⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

“Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

PAMPHLET NUMBER FOUR: “LOVE”

The word “love” can mean a lot of things, but there’s not enough room in this little letter to cover more than a few, or even more than one: the feeling of great affection between two individuals. That’s my definition, not a dictionary’s.

THE EXTEMPORANEUM

Romantic love

Love is a material event. It is the collusion of chemicals, neurons and glands. Its purpose is to drop a person’s emotional defenses and push that person toward a different person. Ideally, this target of affection experiences a concurrent material event in their bodies, and this shared experience makes them want to do things like rub their excretory organs together.

If you can keep your hormones out of it, then you can imagine how objectively disgusting the act of sexual intercourse is. Just take a moment and imagine yourself as an alien observing humans having sex. It’s gross. It’s messy. In our western culture, where even the sight of a female nipple is off-putting, we are willing to take huge personal risks (social, cultural, physical) to toss all of that social conditioning aside and throw our naked bodies at each other.

The many risks in allowing ourselves to be so vulnerable to another person are mitigated somewhat by a vetting process called “dating,” and it is terrible. Every human who has reached his 39th year, like your humble author, without a permanent partner has contemplated arranged marriages with the whimsy that people in arranged marriages probably have for the freedom to date anybody they like.

First, you have to find somebody and then you have to impress them and then you have to keep impressing them until your neurotransmitters velcro together and it hurts more to lose each other than it does to keep the other around. If that reads as cynical to you, you’ve never dated in your late 30s, on the internet.

Internet dating

Back when I started internet dating, there weren’t many options. The big name was Match.com, but that’s where all the old people went. Savvy people like me had The Onion personal ads [archive.org], which didn’t have anything to do with the satirical news site but was part of a larger personal ad network with footprints on edgier websites like nerve.com. People my age who have been married and missed out on the joys of internet dating might not even be aware of the subtle rules and mores that have emerged from that ecosystem, so here are a couple:

• Cultural norms are alive and well. Although there are many exceptions, the general rules of in-person dating are the same. One might imagine that the internet is the great equalizer, with men and women connecting in equal measure. This is not the case. Men cast wide nets and send messages to many women at once, and women have to pick through the morass and choose the men they’ll write back to. The onus is still on the man to make first moves. The result of this is the title of my future book on internet dating, You’re Not the One He Picked, You’re the One Who Said Yes. A real world equivalent would be a man going to every woman in a crowded bar and asking for her number until one of them says yes. Maybe he’ll get lucky and his first choice will express interest. This is very unlikely. He will then go down his list of most desirable women in the bar and ask for their numbers until one of them says yes. She wasn’t his first choice, she was the one who said yes.

• One photo is all that matters. You can write a bunch of paragraphs about how great you are, but nobody will read them. Okay, somebody might read them, but not until they’ve looked at your photo and decided that you’re attractive enough to investigate more. You’ve probably heard of Tinder — it’s the mainstay of modern internet dating. It only gives you one photograph of a person, a name, an age, and a snippet of information. Rejecting or accepting a person is as easy as swiping their photographs in one direction or the other (left for no, right for yes). Imagine swiping right on every person you see and having no matches. That means nobody swiped right on you. For an already fragile self-image, Tinder is an unforgiving wasteland.

There are innumerable factors that go into whether people are attracted to each other. With higher cognition comes higher awareness comes higher standards. Women are fully aware of the risks of allowing a man into their intimate areas (both emotional and physical), so they have to be picky. One species that doesn’t have to worry about so many variables in their desirability has a different romantic burden: they have to be good artists.

Bowerbirds

Birds are weird, man. Science fiction has speculated (it must have been a person making those speculations, but I can’t remember his or her name) that birds could develop human-like intelligence if given free evolutionary reign and a dozen or so more million more years. They’re constantly surprising us with their intelligence and guile, two traits that would likely increase as the pressures of natural selection winnowed the dumb from the less-dumb. The ascendence of humans are evidence enough of this evolutionary preference. See, also: birds are bipedal, dextrous, and already show a penchant for tool use. Evolution has made stranger things than smart birds, it also made birds that do this:

That’s a male bowerbird’s bower, constructed for only one purpose: to attract females. Everything you see there was picked by the bird who built it and not one of those choices was random. Lest you think every bower looks the same, look at this diversity:

Each item is placed with intent and precision and every single bower is unique. Different species of bowerbird make different kinds of bowers. The dome-type, above, and the “avenue” type, below:

Each species prefers different kinds and colors of objects, but some have been observed tailoring their bowers to the preferences of the females they’re trying to attract.

