Yuck
I'm struggling this week.
I'm winter-phobic at this point after having spent eight years in Grand Rapids (which is on pace for 90" of snow before it finally stops in April). It's been better in Queens, much better, but this last cold snap has been brutal.
It's just not getting warmer.
The high was 21F today, or something in that range. I still managed to do 7,000 steps and didn't enjoy any of them. The barriers to doing anything in this weather just feel so high.
I'm still swimming tomorrow, though, even though I may Uber to the ferry. Too much ice at 8:30 a.m. to want to chance walking.
I'm writing twaddle, basically, and I apologize, but I'm just in a funk.
In Short
A short summary.
The average high here in January is 39F. It's been 15-20 degrees colder than usual.
It snowed 14" on Sunday.
I shoveled for an hour on Sunday, and an hour and a half on Monday.
This morning, I took an Uber to the ferry instead of walking because the intersections have 2+ feet of snow piled up at the corners, making crossing the street quite a challenge.
The Uber driver was late. Traffic was almost at a standstill. I got out of the Uber and ran the last half mile to the ferry, part of it through calf-high snow that hadn't been plowed yet.
During the running through the snow, I wrenched my knee substantially. It still hurts.
The ferry gate was closed and the ferry was seconds away from leaving. They took pity on me and opened it back up so I could get on. People in New York can be incredibly nice.
I swam. This is the good part of the story.
When I got home after swimming, I found out that the smoke alarm had been going off because (somehow) water leaking from melting snow on the roof had found its way through the upstairs neighbor's apartment into my study, dripping right through the smoke detector, which made it go off for some reason. Not much water, not a big deal, except for the smoke detector shrieking over and over again. And it wouldn't turn off.
Now our maintenance person is shoveling snow off the roof and I hear him walking around above me. He's flinging all the snow off the roof, which means I'll need to shovel the area by our house again.
This is why I hate winter. Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk.
Not Today
I'm taking a mental health day because every time I start writing it turns into a political post full of white-hot rage. No useful information, no thoughtful takes, just rage over how this country is being destroyed. I'll try to do better tomorrow.
Also, I ordered a whistle.
Friday Links!
Leading off this week, a brilliant story from the past. This is true heroism:
The Plunge.
Wood Stickers Covered This Nicely
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
"I think I can put together this table without the instructions," I said. "It's dead simple."
It was. I still did it wrong:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Finally, Someone with a Spine
This is a transcript of Mark Carney's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Hopefully, this will be looked back on as the moment when the rest of the world stopped bending the knee to a madman.
I'm Just A Boy, Standing Here, Wanting to be Loved, and also Wanting an EZ-Bake Oven
I don't think I've ever told anyone this, but I always wanted an EZ-Bake Oven.
I was in third or fourth grade the first time I saw a commercial on television, and it was magic. I had zero interest in baking, per se, but unlimited interest in abundant dessert supply. Even better, it was dessert I could make myself. No more asking Mom. I would come home after school and bake until the cookies reached the ceiling, then eat them all. Every day.
Better still, I distinctly remember icing packets. Icing makes any baked good taste twice as delicious immediately. It's just math.
I never told anyone about this as a kid because back then there were "boy things" and "girl things," and an EZ-Bake Oven was definitely a girl thing. Stupid cultural pressure. I never forgot about it, though.
Here's the irony. Even now, at this "advanced" stage of my life (ugh), I've never really baked anything from scratch. I've made my share of slice and bake cookies, but that's about all. Maybe if there wasn't the stupid insistence on boy and girl things when I was a kid, I would have spoken up and gotten an EZ-Bake Oven for a holiday gift, and I would have fallen in love with baking. Right now, I could be baking a batch of homemade something or other.
It would definitely have icing. I'm sure of that.
A Dream Joke
As I sit here and watch the world burn, I did have a dream last night in which I told a joke.
This was the joke:
Curtains are on trial. After the jury finds the curtains guilty, the judge sentences them to hang. One person in the gallery looks at the person next to him and says, "They got off pretty light."
Trust me, in the dream, it killed.
MLK Day 2026
I started making this post over a decade ago, and I'll be making it every year for as long as I do this.
I'd also like to mention that while we can all feel angry for what is happening in Washington today, history is long. Many bad moments seem long-lasting and inevitable, but they will all be overcome.
