Date Night
Tonight’s Date Night included dinner at Midway Mercantile and a stroll through the Ice Castles
Dear 2019 Self
It’s time to let go of the negative people in your life, they’re only bringing you down.
(Also: Keep up those 2018 goals, they were good ones)
The Year in Review: 2018
After a two-week delay, it’s time for another edition of The Year in Review. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive overview I’d suggest reading this, but for now, here’s what I’ve got. My little Passport to Your National Parks book earned three new stamps, one from Redwoods NP, another from a sailing adventure around the Channel Islands and third from a Comfort family vacation to Olympic NP. My best friend DM came to visit some penguins in SLC; I attempted to help JM KonMari his apartment; SS hosted a wonderful puja ceremony at her new home; Gatsby got a(nother) cat bed. D and I spent some quality time wearing banana costumes on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, traveling to Boise to watch MH and Ferro earn a blue ribbon at the Idaho Dressage Festival, thwarting United Airlines’ most valiant attempts to prevent us from returning to Quimby’s, mingling with saguaros and watching 1/4 of the Raiders’ winning games for the season, avoiding the dance floor at DG’s Portland wedding and again at TM’s Bay Area wedding, navigating hay bale mazes in Half Moon Bay and finally relaxing with family over the Christmas holiday. As for me personally, I’ve somehow become a reluctant part-time early riser, am making a half-hearted effort to wear more pink and am still fighting the urge to skip leg day every week.
For Your Enjoyment #46
Ladies and gentlemen, sows and boars, the Fattest Bear of 2018 is… 409 Beadnose! Her radiant rolls were deemed by the voting public to be this year’s most fabulous flab. Our chubby champ has a few more weeks to chow down on lingering salmon carcasses before she heads up the mountains to dig herself a den and savor her victory. What does the she win for all this hard work? Stronger chances of living through the winter.
- This may be old news (c. October 2018), but I’m already looking ahead to Fat Bear Week 2019 (image above)
There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.
- A great little anecdote from Douglas Adams (h/t DM)
"San Francisco is like living in Disney World," said Woolson, a writer and designer. "There's no place like it, and if it were affordable, I'm sure I'd move back. But there's tradeoffs - everyone knows about the city already, they're so high on themselves." The Town, on the other hand, is less "showboat-y," he said. "Oakland is not out to impress anybody."
“It was a very awkward time. I guess I kind of lost control of the faculty at some point,” [David Badger, Key School headmaster in the mid-1970s] said. “I thought they were good teachers. I thought they were honest people. I think I was naive as hell.”
America has the same conversation after each mass shooting – the inevitable debate about gun control versus mental-health care (rarely both at the same time). It becomes factionalised, politicised and nothing changes. Then the next mass shooting happens. But it occurred to me that the one person we never speak to about mass shootings is the mass shooter himself (and it is, almost always, a him) – perhaps because they too often kill themselves or are dispatched by police. But if we could, we might ask them this: what would have stopped you doing what you did?
- This longread is heavy but worth a read when you’re ready
Six speakers are placed atop individual plinths and attached to an MP3 player that contains only the song; the entire thing is powered by solar energy with the promise that it will run "for all eternity."
- And now for some lighter topics: All Toto, All The Time
[The] Malaysian busker was about to call it day, as not many people gathered around to hear him sing. Just as he started to sing for fun, the cutest little audience showed up…
“The first sweater I made of a specific landmark was the Tower Bridge in London,” remembers [Sam] Barsky. “I was inspired by a picture I saw in a magazine. I had never been there before and did not make it for a specific trip. But, once I started knitting more landmarks, like the Golden Gate Bridge and Venice, I knew I wanted to go there while wearing them.”
We can do better in 2019. We must. There are, of course, many predictable ways to go about it. We can limit our exposure to the raw sewage of social media. We can turn off the cable news networks and opinion-bellowing podcasts to which we have turned to reinforce the beliefs we already had. We can meditate and run and get eight good hours of sleep a night. Enjoy all of that, and I'll see you when we're finished with it on January 6. But there is something else. Something deeper, more difficult and no less necessary. Something that can go a long way toward washing our souls clean of the cruelty that is the hallmark of our modern society. Something that can help prepare us for a 2019 that promises to be more exhausting, more bewildering, more chock full o' nuts. My friends, we must reckon with what we have done to Hootie and the Blowfish.
- No time for haters this year
In some circles, Collins is the apotheosis of blandness and ubiquity, the byword for the bleaching of soul music, the man who killed Genesis and gave American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman a reason, and a soundtrack, to screw and kill. But for a musician who can count Kanye West, 2Pac, Nas and Ol’ Dirty Bastard as fans, how can he be considered almost terminally uncool?
