13 Months a Year
Someday, in the far future, the world will realize it makes far more sense to have thirteen months constitute a full year. 365 days divided by 13 equals 28 days a month. Every month would have four weeks. With the International Fixed Calendar, everything would be so much easier and smoother.
I don’t have a strong opinion on what the actual thirteenth month should be named, but I like Sol.
The Word
Nicholas Bate asks his readers to choose a word for 2019 and lists 101 ideas.
Choose a word. Any word. One word. Make it yours. Whiteboard it. Write it every day on your planner, put the word on a handful of 3 by 5 cards and place them in strategic places as an ever-present reminder. Get a personal T-shirt printed with it. Learn it in ten other languages. Grab it now: meditate on it, reflect on it; live it, breathe it and nurture it. For 2019.Even before I saw his post, I was thinking along the same lines. My wife asked me what my word was going to be in 2019 and we brainstormed a bit. Her word is “Rhythm.” She decided she most wanted to work on work/life balance, but realized it would never be truly balanced. There would be ups and downs within both of these areas. Her goal then would be to better understand the wave and instead of cresting and crashing, find the rhythm.
For me, I had lots of ideas of things I wanted to accomplish in the new year. I want to be more present with my family, bond on a more adult level with my adult daughter, listen better across the board and stop making assumptions, be more creative and finish a couple of big projects with proper tracking and deadlines, eat better and exercise more and with a purpose.
I settled on “Connect” as my word of the year. Connect with friends and family. Connect my health with my choices. Connect my creativity with my output.
What will your word be?
83 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2018
Here is a fun list of the most extreme, most sobering, and zaniest facts The Atlantic’s science, technology, and health reporters learned this year. Here are a couple of favorites:
Most “Himalayan” pink salt is from the Punjab area of Pakistan, not the actual Himalayas.
Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot is shrinking.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal caused 42 percent of Facebook users to change their behavior on the platform, according to a survey conducted by The Atlantic. Ten percent of those people deleted or deactivated their accounts.
Any Deaths of the Children I’ve Kidnapped Are Strictly the Fault of Parents Who Didn’t Pay the Ransom
In Slate, this essay by Matthew Dessem is an eye-opening satire. I can’t even find a good pull quote to illustrate its point. The whole thing is so well-written that I urge you to read it yourself.
A Nostalgic Look Back at Digital Music Piracy in the 2000s
Abhimanyu Ghoshal, writing in The Next Web, looks back at digital music piracy in the early 2000s. I had forgotten a couple of the sites listed. My recollection is that if you wanted to find the most obscure bootlegs, live recordings, demos, and more, there was a place you could go, and someone would have them.
The Wall
Matt Yglesias, writing for Vox, has an idea why the government shutdown is not likely to get resolved anytime soon.
You should read the whole thing, but basically his thesis is everyone on both sides of the aisle (except Trump) thinks the wall idea is stupid and expensive. Democrats might give Trump funding for something in return worth five billion dollars. DREAMers citizenship might be worth it. However, Republicans don’t want to give up something like that for something they don’t believe in. Hence, nothing getting done.
This might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back regarding Republicans supporting Trump. I mean, Democrats shouldn’t budge one inch unless they get something of equal value in return. Republicans should abandon the sinking ship that is the Trump Administration and start thinking about how they can cut him loose and not get cremated in 2020.
Digital Tickets
Kelsey McKinney, in Deadspin, writes an incredible screed about digital tickets. In short, she hates them. I love her reason why.
Deep Focusing
Matthew Lang is getting set for 2019.
I’m clearing the desk, sorting out notebooks, reviewing app subscriptions, getting a list of books to read and considering what to focus on for 2019. I’ve been all over the place the last few years, time for some deep focusing.
That’s my upcoming weekend.
You Can Only Grieve So Much
Will Leitch basically created Deadspin. He left several years back, and once a year since 2011, he gets back to writing a piece for the site as a fill-in for Drew Magary. While Deadspin is mostly about sports, Leitch has used his space this year to talk about death.
I kind of wish he would have written this piece for The New Yorker, but here it is. It made me feel incredibly melancholy.
Bandersnatch
One of the better things that happened in the last couple of years is the continued existence of Black Mirror on Netflix. It’s by far one of my favorite television shows and has been blowing my mind with each entry in the anthology series.
The movie trailer for the latest incarnation is about a programmer who is adapting a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style of books. The author of the series apparently “went cuckoo.” And now, maybe, the programmer.
