Good morning. Hello. How are you? #816
More Pittsboro PFOAs, More KitchenAid, Holiday cards and holiday letters, Mr. Beast curing blindness.
Good morning! Hello there! How’s tricks? How are you? What a week, huh?
Watched All Quiet on the Western Front last night. Well, I watched the last 40 or so. I’ve been working on it for weeks. It is too harrowing, too terrifying, too much. Gorgeously shot, deserves all those cinematography awards, but man it’s just too bleak. World War I is awful. Awful. That was one hard film to watch. So I followed it up with The Last of Us for good measure. Man. I need to watch something happier I swear to god.
Read the entire Pittsboro lawsuit against 3M, Dupont and a bunch of others about PFOAs. It was interesting. Lotta talk about firefighting foam for airports. Seems like they’ve really focused in on the Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro as a significant source of PFOA contamination into the Haw River, into Pittsboro’s water supply, Jordan lake and the entire Cape Fear river basin. Not the only one of course, but a big one. The lawsuit definitely doesn’t read like it’s the first of its kind, I suspect a bunch of these are going on around the country. And… good. 3M and DuPont both knew these things were toxic since the 50’s. Just kept denying it, covering it up, lying. I guess all this is the plot of that Todd Haynes Mark Ruffalo jam Dark Waters, right? I should watch that.
And I guess this ties into the whole KitchenAid saga because, you know, companies have a tendency to lie and cover things up, but then of course they also have a tendency to be incompetent, and sometimes they manage to do both at the same time. I suspect that if there is lead on the KitchenAid mixer attachments, it is in trace amounts and probably not a big deal, relatively speaking, since our whole world is poisoned these days and this has probably been going on forever and how often to people use their KitchenAid mixers, and how often do they use them with brokedown old attachments where the coasting has been scraped off, exposing the aluminum, which has trace amounts of lead in them. But what interests me is KitchenAid’s response, which is just… terrible! Terrible! Exactly the response that they would have if there was lead in their products! But also it’s exactly the response they would have if they’re incompetent and don’t grasp the magnitude of the consumer freakout on their hands! They both seem entirely plausible!
And also, of course, the most likely answer is something along the lines of “well everything has lead in it, and there are guidelines about how much lead things can have in them and those guidelines are not zero and KitchenAid complies with them.” Which is depressing and always the case and we just do not like to think about these unpleasant truths. The EPA says you can have PFOAs in your water. Not a lot, mind you, jut a few parts per trillion, but it’s not zero!
One thing I did this weekend that I forgot to mention yesterday is that I finally went through all the holiday cards. I was in quarantine when most of them came in, and Emma kept up the display that we usually do. When it was time to wrap up Christmas decor, she gathered them up and left them for me. And I wanted to go through them and give each one of them time. So I finally had that time and I did it! So, belatedly, I thank you all for your cards, and offer you some holiday card thoughts:
First, I vastly prefer cards that have a photo of my friend in them. Seems a lot of people really focus on pictures of their kids, and I get it, because thats what the grandparents and aunties and uncles want, but I like to see pictures of my friends! We did not follow this rule ourselves, I think. We had an illustration. But I realized I do like some photos of the friends.
Next, only a few people did this, but I am getting into the holiday letter. I got like four, and three of them were from family members all over 70, and that is great, but I got one from a friend and I love that shit! It was so great! I mean, this was not a super-close friend these days, but we had our years together and got along great and it made me so happy to know what was up with him, in his new city, with his new kids and fantastic wife. The thing about holiday letters, I’m realizing, is you don’t have to read them. And it’s sort of inverse. Like if one of my best friends sent me a holiday letter in their card, I might not read it, because I talk to them all the time and know what’s up in their life. But the more distant friends, past friends, things like that, I think they’re just great. I’m seriously consider just diving into being an old person and starting up the holiday letter. Which I guess is not surprising given GMHHAY, but, then, this is a different target audience. GMHHAY readers obviously don’t need my holiday letter.
Did anyone else see the most recent Mr. Beast video where he paid to cure 1,000 people of their blindness? That shit teared me up. It seems so cheap! It’s weird, though, he interviewed a guy that runs a non-profit that focuses on this, but I don’t think he ever put a link in the video? Oh wait I was watching it on my TV I bet it’s in the video description. Yep, there it is. Here it is. Okay, well, the math is not obvious on the page, but they ask you to donate $5/month and then say it will cure two people of blindess per year. So that works out to $30 to cure someone of blindness. Thirty bucks! That is insane. I’m gonna go cure 5 people’s blindness right now.
Done. Well shit. Man. If I am ever feeling down, like I didn’t accomplish anything today, I’m gonna go back to that site and pay $30 to cure someone of blindness. I feel like a saint right now. That was awesome.
Maybe you wanna go cure someone of blindness today!
Jane is texting the neighbors now it is pretty hilarious. Also some evenings now after dinner, she just gets up from the dinner table, grabs her phone, and worldessly walks upstairs without saying a word. Moody teenager at the age of five. I love it.
But not always. Sometimes she is an adorable five year-old and just the best. Look at this! Ridiculous.
Moody and Quiet mix for you today. All new stuff. Well, new to me I think that Dodi track might be a couple years old I learned about her from a Tiny Desk concert she had pluck. And a great outfit. Very excited about the new Yo La Tengo can’t wait to see them in April at Cat’s Cradle, assuming I remember to actually go.
Until tomorrow!