Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1492
Baleen research, steel delivery, unhatched killdeer eggs
Good morning good morning. Oh wow we are up to 1492, Columbus year. Today’s edition of this newsletter will be a willfully cruel holocaust, I guess.
Except I am feeling a bit better today! Headache is not gone but is significantly lessened. Most of my work stress/emergencies from this week at least have plans of attack applied to them. One or two have even been resolved. Amazing. I am re-watching Mrs. Davis and it is still a great show and gives me little bits of joy in the evenings.
And I get Andor tonight very exciting. Not quite as solid as Season 1 — you can feel them rushing. But better than pretty much anything else on TV.
And I can see the light at the end of the tunnel of the 12-volume History of Middle Earth. About halfway through the last book. The big question now is do I go re-read the Lord of the Rings trilogy before I finally move on with my life. I gotta admit that after eight months and fifteen books of Tolkien I am getting a little tired of it. But also back when I started this ridiciculous project the sum total entiretly of the project was just to re-read Lord of the Rings. So it would be weird to… not?
Thank you to everyone who wrote in that the mysterious new tower was a 5G cell tower. I suppose this is the logical explanation. It’s weird there’s only one along the road, and weird signal doesn’t seem to have improved any, and that the chips in my body aren’t suddenly tweaking, but I will accept this logic-and-evidenced-based answer.
We are listening to a nugaze band called Tremours. They are not bad. Album is called Fragments. Spotify reccomendation I think, embarrassingly. But I mean, I’m not gonna, like, not check out an obscure new shoegaze band just cuz Spotify mentioned it? Is that using AI? Shit man I need to go to an Candie Rabbi and talk it out.
(I never link back to old issues of GMHHAY, I cruelly assume you read them all. But I guess I must admit the odds are good that you don’t know about Candies, our new nickname for the anti-ai religion. Church Advancing Natural Dominion get it?)
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
Slack really delivering yesterday I think it was one of our busiest days yet. Excellent rant in the #petty-complaints channel about the ten-year expiration on smoke detectors. That really plagued our house while back. I unplugged them all and for a while we had none. But now they are all replaced. I was feeling pretty smug about this as Emma and I were discussing it last night until she pointed out I did this like five or six years ago and we were getting ever closer to the point where I have to do it again. Fuck.
My baleen arrived yesterday. Baleen, according to Wikipedia: Baleen is a filter-feeding system inside the mouths of baleen whales. To use baleen, the whale first opens its mouth underwater to take in water. The whale then pushes the water out, and animals such as krill are filtered by the baleen and remain as a food source for the whale. Baleen is similar to bristles and consists of keratin, the same substance found in human fingernails, skin and hair.
It’s the stuff in whalebone corsets. But it’s not a bone.
This shit is, I am realizing, pretty rare. It has been in my house forever. I am 90% sure it was gifted to my grandfather, who, you know, was the sole representative of the US Government in an area the size of Texas on the north slope of Alaska in the 30’s and 40’s. But my father, who was born in Utqiagvik fka Barrow, Alaska and also made frequent trips there, may have been the one to obtain it sometime in the 60’s. It is unclear.
I do know, however, personally, that we obtained it prior to 1972, the year the laws and regulations about such things all kick in.
The thing about this baleen is it is a whole piece, about four-and-a-half to five feet long. If you look on, say, eBay for baleen, you will not find anything like this. It is against eBay rules to sell whole baleen. It’s basically against the rules everywhere. It’s hard to even find a picture of it on the internet, because mainly what you find are fossilized or carved baleeen works of art from indigenous tribes. But anyway, it looks like this:
It comes from here:
So I’ve been doing some reading and to be clear this baleen is 100% legal: harvested by an indigenous Alaskan prior to 1972.
BUT if it were to ever be sold, it would need a letter attesting this, provided to me by NOAA. And the proof would be on me. I would send all this proof in, NOAA would decide whether or not my baleen was legitimate and grandfathered in and give me a letter that would need to stay with the baleen for all times. Then it could be sold.
Except of course I don’t want to sell it. This is a family heirloom and I do regret not getting a bit more explicit information about its provenance while I had the chance, I just didn’t think about it because it was always there. So it’s going to sit in my house forever, I guess. And then Jane will have to deal with it someday. So, then, do I make Jane’s life easier and get this letter now?
There is another relavant piece of information: this baleen has, carved upon it, the name of the whaler and the city (Barrow, now known as Utqiagvik, as we’ve said). His name is Simeon Patkotak, and the UAF tells me he was an Iñupiaq elder from Barrow, born in 1932, started whaling in 1949 and stopped in got his own crew in 1967.
This means he kept whaling past 1972, the NOAA cutoff year, so the mere existence of his name carved into the baleen does not, alone, prove its grandfathered nature.
Simeon died in 2016 but his son Crawford is still a whaler and is also an arctic historian, so it is very tempting to bug him and ask him but also I feel very white colonist in all this. Then again, maybe I should ask him what to do with it. But Crawford is also an Utqiagvik assemblyman, former chairman of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, real bigwig. Feels weird bothering him.
Man I wished I thought to ask more about this baleen, like ten, fifteen years ago when it was conceivable to get a cogent and correct answer out of my parents.
Basically this whole thing is a family heirloom but also kind of a giant ethical burden and I don’t particularly know what to do about it. Woo! Alaska!
Everyone wish my partner Rocky luck today as we get six (eight?) semi-trucks of steel delivered to our rain-soaked construction site today. See that field of brown above? That is a, like, 20-foot deep retention pond filled to the brim from all the rain night before last. It is drained a bit today. The pads are ready. Steel is going up. This whole thing is crazy. I might drive out there today and get you guys some ERECTION PHOTOS. Maybe tomorrow. It is chaos. They don’t need the finance guy poking around. Insane that this is happening. Absolutely insane.
Do you need a place to store a boat or RV? Drop a line, drop a line. Gotta fill this thing up.
Oh and the killdeer has not yet hatched its eggs yet cmon man we are running out of time.
Man, you know. For the first 52 years of my life? Didn’t bump up against international law and treaties very often. But this year? I got killdeer eggs I can’t touch according to an international treaty, baleen I gotta follow a bunch of international treaty laws about. Suddenly international law is everywhere.
Unless you’re president.
Here have an egg photo. Look at that celestial glow. Look at that mama killdeer. Not in a rush at all.
Jane had a tantrum yesterday about no more screen time at dinner time and it was kinda a bad one, but you know, par for the course because screens make our kids cranky and mean and she is so much more pleasant when she doesn’t get screens and we do limit it because we are sensible parents but also it is almost exclusively educational content, certainly all benign but still. Tantrums.
BUT she listened! She heard me during her tantrum and she moderated her behavior! She had to make up a “Jane can’t talk” game to get control of herself but so what. Really not all that far from the tactic I employed on a particularly tense finance call earlier in the week. I am very impressed. I told her this morning how impressed I was and you could tell she was very proud of herself.
Some days, man. You can turn lemon into lemonade.
Instead of, you know, breaking down and questioning everything in your life.
Justa mix today. New stuff. Except Labi Siffre because that song came on shuffle a couple days ago and it rules. This “Luke & Leanna” song is the most catchy thing Craig Finn has done solo ever great tune. Got some more Shriekback for you. I am oddly compelled by the absolute weirdness of the new Sleep Token record. New Lorde is promising. I like this Dharma Chain band but I don’t know anything about them.
Y’all have a good day now yhear?
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.