James Hazlett Foreman

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  • Pamphlet 8: "Brain"

    ⚡️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 SEVEN: BRAIN

    If you know me, you know why I picked this noun to begin my first pamphlet in almost exactly a year (the last pamphlet was distributed on July 30th, 2017). On the week of Thanksgiving in 2017, I had surgery to remove an ependymoma from my brain stem. Ependymomas are considered cancerous because they can metastasize into other areas of the brain and spinal column, though they are not usually deadly. They are extraordinarily rare in people my age. Lucky me.

    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 Trepanning

    I had two brain surgeries (fun fact — I keep misspelling “surgeries” as “sugaries”). Tumor surgeries are not typically emergencies, but mine was. I spent four days in the hospital leading up to my operation because the neurosurgeon only does operations on Mondays and I went to the emergency room on a day that was not a Monday. This lag time also allowed my body to absorb roughly a billion gallons of strong steroids that shrank various structures in my brain to reduce the swelling from the backed-up cerebrospinal fluid. This kind of swelling often kills people when it comes on too quickly.

    This might be one of the reasons why we occasionally find skulls up to 7,000 years old with big holes in them. The tumor on my brain stem caused a backup in the flow of fluid in my ventricles, which swelled up and got bigger, causing a condition called hydrocephaly. The pressure caused “intractable” headaches (the hospital’s word, not mine), which had become so debilitating that I nearly fell unconscious from the blinding pain. It was that incident that made me go to the emergency room the final time.



    Had I been alive in 6000 BCE instead of our current age of miracles, I would have happily submitted myself to the intrepid protodoctor who thought, correctly, that a feeling of pressure in my head would be relieved by releasing some of that pressure.

    The origin of the word “trepanning” is not, as I thought, from “tree panning,” or the practice of hacking open a hole in a tree and letting the sap run out, which is not even called that. I don’t know where that connection in my head came from, but there is a word for using words wrong.

    Malaportmanteau

    I just made that word up. “Malaportmanteau” is itself portmanteau that combines “malapropism” and “portmanteau.” A portmanteau is a word that combines two things to make up a new word (“cheeseburger,” for instance) while a malapropism is a word that is and sounds like another word, except used incorrectly and usually used humorously. Malapropisms are fertile ground for puns, so I love them and hate them.

    Trepanning is not even a portmanteau, as I thought, thus my new portmanteau, which means “a word confidently mistaken for a portmanteau.” The word “trepan,” the root of “trepanation,” is apparently derived from the greek word for boring, like this newsletter.

    That was a pun based on a homonym, which is not a malapropism. Homonyms are a variety of homophone — two words that are spelled and pronounced the same but mean two different things. Another kind of homophone is a heterograph like “to, too, and two,” or words that are spelled differently, and mean different things but sound the same. English can be confusing.

    The Most Difficult Language To Learn

    Don’t get too excited, it’s not english, which isn’t that difficult. This, according to linguists and other professionals who know such things. I’ve only learned one language, though I took three semesters of Russian in college, in a powerful case of Past Jim overestimating how much schooling depressed and anxious Future Jim would be willing to tolerate (thank you, Lena, for passing me when I most definitely didn’t deserve it). Thus, you could say that the most difficult language for ME to learn was Russian.

    But the answer to the question is: it depends. For people who speak Standard Average English (or “unaccented” American english), the answer would be different from someone who grew up speaking Estonian, which has 14 verb cases. Bora, a language from Peru, has 350 noun genders.

    The concept of gender in languages is confusing, as noted most famously by Mark Twain, who wrote this about German, which only has three:

    Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.

    This is true, if one thinks of gender in language as a biological sex thing, when it’s not that at all — it’s closer to the concept of genre, with nouns of similar shape or size or whatever occupying the same linguistic noun classification. Language is a living and moving thing so some languages have different classifications. My favorite is Dyirbal, which is spoken in Australia, and has a genre of nouns that includes “women, fire and dangerous things.” Brother, tell me about it.

    The answer to the question was answered by The Economist, in an article from which much of the above was derived (you didn’t think I actually knew all this, did you?), is a language used by a dwindling number of people (it was about 1000 people in 2008): Tuyuca, spoken in the Amazon. I’ll let them explain why we would have so much trouble with it:

    Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb.

    The Economist article ends with a sobering reminder that one consequence of our age of technological miracles and globalization is the gradual disappearance of languages as people drift toward a common tongue. Different languages make one think in different ways, and that kind of diversity of thought is something worth saving. Language is culture, too — if we lose one, we lose the other.

