Good morning, there, friend, hello! How are you? All well? Did you enjoy your weekend? Long weekend? Mine was four days that was… maybe too long. I ran out of things to do by day four, not gonna lie.
I would like to start today by wishing two of my best, longest friends happy birthday: Frank and Jussi. Both of them are turning old today. Mig milestone birthday for each. I got to wish Jussi a happy birthday when I was in Boston. I had wanted to be in Fairbanks for Frank’s birthday today but, alas, the vaccine and airplane gods did not align (have you heard about airplanes lately? Feral. Absolute chaos). Good on both of you. Miss you guys.
Yesterday I spent (checks notes) seven hours watching movies and television. This is not a reccomended course of events for anyone. I hadn’t done it in years. It was terrible. But it was also awesome. My god, it is so amazing how quickly your entire life just disappears and all that matters is watching the next episode of that TV show or that dumb movie. And I wasn’t even high, but I bet it’s even more awesome when you’re high. Seven hours.
I watched Moonfall, on the recommendation of a friend who shares both my name and my sense of enjoyment of dumb sci fi and boy did it deliver. What a glorious, terrible, bonkers movie that is three movies in one. I was trying to explain it to Emma, and she was like “Wait a minute, you won’t watch Schitt’s Creek because in the first episode there was a non-realistic application of IRS regulations, but in this movie everything is completely unrealistic and that is fine? Is there some sort of uncanny valley of lack of realism going on with you?” And I think she is on to something there. The rules are complex. Comedies are exempt, anything that knowingly ditches reality for the sake of comedy is just fine. Anything that is so, so unrealistic in the service of a bombastic, completely cliche’s plot is fine. I mean, Moonfall was amazing. The first thirty minutes or so of the film just set up exactly what any Roland Emmerich film needs to set up it’s the best. A disgraced hero. Problems with an ex, an estranged child. A wacky scientist and a beleagured bureaucrat and a stoic soldier. Just fantastic. It was like watching Independence Day all over again. Marvelous.
Then I watched three episodes of The Boys which was, on every level, a fantastically better show. The Boys might be the most insightful political commentary of our time. And Homelander might be the most visceral, chilling, terrifying villian television has produced in ages. It is also hilarious. It is also incredibly hard to watch, disgusting, and utterly terrifying. I kept getting too upset by what I was watching on the screen only to turn to my phone in search of solace, look at Twitter and learn that, oh, in fact The Boys is mostly reality and reality is just as terrifying as The Boys. That was a hugely unpleasant sensation and I am finding it very hard to continue, but it is very good so I guess I will.
After that I watched a pallette cleanser YouTube video from a channel called Cardboard World that my wife is currently obsessed with and, you know, she may have a point.
Then we watched the last episode of Stranger Things which, it turns out, is not in fact the last episode, there are two more coming in ten days or so, which is kinda annoying, this made a perfectly fine last episode, mainly because the evil jocks weren’t in it at all and I am taking serious issue with the way this season of Stranger Things deals with bullies and jocks. I do not like it one bit nope no siree. I have a theory about Stranger Things this season. It does not know if it’s an hommage to 80’s films or the actual 80’s, and it is conflating the two. And the two were not the same. In the actual 80’s mental institutions were not housed in creepy mansions. In the actual 80’s jocks sometimes had a little bit of complexity. Actually, come to think of it, in 80’s films (Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, okay, in John Huges 80’s films) jocks sometimes had a little complexity as well. I suppose they could redeem the jocks, and maybe they will, but they didn’t bother with that other clichéd girl bully out in LA so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Despite that, the last episode was a good ride. The episodes are all way too long and the whole thing is a little exhausting but it is good. Maybe that’s why they decided to take a nice, long breather before the finale which is probably gonna be, like, six hours long across two episodes.
Then I went to bed and I was so excited because I was going to finish Vaclav Smil’s latest book, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going, which I thought I would love but I actually hated hated hated so much. I thought it would be a great little hand book about how the world actually works, and it did sort of start out that way, talking about the main pillars of life and society on the planet, and there were fascinating chapters on ammonia and concrete and oxygen and carbon fuels and energy and… well, if you’ve read any Smil it is basically a little digest of a lot of his books all rolled into one. Look, Smil is brilliant, Bill Gates is right to have read all thirty-plus of his books, you read a Vaclav Smil book — including this misfire — and you instantly feel smarter.
That out of the way, this book sucked. It was dreary AF, and I am someone who devoured Energy and Civilization like it was pulp sci fi. I kept falling asleep, it was a struggle to read more than ten, fifteen minutes at any time. Even in the middle of the day! Mostly, though, in a way unlike any other Smil book, it exposes Smil’s failings and makes him a dreary human like the rest of us. He spends an extraordinary amount of time in this book — as he does in other books — pooh poohing predictions and, especially, complex scientific modeling. Fine. I’ve often agreed with him on his adorable, curmudgeonly hatred of scientific modeling. He also makes the very necessary point that these models are basically useless because reality has a nagging way of going off the rails in ways that no one could have ever predicticted — he uses the rapid, last-three-decades rise of China as an example.
