this week i

concluded baroness von sketch show.  tommy kha's return to sender worth a browse.  marcie baked pear pie, david planed a cutting board

drove to sisters for volcanic obsidian, crater lake for oregonian propensity for uncreative names, mount shasta for cascadia's southern terminus

 

read luster by raven leilani

there is a painting that i love by artemisia gentileschi, judith slaying holofernes.  in it, two women are decapitating a man.  they hold him down as he struggles to push away the blade.  it is a brutal, tenebrist masterpiece, drenched in carotid blood.  gentileschi painted it after her mentor, agostino tassi, was convicted of her rape.  as i am working on a piece inspired by this painting, my father dies.  i bury him next to my mother, and for weeks i don't sleep and the mice eat all my fruit.  mark sends his condolences in a card, but then he stops returning my calls.  he sends the drawings i left at his house in an envelope simply labelled stuff, and i leave him some voicemails that mostly boil down to him being a hack who only draws four-fingered hands, to how he is an impossible dweeb who needs to be kept away from women and shot into space, and a few times, yes, i stand in front of his house in the middle of the night.  i draft some emails i don't send and wander the halls of the office with all the things i want to say to his face.  but when i see him now, when i go back into the stairwell next to kevin's office and see how mark has remained unchanged, how he is flanked by two women and proceeding gaily about his life, i lose my nerve

i feel rebecca reassessing my presence in their house.  while i have learned how to use a mop and maintained the appearance of tutoring their daughter in the pineapple method and everything else african american 101, my resume has been revised so frequently that my career in publishing and soft cheese has become a career in scientific journalism, the zebrafish trials at sloan kettering surprisingly easy to riff about over the phone, though not as easy in person when the interviewer, a distant relation of jonas salk, wants to talk about the moral implications of giving mice cocaine.  during my interview with cvs, i try to be convincing in my assurance that pointing young adults in the direction of plan b has always been a part of my five-year plan, but after the interview i go to the parking lot to drink some cough syrup and notice one of the managers watching me from his car

i ask him if something is wrong, and he hoists me up and takes me from behind as a sleepy radio voice is introducing "come on eileen."  you have nowhere else to go, he says.  he asks me to say it back to him

the cadavers in rembrandt's paintings were all criminals.  the subjects are really the learned men around the corpse

9/2

this week i

visited portland et al

 

read the master switch by tim wu

in this way, the bbc would for decades be spared the great controversy over advertising, which would consume and ultimately shape american radio.  the bbc, as reith tells in his memoir, "is not out to make money for the sake of making money."  the company's sustaining revenues came from the sale of licenses to receive broadcasts (ten shillings) and, in the early days, a royalty fee added to the price of radio sets.  as for the american revenue model, the first parliamentary committee to consider radio banned advertising on the basis that it might "lower the standard" - though no explanation was given of how mention of tinned meat might have this effect

 founder's myopia

 those who have watched the peculiar and heathen ways of the bell monopoly know that it is, without doubt or question, the most conscienceless organization in the united states, compared to which the gigantic standard oil trust is a mere kindergarten of devious financial and industrial devices

 in total, bell would collect seven nobel prizes, more than any other corporate laboratory, including one awarded in 1956 for its most famous invention, the transistor, which made the computer possible.  other, more obscure bell creations are nevertheless dear to geeks, including unix and the c programming language

 eventually, a meal gets away even from kronos

 two (later three) networks defining the medium that would define america, offering programming aimed at the masses, homogeneous in sensibility, broadly drawn and unprovocative by design

 like the farmer who is dismayed by a tractor's lack of horses

 in 1956, elvis presley's appearance on the ed sullivan show attracted an unbelievable 83 percent of american tv households.  a broadcast of the musical cinderella in 1955 attracted 107 million viewers, nearly 60 percent of the entire u.s. population

 the homogeneous giant enterprises..by the 1990s, given way to a gang of octopuses owning properties diversified mainly across media industries, typically holding a film studio, cable networks, broadcast networks, publishing operations, perhaps a few theme parks

 in 2000, verizon appointed as its general counsel william barr, the former u.s. attorney general and one-time cia operative; his style was distinctive.  on one occasion, angered by an anti-bell vote cast by an fcc commissioner, barr cooly allowed "i want his balls in a jar"

 

8/26

this week i

met zora, scratched ruffles, ate paella.  before you think about anything else today, think about how our species might stabilize the natural world

can you imagine a situation where i would want one of your chisels?  like, that would have to be an apocalyptic situation.  a real chisel, not the chisel you used as a screwdriver when you were twelve

 

 

read..