    Hot Snakes

    It’s one thing to learn a language, it’s another thing to speak it. Metaphors are fraught and all too common. If I were to tell a person who’s just learning english that I wasn’t feeling well and I had “the hot snakes,” they would probably be extremely confused. That’s a bad example, because it confuses lifelong english speakers, too, as in this memorable outtake from Parks & Recreation, which you’ll have to watch if you want to know what hot snakes mean (if you haven’t figured it out on your own already).

    生肖

    Speaking of hot snakes, I was born in the year of the snake, according to the Chinese zodiac. Specifically, the year of the fire snake. According to one website, this is what being a snake-person means:

    In Chinese culture, the Snake is the most enigmatic animal among the twelve zodiac animals. People born in a year of the Snake are supposed to be the most intuitive.

    Snakes tend to act according to their own judgments, even while remaining the most private and reticent. They are determined to accomplish their goals and hate to fail.

    Snakes represent the symbol of wisdom. They are intelligent and wise. They are good at communication but say little. Snakes are usually regarded as great thinkers.

    Snakes are materialistic and love keeping up with the Joneses. They love to posses the best of everything, but they have no patience for shopping.

    Snake people prefer to work alone, therefore they are easily stressed. If they seem unusually stressed, it is best to allow them their own space and time to return to normal.

    In other words, it’s nonsense. The above could describe anybody. Having spent many years in school with people who were born in the same year as me, which is how the Chinese zodiac is determined, I can confidently say that lots of people don’t have all of those characteristics.

    As somebody who knows about these things will surely want me to know, the Chinese restaurant menu version of the Chinese zodiac that I’ve cited is merely scratching the surface. The true Chinese zodiac goes much deeper, going from months, to days, to hours (which are called your “secret animals,” which is awesome). It’s still meaningless.

    Recommendatae

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

    James Randi on Nova

    Early Jim lived in the dark ages before the internet (people often forget that on-demand video is an extremely new phenomenon), so he derived entertainment from shows like Nova. The best episode of that show probably ever concerned The Amazing Randi, a magician turned professional skeptic. It was because of that, and Carl Sagan’s books, that I am so annoyingly skeptical. This segment, specifically, inspired the person who wrote that stuff about the Chinese zodiac you just read.


    Snowmelt by Zoë Keating

    I wrote this on Facebook so I’m just going to repost it here: Zoë Keating, whose husband died of cancer that began in his brain, released this EP recently. They were together for 16 years. She calls it “four songs from the end of a long winter.” It’s such a gift to be able to follow an artist through these emotional tribulations. The song Possible, for example, has a note of hopefulness enveloped in melancholy and I can’t stop listening to it.

    COLOPHON

    Composed on a computer, distributed to the internet via wifi at a coffee shop. The typesetting always gets extremely wonky with TinyLetter, so if parts of it look weird, it’s the platform’s fault.

    jim v3.0 is still compiling

  • Pamphlet 7: "Coffee"

    ⚡️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 SIX: COFFEE

    The most important beverage in my life is one that I am also very addicted to. I get cranky headaches if I don’t have it. I’m grumpy before I drink it. I’m drinking it right now (I just took a sip). It’s a cultural artifact of American life that we can’t live without: coffee.

    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 Africa: Cradle of Civilization

    We can trace coffee’s origins go back to Ethiopia, where the legend of the goats-eating-berries was born. The crux of that legend is that a Christian monk got the idea to make a drink for humans out of the berries that made a bunch of goats jump around like lunatics. The drink propagated throughout Africa and the Middle East and it became a staple of the Arab diet long before it got to Europe. Coffee: invented by Christians, perfected by Arabs. In all the controversy and dispute between the west and the Middle East, it’s good to remind ourselves of the times we worked together to make the world a beautiful place, and there are fewer things more beautiful than a steaming mug of black coffee.



    Aristocratic Performance Rituals

    Coffee was the dominant hot-and-stimulating drink of England, until tea came along in the 17th century and wealthy aristocrats made it a more desirable beverage to the lower classes who wanted to be fancy, too. A common trend in European history is this: fancy aristocrats invent elaborate social performances and then measure each other based on how fancy their peers’ performances are. The finicky and elaborate nature of making a good pot of tea provided the perfect opportunity to create one of those rituals. The poor wanted to be fancy, too. Thanks to the evergreen laws of supply and demand, higher demand led to higher supply, which led to lower prices. Suddenly, poor people could drink tea, too. I used the word “fancy” four times in the above paragraph, but I’m not sure it’s enough.

