Waiting
Of Santa Claus and Baxbakwalanuxsiwae
Sam Kriss has a great newsletter called Numb At The Lodge, and in a recent edition he wrote about Santa Claus — but also so much more:
“There are two named individuals known to live at the North Pole. The first is Baxbakwalanuxsiwae, He-Who-First-Ate-Man-At-The-North-End-Of-The-World. In the mythology of the Kwakiutl people of what’s now British Colombia, Baxbakwalanuxsiwae is a primordial cannibal. His skin is grey, and every inch of it is covered in ravenous, gnashing, blood-stained mouths with razor-sharp yellow teeth. When those mouths aren’t crushing human bones or tearing human flesh, they cry hāp! hāp! hāp! which means eat! eat! eat! He goes naked in the snow. He lives in a lodge at the furthest northern edge of the world, with blood-red smoke rising from its chimney. He shares this lodge with his wife, Qominaga, who dresses in strips of red-and-white cedar bark; the two of them sometimes take the form of monstrous black birds and fly south to steal people away and eat them.
The second inhabitant of the Pole is called Santa Claus. According to the conventional account, Santa Claus descends from a (probably) real historical person: Saint Nicholas, Defender of Orthodoxy, Wonderworker, Holy Hierarch, and Bishop of Myra, who (probably) lived in Asia Minor in the third and fourth centuries AD. Something’s off about this story. The Santa Claus we’ve ended up with is a weird guy, and there are a lot of things about him that seem to have no obvious precedent in the Anglo-Dutch tradition. For instance: his practice of going into houses via the chimney. Why? Or his team of flying reindeer. Or Mrs Claus, who is not the sort of companion a Catholic bishop should have. Also, Santa lives at the North Pole. A barren, freezing wilderness, where Santa’s only neighbour is Baxbakwalanuxsiwae of the chomping mouths.”
Most of what we know about country music is wrong
From Elamin Abdelmahmoud for Rolling Stone: “Ralph Peer was the beginning of the business of country music. He went to the South with the sole purpose of finding competition for Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, a black woman. In the South, he was convinced to record Fiddlin’ John Carson, in what became recognized as the first commercial country-music recording, ‘The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.’ Peer took credit for inventing something he called ‘hillbilly music,’ which is what country was known as until after the Second World War. It didn’t matter that what he found in the South were white and black musicians recording the same songs and playing the same music with the same instruments.”
Japanese custom requires every school child to have an identical $450 backpack
From One From Nippon: “Every year, around March, a curious social custom occurs in Japanese families. Parents of kids entering elementary school visit the grandparents and gingerly tread the topic of buying the kids a very expensive item: a randoseru. The Japanese school bag costs a whopping $450 on average. During the Meiji Reforms of the late 1800s, Japan aimed to modernize, and one tiny part of these reforms was the introduction of the rucksack for soldiers to carry their baggage, a word that eventually became “randoseru” in Japanese. And schools instituted rules: No commuting by car, rickshaw, or horse and every student had to carry their own books and notebooks in a randoseru.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “Most of what we know about country music is wrong”We are all surrounded by “placebo buttons”
From Jacobo Prisco for CNN: “In New York City, only about 100 of the 1,000 crosswalk buttons actually function, confirmed a spokesperson from the city’s Department of Transportation in an email. That number has steadily decreased in recent years: When the New York Times revealed that the majority of New York’s buttons didn’t work in 2004, about 750 were still operational. The world is full of buttons that don’t actually do anything. They’re sometimes called “placebo buttons” – buttons that are mechanically sound and can be pushed, but provide no functionality. Like placebo pills, however, these buttons may still serve a purpose, according to Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist.”
