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“You’ve Got Mail!”
For years, I would walk into the local Barnes and Noble and buy a book or two. The employee checking me out always asked for my email address. I always said no. I don’t want more sales offers and pitches in my email. I already filter what I do get and most times I delete them without looking.
I wondered how many people actually said yes?
When email was new and exciting it was awesome to get a new message. “You’ve Got Mail!” echoed and it was cool. Now, everyone’s email has far too much spam.
What if Barnes and Noble’s employees told customers they had just won a $10 gift certificate? They could say, “Congratulations! You just won a $10 gift certificate. Can I email it to you? Your email will be entered to win more gift certificates each month.”
Now it’s about the customer getting something instead of Barnes and Noble. That feels like Marketing 101.
Library Literacy vs. Street Sign Literacy
Dave Perell, in his Monday Musings newsletter, described something I was also thinking about in the back of my head.
I’ve long believed that we’re experiencing a decline in advanced literacy.
On this topic, I don’t really care what the statistics say because they’re misleading. Official literacy rates measure what I call “Street Sign Literacy,” which is the ability to read signs and basic articles, and we are undoubtedly getting better at it.
But we are getting worse at Library Literacy, which gives you the ability to understand logic and think about ideas abstractly. It’s what you learn when you read dense fiction or difficult philosophy, and we don’t really measure it.
In short, you need Street Sign Literacy to live, but you need Library Literacy to think.
The ability to think abstractly and logically seems like a lost art to the world today with conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism running rampant.
Pearl Jam Announces ‘Deep’
Daniel Kreps, writing for Rolling Stone, has the story on this new Pearl Jam archive.
Pearl Jam are offering fans an immersive plunge into the band’s live archives with their newly announced Deep, a digital collection of nearly 200 Pearl Jam concerts spanning from 2000 to 2013.
The just-launched Deep hub on Pearl Jam’s official site allows visitors to access 186 bootlegs and 5,404 tracks from the past two decades, with each gig accompanied by show descriptions written by members of the band’s Ten Club fan club.
This is pretty amazing. I wish I was a bigger Pearl Jam fan.
I’m not much of a bootlegger either, so finding cool bootlegs in shady record stores never was my scene. I would imagine it’s a dream for the average Pearl Jam fan.
Now, if Gene and Paul would do this for the KISS catalog that would get me to pay attention. Yes, I know there’s a new Off the Soundboard series coming. Maybe this sort of thing will come out once the End of the Road tour plays its last show.
A Beautiful Life
Rebecca Toh answers what it means to live a beautiful life.
A beautiful picture of your life isn’t the same as a beautiful life.
A beautiful life isn’t about loving yourself or loving others but loving both yourself and others.
A beautiful life looks like a vase with scars on it because it was once broken but someone took time and effort to patch the pieces back together.
A beautiful life cannot be planned or executed perfectly but can be experienced fully.
A beautiful life is honest. But honesty isn’t possible until you learn to see and acknowledge and tear down all the walls you have built up in order to protect yourself.
A beautiful life is one lived awake, or one lived trying to be awake. A beautiful life is full of “trying.”
A beautiful life is beautiful despite cancer, business failures, the loss of a marriage, financial mistakes.
A beautiful life is knowing you are nothing and everything.
A beautiful life is something you’re already living.
Enjoy every moment of it.
A perfect list of beautiful sentiments. I wish I could live up to them.
Los Angeles Angels Releasing Albert Pujols
The Los Angeles Angels are releasing future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols today, per sources. Pujols is in the final year of his 10-year, $253 million contract.
— Mark Feinsand (@Feinsand) May 6, 2021
This is incredible news. While not totally unexpected, the timing is weird and the question remains if the release also releases him from the 10 year post-playing days contract. Apparently, that contract is only worth a million a year so it is possible Pujols just gets that in a lump sum and he’s free to go become the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals like I want.
I hope he finds himself in Cardinals red real soon.
Stupid is as Stupid Does
Writing for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson wondered about all these batshit crazy people refusing to get the vaccine.