    The aristos weren’t happy about that, but at least they had their fancy and extraordinarily expensive vessels! You can’t just grow more teapots — those had to be made, by hand, and the best stuff cost around $600 for just one tea cup. Good luck affording a so-white-it’s-translucent ceramic tea cup from China, plebs!

    English “china”

    Proper English tea has milk in it. Adding milk after you’ve poured the tea is the English way, at least for high-nosed toffs. Working class people put the milk in first. The reason for this, so the story goes, is because the clunky, cheap porcelain made in England would shatter at contact with boiling water. Chinese porcelain didn’t do that. It was the good stuff. It was strong, lightweight, translucent and durable. The European knock-offs weren’t.


    Chinese porcelain was so expensive that the introduction of tea sparked a porcelain arms race all over Europe. Alchemists, potters, sculptors, and artisans worked together from France to Germany to England in little skunkworks to crack the Chinese recipe. They churned out a lot of almost-theres with varying levels of success.

    This allegedly changed when a man with the extremely working-class British name Ben Lund added “Cornish soapstone” to the mixture. The humble powder of talc was all it took to keep his recipe for porcelain from shattering. His factory was bought by what is now Royal Worcester, the oldest (or maybe second-oldest) operating porcelain manufacturer in England.

    Eventually, the cost of Chinese porcelain came down, too (supply and demand, baby), but not before England had flooded the market with bad copies and had the audacity to call the stuff “china.”

    “Coffee – the favorite drink of the civilized world.” – Thomas Jefferson


    Tea

    Tea is the most versatile word in the English language (except, maybe, that word). It can refer to

    ⁃ a plant, Camellia sinensis
    ⁃ a small meal between lunch and supper
    ⁃ a drink, drunk at tea time, but not necessarily made of the plant called tea
    ⁃ gossip, as in “the tea,” the telling of which is called “spilling”
    ⁃ a river in Brazil

    Revolution

    Americans don’t drink tea the same way our English friends do because, well, they’re English. We’re Americans. We share a lot of cultural DNA with our English founders, but the big divergence put an end to that (the American Revolution, you might have heard of it). We rejected tea as our National Hot Drink and embraced the hardscrabble, hard-hitting, tar-black working man’s drink. We didn’t have to go without the meal called tea, though, because it didn’t exist yet — that didn’t come about until, you guessed it, a rich English Duchess invented it in 1850, because English aristocratic women had two jobs: socialize with other aristocrats and, most importantly, make male babies. If you’re like me, you can’t even mention making male babies without thinking of the most famous Male Baby Wanter in history, the irascible Henry Tudor.

    Anne Boleyn

    The only wife Henry truly loved was Jane Seymour, because she gave him a son. There’s no reason to doubt that his love was real, because he was a petulant bully who only really cared about himself and his legacy, and the Queen who eventually gave him a male heir was a dream come true. In case you doubt his true love for her, he had himself buried next to her at Windsor, which is the highest honor any dead king can give to a dead queen. Henry Tudor is known for executing his wives, but he didn’t have time to get bored with and subsequently get rid of Jane — she died two weeks after giving birth to Edward, an unremarkable monarch whose only laudable act was to die young and hasten the ascension of his half sister, Queen Elizabeth I.

    The Queen right before Jane was the most famous of Henry’s wives, Anne Boleyn, who was executed on largely fictional charges of treason and incest. The method of her execution is just as noteworthy as the rest of her life — the executioner used a sword to do it (most people got the axe, as it were). This is often cited as a sudden and uncharacteristic honor on behalf of Anne’s royal mien and upbringing in France (where all executed monarchs get a sword).

    But count me among the Anne Apologists, because I say that Henry decided to have a sword swing end her life because of his obsession with the British monarchy that he was so desperately trying to continue in his own image. More specifically, he was really, really into the Arthurian legends and chivalry and all that (French is the language of chivalry, and he wrote some embarrassing love letters to Anne in that language). He even had a big replica of the Round Table with himself in Arthur’s seat. The prime symbol of Arthuriana is the sword, and a monarch executing a traitorous queen with a sword was the ultimate act of Proper English Retribution. Like everything else in Henry’s life, Anne’s execution was about Henry.



    While on the subject of Anne, she’s just about as close as we can get to a feminist icon in Tudor England. She knew what she wanted, and maneuvered herself and the people around her to get it. She was also an intellectual who argued with Henry and won. She refused to have sex with Henry until he made her Queen, which Horny Henry respected. She’s almost certainly innocent of the crimes she was executed for, not only because Henry wanted her out of his life and was capable of doing anything in order to make that happen, but because of what she did while waiting for her death in the Tower — she summoned the Archbishop of Canterbury to her cell and confessed everything to him.