This isn’t just a mating ritual, this is art.

There is no concrete consensus about why bowerbirds do this, but some speculate that it’s an externalization of display plumage. While peacocks, for instance, use their massive, colorful feathers to attract mates, bowerbirds evolved the same predilection to attract females using colorful displays but build them instead of grow them.

Not all art has a purpose. Some definitions of art include its inherent lack of functional usefulness, but maybe we can learn something from the bowerbirds. Some artists are in it for the sex (this is especially true if we include musicians), but self-expression is a way of displaying plumage we make rather than plumage we grow. There’s no point to making art that nobody sees. We make art to announce ourselves, to plant our flag into the ground and claim this space, this time, for us. I made this, now look at it.

Bowerbirds don’t just make bowers to attract females. Some species just use the bower as an enticement for the real act: a dance [youtube.com]. Dancing is something humans do, too, and it sucks.

THE ANECDOTUS

I don’t dance but I still go to a dancing-based party every month called In Bed By Ten [facebook.com], which is run by my friends Matt and Kelly. It’s a great time, even though I don’t dance. I get to hang out with other people who aren’t dancing, and lots of my friends go. It’s a chance to see them and socialize. I also can’t go without getting flak about my not dancing. People try to get me to dance, and have been trying to get me to dance for my entire life, but it just isn’t going to happen. It’s not some game I play to get attention (which is a fair accusation). It’s not really even a choice. I don’t dance because I’m terrified of looking ridiculous and let’s face it, everybody looks ridiculous when they’re dancing (except maybe the professionals).

This fear of looking ridiculous has manifested itself my whole life in lots of unpleasant ways. Social anxiety is, ultimately, a fear of ridicule, and I’ve struggled with that since I was very young. I’m happy that I’ve been able to conquer most of my social anxiety, but the dancing thing remains. I just can’t let go of myself enough to dance.

THE RECOMMENDATAE

I don’t know what to recommend with this issue, so instead I’ll give you a link to my internet dating profile, which you can read at your own risk. Warning: sincerity.

Thank you for reading, my loves.

⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

“Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

PAMPHLET NUMBER THREE: “HUMAN”

A human being is one of a large group of known animals (and a much larger group of unknown animals) of the genus Homo. All human species are extinct except one: Homo sapiens. Everybody reading this pamphlet is presumed to be a member of this species at the time of writing.

THE EXTEMPORANEUM

Homo Sapiens

I just finished reading a book called Sapiens, which chronicles the history of our species of human. We are not the only humans to have walked on the earth — here’s a list of seven of others, a mere sampling of the probable dozens of our cousins who died before we got to know them. We are unique among them simply because we survived.

Why we survived is a puzzle of history, but there are tons of theories, most of which agree on the how, if not the why. About 40,000 years ago, humans experienced a cognitive revolution, a fancy term for a simple idea: ideas. You can read more about that at the link, but the basic explanation for human domination of the globe can be illustrated with a line.

Most species on the earth follow a straight line. They occupy their ecosystems and fall into a temporary equilibrium with the world around them until some external force knocks the ecosystem around and they survive or die off. It’s a predictable trajectory. It’s how life happened and keeps happening.

Homo sapiens were like that, too, for a hundred thousand years, until the cognitive revolution. Our straight line started zigging and zagging. We developed complex ideas and languages to communicate them. We developed cultures and religions and ideas like trade and currency. We started cooperating in larger numbers. Rather than adapt to our environment, we changed it.