What are they thinking, these vaccine-hesitant, vaccine-resistant, and COVID-apathetic? I wanted to know. So I posted an invitation on Twitter for anybody who wasn’t planning to get vaccinated to email me and explain why. In the past few days, I spoke or corresponded with more than a dozen such people. I told them that I was staunchly pro-vaccine, but this wouldn’t be a takedown piece. I wanted to produce an ethnography of a position I didn’t really understand. […]
This is the no-vaxxer deep story in a nutshell: I trust my own cells more than I trust pharmaceutical goop; I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites.
Dear no-vaxxers,
You have misplaced your trust. You are stupid.
Scientists and doctors are smarter than you about this subject. You are ignorant of this subject. Do not think your ignorance is better or just as good as others with knowledge, experience, and intelligence.
It is not.
You are being stupid. Stupid people get others killed.
Have your tried not being stupid?
The Complete Star Wars Timeline
It’s Star Wars Day!
Alex Damon and Mollie Damon of Star Wars Explained have updated their Complete Canon Timeline for the Star Wars saga for 2021, just in time for May the 4th, using every item of reference they could find to explain everything that ever happened in a galaxy far, far away in one hour-long video.
This is the entire history of the Star Wars canon as of May 3, 2021. The Star Wars films, TV shows, books, comics, video games, and short stories are all summarized into the most important moments in galactic history!
Marvel Studios Celebrates The Movies
I’m surprised how much this video gave me chills. Excellent work.
Focus
Sunday, for me, means preparing for the upcoming week. Sometimes it’s simply mentally preparing. Sometimes it’s listing out everything that needs to get done.
The thing is, I’ll never get everything done that needs to be done. I won’t get on top of my to-do list. It is always updating.
What I can do is choose to do the things that matter most. Work or personal… what is most important to me.
I make my lists with the goal of eliminating the unimportant.
My wife has a better understanding of what drains her of energy and time. I’m still learning.
I write in my journal to focus on what’s important. I don’t always succeed, but I’m trying.
Maybe someday, I’ll have my ability to focus fine-tuned enough that I won’t ever have to write a reminder.
Not today. Not tomorrow. But someday.
Joe Biden’s Popularity
Alex Roarty and Adam Wollner, reporting for McClatchy on Joe Biden’s popularity:
Sarah Longwell, a former GOP operative and founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, said her studies of voters who supported Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 show they are “the most optimistic group in the history of focus groups I’ve done.”
She said that has been due to the perceived chaos of the Trump administration coming to a close and a sense that the coronavirus pandemic situation is finally improving.
“Now there’s a sense of relief,” Longwell said. “Imagine there’s a car alarm that’s been going off for a long time and suddenly it’s quiet.”
Insert the Billy Eilish, “Duh” here.
What Do I Want?
On his blog, Greg Morris asks a pretty important question about upgrading and wanting more.
Upgraded my phone, tablet, computer, and anything I could get my hands on almost constantly in a search for something better. When in fact it wasn’t better it was looking for, it was an answer.
He realized he was trying to fill a hole with tech purchases, but that wasn’t working.
I wanted something to fill another hole in myself. It didn’t matter what the hole was, but I filled it with buying tech. Simply because I thought it made me look cool on the internet. Although every upgrade offered me something, these things are not what I needed. What I, and load of people like me, needed was to get to the root of what I really wanted. What was I trying to mask and fill with buying things?
I strive to find the right kind of minimalism, but curating my collections is difficult. I have outdated technology I should sell, comics I will never read again that should find new homes, and more.
Illini Basketball | Season Highlights
All the season highlights of a year like no other.
What an incredible basketball program. I think this is just the beginning.
Seasonal IKEA Employee with the Responses He’d Like to Say toCustomers
Scott Seiss made me laugh pretty hard with his honest answers to inane questions from customers as a seasonal employee of IKEA.
I think this one is my favorite:
Customer: I’d like to speak to your manager
Seiss: I’d like to speak to your mother. Tell her she should be embarrassed she raised someone to act like a baby in public. You want to speak to the manager? Please. The manager doesn’t know what’s going on. Haven’t you ever worked anywhere before?
I hope he never stops doing these.
Languishing
Adam Grant, writing for The New York Times, explains the not quite post-pandemic feeling we are all experiencing.