    Confession

    During this confessional with the Archbishop, Anne Boleyn doubled-down on her innocence. For an observant Catholic, this is the Ultimate Truth Zone. If you lie during a confession, you’re heading straight to Hell when you die. You gotta hand it to Catholicism — there is no better way to keep tabs on a the politics of a parish than by a) forcing everybody to tell you every bad thing they did and b) damning them to hell if they don’t. This not only gave a priest leverage and protection (even if the implied, icky bad juju of doing social or physical harm to clergy weren’t enough), it put a lot of power in the hands of a powerful, educated minority. If you’re suspicious of large, pervasive organizations having too much power, maybe you would have been one of those guys throwing tea into Boston Harbor, too.


    Recommendatae

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    How To Make a Proper Cup of Tea

    Boil water. Put a tea bag in a cup. Pour the boiling water into the cup. Let it steep for as long as you like. Remove the bag, add whatever you like to it (milk, honey, lemon, whiskey). There are a lot of fussy rules, if you want to be fussy (Americans are notoriously non-fussy). I suggest you look elsewhere for those. Like here, for example: http://www.vogue.com/article/english-teatime-etiquette-how-to

    The Hot Jimmy

    One of my favorite fall/winter drinks is a variation of a hot toddy that I’m calling the Hot Jimmy. (I didn’t know what a hot toddy was until after I had invented my version – thanks, Lisa!). I make a cup of herbal tea (which has no tea in it) — lemon ginger is my favorite — add a bit of honey and throw in a shot of Wigle hopped whiskey (which you can’t buy right now). It’s perfect for a damp, dark autumn evening.

    ADDENDUM APPROPRIATUS


    Catherine of Aragon

    I said Anne Boleyn was a feminist icon, but I don’t want to ignore her predecessor, Catherine. She was probably Henry’s true love, despite the way he treated her (annulment, banishment, forced estrangement from her daughter). He left her in charge while he went to fight the French, during which time she fought off an attempted invasion by the King of Scotland. She rallied her troops while in full armor and extremely pregnant, and got super pissed when the English military, fearing for her delicate nature, brought his clothes as proof of King James’s death rather than his actual dead body.

    COLOPHON

    Composed on a computer, distributed to the internet via wifi at a coffee shop. The typesetting always gets extremely wonky with TinyLetter, so if parts of it look weird, it’s the platform’s fault.

    keep the coffee comin’

  • Pamphlet 6: Food

    ⚡️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 SIX: FOOD

    This is the first issue of the new year, the sixth issue total and the first in a new series. I’m going to be trying some new things (see the COLOPHON, below, for details). But enough of all that, let’s get into the object of our acts of culinary consumption: FOOD.


    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

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

    Mayflies

    Here’s a workable definition of life: Life is the acquisition of adequate calories before reproduction. I offer you the mayfly as an example. It hatches underwater as a nymph, with a big digestive system and little else. The nymph eats as much as possible, sometimes for years, only to ascend into the air as a winged imago, its final form. The imago has a mouth, but it’s nonfunctional. It can’t eat. It doesn’t want to eat. It wants to get hella laid. The mayfly lives a day or two. It mates, lays its eggs, and drops dead. The eggs settle on the bottom of a pond and the cycle continues. The eggs hatch, and the hungry nymph starts collecting calories.

    Calories

    I often wonder what humans of the past would think of humans of the now. Drop one of our early human ancestors into our lives and he would be stunned by a whole bunch of things we take for granted. We live in the safest age of human history. We run for fun, not to save ourselves from marauding enemy tribes or hungry megafauna. We have so much food to eat for such little cost that the leading causes of death in humans arise directly from our diets. Losing weight is actually easy, mathematically speaking, for the baseline human (with “normal” bodies not beset by disease, hereditary flaw or misadventure): consume fewer calories than you use.


    Our bodies are made to prefer high calorie foods. This instinctual drive to eat the lowest possible volume with the highest possible calorie content made Americans the fattest people in the world, but it also made us come up with some pretty amazing innovations.

    “My doctor told me I had to stop throwing intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people.” – Orson Welles


    Preparation

    The human life cycle is slightly different, with the same pieces rearranged. We get our calories from food we pick up and put in our mouths. This is true for most animals, but humans developed a unique twist that probably made us who we are today: we prepared it before putting it our mouths.