Neanderthals, as a contrast, occupied Europe for at least a hundred thousand years and had no such zigging or zagging. They showed signs of rudimentary ritual practices and had access to fire, were much more suited to their environment than human beings, yet they became extinct while human beings thrived. For many years (and, in some cases, still today), scientific consensus was that humans had killed them off. This is consistent with human behavior.

Humans didn’t kill off everything, but most things didn’t survive us. If it was big and meaty, we killed it and ate it. If it was big and dangerous, we killed it and probably tried to eat it, too. Human migration around the world can be traced by mass extinctions of megafauna (a fancy term for big animals). Where people went, the giant sloths and woolly mammoths died.

But humans shared Europe with neanderthals for five thousand years, and there were a lot fewer of them than there were of us. If we had wanted to kill them, the neanderthals would have been dead. The prevailing theory now is that we probably made love to them, instead.

I find it comforting and inspiring that our ancestors didn’t slaughter every other human species. In all probability, we worked together, lived together. We only know this happened with neanderthals because we decoded their genome, and we can see their genes buried in our own DNA. Who knows how many other species of human we shared and cooperated with? We didn’t kill them, we carried them with us into the future.

My Genes

I have 268 neanderthal variants in my genes. Here’s what my chromosomes look like, with the Neanderthal variants are in blue:

Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had a common ancestor, and then came back together in Europe for a few thousand years. Modern Homo sapiens with a 100% European lineage, like me, all have Neanderthal DNA in them, but I have relatively little (I’m in the 30th percentile or so). How do I know that I’m 100% European?

I filled a little vial with my spit and mailed it to 23andMe and in a few months I found out that nobody on earth is more white than me:

These results are only accurate to about 500 years ago, and confirms what we Foremans already knew about ourselves (though it’s mostly my mother’s side — the Hazletts — that we know about, thanks to extensive genealogical research by my more recent ancestors). These results have no affect on my life at all, since I already knew what I was and where my people came from. There were no surprises in my genome, no secret dalliances with Persian princes (or Greek peasants, for that matter). I’m a little disappointed that my family history is an arrow-straight line from one corner of one continent to me, but that’s preferable to not having a line at all.

End of Line

I want this newsletter to be 75% informational and 25% personal, so indulge me: I don’t know if my line ends with me, and I’m not sure I mind either way.

My parents had six children, so it’s not as if the venerable Foreman line will end with our generation. My brothers and sister are breeding and they’re doing a great job with it. I have no illusions about the feeling of immortality often cited in making decedents. There’s no immortality to be had for us, and that’s okay.

Indulge me this, too: what was the first name of your great-grandfather? Do you know your grandmother’s middle name? These are things that can be found in public records, so no bonus points for finding out later. More to my point, do you know what your grandmother’s friends called her when she was little? Do you know what her favorite color was? What was her first crush like? How did your grandfather feel when he got his first job? These things are accessible, if they’re still alive or anybody currently alive ever asked them, but good luck answering those questions for your great-grandparents and don’t even bother with the great-greats. Even if that data was accessible, would you read it? Would you read all of the autobiographies of all of your great-great grandfathers? Be honest.

Unless you happen to be particularly noteworthy, you won’t be remembered for very long past your death. Did you write a book? It’ll go out of print. It’ll join a vast store of digital copies of books written by hundreds of thousands of people, likely so similar to others of its kind that nobody will read it. Did you paint a famous painting? If it’s in a national gallery or famous collection, maybe somebody will see it again. Were you ever such a famous movie star that you dominated an entire genre for decades and everybody in the country knew you by name, like William Hart? Good luck finding someone who knows him now. Another fun game is to ask a teenager to name more than one Beatle.

Imagine the burden of our information on our descendants. The autobiographies of their ancestors won’t be theoretical, they will be key-word searchable and accessible from anywhere on earth. And they’ll be exhaustively complete. We wonder what our great-great grandparents did for a living? Our great-great grandchildren will know who our friends were (Facebook), who we dated (Match, Okcupid), where we went (4square, Yelp) and have insight into our most intimate thoughts (email, blogs). More information is better, but when is it too much?