Yet his undying disdain for predictions, and his stated refusal to make any predictions himself, do absolutely nothing to tame his own habit of making predictions himself. Gawd, he is constantly making them, and nine times out of ten the predictions he makes are depressing, horrifying, and completely unhelpful to anyone who has an interest in improving the world. I counted over twenty predictions in chapter six. And they are often exactly the sort of predictions he decries, using the outlier event of China as an example. Like he’ll say “yeah we’ll never get there” about electric car adoption, pretending it is linking back to his calculations about physics and cobalt three chapters earlier, except it’s not, because it’s apples and oranges and Smil doesn’t know any more than the rest of us. I mean, shit, the dude says he doesn’t do predictions, and predictions are right there in the title of the book.
He’s also just. Gawd. So fucking depressing. I mean, yes, his arguments are depressing. We are completely screwed from a fossil fuels front. We’re never getting off of them any time soon. The planet can only feed between three and four billion people without using fossil fuels as fertilizer and ammonia, and, as he hypocritically predicts, we would never decrease our population that much (as an aside, this figure is massively important. Remember it every time some know-it-all goes on about how we need to keep growing our population).
The only thing Smil suggests is doable or possible for helping the planet is that we all leave the cities and eat less meat. He gives no realistic path to getting there. He pooh poohs every human that puts any effort into narrative, or marketing, or convincing people of these things. In fact his whole book about how the world works seems to… basically ignore humans and their minds and their spirits. The only thing this book acknowledges about humans and how the world works is their industrial footprint. If a human tries to make a path towards saving the planet, they are talking bullshit. But he is completely allowed to repeatedly, unceasingly, predict that nothing will work.
(There is a three-or-so paragraph endeavor to explain different types of predictions, those based on straightforard single stats vs those based on complex systems, etc. It makes sense. You can rely on more simple models more than complex ones. But this does nothing to guide or mitigate his own predictions).
At first, when I started the book, I still retained my legacy respect for Smil and I got really upset by the first few chapters. His math on fossil fuel use and where we use it beyond power plants and cars is illuminating and terrifying. But then, as the book went on, I realized the entire book is, essentially, a centrist wash job. Smil himself is a recluse — he’s only attended a single faculty meeting of the college at which he’s worked for twenty years. He eats a low-meat (maybe veggie who knows) diet and — good for him — has thick walls with extra insulation in his house.
Yet I can’t help but wonder why he even bothers. He pretty much said outright he believes nothing will work until humans de-urbanize, yet he still lives in a city of nearly a million people. He’s just like the rest of us! He half-asses his environmental mitigation, like the rest of us which, I guess makes me feel less bad about my own failures? But it does not really make for someone I am inclined to listen to. Not that he ever claimed to be a personal example. Yet he’s the one saying it’s all about personal actions. Corporations show up in his book about how the world works about as much as people do, as in barely at all. There’s a whole school of environmentalism that eschews the focus on personal responsibility to focus on the real polluters (the Romans!) the corporations. Smil does not belong to that school. Yet he seems to half-ass his personal efforts. It is… disappointing. A hero fallen, etc. etc.
Anyway. In other news, my wife has this magical burning want that you stick over your stings to make them stop itching. It is kind of amazing. You stick it on your bite, and press a button and then it just burns it for three or five seconds. It stings. I had been half-assedly thinking lately that I could handle a tattoo, but, lol, nope. I am such a wimp. My mother-in-law is thinking now that they might be spider bites, which would make sense, I suppose, except I feel like I would have seen a spider? But, then, I was pruning six-foot high Tomato plants, maybe one fell? I don’t know. Spider bites, man. Hell of a thing.
Finally, I did a pretty serious self-haircut this weekend, cut most of my bangs off but not any of the longer hair behind them and it looks awful and Emma keeps staring at me in horror and it is really pretty funny. I am slowly trying to repair it by cutting more off, and we all know how that goes. I would post a picture but I am not a Masochist. But, you know, if I do randomly run into you (lol) or show up on a Zoom, try not to stare as I spend a month or two growing it out again. It is.. it makes me a little self conscious. Luckily Jane seems completely indifferent.
Okay moody and quiet mix for today. Mostly new, couple old gems. I got a new Sisters of Mercy shirt and I wore it yesterday. When we were on our walk through the neighborhood we ran into two nice old ladies in a red minivan who had lost their doc the next neighborhood over. They gave us a flier. They were very nice, considering my terrible haircut and very scary goth shirt. Not the kinda guy you’d expect to find in such a quiet, unassuming hood. I hope they find their doggie.
Okay gotta go I can already tell this is going to be an absurdly busy week at work. At least it’s only four days.