April 23-27, 2018
Rose starts the week gathering some ideas on creativity, like so many eels. How does one catch eels? Bare handed? Do I design myself some gloves? Or some kind of hunting stick, or camera trap? Maybe I should sing to the eels, to make them feel safe. I need to become an eel expert, to be able to tell which are healthy and which are sick and need attention, and which should be let go. Some eels are not meant for my barrel.
Do you know what Roko’s Basilisk is? If you don’t, you luckily have Sally’s Tuesday post. If you’re like most of the people who have heard of Roko’s Basilisk, there’s a good chance you started to look into it, encountered the phrase “timeless decision theory”, and were immediately struck by the overwhelming need to do literally anything else.
Christie gets snared in a massive “reply-all” fiasco, and analyzes the responses. Once something’s on the internet, it takes on a life of its own. As the NC5760131 emails continued, they became more and more light-hearted. “I just wanted to inform the group that a hot dog is 100% a sandwich,” wrote one guy.
Michelle visits the long-lost Famous Women Dinner Service, where Cleopatra, Virginia Woolf and 48 other women could grace the same table. By including these and other taboo-breaking women in the Clarks’ dinner service, Bell and Grant didn’t so much rescue them from obscurity as seat them alongside the uppermost upper crust of British society. It was a bit of mischief that Kenneth Clark, despite his initial misgivings, seems to have enjoyed: in later years, he is said to have selected particular plates for particular lunch guests at his Piccadilly apartments—perhaps to honor their interests, or to prick their sensitivities.
On Friday, Jenny reduxes a 2016 post on the charms of the kookaburra. A not-a-morning-person Aussie may beg to differ on the charm thing. The dawn racket is probably just damn annoying. But as a tourist, I woke up extra early and sat by the window in the dark, waiting for the cackling to begin.
We’ll see you bright and early Monday morning.
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To catch eels: Cut a broomstick handle to about 4 ft. Attach a straightened-out clothes hanger to the end of that; attach a medium-sized hook to the end of that. Attach some bait to the hook. Drive to a place where rocks meet the sea, like Pacific Grove, California, and walk down to the sea, until you’re in about a foot deep. Poke your eel-pole, bait end first, under an adjacent boulder. Repeat until you get a bite, the shove the bait and hook down the eel’s gullet and then pull the eel out of the water and put it in your bag. Warning. This kills the eel. My grandfather did this.