Good morning. Hello. How are you? #422
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Doing okay? Happy Juneteenth! Can you imagine the weirdness of having a holiday you’ve always personally coveted in the face of massive public indifference going, in the span of two years, from a more-or-less intimate, private thing to something that Republican Senators unanimously embrace? I imagine there are probably a lot of complex, mixed feelings on the topic.
I told you yesterday you wouldn’t hear from me until I was in Alaska, but I lied! I am going to write a GMHHAY you today. Lotta odds and ends to clear up before I get to Alaska, and I usually write one weekend edition, so today it is! It’s going to be delivered late, though, because I slept in 20 minutes and I will have to get Jane out of bed and do breakfast before I can finish this but that’s okay. It’ll be a nice, long, leisurely weekend read, right?
Important news: Taylor Swift put up the pre-orders for Taylor’s version of Red. SO EXCITING. Thirty songs. She re-recorded them all. Unfortunately no vinyl edition for pre-order yet, which is probably good because now we’ve entered the period where I already have the vinyl for Red and I will have to decide if I want a second copy because of course I want a second copy. Taylor’s copy. Maybe it’ll have a re-recorded version of Starlight on the vinyl. oooooooooo.
I finished the gardening and gardening video yesterday, so here it is for your enjoyment. Did a lot of maintenance, fertilizing and pruning and trellising to get everything in a good situation for Emma to maintain it and water it for a week without me. Emma is not a gardener, but I think she will do just fine at watering for a week. There are a LOT of green tomatoes, maybe they’ll be read by the time I get home! Seriously I probably have, like, 50 tomatoes and 100 cherry tomatoes growing on the vines. And the peppers are going insane. I picked a few yesterday but I am mainly leaving them on the vine to grow while I’m gone. I also harvested a nice head of lettuce, and a nice Napa Cabbage that we will eat in a salad tonight, that’ll be yummy. The compost seems to be doing mostly fine, still only 80 degrees, but it is undeniably turning into compost. The beans and beets got completely eaten by the deer, but my netting will be here by the time I get home, and I’ll plant the fall crops in a week or two after that so, you know, try, try again. I have a few baby watermelon growing on the vines! That is exciting. And my first cucumber has sprouted. Do cucumbers sprout? Well, I have one. Fennel is doing lovely. Luffa has grown to around eight feet tall. It hurts to have lost the beets and beans, but at least the peppers are bouncing back from their deer ravaging.
I gotta make more waffles today so Jane is in waffles while I’m gone. I had this whole dilemma because I needed to make a batch and a half of waffles, and each batch of batter makes two squares of waffles, and I needed three squares of waffles. But I solved the problem by accidentally burning the first square of waffles. I swear to god, I check that stupid, loose dial to make sure it’s set at two every single time before I cook the waffles, and it’s always set to two, but the one time I don’t check it, it gets bumped to four, and the waffles burn. So I gotta make more batter at breakfast today, but honestly, it worked out. Now Jane and Emma will have enough waffles for my absence. Also gotta bring in enough Zevia from the garage to make sure my poor wife doesn’t run out of her caffeinated-or-decaffeinated, naturally sweetened fizzy water.
Lot’s to do — gotta pack, gotta help Emma assemble a bed, gotta clean up my kultch piles (I should really link back to that edition but I am lazy), gotta find some mix CDs to pack because the car I’m borrowing from sis might have CD player in it. Big day!
I am reading a biography of the economist Joan Robinson, and it’s such a great read. First thing, she had this great dichotomy in economists: Turvists or Turnipists. Curvists were economists who loved their models, their graphs, their theory, their curves. The theoretical economists. And Turnipists were economists based in empirical data and real-world observations. We could think of Turnips in this situation like Widgets. I definitely identify as a Turnipists. Joan herself saw it as her vision to merge the two. Damn fine job she did, too. Her first major work, The Economics of Imperfect Competition went a very long way to bridge Marshall and Keynes. It was a bestseller. She was kind of a nobody before that — the wife of a Cambridge economist but not really viewed as one herself. Her ascent was metoric and astonishing. Most economists of her day believe she was denied the Nobel due to her gender. And, of course, the fact that she didn’t want it. And maybe her later-in-life obsession with North Korea.
But anyway, the biography is stated as an attempt to merge Joan’s early theories with the epistolary record of her interaction with the other economists of the Cambridge Circus, and analyze the influence of Saffro, Kahn, Robertson and, of course, Keynes on her work. It is written like a long version of something you’d read in an economics journal.