    You thought I was going to say “we cooked it!” We did! But that came later. We evolved smaller teeth, smaller guts (see below) and smaller faces long before we ever cooked anything. Our ancestors used stone tools to tenderize meat and cut it up into smaller pieces. That’s some pre-human ingenuity!

    The beauty of meat as a food source is that it lets some other poor animal collect the calories for us. Cows spend their lives eating and digesting because they have to. They eat plants, and plants have such a small calorie count for their volume that cows need a four-segmented stomach to get the most nutrition they can out. A cow converts those calories into big muscles that it needs in order to carry around all those big stomachs full of digesting grass, and then a human comes along and skips the boring part and eats the high-calorie muscles.

    This all begins with the most efficient energy-creating system in the natural world, photosynthesis, which lets that crunchy grass grow into tasty food for a cow just by being in the right place at the right time to absorb the energy and carbon created when sunlight snaps ambient carbon dioxide molecules in half.

    The grass uses the sunlight to make itself food for the cow, which uses the grass to make itself food for a human. Every animal takes the work of another to make itself.

    After our pre-human ancestors discovered fire, they figured out how to use it to make their food better. Because meat is the easiest solution to the maximum calories for minimal effort problem, cooking meat was probably what catapulted those proto-humans into the big-brained dummies we are today.

    By cooking meat, you make it easier to chew. You can eat more of it in less time. That little innovation made us who we are.

    Vegetarianism

    We eat meat because we always did. From fish to bison, meat was the high-calorie rocket fuel in our cognitive development. But that was a few thousand years ago.

    As my morality and my politics begin to coalesce and align into a Do No Harm kind of lazy pacifism, I find the act of eating a dead animal less and less justifiable.

    You might have noticed my interest in human evolution (this is the last issue to dwell on the subject). There’s no question that vegetarianism (or, dear god, veganism) in protohumans would have been disastrous. Eating cooked meat was a key to human survival over the last few bottlenecks, migrations and ice ages. But just because it was important then doesn’t make it important now.

    Most of us don’t have to eat meat to survive (note: iron deficiencies and other medical issues still require many people to eat meat, bless them). My sessile, first world life makes me need fewer calories than my ancestors, and I have access to so many high-calorie, low-effort food sources that I probably wouldn’t even lose a single pound if I stopped eating meat (let alone starve).

    I eat meat because I’m lazy and unsophisticated. I like hamburgers. I like hot dogs.

    I believe that our species will one day look upon eating meat as a necessary evil that they will also have grown out of.

    “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” – J.R.R. Tolkien


    Broccoli

    When I was in grade school and was asked what my favorite food was, I said “broccoli.” I will defend this choice to the grave. It’s still my favorite. I prefer it raw, but I’ll eat it any way I can get it. I don’t put salt on it. I don’t put cheese on it. I just eat it. I would not pass up a pizza for a bowl of brocc, but that doesn’t mean pizza is my favorite food. They are not contrary ideas.


    Broccoli was created by the ancient Romans, proving that people who are against genetically-modified foods can’t even be consistent in the foods they purposelessly fear. Broccoli didn’t become popular in the US until the 1920s. It only took broccoli 2500 years to go from a cultivated offshoot of cabbage in northern Italy to a staple food in America, though, be fair, America didn’t exist for most of that time.

    Fractals

    There’s a type of broccoli less popular than the kind you find in most stores here. It’s called “Romanesco,” also called “roman broccoli” (image above). It differs from the other varieties of broccoli in a few significant ways (it has a nutty flavor), but it is best known for its geometric fractal growth pattern.

    You’ve probably heard the term “fractal” but maybe not know what it is. The geometric fractals are easiest to understand, so I’ll make it simple: a little piece of a fractal form looks just like the biggest piece. A fractal triangle would be a triangle made out of smaller triangles, where are also made out of triangles, etc. There’a also a lot of math involved in fractals, which you can see at the link at the bottom of this pamphlet, if you’re into that sort of thing.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

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

    • A lot of kids know the word “fractal” because it’s a word in the song from Frozen, “Let it Go.” Elsa refers to her powers as creating “frozen fractals” and snowflakes kind of look like fractal patterns. Also, it’s a great song with a great message, but saying the message would just be restating the title.


    COLOPHON

    Composed entirely by James Foreman on a notebook computer with additional edits via telephone.

    I wrote five issues last year, so I think that’s how I’m going to continue doing it. Volume 1 was five issues, and Vol. 2 will also be five. I don’t know how much time will be between Volumes, but hopefully not as long as last time. I’ve toyed with the idea of formatting the previous issues for print, maybe with little illustrations instead of photos scrounged from the internet.

