The Slackening

★★★ Morning was mild and damp, poised between two unpleasantnesses. The green tinge on the trees on the crosstown street couldn’t keep the darker gray over the park from seeming Novemberish. The showers came, but never too severely. An umbrella out on Fifth Avenue went inside-out, but it was a very flimsy-looking umbrella. For a little while, the sky was blue over still-wet pavement. Then the blue raced off and the gray raced in again. The late light came in clear and certain, though, under variously gray on white, white and blue, and uptown gray on gray. The clouds were lovely and majestic. It seemed necessary to remark aloud that one, gold-tinged in the west, looked like an elephant, even if the legs took some extrapolation. The upthrust trunk was indisputable.

This is plenty pretty. There are some weird sounds bubbling under but do not let them distract you from the plenitude of prettiness up top. Enjoy. Your weekend is almost here!

Is alcohol good for you? It’s a perennial question that defies easy answer because nobody fucking knows anything. It’s a whole lot of maybes and guesswork and “well, it did fine on dogs, it should probably be okay for people.” It could be bad. It could be good. It could be neither. Nobody knows. Even the conjectures are shot through with caveats. Listen up: I am not by credential a scientist, but I’ve got Nobel Prize-level expertise at telling other people how to live their lives, so I will say to you here, on the subject of alcohol, if you are medically and spiritually able to drink it, do so. Whether or not alcohol provides any benefits to your health, what it is fucking amazing at is warming you up on the inside, making the people around you more interesting, filling your eyes with a bright glow that is too often dimmed by experience and softening all the harsh, painful edges you spend your days trying to dodge with limited success. Alcohol is a big puffer coat for your brain that insulates it from the cold gusts of reality. Do you know how terrible reality is? Of course you do. It’s why people do almost anything they can to avoid it. It’s why there’s alcohol in the first place. Who gives a shit if it helps you live longer? Knowing how fucking nightmarish life is to start with in what world does “aids longevity” count as a recommendation? Good Lord, in alcohol you already have the perfect product for dulling your awareness of your painful, pathetic existence. Every glass offers the promise of possibility and the sweet mystery of what might happen next. Don’t get greedy.#

27. Cream of anything
26. All other chowders
25. Bisques, any kind
24. Potato-intensive anything
23. Misc. cheese-based
22. Cold sweet fruit-based bullshit that, come the fuck on, I wanted soup
21. Mulligatawny
20. Nettle

I didn’t watch the O.J. show—as someone who lived through the ’90s when they first came around I am vexed and baffled by the insistence that we do it all over again; I don’t blame young people here, because they are too dumb to know better, but if you are over 35 and you’re excited to bang your head against that wall one more time you should be ashamed of yourself—but this is remarkably well done and worth your time if you’re inclined to go down that road once more.#

So, you want to go to Cuba. Which you should! Now. Yesterday. Before America relaxes all of its traveling restrictions. Some predictions put the number of Americans that will then stream into Cuba at 10 million annually, turning the island country into the next Caribbean once-paradise ruined by Bud Light, chicken nuggets, all-inclusive resorts, and port shanty towns for the brave cruise ship explorers. At the very least, it won’t be the same.

But, there’s a catch! You’re also an American, and that makes travel to the embargoed country sticky. Here, then, are a few things to keep in mind if you travel to Cuba in the next, let’s say, six months before everything changes. (I am not a lawyer and none of this constitutes legal advocacy or advice!)

“I don’t think we’re ready for highly searchable, easily accessible, leaks and data dumps. We are not a particularly measured society, and this sort of information actually rewards a sense of historical context and measured analysis. We like to validate assumptions, not explore corpora.”
—You will not be surprised to learn that the next line in Awl pal Paul Ford’s excellent piece on how we should handle mammoth data dumps begins with “but.” The driving force behind everything we do as a species is more or less, “Every other time I’ve charged into something without a good idea of what the negative ramifications may be it has ended up badly for everyone, but LOOK AT THIS THING I REALLY WANT TO DO IT I’m going to tell myself this time it’ll be FINE.” If we saw a shiny button we had never seen before with a sign on top that read “I’M NEW, PRESS ME AND DIE” we would press it because we focus on the “NEW” part, not the “DIE” part. We’re big dumb babies and we can’t help ourselves and we never learn. We don’t do subtlety, we don’t do restraint, and we don’t do a whole lot of worrying about how badly our poor impulse control has served us thus far. I’d say we get what we deserve but the way it seems to play out is that we get all the pleasure and it is the next generation and those least able to afford it who get handled the bill for the “deserve” part. Wait, where was I? Oh, right, Paul Ford’s excellent piece on how we should handle mammoth data dumps makes some very interesting points. I even took time off from finishing his article on code—I’m 80% of the way through, I swear!—to read it. Go take a look.#

There are two things I need you to know this morning: 1) You have just about made it through what by any stretch of the imagination has been 2016’s longest week thus far, and 2) I think I might be a little in love with Temi DollFace. Maybe you will be too! Enjoy. Also, nice work on number 1, the degree of difficulty was astounding.

★★ A child in a marching line of heavy-coated children, exiled from school for the sake of a peaceful testing environment, demanded to know why it was so cold out. The high bright sun was a contradiction unto betrayal. In the greenmarket, signs were out for hot cider. By early afternoon, the bite had relaxed. The four-year-old shed his coat while waiting for the third grade to let out; then, as clouds thickened over the sun, he reluctantly asked for it back.

“The researchers built another octopus-inspired bot called ‘Poseidrone’ that tackled the more difficult challenge of swimming. A few different tactics were employed before engineers decided the best swimming mechanism was to give up control of Poseidrone’s arms altogether. The end result is a little kooky-looking (think a chicken flapping its wings underwater), but it gets the job done.”
—This is also a metaphor for how to “swim” when you are drowning in “LIFE,” but suffice it to say that scientists in Italy are using biomimicry to create “soft robots” that imitate ocean creatures that are already essentially aliens, so I think our work here on earth is done. No thanks to the weathermen!