THE RECOMMENDATAE

Thinking about my descendants is a bit theoretical at this point in my life, as I sit alone in a coffee shop, single and loving the voluntary seclusion of living alone, kids aren’t near the top of my priorities list. Love and marriage are the standard western human precursors to kids, and my favorite love songs are not about the fire of lust but the warmth of comfortable domesticity. The gold standard of that kind of love song is This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads. If you know me and you know the same kind of music, then you already know about that, so what’s the point in a recommendation? Instead, I’ll recommend this video for a live version of another favorite Talking Heads song, Houses in Motion — this one has bonus choreography and Canadians wearing wigs:

THE ANECDOTUS

I first fully became aware of my species during early adolescence, but not for the reasons that implies. I grew up in the homogenous neighborhoods of suburban West Virginia. From kindergarten to high school, there was one black student in my class (though not the same one throughout). I did three things in that period of my life: 1) watched tv 2) stayed up late 3) wrote stories. Every Saturday night, after SNL, WTOV played Star Trek episodes.

Star Trek informed my idea of what it meant to be human, contrasting our species with others. To me, different races were Klingons and Romulans, not dark-skinned humans. There was no racism in our household. The topic was rarely even discussed. There’s some kind of privilege in that, but I think it helped me rather than hurt.

ADDENDUM APPROPRIATUS

We’re still finding little secrets in our genes, and I’m happy to report evidence that supports my thesis that humans cooperated with, and loved, strangers they encountered: a new non-sapiens human relative found in our genes.

thank you for reading, fellow human

⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

“Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

PAMPHLET NUMBER TWO: “LIGHT”

Light is one of those subjects that you can’t stop thinking about, once you let it in your head. Einstein couldn’t stop thinking about it, and thank goodness for that. Another person couldn’t stop thinking about it, either, a person who led a far more interesting life than his mathematical descendent (sorry, Al).

THE EXTEMPORANEUM

a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton invented an entirely new branch of mathematics before he was 30 (though Leibniz begged to differ). He came up with those laws of thermodynamic laws we all know and love, too, and a whole bunch of other things that are beyond the scope of this newsletter. Concordant with the theme of Pamphlet 2, Newton was also obsessed with the properties of light.

Newton walked the halls of Trinity College and littered the ground behind him with his optical discoveries: how prisms work, the intrinsic nature of colors, designs for new kinds of telescopes, how to grind better mirrors. Curious about the behavior of light against the human eye, he stuck a large needle between his ocular bone and his eyeball to see if how his vision changed when he squeezed it. No joke. He even diagrammed it:
Oh, and he was 24.

Isaac Newton was also a grade-a jerk with a thin skin. Another scientific luminary in a time when one could throw a stick in a random, filthy, street and hit three luminaries was Robert Hooke (he discovered the cell structure of living creatures and named them such), who made some mild criticisms of some of Newton’s discoveries. Newton’s reaction was to take his ball and go home, withdrawing from public discourse altogether.

Newton didn’t stay away from the public eye forever, and eventually, in his old(er) age, found himself in charge of the Royal Mint, which was plagued by the circulation of false coinage. He is credited with successfully prosecuting dozens of forgers by disguising himself and hanging out in pubs, gathering evidence and conquering counterfeiters like a 17th century Sherlock Holmes. How has this footnote of history never made it to a quirky BBC detective show? Speaking of whom…

Bartitsu

Sherlock Holmes was no mere fighter — he was a practitioner of an obscure “gentleman’s martial art” of the 1800s, a style of combat that utilized the gentleman’s walking stick and was always depicted in practice by a gentleman with a gentleman’s hat, tails and gentleman’s mustache.


Bartitsu (or, as Doyle miswrote it, baritsu) was invented by the extremely English-sounding E.W. Barton-Wright. The name Bartitsu was a combination of his name and “jujitsu” which was, among a large number of extant martial arts, a major source of inspiration. In fact, Barton-Wright is credited with being one of the first westerners to teach Japanese-style combat, a manifestation of the era’s obsession with orientalism.

