Good morning. Hello. How are you? #737
The alarming EU-US electric shredder gap. The tyranny of narratives.
Good morning! Hello, there. How are you this fine Tuesday? Well, I hope? Oh look, it’s edition #737, we’re on a Boeing number. I forgot to acknowledge the Boeningness of issue #727. That was the current daily routine issue. No time for small talk, I guess. I remember the 727s. Wein Air Alaska used them. They had 11. After my grandfather’s time, though. But a staple of my childhood travel. They were very impressive planes when you were a kid. Bigger than the 737. Loud. Oh hrm. I guess we didn’t mention Boeing on issue 707 either. Wait. Did we? No we did not. I remember the 707 too. Alaska Airlines was a big operator. Not Wein, though.
Damn, you start off a GMHHAY and suddenly you’re off on a tangent about 80’s Alaskan aviation. Sorry about that. Big part of my childhood. I remember the DC-10 scare. I remember flying over the pole to London from Anchorage at the height of the DC-10 scare. Very scary for a 10 year old.
I’ve been trying to find an electric chipper shredder that doesn’t suck. It really is ridiculous. They just don’t make one in America. They’re all garbage. I cannot convey to you how badly I want a chipper shredder, how badly I want to make my own mulch. Or, rather, make more mulch, since I already make perfectly good mulch out of leaves and can just pick up perfectly good brown gold pine needle mulch off of the ground. This is not a rational need. I have one of those SunJoe chippers, which says it can chip a branch up to 2 inches, which isn’t bad, and it does okay if the branch is dried and has no leaves on it, but if it’s got leaves or, worse, pine needles, the thing clogs every two seconds and is a nightmare. All of the electric chipper shredders are the sad kind that look like shopping carts or baby strollers, not the manly kind that look like the thing in Fargo the movie.
There is one, it is by a big macho shredder company called Patriot. It looks very solid and heavy duty. Unfortunately, by all accounts, the thing is just marginally better than the SunJoe and its ilk. Now, I would probably buy it just for a marginal improvement. But the thing is $1,500. $1,500! That is so insane! And even then I would probably buy it if it were, you know, like as powerful as an electric motor can be, but the thing is… fifteen amps. One point five horsepower. It runs on 110 current. Come on! Give the thing a beefy motor, let it run in, like, 220 and 40 amp, and give it some real power, and let’s talk. It is so, so disappointing. Also the thing hasn’t been updated in, like, six years. Real chicken-and-egg problem here. Why would they bother updating it when no one buys it, why would anyone buy it when it’s so underpowered.
Meanwhile, in Europe they have the amazing, fantastic, Forest Master FM4DDE. Look at this thing! It is amazing!
Four – four! — horsepower! And its only three hundred euros!
Am I crazy enough to import this thing? To have it shipped to America? To get the appropriate electrical conversion stuff? is that even possible??? It runs off of EU 240 volt household current. Can I run that off of 220? Can I… install an EU 240 volt outlet on the outside of my house? Does anyone know about this?
Oh my god I want this thing so badly.
So badly.
This week’s other obsession is learning to find the little bump on the 5 key on the numeric keypad on my keyboard. Every day I make extensive use of the keypad, and I am a 50 year old man who has been typing since Mavis Bacon and Word Munchers taught me to type in 1981 on my Apple //c, and I still don’t use the little bump on the 5 key and I am always typing in the wrong numbers, and numbers are a very bad time to type on the wrong keys, since it’s much more difficult to notice a typo with numbers than words. I’m slowly getting better but, man, teaching an old dog new tricks. They weren’t lying.
Still working my way through Robert Shiller’s Narrative Economics and it is making me think a lot about narrative which, not sure if you’ve noticed, is really not my thing. I do not like narratives! I do not like the power of narrative! I think, by and large, narratives are a form of cognitive bias.
I mean, I like a story as much as the next guy, but I am Very Much Not Into the concept of “The Power of Narrative.” The jury’s still out on whether Shiller is “into” it either, but he is very much doing a persuasive job (through narrative!) elucidating the power of narrative. Speaking of juries, if a prosecutor inserts a random but evocative fact into the narrative of a crimal’s act (“the killer knocked over a bowl of guacamole as he made his escape”), a jury is statistically more likely to convict. That is not good! Narrative is bad!
Shiller does make a very good point that it’s just as bad to rely on data only, in the absense of narrative. He says that to explain a recession based only on financial statistics is akin to explaining a religious revival solely by the budgets of printing religious tracts. This is fair. But this does not mean narratives are good, only that they are necessary.
He also points out — very compellingly — that our dreams consist almost entirely of narratives. And again, fair point, but dreams are also nightmares and this does not make them good.
As far as we can tell, only humans make use of narratives. There are arguments that we ought to be called Homo Narratus or something like that (they argue a lot about the second word: Narratus? Narrativus? Narrativa? but the idea is the same) instead of Homo Sapien, which apparently means “Wise Man?” Lol. Yeah, that is a dumb name for us.