At first, I didn’t recognize the symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having trouble concentrating. Colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the horizon, they weren’t excited about 2021. A family member was staying up late to watch “National Treasure” again even though she knows the movie by heart. And instead of bouncing out of bed at 6 a.m., I was lying there until 7, playing Words with Friends.
It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.
Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.
“Languishing” is such a perfectly descriptive word. My wife and I often have discussions about our emotions and how we are feeling. Languishing is exactly how I’ve been feeling for months.
I Tried to Recreate the Original Four Loko to Prepare for a Summer of Chaos
Katie Way had a fun assignment from Vice: try and recreate the banned Four Loko drink and write about her attempts.
To be totally transparent, I was born in the wrong generation: I should be 31 right now, because if I was, I would have taken the full brunt of the original Four Loko craze directly to the forehead. Unfortunately, I was in tenth grade in November 2010, when the FDA banned alcoholic energy drinks. So, while nobody reading this has had an OG Four Loko in over a decade, my memory isn’t the sharpest—I was probably worrying about how to get a good PSAT score or some bullshit like that when I was tentatively sipping a lukewarm watermelon flav Loko in a Safeway parking lot. (To be honest, if OG Loko existed when I was finished with puberty, I’d probably be a very different person—someone, at least, who’d gotten her stomach pumped during college.)
I wish I could get a gig where I had to try and make a boozy alcoholic beverage with insane amounts of caffeine and then write about it. I will admit a time when “Red Bull and vodka” was a drink I drank a lot.
Also, come on Katie… you definitely had your stomach pumped in college.
THE INTERNET K-HOLE
The INTERNET -K-HOLE is a vast amount of very amateur snapshots taken from the mid-1970s to mid-1990s, with absolutely no other context provided or needed. Mostly a whole bunch of people I’ve never seen before… but if I scroll long enough—hours maybe—I will see an image of myself somewhere, I am sure of it.
NSFW warning: a small amount of lite smut compared to the gargantuan size of the collection; however, the second picture in the latest post happens to be of a butt. The one after that is Lemmy in a hotel room. Then comes the panoply of randos.
And more butts.
The Hotel Bathroom Principle
Dave Perell, in his weekly Monday Musings email, made a smart observation.
Whenever I’m in a city and I need to use the bathroom, I walk into a fancy hotel.
Fancy hotels always have nice bathrooms. And if you’re dressed well and walk confidently, you won’t be hassled for using the bathroom.
The world is becoming more casual. But if you dress too casually, it looks sloppy and careless.
When you want to cultivate serendipity, stick to the “Hotel Bathroom” dress code. Always dress well enough to walk into a bathroom at a hotel you’re not staying at and get away with it.
If you remember the “Hotel Bathroom Principle” you’ll always look sharp enough to capitalize on a serendipitous encounter.
This is good advice.
100 Day Plan
Seth Godin wants you to make a plan.
What do you want to be doing 100 days from now?
What change do you seek to be making? With which skills? Surrounded by which people?
For that to happen, day 99 will need to be different from today.
And so will day 98. In fact, so will tomorrow.
If we keep focusing on ‘what’s next’ we might never get around to doing the work we need to do to get us to day 100.
I’ve never done something like this. I wonder if I would benefit? Probably.
Welcome 2 America
The first new song from Prince. “Come on in… sit right down.”
Ahead of his time.
I’ve been waiting for new Prince music since he passed away. I can’t wait.
Will it Be the Roaring ’20s Again?
Rebecca Onion (What a great name…), writing for Slate, reviews the expert opinions on if the 2020s might copy and paste from the 1920s.
I remain very interested in the reasons the ’20s appeal to our imagination right now. Of course, it’s the booze, the sex, and the parties. But it’s also a decade with a very strong identity—and I think that helps.
I think it’s important to note, no one says, “Roaring 30s.”
I tend to think there’s going to be a massive uptick in parties as 2021 winds down and the pandemic is firmly in the rearview mirror. My best guess is this is exactly what will happen right about New Year’s Eve 2021 through 2022 and likely beyond.
Apologies to Prince, “Two Thousand Two Zero, party overruled out of time. So tonight we’re gonna party through Twenty Twenty-Nine.”