Hello Thursday!

Now that I think I’ve gotten the hang of getting a newsletter out in a timely fashion, I’m going to work on taking it up a notch — remembering to put links to the things I talk about, putting graphics on a regular basis, that sort of thing. It’ll probably take me a while to get the balance right, so please bear with me.

That’s the opposite of fixing

One of these days I’ll learn not to mess around with things that I don’t quite understand, but apparently yesterday was not that day. When I was driving yesterday, the blower motor on my car’s AC died on me. Just stopped all of a sudden. No warning, just straight from working fine to not working at all. So when I got home, I went online to see if I could diagnose the problem, fix it myself, and save some money.

I learned that the relay was one possible culprit, and learned one way to diagnose it. But apparently either the way I learned to diagnose it wasn’t a good one, or else I did it wrong, because once I did that, the car started throwing error messages at me related to the powertrain. So I call my mechanic, confess my sins, and arrange to bring it in this morning.

This morning I go to take my car to the shop, about a half-mile drive. It dies about halfway there, just over the crest over a hill, on a very busy street, it starts throwing all sorts of errors messages at me that I’ve never seen before, then dies. For what feels like forever — but is actually probably less less than a minute — I’m stuck there, with my hazards on, with cars frantically changing lanes to get around me, trying to get the car to restart. Just as I’m about to give up and call the shop to arrange a tow, it starts and I’m able to get it to the shop. And that’s how I was able to turn the failure of a 12-dollar part into while will almost certainly be a several hundred dollar repair by the time they’re done.

It reminds me of a story my mom told me about my grandfather. He was a carpenter all his life, starting out as a Seabee in World War II, working his way up until by the time of his retirement he was supervising multimillion-dollar construction projects. But apparently plumbing was not his strong suit. My mom could remember the plumber pleading with my grandmother to please call him whenever she had a problem, before my grandfather had a chance to mess with it, because it would make his work easier and her bill smaller. I suppose I take after him — I’m game to give it a shot, even if I don’t know everything, and apparently I tend to create problems for myself by doing so.   

Things to check out online:

• Exclusive Interview | AleXa: Finding Freedom Beyond Borders — I first discovered AleXa when she was a K-pop idol. I enjoyed her songs and her music videos, and then when I learned more about her, I thought she was really interesting: Her mother is Korean, her father is Russian, and she grew up in Oklahoma. She went to Korea to debut as a musician, then came back to America to win the American Song Contest in 2022, and lately she’s been in Sweden participating in Melodifestivalen 2026. She’s truly an international star. One fact that I learned from this interview is that her mother was a Korean-American adoptee, so AleXa grew up without her Korean culture, because her mother had been separated from it.

• What the Hell Is That Weird Painting Donald Trump Just Posted? — Seriously, just take a second a go look at it, because any description I make is going to fall short of how weird this painting is. It’s a mixed-up jumble of random patriotic symbols configured in such a way as to tickle the fancy of any red-hatted MAGAt. And although it bears more than a passing resemblance to a lot of the AI slop out there, I spend some time on the website of Ray Simon, the painting’s creator, and saw that he was making paintings of this quality and with these characteristics 18 years ago, well before AI was capable of producing slop, so apparently AI slop looks like Ray Simon paintings, not the other way around.

• Manhattan DA’s Office Seized Dozens of Antiquities from the Metropolitan Museum in June, Bringing Total to $95 M. — When I was taking my art history methodology class, among the books that we had to read in preparation were Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World (Sharon Waxman) and The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (Lynn H. Nicholas). After reading those, I felt pretty disgusted about the museum profession as a whole, and briefly considered getting out of the field entirely. I thought better of it, though. I’m glad to see that the Met is making progress toward repatriating the illegally-obtained antiquities in its possession, though I wish they were doing it without having to be dragged kicking and screaming by the DA’s office. (While as an art historian I can appreciate the statement by the Met’s provenance expert Lucian Simmons that “this work takes time and every individual object deserves to be studied and assessed,” I can also appreciate that museums have for too long used statements like this as shields to enable them to hold on to their ill-gotten antiquities, even if only for a little bit longer.)

What I’ve watched recently:

Grace, Lily, and I watched the live action Cells at Work movie (2024). It was surprisingly good — much better than it had any right to be. If you're not familiar with the Cells at Work! manga that it's based on, the basic idea is that it's an explanation of human anatomy (particularly in the bloodstream) using anthropomorphic cells. We follow a red blood cell and a white blood cell over the course of their lives, meet other types of cells (both body cells and invading germs) that they interact with, and see how the body works from the inside. There's also a subplot where we see what happens to the people whose bodies we're inside of, but most of the action takes place inside the body. I cannot believe how highly I am recommending this film!

What I’ve been reading:

Since last week I’ve finished reading

• Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 19 (Yuto Tsukuda)

• The Winter Long (Seanan McGuire)

• Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, vol. 1 (Shio Usui) — The end of volume 1 left me looking forward to volume 2. This is a definite VERY slow slow burn, but not in a stupid, contrived way. The viewpoint character is coming to question everything she had previously believed about her life, and that takes time. At no point was I screaming at the page because I felt like the author had forced a character to miss an obvious chance to have a realization for the sake of railroading the plot.

I’ve continued reading

• Cozy Companion, vol. 25.

• Inkpot Gods (Seanan McGuire)

• Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World (Anne-Laure Le Cunff)

• The Winter Long (Seanan McGuire)

• Blue Rose: The AGE Role-Playing Game of Romantic Fantasy

and I’ve started reading

• A Red-Rose Chain (Seanan McGuire) 

• My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women’s Movements (Pernille Ipsen) — Because I grew up with a childhood that was in many ways the American stereotype (Dad worked in a factory, Mom was a teacher, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, marching band, etc.), I’m fascinated by people who grew up otherwise. Pernille Ipsen grew up in a feminist communal living space in Copenhagen, raised by seven mothers — this could not be more different from my childhood! The fact that she went on to become a historian and so was able to bring historiographical methodology to writing about this time in her life made it that much better. 

And as always, THIS NEWSLETTER CONTAINS 100% HUMAN-CREATED WORDS.

Have a great week, and I’ll see you next Thursday,

Jason