A thing that I hate about narratives is that there is a conflation between real narratives and fictional ones. And this conflation exists at all levels. Like basically from the second a narrative is releated more than once. Look we all walk around using narratives as heuristics explaining our motivations — it’s why we all tell super boring stories when someone asks how we’re doing or why we feel a certain way. But those super-boring narrative are the only real narratives. If someone asks me how my day was and I ramble on about how I stubbed my toe and it put me into a bit of a cranky mood but, you know, I got through the day, and also there was a work meeting where I had to tell everyone to work 2% harder this week because there’s a sales deadline on Friday, and also I made tacos and I was out of meat and it was just a hard day even though nothing happened, you know? That is a super boring narrative. It is a super boring narrative almost exclusively because it’s true.
But then one of the people in the meeting goes on and makes a new, more zippy narrative about how I yelled at everyone just because I stubbed my toe, and boy, that narrative has some flair and zest and excitement, so that is the narrative that takes off, and now suddenly I’m a guy who yells at people because of a stubbed toe and fuck narratives in the ear, seriously.
I believe we should be fundamentally dubious of narratives.
When someone writes a narrative, they are writing fiction. Elements of it may seem like reality, but it is not reality. It removes the humdrum, the boring. Like those freakin Star Wars films that act like every planet is right next to each other and you can just skip between them like they’re in the same neighborhood. They cut out a fundamental reality of space — that it takes forever to get anywhere — because it’s boring. But that fundamental aspect makes everything completely different. The empire just wouldn’t work over those distances. And if the whole thing is negated — as they usually pretend — by fancy hyperdrives, then tell us about those! How are we forty years into Star Wars and we still know absolutely nothing about hyperdrives? Because they’re just there for narrative service, to tell “larger truths” about us real humans, in the fictional world. Except the larger truths you derive are fake! Darth Vader doesn’t matter! The dude who makes a faster hyperdrive matters! Logistics! Science! Narrative that shit!
Or the sexy romance novel where the bored housewife is just so, so stifled she has to leap out of the confines of her marriage to go find adventure. Which happens, sure, but those housewives are also really into Sudoku or gardening or something, and in reality, 99% of the time, the urge passes and life just.. goes on.
Real narratives are boring. Except they’re not boring! They’re real! Why are we always jazzing them up and making us all feel like our lives are boring? No! No!
Everyone is so into narratives these days that we are positively bombarded with loud, screaming, overwrought and overhyped narratives all the livelong day. Narratives in our psychology and religion and vacuum cleaners (Dyson is such a genius) and our soup (artisinal with no preservatives made by people who really care) and our cars (join the EV revolution) and our this and that and gawd people just chill with the narratives enough already.
This is why I want plotless fiction. Plotless sci fi. This is why ASMR is popular. This is why electronica is popular. You know all those people who say they like music who don’t listen to the words? They are on to something! A break from narrative. Shiller says that music seems to be exclusive to humans as well and some people suggest we be called Homo Musicus. I like that better.
Chronicles. Not in the Narnian sense. In the “historical log” sense. These events happened, here is the order. Not stale or dry. If you know what someone was thinking, write it down. But stop with the editorializing, the sprucing up, the rearranging, ths streamlining. Chronicles not narratives.
(Shiller does make a great point about a history professor speaking at a conference in defense of historical fiction. He says that when we are trying to get a sense of a past time, it makes more sense to take our history facts spruced up with someone’s best guess of dialog and slang rather than to take it utterly devoid of any dialog and slang, since there surely was some. This is a good point in defense of the utility of narratives, but of course it can — and almost always does — go too far, since the people of that time were almost certainly living humdrum chronics, not exciting narratives).
He also makes mention of several forms of Dysnarrativa: cognitive illnesses regarding narratives: “arrested narration (the ability to tell only stories learned before a brain injury), undernarration (the telling of vacillating, impulsive stories), denarration (failure to organize a story in terms of an action-generating temporal frame), and confabulation (the fabrication of stories that have little or no relation to reality).”
I would posit that undernarration and denarration are noble virtues. And 99% of everything that we call narrative these days is actually confabulation.
Emma taught Jane how to say “good night Daddy, I love you Daddy,’ instead of just insisting I stay at her side all night. I don’t know what Emma did, I’ve been working on exactly this for months, and I feel dumb that I couldn’t pull it off myself, but also deeply thankful that it finally happened. Makes bedtime so much more pleasant.
Jane was very whiney yesterday. Well, she was a perfect angel in the morning, at breakfast, and through the morning workday, and through lunch, which I had to do solo cuz Emma was out. But from then on? Whine whine whine. Until the evening, when she started her parkour routine right before bed.
“Jane. If you want to do more parkour in the day you could start earlier. You could do parkour all day.”
“No. I only want to do parkour before bed.”
Okay, then.
Oh god it’s so late I spent way too much time ranting about narratives, sorry. Just a mix for you today, mostly new. New High Vis is awesome. New Brian Jonestown Massacre is great. New LCD Soundsystem starts slow but ends majestic. New Lambchop is moody but has some great cuts. Kinda wish I went to the Titus Andronicus show @ Cat’s Cradle last week. I used to see them a lot and there’s something about the production on the albums I don’t love but they are so good live and have so much energy and write great songs. Also very into Darklands this week I have been listening to it on repeat which is not good but also amazing what a beautiful album.
Until tomorrow!
The Forest Master is a must. Even if you spend another €600 to get it here and operating you’re still coming out ahead. Mulch!