I hope they will be, anyway.
__________
Today is a national holiday in the United States to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
It's easy to forget the kind of hatred and stupidity that King was fighting against, but a good place to start is here: What was Jim Crow. The Wikipedia entry for Jim Crow laws also has detailed information. And the Wikipedia entry for King is here.
We're still fighting against that hatred and stupidity today.
Also, here's a link to a 2006
post when Eli asked me about Martin Luther King for the first time. It's still one of my favorite posts.
Friday Links!
Leading off this week, a haunted man: Heavy Is the Crown: George R.R. Martin on His Triumphs and Torments.
Accurate in every way: Fascists are Pathetic.
WHAT? Senegal's Spear-wielding Savannah Chimps Yield Clues On Humanity's Past.
This is brilliant: The loving lies a father wrote to his daughter from a gulag.
This is from Texas Monthly's archives and it's a tremendous piece of journalism: Love and Death in Silicon Prairie, Part I: Candy Montgomery’s Affair.
Here's an excerpt from the article I'm about to link:
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, where the combatants used the medieval estate groupings to define their battle lines. According to their writings, land-owning aristocrats (the Second Estate) were the party of the Right, while the interests of nearly everyone else (the Third Estate) belonged to the Left.
Landholder vs stockholder: In 1752, David Hume discerned that wealth was becoming untethered from land. Here lies the origin of our political divisions.
A fantastic list: From Dylan to disco, Beyoncé to Bob Marley: the 30 best live albums ever – ranked!
From D.G.F., and it's fantastic: Landslide; a ghost story.
From Wally, and it's tremendous: The Kept and the Killed: Of the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression, more than a third were “killed”. Erica X Eisen examines the history behind this hole-punched archive and the unknowable void at its center. On-brand for a cat: A Cat Left Paw Prints on the Pages of This Medieval Manuscript When the Ink Was Drying 500 Years Ago. It's back: Gourmet Magazine Is Back. It’s Not Exactly Sanctioned.
The Swim
I was leaving the pool today. It was sunny on the Lower East Side. I walked through Manhattan, headed toward a bit of lunch, and I realized something.
Swimming is the greatest mental health contributor I have in my life.
I can feel terrible when I arrive at the pool, but by the time I've left, my whole mindset has changed. I'm hopeful. It's not easy to be hopeful right now as our country crumbles around us, but after I swim, I feel like there's hope.
For a few hours, anyway.
That may not sound like much, but for me, it's huge. It lifts me up before I slowly sink back down, and then it's time to swim again.
It all works, somehow.
I don't even swim that far, only half a mile or so. That's only about 25 minutes. Still, it's enough time make me feel like a different, more positive person.
Also, Eli 24.5 is in Switzerland again:
I don't care how many times you see that view. It's still amazing.
The Land of the Thin-Skinned
Scott Adams died yesterday.
If you're interested in his heel turn from relatively amiable cartoonist to a remarkably vile human being, I highly recommend listening to the two-part series from the Beyond the Bastards podcast, which goes into his life in quite some depth.
There are many things from the podcast that struck me, but what struck me most is how thin-skinned the ultra-wealthy have become in this country. Even with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank (and literally living in a house shaped like Dilbert's head), Adams became incendiary over the slightest criticism. He even created sock puppet accounts on platforms like Reddit to argue on his behalf.
It does seem that it's the ultra-wealthy right wingers who have developed in this manner (Musk and Trump come to mind immediately) although I'm sure there are liberal examples if I looked long enough.
My question, though, is this uniquely American? Have we somehow become a nation of the most thin-skinned people on Earth? What happened to us?
Nazaré
Nazaré is the most well-known in Portugal. From the international perspective, at least.
It's not for religious reasons, though. Right outside the church, in the ocean below, break some of the largest waves in the world.
How big? RED CODE at NAZARÉ. The largest wave ever recorded there was 35 meters (115 feet).
Eli 24.5 went to see it in person with his old college roommate. No, he didn't surf.
The forecasting system said "calm," which is the lowest of five levels. Still, 10 meter waves were breaking. This is what passes for calm here--20+ foot waves.
He's sending me pictures and I'll post them when they arrive.
