Welcome to Reality Farm.
CONTENT CROP 🌾
An even-handed look at how dangerous various hobbies are: “Some of the data surprised me. E.g., I found driving, skiing, and cycling to be safer that I expected, whereas climbing the Tetons and especially Mt Everest is actually much more dangerous than I anticipated. Not surprising to me was the insanely high risk involved in Base Jumping, which is shown to be 480,000 times more dangerous than commercial aviation, with an expected death per 21 hours of participation, and practically no chance at all to survive the next 1,000 hours of flying through the air.”
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Disassociation is certainly having a moment: “Like coke — and unlike MDMA or psychedelics — the effects of snorting ketamine subside in less time than it takes to watch your average Netflix special, and rarely cause a hangover if consumed in moderation. (One New York drug dealer sells a gram for about half the price of coke, and it lacks cocaine’s stigma as a source of cartel violence and environmental destruction).”
note: hahahahahahahahahah
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The lonely life of a concert pianist: “It’s just you, the airport lounge, the hotel room; is there a piano where I can practise?, an old grand in the ballroom maybe, or maybe not, the green room, backstage, the concert stage, handshakes with the conductor and the concertmeister. Now play an intense piece of music for forty minutes or so (and for that span you are finally part of a group, in communion with the musicians on your left and the audience to your right), take the applause, shake hands again, head to green room, then your hotel room, jump in a taxi, sit in the airport lounge and so on.”
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Two longreads for your post-Thanksgiving return to work:
“PONZI SCHEMES, PRIVATE YACHTS, AND A MISSING $250 MILLION IN CRYPTO: THE STRANGE TALE OF QUADRIGA”: When Canadian blockchain whiz Gerald Cotten died unexpectedly last year, hundreds of millions of dollars in investor funds vanished into the crypto ether. But when the banks, the law, and the forces of Reddit tried to track down the cash, it turned out the young mogul may not have been who he purported to be.
“Patagonia’s Philosopher-King”: How Yvon Chouinard turned his eco-conscious, anti-corporate ideals into the credo of a successful clothing company.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
RADIO FREE REALITY 🎙
electronic
indie rock
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
Sometimes, the fabric of reality wears thin.
A terrorist in the U.K. recently stabbed two people to death near the London Bridge. The attacker, Usman Khan, was out on parole after being convicted of terrorism-related charges in 2012 — including plots to blow up the Houses of Parliament, the US embassy, and local synagogues.
The attack drew immediate media attention not only for the fact of terrorism, but also for the response. Three men were filmed fighting back against the terrorist, eventually subduing him before police arrived and shot him to death.
Details emerged:
One man fought off the terrorist with a fire extinguisher.
A Polish immigrant working as a chef at Fishmongers’ Hall attacked the terrorist with a narwhal tusk he grabbed off the wall.
One of the men who fought off the terrorist was a convicted murderer (on day release) serving a life sentence for strangling and slitting the throat of a mentally-disabled woman in 2003.
A plainclothes police officer, who happened to be nearby, tore at least one of the knives out of the terrorist’s hands.
The terrorist was wearing a fake suicide vest.
One of the victims of the attack was leading a conference on prisoner rehabilitation.
Pundits quickly theorized that the attack was some kind of “return to relevance” for ISIS, as if, between our semi-permanent security state and the collapse of the caliphate, we had forgotten that we still had to deal with Islamic terrorism.
Which, maybe we did.
Terrorists have conveyed the message that they are ready to wait, that their notion of time is not ours. This is a clear sign of the return to the archaic, a return to the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, which is significant in itself. But who is paying attention to this significance? Who is taking its measure? Is that the job of the ministry of foreign affairs? We have to expect a lot of unexpected things in the future. We are going to witness things that will certainly be worse.
"On War and Apocalypse”- Rene Girard.
WALKING THE FENCELINE 🕸
Roughly a year ago, as work slowed down during the holiday season, I had a lot of time on my hands. Rather than pursuing productive hobbies or working on personal projects, I became psychotically obsessed with the Wall Street Journal’s real estate page.
[*Beware* in a truly despicable act of selling out, the WSJ turned half of their Real Estate page over to some company called Mansion Global and I refuse to click on their ads masquerading as my beloved WSJ real estate articles.]
I spent hours, every day, looking at compounds in Greenwich, Jackson Hole, Bel Air, and New York City. If you’re lucky, the page will occasionally feature houses in zanier locations like Mackinac Island in Michigan, where vehicles are banned, which proves a delightful challenge to those folks determined to build their third 15,000-square-foot vacation home on a small island where vehicles are banned.
The thing to keep in mind is that many people with lots of money have awful taste. Like tattoos, the fun of looking at these houses is figuring out what kind of garish, terrible taste most suits (or least offends) you. The Atlantic has an excellent piece on the phenomenon, “The Guilty Pleasures of Mansion Porn” — it’s some combination of fantasy, masochism, voyeurism, and outright hilarity.
Every week, the WSJ runs a house-of-the-week contest, with captions like: “Will it be a Virginia country residence with Bunny Mellon’s touch, a Rhode Island house with a peaceful pond or a Tuscan-style home with an indoor ice rink?”
Then, sometime in December, the WSJ hosts a house-of-the-YEAR contest, in which all 52 houses-of-the-week are pitted in head-to-head, infinity-pool-to-infinity-pool, wine-cellar-to-wine-cellar combat. I made all my friends at work take the house-of-the-year contest and send me their top pick, which functions both as an excellent way to psychoanalyze your co-workers and a fantastic opportunity to mock each other’s taste.
In full disclosure of my own terrible tastes, these were my favorite three houses of 2018:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-modernized-manse-in-charleston-1538056800?mod=2018-house-of-the-year
Naturally, some fucking hideous house in Hawaii won the 2018 contest. Luckily for you all, the 2019 contest approaches. Rest assured I will post the link here when it kicks off.
THE GOVERNMENT OBSERVATORY ON THE HILL ABOVE MY FARM 👁
Nothing to report.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
“Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson
(Fiction, 1883. Seven dollars.)
Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
One of those books you’d never get around to reading, but really, really should. It’s also the subject of an excellent Seamus Heaney poem, “In the Attic.”
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
In all honesty I spent the past week on vacation and wasn’t paying attention to internecine fights on the right.