Dear friends,

“[M]aybe our own rules and need for order are the true authors of misrule and cruelty.” is a sentence I read (okay, listened to, I have finally been converted to the Church of the Audiobook) recently and I can’t stop thinking about it. (Audiobooks are great for when you want to do something with your hands and eyes (like sew) but are really annoying when you want to cite them.)

March 31 is Email Debt Forgiveness Day.

Don’t ask what led me to the most recent issue of Clowning Around, the organ of the World Clown Association (not sure I could give a coherent explanation if I tried); instead revel in the vibe, which is basically “what if the newsletter of the HOA was written by and for literal clowns” and the thrilling news that the Hammer Museum in Haines, Alaska, has a Ringling Brothers tent hammer! (I may have linked to the Hammer Museum before because I really like hammers.)

There is a story (possibly apocryphal, I can’t find the primary source) that Robert Benchley took a course on international relations but did not attend (m)any of the lectures:

At the end of the semester, the final exam turned out to be just one question: "Discuss the North Atlantic Fishing Treaty from the point of view of A: The United States and B: Canada.

Benchley, who did not have a clue about the treaty, proceeded to answer the question with a treatise that started:

"Everyone knows about the North American Fishing Treaty from the point of view of A: The United States and B: Canada. Therefore, I would like to discuss it from the point of view of C: the fish."

(For an English class in high school I was assigned a compare-and-contrast essay, which somehow I misplaced between leaving my house and arriving in class. I ended up scribbling a very short essay comparing-and-contrasting the essay I had lost with the essay I was writing. I don’t remember my grade but I do remember that the teacher wrote something like “Sheesh!” on it.)

I think that AI has some uses, but why are we getting sloppelgangers and not stuff like this? That last link is not, as far as I know, AI, but is the kind of thing that used to take dedicated effort to put into the world, and would now be trivial to do. [Perhaps the effort is the appeal and I have just answered my own question.] Anyway, if we’re going to have epistemic collapse, I’d like the kind where we get a bunch of jokey cryptids, thanks.

Shuffling daylight around is not my favorite of our civilization’s weird customs but I did enjoy learning that Central Western Time exists.

Stay well!

Your friend,

Erin