I saw this on Twitter yesterday and it’s so good. The dodo part about a minute in is just great acting–all of it is, really.”You’ve given us a lot to think about!”
The Galactic Federation interviews Earth for membership pic.twitter.com/okgC7L0IuH
— Vinny Thomas (With Eggnog!) (@vinn_ayy) December 8, 2020
We’re stuck in the loop of sunny days and winter pollution, even up on the trails. 
Of course, I’m not too mad at the warmish weather–I’ve decided to try making some softshell snow pants, so this gives me some time to gear up.
It was unseasonably warm, then it snowed and we had January lows, now it’s warming back up again. I felt this New Yorker piece: Welcome to Fall, the Two Days Between Summer and Winter
Yes, it’s finally that autumnal season! Gather the harvest for the cornucopia! Roast butternut squash and braise pork shoulder with good friends ’round the hot wood fire as you—O.K., is that sleet? It’s sleeting now. And it says that tomorrow it’s supposed to be in the eighties. Then it’s going to snow. How is that possible?
…Now on to that cozy, warm, wondrous holiday season! Cold, wintry nights full of family and roaring fires and stockings and candles and cookies and—oh, that’s over now, too. Great. Get ready for five months of February!
Mike Monteiro sent out a newsletter a month or so ago talking about pianist Keith Jarret’s famous concert in Cologne, Germany. I didn’t know the backstory, but Mike summarizes it pretty succinctly:
Keith Jarrett, who is having a very bad day, runs back to the Opera House, sits down at the piano, exhausted, hungry, in pain, wearing a back brace, and improvises a performance on a very busted piano that ends up becoming the best-selling album in jazz history.
I thought he was going to use the story to talk about creative limitations or what have you, but he takes a hard right and I love it:
The show doesn’t start because everything is perfect and you’re ready to go. The show starts because the start time is printed on the ticket. So take a look around at what you have, because that is what you have.
Show time is November 3. We might not have gotten the piano we wanted, but we will play it. Because in the end a piano is only limited who’s willing to play it, and how. And we’ve had a string of very, very bad days, and how.
(Utah peeps, early in-person voting starts today! And our mail-in ballot drop boxes are open 24/7. Drop them off, don’t mail!)>
Hello again! I only planned to not post on Monday last week..but the Wasatch Front saw hurricane force winds Tuesday as a storm moved in and we were without power from Tuesday morning to Sunday evening.
It was fine in the bigger scheme of things (especially compared with the fires in Oregon and California) but frustrating at times (goodbye, everything in the freezer).
But the power is BACK now! I pretty much spent Sunday night using different appliances and turning on the lights.
A Japanese amusement park re-opened but asked riders to not scream out loud on the rides. As translated, the phrasing they used is to “Please scream inside your heart” and if that sentence pleases you, you’re not alone. You can get it on a shirt, a mug, a poster, a meme…and I want them all. This version, by Sarah Walsh, is nice and colorful:
Ride that roller-coaster stone-faced, my friends, and keep those screams inside.
I love how even the vocabulary Twitter account is sub-tweeting our president now:
The Latin proverb ‘stultorum quanto status sublimior, tanto manifestior turpitudo’ warns that inept people who engineer themselves into powerful positions will always end up disgracing themselves. It literally means ‘the higher the status of fools, the more obvious their shame’.
— Haggard Hawks 📚🦅 (@HaggardHawks) July 13, 2020
The Latin feels appropriate for President Nero, doesn’t it?
…week/month/year. This is all I have today but sure! Bring on July.
This was in Sunday’s paper:
As I said on Monday, what a time to be alive. (I’m saying it with a different inflection here, but still. Things are going on. I saw something on Twitter the other day along the lines of, “Future historians will have to pick which quarter of 2020 to specialize in.”)
Our nation’s capital looks like a military dictatorship, 100,000 people are dead from a pandemic we could have been prepared for, nearly 40 million people are out of work but corporations got over $500 billion in stimulus money, everything from policing to educational systems are dysfunctional… this could be a really long list.
A friend sent this last week and I have been watching it on repeat when I can’t mentally add to that list any more.
Tag yourself, I’m the freight train at :12.