Barton-Wright did not just make up a martial art using a modern version of a club, he founded a capital-C Club called the Bartitsu Academy of Arms and Physical Culture. He encouraged a well-rounded martial arts education, believing that one should master many forms of combat. Pursuant to this, he imported martial arts masters from all over the world and even hosted a group of historians experimenting with ancient fencing techniques. As if all that weren’t Elizabethan enough, he also employed (and in some cases, invented) a slew of therapies involving electricity, heat and radiation.

Bartitsu was essentially forgotten, but has seen a resurgence in the 21st century as another generation discovers its own incarnation of Holmes.

Jackie Chan

Speaking of bridges between asian and western cultures, Jackie’s nickname as a child was 炮炮, which means “cannonball.” It’s a pretty accurate description of Jackie Chan as an adult, too.

Contrary to popular belief, he never did all of his own stunts. He has the world record for having personally performed the most stunts on film, but he had a team of extremely talented stunt performers who worked on every Jackie Chan movie for most of the 80s, when his most dangerous stunts took place, like the stunt in Armour of God (Jackie fell from a tree and fractured his skull).

Some of Jackie’s greatest assets are his humor — kung fu comedy is a genre he is credited with inventing — and his willingness to embarrass himself, something that his late co-star Bruce Lee didn’t do. Jackie’s producers want him to be more like Bruce (so he could be the next Bruce Lee), but Jackie didn’t find real success until he purposefully went the opposite direction. Where Lee was a stalwart paladin, Jackie was flawed and bumbling.

During my research, I found a video by the folks at Every Frame a Painting that perfectly sums up everything I just wrote, so you should just watch that instead.

This is my earliest recollection of ever even hearing about Jackie Chan, when he won a lifetime achievement award from the MTV movie awards (which they discontinued because the last winner, Clint Howard, seemed to be so legitimately touched by what nobody else took seriously). This award was given to him when he was finally breaking through in Hollywood and preceded his most famous American movies.

THE RECOMMENDATAE

A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

It’s finally feeling like autumn around here, a season that makes me want to listen to music like The Handsome Family, whose song, My Sister’s Tiny Hands, I heard Andrew Bird cover at his most recent Pittsburgh show. I had no idea it was a Handsome Family song, but reading the lyrics (sample: “The sunlight spread like honey/ Through my sister’s tiny hands”), it makes perfect sense. The descriptions of light, shadow and darkness are some great writing.

Not every recommendation in this newsletter will be a music video, which is good because I have another one:

I used IKEA’s “Dioder” LED light strips to make my grandfather’s > aunt’s sword into a lamp. They’re bright and warm and don’t have that weird, bluish LED flicker and you can use command strips to temporarily attach them to something that you treasure. I probably don’t have to worry about this sword’s preservation, considering it lived much of its life as a stake for tomato plants in one of my grandfather’s patient’s gardens.

QUOTUM INTERRUPTE

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” – Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

THE ANECDOTUS

a memory retrieved from the depths of my mind’s ocean by bathysphere; or, a thing that happened recently

Despite being a modern, medicated American, I still have the occasional bout of depression. It’s not capital-D Depression, which I do have, which is managed by the medication. Its symptoms include an unwillingness to leave one’s safe little spaces, an avoidance of social situations, a sinking sense of malaise. It’s Depression Junior, a sad feeling for a little while. But there are things you can do. In order of importance:

• drink at least one glass of water, and more than one is better

• eat a little something with lots of protein in it

• pick one small task (take the garbage out, wash a few dishes, etc.) and do it

• call somebody who loves you and talk for a bit

• turn all the lights on

Light therapy is useful in cases of seasonal affective disorder, but lots of light is just good for you. It chases shadows away, and when you’re sad, you don’t need any damn shadows around.

Thank you for reading, dear reader.

⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

“Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

ISSUE NUMBER ONE: “DEBATE”

I chose the word “debate” because the first presidential debate of the election took place last week. I didn’t watch this debate, but social media is covered in opinions about and reactions to it. I feel like I was there!