    LINKS

    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/

    http://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-are-fractals/

  • BROADSIDE: "An Anniversary of Being Born"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

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

    BROADSIDE: AN ANNIVERSARY OF BEING BORN


    The term “broadside,” in the context of printing, comes from the pre-newspaper method of delivering information to the public. News was printed on a single side of a thin piece of paper. A common use for them was to attack rivals or to make the case for a political point, which is why the word is often used to describe the same tactic in modern times. This is a BROADSIDE because its only concern is a single topic, and not because its content is inflammatory or political (because it isn’t).


    This weekend — the first weekend after Martin Luther King Jr. Day — is a momentous one. It’s when I discarded an old life for a new one. Eleven years ago, my marriage ended. I can’t believe it’s been that long, until I look in a mirror. I don’t mind getting older, but it’s not easy to watch it happen.

    When I learned to embrace the things I can’t change, my life got a lot better. I’m a pathetic sucker for inspirational quotes, and my favorite inspirational quotes are about how we can’t change things:
    We cannot control the wind, but we can adjust our sails. – anonymous
    Weather, wind, time, gravity — there are so many things in this wild universe that can’t be altered by our actions, though sometimes we can nudge them around. We can’t avoid death, but we can hasten it. We can’t make time slow down, but we can enjoy the moment. We can make somebody hate us, but we sure can’t make them love us.

    Divorce is probably as painful as death. – William Shatner


    Yesterday: I knew when my marriage had ended, but not the year. I’ve used the same email address for years. When my memory stumbles, gmail is there to catch it. A quick search revealed that, shortly after the events that led up to the end of the marriage, I wrote a narrative of those events. It’s not easy to read. I won’t let you read it because it’s full of names, and I don’t name names. My memories of some of the events still make me wince, even if the wounds have healed.

    My marriage only lasted for 6 months. The relationship before it was only 3.5 years. When viewed objectively, my pain should not be as great as a person who was married for longer or had more to lose. Nobody has ever made me feel that way by comparing their divorce to mine — it’s shame, self-imposed, felt only by me.

    Allow me to contextualize:

    • She was my first love

    That’s all. That’s enough.
    Cameron has never been in love – at least, nobody’s ever been in love with him. If things don’t change for him, he’s gonna marry the first girl he lays, and she’s gonna treat him like shit, because she will have given him what he has built up in his mind as the end-all, be-all of human existence. She won’t respect him, ’cause you can’t respect somebody who kisses your ass. It just doesn’t work. – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off


    It is recommended that you make every effort not to accept animals that are in an injured or disabled condition. – Guide to Animal Handling


    Animals in pain will bite people trying to help them. Some people know that and touch them anyway. They know the danger. They see a creature in pain and they have to help. Some of those people reached out to me, and they stayed even after I bit them. The very least I can do is reach out to some wounded dogs. I can pass along that generosity of heart by helping people who need it, too. I’ve done that, and I’ve been bitten. It was always worth it.

    A wounded deer leaps the highest – Emily Dickinson


    Taken out of its context, the above quote appears inspirational: wounded people are better for having been wounded. But that wasn’t her point. The high leap of a wounded deer is a cover, a fake. “I’m fine. I’m not hurt at all. Sorry if I bleed on you. It’s nothing.” After my marriage was over, I jumped into dating again, and I jumped high. I wasn’t ready. A relationship can only succeed when the pieces match, if the positive parts of one person can fit into the negative spaces in the other. I had a big empty space that drank every ounce of emotional support poured into it, but I couldn’t give any of it back.

    In the same poem, Emily Dickinson wrote “Mirth is the mail of anguish.” I was extremely mirthful. I was brimming with mirth. I didn’t know I was setting a trap. That’s when I did most of my wounding.

    It’s called “wounded,” Peanut. “Injured” is when you fall out of a tree or something. – Band of Brothers


    A wound is inflicted, an injury is suffered. You can read a lot between the lines when I make an effort to use the words I choose. Let me be clear: the time for blame is long past and ridiculous anyway. The person who wounded me isn’t the same person she was when it happened. Like the enemy soldier who becomes a friend later in life, after the war and its reasons are long resolved, the historical facts are immutable. I healed a long time ago, but I can still contemplate the scars.

    My sun sets to rise again. – Robert Browning


    The slow upswing isn’t as interesting as the sudden drop. A shattered glass is more interesting than an intact one, which isn’t as interesting as watching it break. Would you rather watch a building implode or watch them build the new one? That’s why this section isn’t as long.