I stopped speaking at 19 and suddenly found my artistic voice
From Henn Kim for The Guardian: “As a teenager living near Busan, South Korea, I felt that the everyday noises around me were like a battlefield. When I was 17, I started wearing headphones to escape. I was 19 when I decided to stop speaking. Despite my silence, friends at school valued me as a listener. We communicated through nods and gestures. Growing up, I felt trapped because I couldn’t express my emotions. Now, without words, I felt inspired. I started to communicate via text messages. Unlike spoken words, these can be edited. I moved to Seoul and began working part-time at a club when I was 22. There I met like-minded people who loved art. Finally, I began to speak a little.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
How a mentally disabled man recorded his life through property title deeds
From Word magazine: “Sometime in the mid-60s, George and Pansy began investing their limited resources in real estate; buying and selling valueless plots of land in the Seattle area. These investments never made much money, but they ultimately allowed George to create a strange, disjointed autobiography within the legal records of Washington State. Whenever a parcel of land is bought or sold, the title deed is recorded on 16mm microfilm in the county courthouse. George discovered that, due to a quirk of the law, anyone who pays the nominal per-page fee can record anything they want as a “title deed.” So he began using this recording system for purposes that were never even envisioned.”
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When a Chicago newspaper bought a bar to expose corruption
From the Sun-Times: “The Chicago Sun-Times began publishing an elaborate 25-part series in January 1978, following undercover work by a team of reporters who purchased a run-down dive bar — the Mirage tavern — to expose corrupt city inspectors who glossed over obvious code violations in exchange for bribes. Forty years later, the reporters who worked on the undercover series shared their memories at an event moderated by editor-in-chief of the Sun-Times Chris Fusco. “Even in an era where newspapers did a lot of undercover journalism, heavy-lifting, reporters being able to take months to do work on one story, this one stood out because of its creativity,” Fusco said.
This Japanese shop has been in business for over a thousand years
From Ben Dooley for the NYT: “Naomi Hasegawa’s family sells toasted mochi out of a small, cedar-timbered shop next to a rambling old shrine in Kyoto. The family started the business to provide refreshments to weary travelers coming from across Japan to pray for pandemic relief — in the year 1000. Japan is an old-business superpower. The country is home to more than 33,000 with at least 100 years of history — over 40 percent of the world’s total, according to a study. Over 3,100 have been running for at least two centuries. Around 140 have existed for more than 500 years. And at least 19 claim, like the Hasagewa family, to have been continuously operating since the first millennium.”
When people are going blind, their brain sometimes creates hallucinations
From Julia Rothman for The New Yorker: “When I first saw them, they were in the lobby of my building,” said Ron Markowitz, who suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome. “These people were moving generally in my direction, but not reaching me. There didn’t appear to be any conversation between anybody. There was no noise or sound. They were on the ground, but there was no walking. They were just gliding. They were in brown tones and dressed in costime from the late nineteenth century. There were no hands or arms. I could see they had faces, but I couldn’t see their features. I was told that what I have is called Charles Bonnet syndrome – my brain is trying to compensate for what my eyes aren’t seeing. It’s trying to help me fill in the blanks.”
In every state but one, the game is called “Duck, Duck, Goose”
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipty engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me.
World War II bomber crash lands in Florida
She got nothing for inventing Ozempic and she’s fine with that
The German magazine Der Spiegel spoke with Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, the Danish chemist whose research laid the foundation for the creation of semaglutide, the diabetes and weight loss medication sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, which has generated billions of dollars in revenue for Novo Nordisk (so much revenue that the company is now worth more than the entire Danish economy). Knudsen has no share in either the stock of Novo Nordisk or the intellectual property behind the drugs, and has never even asked for a raise in her 34 years working at the pharmaceutical giant. “I don’t care that much about money, I’m a socialist!” she says (via The Browser)
How to type an é
She’s the last of a forgotten and persecuted people
From Sean Thomas for The Independent: “Sitting in her little house near Tarbes, in the French Pyrenees, Marie-Pierre Manet-Beauzac is talking about her ancestry. The story of her bloodline is marked with a unique sadness: because she belongs to an extraordinary tribe of hidden pariahs, repressed in France for a thousand years. Marie-Pierre is a Cagot. If the word “Cagot” means nothing to you, that is not surprising. The history of the Cagot people is obscure; some assert it has been deliberately erased. Marie certainly believes that: “To talk about the Cagots is still a bad thing in the mountains. The French are ashamed of what they did to us, the Cagots are ashamed of what they were.”
