t need:
need to buy
don’t need to buy
checked
√
unchecked
√
I’ve used Obsidian - my new tech obsession - to make a shopping list that works on my phone and computer; they are synced:
The table on the right contains everything that I might want to buy. Every item that I don’t need is checked (that’s the one unintuitive thing about this system). If I need, say, Jura Scotch, I uncheck it. It will then appear in the need-to-buy window on the left. Note that it appears both in the complete list and in the alcohol list. If I check Jura Scotch in either list, it disappears from both lists, but of course it is still in the no-need-to-buy list, now checked. You can see how I use tags to classify things, etc. The programming involved is pretty easy. For example, the alcohol list looks like this under the dashboard:
```tasks
not done
tag include #shopping
tag include #alcohol
sort by description
```
And since Jura Scotch has a #alcohol tag, it is selected by this query when unchecked.
Birdseye introduced the first line of frozen foods at a retail store in Springfield, Mass., on March 6, 1930.
Frozen foods were necessary during WWII because metal cans were scarce.
After the war, the frozen food industry begins to spiral downward as consumers return to purchasing items that are no longer being rationed — frozen foods were merely a temporary, affordable substitute, not a desired purchase. However, the upcoming re-introduction of orange juice concentrate will change the perceptions of consumers.
There is no simple moment when frozen foods suddenly became available and popular, but if you look at the timeline you will see that they really came into their own in the mid to late 1940s. I bet the metal shopping list was made around that time.
What’s missing
My wife pointed out the surprising fact that the list doesn’t contain cigarettes! I guess that ciggies are simply not something smokers are likely to forget, especially since supermarkets conveniently placed them at the checkout counters. For our convenience naturally.
This followup shows how to use the Internet’s resources to dig deeper into the history of this device.
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré « L’alphabet de l’ouest africain »
MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, has an exhibit of the work of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Côte d’Ivoire, 1923–2014.
MOMA’s introductory text in the gallery
Born in 1923 in Zéprégühé in western Côte d’Ivoire, Bouabré started his career as a clerk and translator in the French colonial administration. On March 11, 1948, he experienced a transcendental vision that prompted him to seek divine truths in nature and to interpret his immediate and wider surroundings-first through writing and eventually through visual art. From the late 1970s until his death in 2014, he created hundreds of colorful drawings on postcard-size pieces of cardboard salvaged from his neighborhood in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s economic capital. Distinctive in style, these works feature animated figures and abstracted elements enclosed within hand-drawn frames, which themselves contain text describing the subject or content of the drawings. Bouabré once said that he used writing “to explain what I’ve drawn…. Writing is what immortalizes.”
What bothers me about this is the impression it gives me that the amazing images that fill the first room and some of the second are primarily “colorful drawings” with borders of explanatory writing. In other words they see him as making art.
The exhibit displayed several hundred postcard-sized images consisting of drawings surrounded by writing in the “frame”. For example, this card labeled « BI »
At first, I thought this was simply an image by someone who rather fanatically drew whatever struck his fancy. Then I wandered over to one of the nearby computers and saw this eye-opening image of « BI »
Suddenly, without adequate help from the museum, it became clear that these images are mnemonic devices for learning Bruly’s extremely complex syllabic writing system.
The first section of « l’Alphabet » has a long piece of writing in French with Bruly’s syllabic representation above:
Notice how he even represents the liaison sounds of French by writing « (ZÔ) » and « (ZA) ». These symbols are easy to find in Bruly’s book:
The nice thing about a syllabic writing system is that you can represent so many languages with it. The downside is the large number of symbols needed to represent the many sounds of all the languages in West Africa, including French.
Klein’s two concluding paragraphs should be enough to entice you to read the whole article.
I want to say this as clearly as I can: [Rachel] Carson and Nader and those who followed them were, in important respects, right. The bills they helped pass — from the Clean Air Act to the National Environmental Policy Act — were passed for good reason and have succeeded brilliantly in many of their goals. That it’s easy to breathe the air in Los Angeles [and the Bay Area] today is their legacy, and they should be honored for it.
But as so often happens, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Processes meant to promote citizen involvement have themselves been captured by corporate interests and rich NIMBYs. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. “It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again,” Sabin writes.
I am a little surprised that Klein doesn’t mention how the Vietnam War, which has a lot of liberal fingerprints on it, also contributed to distrust of government.
As everyone knows, we Republicans don’t believe facts.
So I was very happy when I found this beautiful visualization of monthly global temperature anomalies between the years 1880-2021 based on the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP v4).
In other words, the facts show that Earth has been warming, especially in recent years.