    I got better! I was reborn. The wounds made me stronger, better, faster. I had my heart broken and it took a while, but it healed up nicely, thanks to a lot of patience and work and therapy and help. I’m more consistently happy now than I was then. The memories that have lasted are the happy ones. We had a lot of fun and I learned a lot from her. My sun rose and it’s still rising. But there’s still work to be done.

    My thirties were a time of great abundance, but nothing stuck. I shouldn’t say nothing, because they were people, but, in the words of Taylor Swift, I couldn’t make ’em stay. Actually, it was more like I couldn’t make myself stay. In the eleven years since my first relationship ended, no relationship of mine has lasted more than a year. I’ve done most of the dumping, rather than having been dumped. Why? Did I run away when things got tough? Did I get bored when things got safe? Did I pick the wrong relationships?

    We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all. – Eleanor Roosevelt


    Confession: in times like now, January of 2017, I’m not very hopeful for the future. Messages on dating websites go unanswered. My photos on dating apps go swiped in the wrong direction. Efforts to move acquaintances into dates bear no fruit. The signs we look for when somebody is interested in us are absent from every encounter. There’s nobody on my mind. I have no crushes, and there are no crushes on me. Is it a dry spell or a desert?

    My confidence is like a soldier without a war, and it starts fighting itself. Am I unlovable? Am I unbearable? Am I unattractive, unlikable? I’m too fat for anybody to be interested. I’m too ugly to catch a second look.

    The negative thoughts don’t stay forever, but they never really go away.

    The last wounds to heal are the ones I’ve inflicted on myself. I don’t think I’ll be completely better until I let those wounds heal, too.

  • Pamphlet 5: "Fire"

    ⚡️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 FIVE: FIRE

    Burn a log in a fireplace. The light and heat is a mirror of the activity on the surface of the sun. Energized oxygen locks into place with the dormant carbon atoms in the wood and the sunlight used to separate oxygen from carbon during photosynthesis comes bursting back out. That’s what a fire is, but it’s not everything a fire can be.

    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 Sun

    The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace
    Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees

    That’s an old children’s song made famous by They Might Be Giants [youtube.com] and it’s all around exactly right. Without a giant, heavy, dense, ball of gas in the middle of our solar system for earth to orbit, we most definitely would never have evolved.

    The sun is also a star, and stars are the source of all matter in the universe. A star is dense and that density increases as it ages, crunching atoms closer and closer together and pushing the resulting elements into its core, piling them on as it burns. When that star one day explodes, as they often do, it sends all those complex elements into space. When enough of that stuff gets in one spot and cools down, those elements clump together and spin around and, eventually, you get planets.

    It’s such a weird, beautiful concept that I want to state it in the plainest terms: we’re made out of stars. The Big Bang threw all that radiation into space, where it cooled off and came together and got close enough to start slamming hydrogen atoms together, which made helium, etc. That’s the source of every single atom, even the ones in your body.

    It’s tempting to get really deep into the science here, because it’s really, really awesome. For instance, the “necessities” of life seem less and less necessary as we learn more about our universe. We know that sunlight isn’t necessary for life (just look up a little thing called chemosynthesis [wikipedia.org]). Now we’re not even sure a stable orbit around a star is necessary. There is ample theoretical basis for an internally-heatedplanet (by decaying uranium, for instance) that could conceivably sustain an ecology of creatures that have never seen any kind of light at all, on planets drifting silently between stars. But as Richard Feynman says, I have to stop somewhere.

    When you die, you can get cremated, and superheated oxygen collides with the carbon in your body, and the beautiful, glimmering sunlight that triggered the photosynthesis in the plants eaten by you and the animals you ate and then encorporated into the cells of your body splits open in a blaze of subatomic particles and rejoins the thermodynamia of the universe.

    Or you can be buried, and then slowly consumed by tiny organisms that eat the carbon in your body and feed larger organisms that are eaten by even larger organisms that themselves die and on and on until the matter that made you makes a whole lot of things that aren’t you.

    If you’re lucky, all this happens after the miraculous collection of carbon and atomic forces that came together to make you had a grand old time and the people left over on earth can console each other by saying “well, that’s was a good long life.”

    Long Lives

    World records are premised on the ability to document the achievement. The fastest living man could be Usain Bolt, but there’s no way to know without measuring the running speed of every human on earth, which is impossible. Just so, there’s no way to know how old the oldest living person is without a precise measurement of every human life, so we have to trust birth records in foreign countries to tell us who the oldest (verified) person is.