The film is live on Netflix tomorrow, so you have less than 24 hours to watch the trailer over and over again looking for Easter eggs. By the way, this is what a Bandersnatch is.
Curiouser and curiouser.
50 Wonderful Things of 2018
Linda Holmes, of Pop Culture Happy Hour, adds to her annual end-of-year lists. I always find something I need to see, read, or hear.
Thank You Notes from Josh Whitman
With apologies to The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, University of Illinois Athletic Director Josh Whitman gives us a sneak peek of him catching up with his correspondence.
Survival Instinct
Will Cockrell and Peter Frick-Wright, at Outside Online, collect several harrowing stories of survival. They are short stories of incredible perseverance.
How Much of the Internet is Fake?
Apparently, you shouldn’t believe anything on the internet. Who knew? Max Read explains in NY Mag, there’s a good chance anything you encounter on the internet is fake, including the metrics, the people, the content, and the businesses. It isn’t going away anytime soon either.
Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads.
Every Word Counts
Seth Godin with a Christmas message ―
Poets use words (and silence) to change things. They care about form and function and most of all, about making an impact on those that they connect with.Every word counts. Every breath as well.
In a world filled with empty noise, the most important slots are reserved for the poets we seek to listen to, and the poet we seek to become.
How to Write a Hallmark Christmas Movie
My family adores Hallmark Christmas movies. My wife and step-daughter start watching as soon as they start hitting the airwaves, which I believe is sometime in October. They have a grand time commenting on the plot and the characters. They were doing this way before the drinking game became popular.
The general joke about these movies is they are all essentially the same movie ― woman comes home for the holidays has a meet-cute with a local man who they initially dislike, but end up falling in love by the time the snow falls on Christmas. Sprinkle in a big tree, ice skating, gingerbread making, cookies, and a non-threatening ex and you have a Hallmark Christmas movie.
Ruth Kinane, writing for Entertainment Weekly, interviewed two scriptwriters who have had movies made and they explain the ins and outs of Hallmark Christmas movie-making. I had no idea how many rules there are.
Right, there cannot be a single scene that does not acknowledge the theme. Well, maybe a scene, but you can’t have a single act that doesn’t acknowledge it and there are nine of them, so there’s lots of opportunities for Christmas. They have a really rigid nine-act structure that makes writing them a lot of fun because it’s almost like an exercise. You know where you have to get to: People have to be kissing for the first time, probably in some sort of a Christmas setting, probably with snow falling from the sky, probably with a small crowd watching. You have to start with two people who, for whatever reason, don’t like each other and you’re just maneuvering through those nine acts to get them to that kiss in the snow.It almost makes me want to give it a try.
Your 2019 KPIs
Nicholas Bate is back with your key performance indicators for 2019.
- In-Box. Goal: 0.
- Hours sleep per night. Goal: 8.
- Classic books read per week. Goal: 1.
- Meals cooked/made from scratch per day. Goal: 2.
- Hours without digital interrupt. Goal: every evening, 4 hours, pre sleep.
- Facebook accounts held. Goal: 0.
- Live & Breathe HG21C. Goal: 4 hours per day
Home
On Christmas Eve 1968, NASA astronaut Bill Anders took the now-famous Earthrise photograph while aboard Apollo 8. Additionally, there was the famous Christmas Eve broadcast from the astronauts.
I was born in the summer of 1968 and it was a tumultuous year. A war raged across the Pacific and on American television sets. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. The St. Louis Cardinals did not win the World Series. Bobby Kennedy was killed.
However, some amazing things happened too. 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered. Led Zeppelin made their American debut. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law. And at the close of the year, astronauts on a roundtrip flight to the Moon took one of mankind’s greatest photos and said some words to a wounded nation.
2018 isn’t 1968. As much as I’d like to find the “not normal” of today reflected in the past, it really isn’t there. What does remain is the blue marble of a planet hanging there in space. Our home. Our only home.
On this day, it’s good to be reminded of home.
The Distraction Free iPhone
Curtis McHale posted a review of a Medium article by Jake Knapp on going six years with a distraction free iPhone. I think the most important bit from the article is Knapp’s realization that a distraction free iPhone is a competitive advantage.
Here’s the thing: When I stopped instantly reacting to everyone else’s priorities, I got better at making time for the projects I believed were most important—even if they weren’t urgent or nobody was asking for them. I invested effort in documenting and promoting my design sprint process. And, after a lifetime of putting it off till “someday,” I finally started writing, eventually publishing two books.I think I want something like this, but I’m not sure. I’m going to keep thinking about this.