Except then the epistolary record takes you into the secret world of eminent economist Richard Kahn and Joan Robinson, where the two were in love with each other for fifty years, and did their best to not hook up for most of that time because they knew it would mean the end to Kahn’s career, as well as Joan’s husband, because Cambridge did NOT go for any hanky panky back then. And suddenly this dry economics biography (which was great!) reads like an Anaïs Nin journal from the Artaud/Miller years and it is just fantastic. Talk about a pleasant surprise. Read any of the relevant wikipedia pages about these people and you’ll get no hint of it. I already knew dimly about their “affair” from Keynes biography — in the early years, Keynes wasn’t sure they were having one (neither were they! They were trying not to!) but he would write letters to his wife (god Keynes and his wife really never seemed to be in the same city back then) about how dangerous Kahn and Joan were being. But he only had his suspicions back then. But, man. Wow. Those two. They must have felt it. They tried so hard to not hook up. For decades.
Went to see Dr. Paul, my doctor yesterday. I tried to refill my Mobic (for my headaches resultant from my fused neck) and the pharmacy was like, “nope.” I had a neck doctor but she sucked and did nothing for me and then moved away and sent me a terse email telling me to take it up with Doctor Paul. Okay, I guess being fair, she did give me a second MRI, confirmed my diagnosis I had gotten in New York of Kippel Fiel syndrome, and answered a lot of my questions, but she couldn’t actually do anything to fix things. So, anyway, back to Dr. Paul I go, he refills the Mobic, no problem. He tells me he can give me an injection for my trigger finger, so that is exciting. I’m gonna get that when I get back from Alaska. But all in all, he’s very unimpressed with me, I’m up 40 pounds from my pre-pandemic weight, my blood pressure’s up. It’s now on the wrong side of borderline, instead of on the right side of borderline where it’s been my whole life. So, you know, just peachy. Probably time for a diet.
I gotta say, too, these covid screening questions do not inspire confidence. It’s super weird they don’t ask about vaccinations. Do they know I got vaccinated? I didn’t get vaccinated in the UNC system, do they know anyway? I assume not cuz HIPPA? So, like, why don’t they just ask if you’ve been vaccinated? It’s so weird. And then! They ask me if I’ve left the state in the last two weeks, I say yes, and nothing changes about the questions or the results. Which makes me assume they’re secretly asking if you’ve been to India or some other hotspot, which, then, why don’t they ask that? Weird. The whole thing just gives me this uneasy sneaking suspicion they’re all asking this because there are a bunch of people who work there who haven’t gotten vaccinated. Not like you actually see any other patients anyway.
Kevin Drew from Broken Social Scene has a new solo project and it’s a sort of synth pop instrumental thing called KDAP and he put out a video and it’s not really a video it’s a “visualizer” but it’s a video it’s like an awesome HD version of a 1992 electronica rave video and I love it so much:
Big news this morning on the Laguardia front: AOC has successfully gotten the ill-advised Airtrain project at Laguardia paused. I mean, I will admit. Part of me wishes, right now, that the stupid thing was done because even backtracking to Willet’s point and hopping an overcrowded seven train back into the city seems better than the current cab situation. But at the same time, it also illustrates just how stupid this route is. Apparently some activists did a FOIA request and found some correspondence where, shockingly, it turned out that maybe the Willet’s point route was rushed through because, breaking news, Andrew Cuomo is a dick. I suspect the pause won’t result in much — certainly not the political cojones to muscle through the correct train route through Steinway on the N Train. And this does make me wonder what AOC’s long game is here, because she can have her constituency behind her when killing Willet’s point but they will turn on her when she advocates an Astoria route, and then we’re back to the drawing board, and cabs, and Uber, of which, to my understanding, AOC is not a fan. But I welcome her support while it’s here. And maybe she’ll surprise us!
Let’s do a playlist! Country! This one is REALLY GOOD. So much good country these days, and of course 90% of it is by ladies.
Oh wow it is 8:59. I made it! It’s like… Oh wow. I slept an extra 40 minutes and still finished this post on time! Really feels like I beat the devil today. Hopefully this kind of luck will run through the whole day. I’d make a felix felicitus reference but I stand by my JKR cancelation.
I hope your weekend is going swimmingly. Hope you get some sun. And some sleep. And some fun in the sun? Maybe? But don’t get burnt. Wear sunscreen. Maybe a hat. Even though they’re really hot. Someone needs to make cooler hats, I swear to god.
Anyway.
Talk to you Monday from Alaska!