(1) markets in future behavior

automated vacuum cleaners that try to make money on the side selling floor plans of their owners' apartments

you are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass

(2) like a stroke of calligraphy

the version we know best comes from hans christian andersen.  his rendering is more heavy metal than ours: a group of young storks are taunted by a cruel child, so their stork mother tells them she knows the pond 'in which all little babies lie, waiting till the storks come...we will fetch a little baby brother or sister for each of the children who did not sing that naughty song.'  but for the cruel child 'there lies in the pond a little dead baby who has dreamed itself to death.  we will take it to the naughty boy, and he will cry because we have brought him a dead little brother.'  this bit of the story is left off greeting cards

in 1694 the scientist charles morton suggested in deadly earnest that the stork, along with the swallow and crane, wintered on the moon.  then, in 1822, a stork arrived in a german village with a thirty-inch spear in its neck.  the spear, metal-tipped, rising up through the bird's breast and out of the side of its neck, was identified as coming from central africa

(3) astrostrategy

 the masters of infinity

in the orbital plane shared by the earth and the moon, there are five lagrange points, where the combined gravity of the two bodies allows for objects to be suspended, relative to both, without using thrusters (which otherwise maintain a spacecraft or satellite's position in space)

controlling the mineral and energy resources of asteroids may also be an attractive prospect.  the entire mass of the asteroid belt is only around one thousandth of the mass of the earth, but around half of that is contained in just four large asteroids: ceres, vesta, pallas and hygiea.  unlike planets, asteroids have no atmosphere and much less energy is needed to lift materials off their surfaces.  in december, a japanese mission returned to earth with the first samples taken from below an asteroid's surface.  nations have fought plenty of wars over shitty little islands.  fighting over shitty little asteroids is not implausible

in space, linear distance is less important than the energy required to travel between two points.  thanks to the gravity wells formed by the planets, far more energy is required to travel from the earth to the moon than from the moon to mars - a distance 150 times greater

the soviet almaz space station was mounted with a machine gun

(4) brick and mortar

a recent paper in nature noted that in 2020 the weight of human-made stuff exceeded living biomass for the first time.  (it was just 3 per cent of biomass in 1900.)  while trees and other vegetation weigh in at around 900 gigatonnes, buildings, roads and other infrastructure add up to 1100 gt (animals contribute 4gt, half the weight of plastic on land and sea).  there is now more concrete in the world than any other man-made material.  after fossil fuels, it is the largest source of carbon dioxide, contributing 8 per cent of emissions, which puts it ahead of aviation and agriculture.  each of its ingredients has a calamitous footprint

(5) development aid

as the guyanese historian walter rodney wrote in how europe underdeveloped africa (1972), roads and railways were not constructed in the colonial period so that africans could visit their friends.  more important still, they were not laid down to facilitate internal trade in african commodities.  there were no roads connecting different colonies and different parts of the same colony in a manner that made sense with regard to africa's needs and development.  all roads and railways led down to the sea

the us never built a road unless its forces might one day travel along it

china extended overseas development credit of $462 billion, only slightly less than the $467 billion provided by the world bank in the same period

(6) shipping

if you're having a sweater shipped from the other side of the planet, the cost of shipping adds just a cent to the price

communication by cable was more pivotal to the maintenance of british economic and political power than railways or steamships because it stitched the internal indian information-gathering systems onto overseas networks and thus centralised the state's ability to collect strategic intelligence and expanded its capacity to project state power

if you lined up the containers on one of those ships in single file, they would stretch for ninety miles

(7) profound changes afoot

even more urgent and evident, though, is the potential impact that africa will have on the global future.  according to the united nations population division, the continent's population is growing more quickly than it ever has.  today there are approximately 1.4 billion africans.  by 2050 that number will nearly double to 2.5 billion.  and by century's end, according to the un's median projection, there will be 4.4 billion africans - well more than the combined populations of china and india today.

to a degree few foreign policy thinkers seem focuesd on, this will have an impact on the environment and climate change, migration, conflict, global demand for goods and services, and the contest between democracy and authoritarianism.  this all arguably makes africa's political and economic course the central human story of the century, and one that the us has a profound and all but unrecognized interest in

8/19