    The oldest (verified) living human being is Emma Morana, an Italian woman who just turned a 117 years old in November. As far as ancient humans go, she doesn’t look quite as corpse-like as some of her fellow Oldest People:

    The oldest (verified) person ever is Jeane Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days. She had one daughter who died at age 36 of pneumonia, who had one son who also died at the age of 36, in a car accident. Jeane lived in the same small town in France for the entirety of those 122 years.
    Don’t let the cigarette picture fool you — she smoked only one or two of them a day, showing a moderation that defined her lifestyle of consistent exercise and clean living. She claimed to have never been sick, and she almost burned her apartment down at the age of 110 because of poor eyesight.

    The list of Most Long-Lived (Verified) Humans shows that death has a clear preference for men: an overwhelming 94 of the 100 oldest (verified) people are women. There’s no consensus as to why women tend to live longer than men or why there are so few ancient men compared to ancient women (85% of centenarians are women).

    One leading explanation puts the blame squarely on the lack of menstruation in men. Women have less iron in their bodies than men because blood and other iron-heavy stuff (I’m not a doctor) is lost at a reliable rate of once per month. More iron means a higher risk for cardiovascular disease, which is one reason why red meat isn’t very good for you and why vegetarians tend to be healthier than the omnivorous among us. Male and female iron levels eventually equal out, later in life, but women have those 50 years or so of a head start.

    If you had to live in the same town and, for most of it, the same apartment for the entire duration, would you want to live to be 122? For some people, a long lifespan spent in one place is no life at all. It’s not how much time you spend on earth, it’s how you spend it. Besides, there’s really no such thing as linear time.

    Nonlinear Time

    Everything that ever happened has already happened, from the beginning of the universe to its end. We experience time at a rate of 60 seconds per minute. Life is a series of now moments strung together — those that haven’t happened yet are purely theoretical and we call them “the future” while nows that have passed are called “the past.” We can only perceive one now at a time.

    I say the future is theoretical because there’s no way to know it will happen. We expect it to happen because of all the nows that preceded it. We’re all natural scientists, hypothesizing that the nows to come will resemble all the nows that came before, because those nows fit a certain pattern. Finding and anticipating patterns is also called “learning” and we immediately start doing it when we’re born. A baby who drops his toy on the floor over and over again is testing his environment (and his parents) and learning about gravity.

    It’s not an easy concept to internalize until you use the flatland thought experiment. Since time is the fourth dimension, we can use the other three dimensions in the illustration.

    Imagine a species of 2-dimensional creatures. They have no height, only length and width. They’re squares or circles or triangles but they’re all living side-by-side. The concept of “above” might exist in the minds of their scientists, but they’re incapable of perceiving it.
    But not us. We’re 3D. We can look down on those poor 2D creatures and see their entire world spread out before us. We can even see inside their 2D bodies and their 2D buildings. No walls they made could keep us out — we could, at a whim, pick any one of them up at any time and take it on the ride of its life.

    Now, add a dimension on top of that one. We’re the flatlanders, now, and some mysterious 4D creatures look at our poor, feeble 3D lives and pity us. We can’t perceive time but it effects us, just as the 3rd dimension effect the flatlanders. Those 4D beings perceive time just as we perceive the third dimension. They see time not as a linear progression of nows but as a set string of nows that they can see all at once.

    It might feel like predestination, but it really isn’t. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, then how can you say what was supposed to happen? It’s not a curse, but a blessing, to not know how things are going to turn out.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

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

    Many of you already know me and already know that my nephew, Miles, died in the summer of 2014. He should be turning 20 next week, but he isn’t. His work lives on, frozen in time, and we can all still enjoy it. In honor of his birthday, I recommend you spend some time with him.

    My other suggestion is to watch this video of Richard Feynman describing the chemical process of fire. He was a genius and a fantastic storyteller and a great bongo player.

    THE ANECDOTUS

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

    I have never liked the sun. I’ve won every Who’s More Pale contest I’ve ever entered, by clear margins. I burn easily. I’ve never had a tan. The sun stings my skin and hurts my eyes and heats everything up (the only thing I hate more than direct sunlight is too much heat). This is not revisionism based on present biases, and I offer photographic proof:
    Yep, that’s me, hating the sun.


    You light up my life, my sweet reader.

  • Pamphlet 4: "Love"

    ⚡️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.

  • Pamphlet 3: "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 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

  • Pamphlet 2: "Light"

    ⚡️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.

  • Pamphlet 1: "Debate"

    ⚡️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.