THE EXTEMPORANEUM

a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

The Debates of 2016

Theory: either of these candidates — Clinton and Trump — would almost surely lose if the other side had ultimately nominated a less polarizing person. Election 2016 is the battle of Who is Loathed Less, which is why I’m certain that Hillary will win and the next four years will look a lot like the last eight years. I don’t know if this is good or bad, as I don’t think an American president’s legacy can be fully understood in its own time.

The less time spent on politics the better.

The topic of debates leads me to think about the most famous debates in our country’s history, from a time when candidates had to be loud.

Lincoln-Douglas Debates

These debates took place while Lincoln was a lowly Illinois politician, paying the dues that would lead him to the presidency. You only really need to know three things about these debates: 1) they were about slavery, 2) each debate took a long time, and 3) Lincoln lost the dang election.

The debates themselves are a good read, if also very dated — the racism so despised by Lincoln and his contemporaries sounds nightmarishly bigoted to our modern sensibilities. Not even an actual racist would say Douglas’s words in a debate in 2016:

“I believe [this Government] was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races.”

Read that and then consider number 3, above: Lincoln lost the election.

As for the length of the debates: both Lincoln and Douglas spoke for 90 minutes, though not concurrently (in the case of the first speaker, who had an extra 30 minutes to rebut the second speaker). I wonder how many 90-minute speeches any candidate gives these days, let alone seven of them over three months. Less likely still is that they would be televised. Nothing newsworthy on television goes for that long without a break, except maybe CSPAN.

Speaking of CSPAN, I saw Obama speaking at the dedication of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, where he invoked another of America’s great men, a Douglass with an extra “s” and whose opinions on the matter of slavery could not have been more opposite the other Douglas.

Frederick Douglass

Obama used the adjective “leonine” to describe Douglass, which is an enviable turn of phrase. Adjectives are best when used sparingly, and if you’re going to use as few adjectives as possible, you’re going to want one adjective to be descriptive.

Not only does Douglass’s hair and intense expression make you think of a lion, “leonine” also covers other possible adjectives, like “regal, ferocious, stately.” It evokes Africa, too, a fact of geography inseparable from the plight of Douglass’s people. When you come up with such a perfect adjective like that, you close your notebook and take a nap.

As is the case with so many great people, some of the most noteworthy trivia aren’t what they do but what they don’t do. When Douglass visited Ireland and England, he was treated like a human being. The British had abolished slavery a generation earlier, and Douglass, still technically an owned slave in his home country, was welcomed as an equal. One group of supporters had collected enough money to buy Douglass’s freedom and they implored him to remain in Europe. But he didn’t stay in the peaceful safety of a society that accepted him, because he would not leave his wife and millions of his people behind.

This decision put him back in the belly of the darkest period in American history, which is where we, his cultural descendants, needed him. His contribution to our country cannot be understated.

THE RECOMMENDATAE

A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

A song I’ve enjoyed ever since hearing it at the end of an episode of Silicon Valley is DJ Shadow’s/Run the Jewels’s “Nobody Speak.” The collaborators recently released a video for it, taking the concept of a political debate from a battle of words to, well, a battle. It is most definitely not safe for work. Click the screenshot to watch it.

Also, this was shot in three different countries: the US, the UK and the Ukraine. The entire 4 minute video takes place in one room.

THE ANECDOTUS

a memory retrieved from the depths of my mind’s ocean by bathysphere; or, a thing that happened recently

A rare pleasant memory from high school: my senior year humanities class, we were split into groups and tasked with proving or refuting the thesis “Women are inferior to men.” We were required to use only sources available to people at the time of the women’s suffrage. The setup was more trial than debate, and I cross examined one of the experts for the pro-women camp. I triumphantly won the debate for my side by asking a series of questions that were, in hindsight, completely unfair. I asked him to name some noteworthy female scientists, writers, artists, etc. He couldn’t, and the tribunal of judges were swayed to our side.

One of the judges was Mrs. Ragni, the venerable (ancient) German teacher, who later congratulated me for my performance. I rode that high for a long time and okay I might still ride it a little.

Thus concludes Pamphlet 1: “Debate.” I hope you had as much fun as I did. Co-written by Wikipedia.