Something reminded me I have a newsletter
Feel free to unsubscribe. Obvs. It’s been more than a year since I sent one of these. I imagine you’ve moved on.
(BTW, I have migrated from tinyletter to substack. Because all the cool kids are on substack, apparently.)
I felt I should do some sort of end of 2019 round-up but I haven't made any notes or anything so these are things that have stuck with me this year:
1. The song The Overload was made by the Talking Heads in an attempt to sound like Joy Division - without them ever having heard any Joy Division. They'd just read about them. Thats a good way to make art.
2. FDR once called for "bold, persistent experimentation". That's a good thing to call for.
3. I loved this description of a gear change - from Self and I - "On the drive to the cottage, he changes gear the way a singer goes up an octave: as an intensifier."
4. I cherish unexpected connections. Here's a peach from Victoria Coren's For Richer, For Poorer: "..the juxtapositions of genre and status aren’t surprising at all. That is how celebrity works. Fame is one big bubble where they all meet. That is how Freddie Trueman’s daughter came to marry Raquel Welch’s son. That is how the American boxer Mike Tyson came to date the Streatham-born model Naomi Campbell, argued with her at a cocktail party and was sternly told to ‘Leave that girl alone!’ by the elderly Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer. ‘Do you know who the fuck I am?’ snarled Tyson. ‘I’m the heavyweight champion of the world!’ ‘And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic,’ replied Ayer. ‘We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.’ Now that’s what I call a cocktail party."
5. And here’s an unexpected problem for a security service, from GCHQ: “The GCHQ staff were also sporty, providing most of the players in the Foreign Office football team that won the Civil Service Football Cup in 1952. This could present some peculiar problems. When local reporters covered matches in Cheltenham, they were told they could name the goal-scorers of the visitors, but not of the local team.”
Look. Five things. Maybe that could be the format from now. Monthly maybe? Stay tuned...
(There are now 546 of you. 546 is the sum of 8 consecutive primes 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 + 71 + 73 + 79 + 83. 546 Herodias is a carbonaceous asteroid. It is an identified Eunomian interloper.)