- In other musician-hating news, here’s a bit on Phil Collins
It’s crazy….. people really are just out here saying that I stood for baggy clothes? Or that I stood for fitteds? Or cornrows? Or tattoos? Or throwbacks? Or anything like that? Nah, come on. What I stood for was something way deeper. I mean — to me, if I had to sum it up? I’d say I stood for being yourself.
- This AI essay for The Players Tribune is worth a read
With major implications on everything from the classroom to the church pews, from the Capitol to the dinner table, an unrelenting demographic shift has hit a major milestone: Fewer than half the people living in Salt Lake County are on the rolls of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints … Salt Lake County has not only become less LDS over time, it also has added more people from various racial or ethnic backgrounds.
- SLC: Slowly Becoming Less Mormon and Less White?
Utah ranks No. 1 among the states for its population growth rate this decade – thanks to its high birthrate plus a strong economy that attracts people from other states and abroad…With immigration increases over recent years, [Pam Perlich, director of demographic research at the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute] said, “We are on our way to becoming a very large global metropolitan area. We can expect the continued arrival of international people because the labor market is global at this point.”
- Guess we’re all moving to Utah these days
We can’t quite put our finger on why, but Washington, DC, is feeling a bit tense lately. If the idea of taking a tour of the Capitol Building has you breaking out in a cold sweat, it’s time to turn your attention to the other nearby towns in the mid-Atlantic area, like beautiful, blood-pressure-lowering Annapolis.
[M]osquitoes really don’t have many defenders, even among the scientists who know them most intimately. The idea of eradicating mosquitoes to stop malaria doesn’t particularly bother Steven Juliano, a mosquito-ecology researcher at Illinois State University. “It might be worth losing one species,” he says. “It might be worth it because the burden of human suffering is pretty high.”
- What would happen if mosquitoes were to disappear?
Hygge, a Danish word defined as "a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being," has been practically weaponised in recent years in an effort to sell candles, socks, and blankets. Hygge was never a lifestyle, but it's certainly marketed as one over here by people wishing to cash in on the Scandi-zeitgeist.
The Ruth Bader Ginsburg celebration, therefore, isn’t strictly about RBG at all; it’s about DJT. With a president who knowingly sets himself up as an icon of one pole of American politics, it’s about picking (or even inventing) a rival icon to rally around – a way to rebel against a president who openly vows to fill the nation’s courtrooms with like-minded judges, most of them hostile to the concepts of due process and equal protection that liberals hold dear. But in its very presence as an anti-movement, a liberal call to arms to thwart Trump and Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society, the cult of RBG furthers the politicization of the court. It’s a form of surrender to the “everything’s political” argument that enables Trump to traduce boundaries of propriety that have existed for decades, dismissing the existence of any sort of independence or professionalism in government institutions.
- RBG fever vs. the politicizing of the Supreme Court
“Typically, women should have fair skin, be 162cm to 168cm tall [over 170cm is too tall] … weigh less than 48kg, have large eyes, a perfect nose, and long hair,” said the Korean gender studies expert. “These standards are common when applying for part-time jobs that don’t require much skill. ‘If a cashier is pretty then customers will enjoy the experience better, [therefore] we should hire pretty girls’ – this becomes treated like a true statement.”
- South Korea’s beauty standards are out of control
While Wallace Stegner’s notion that parks are “America’s best idea” has become synonymous with the nation’s love for them, there’s a little more to his famous 1983 line. The Pulitzer prize winner went on to describe the parks as a mirror for America’s national character: “They reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” Considering the problems besetting them, his sentiment now seems open to question.
- Our love for the NPS and the problem of over-tourism
To be called GOAT these days, you can merely be among the best, or popular in that moment, or a really good quarterback with one ring. Folks talk GOAT if you win the first five starts of your NFL career. There are allegedly two GOATs on the same high school football team and three GOATs in the same sport. Do we not understand the meaning of the word “greatest” – that there can be only one?
- “We’re being overrun by a herd of GOATs”
There’s a vibe here. You see it in the other guys and in Coach Kerr and the front office, and you feel it in the staff and everyone else. Nobody is thinking about anything but a championship. They carry themselves like it. I’ve been missing basketball — and playing ball, that’s what it’s always been about for me. I found a new place where I’m being welcomed with open arms. I’ll be back at 100% this season. A year from now, looking back, I know this is going to be the best decision I ever made.
- BOOGIE
…And finally, courtesy of the LA Times, here are "Five hopeful poems to usher in the new year”
Yayoi Kusama
I don’t think D fully understood how happy I was to finally see one of these pumpkins.
Pumpkins bring about poetic peace in my mind. Pumpkins talk to me. - Yayoi Kusama
Newseum
I’d highly recommend a visit to the Newseum if you’re in DC; the Pulitzer Prize Photographs Gallery itself is worth the admission. (But really, Newseum - What about First Felines?)