Research shows there’s nothing wrong with marrying your first cousin
From Richard Conniff for Discover: “Charles Darwin, the grandchild of first cousins, married a first cousin. So did Albert Einstein. In our lore, cousin marriages are unnatural, the province of hillbillies and swamp rats. In the United States they are deemed such a threat to mental health that 31 states have outlawed first-cousin marriages. This phobia is distinctly American, a heritage of early evolutionists with misguided notions about the upward march of human societies. Their fear was that cousin marriages would cause us to breed our way back to frontier savagery. But a team of scientists led by Robin L. Bennett, president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, found cousin marriages are not significantly riskier than any other marriage.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “She’s the last of a forgotten and persecuted people”I’d love to go back in time
Viral hit Baby Shark is based on a German camp song
From Twenty Thousand Hertz: “Pinkfong’s version of Baby Shark is especially sticky, but I think that there’s something elementally enticing and irreducibly catchy about Baby Shark no matter what its arrangement. And I think this because the Pinkfong version, it’s not the first time that Baby Shark has gone viral. In 2006, Alexandra Mueller was working at a camp for kids teaching journalism. There was a song they sang at the camp called the Kleiner Hai [Music clip]. Kleiner Hai means little shark in German. As you can hear, the song has a different tune than Baby Shark, but it’s recognizably related. The verses mean more or less the same thing and it comes with all of the same hand motions.”
An engineer got a ticket and his response changed the way traffic lights work
From Thomas Claburn for The Register: “A Swedish engineer’s umbrage at a traffic ticket has led to a six-year legal fight and now a global change in the speed with which traffic light signals are timed. After Mats Järlström lost an initial legal challenge in 2014, a federal judge ruled that Oregon’s rules prohibiting people from representing themselves as engineers without a license from the state are unconstitutional. Järlström’s calculations and advocacy have led the Institute of Transportation Engineers to revisit its guidelines for the timing of traffic signals. As a result, yellow lights around the globe could last longer, since the ITE is an international advisory group of 90 countries.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “Viral hit Baby Shark is based on a German camp song”Disney loves the public domain when it applies to someone else’s stuff
Trung Phan has a great newsletter, and one of the topics he wrote about recently was how Disney loves — but also hates — the idea of copyrighted work losing its protection and winding up in public domain. Here’s an excerpt:
“January 1st is Public Domain Day, when works lose their copyright protection. The 2024 batch was highly highly anticipated. Why? Because Disney lost the copyright on Mickey Mouse (specifically, the version that was in the 1928 “Steamboat Willie” short film). And people care about Disney because the entertainment conglomerate has a very contradictory relationship to copyright.
On the one hand, the number of Disney films that are sniped from Public Domain is astounding. There are at least 50 of them. Just 8 of these sources — including Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book), Hans Christian Andersen (The Little Sea Maid), Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland) and some little-known writer named Shakespeare — have accounted for more than $16B at the box office:
But when it comes to Disney’s own content, it’s a very different story. Why? In 1927, Walt and his chief animator created a popular cartoon character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The character blew up and then the chief animator took his team to Universal and basically jacked Oswald. In response, Walt was determined to never let someone else control the fate of his animations. This has manifested in US copyright laws conveniently being extended every single time Disney’s works are about to enter the public domain:
Trying to acquire “The Knowledge”
From the Everything Is Amazing newsletter comes this gem, about what is involved in trying to join the legendary tribe of Brits who drive traditional London black cabs:
“Everton Thomas, a 33-year-old bus driver from Woolwich in southeast London, is sitting in a cramped, ugly office decorated with maps of the city. There are maps on the walls, maps on shelves, and a big paper map spread out on the angled desk opposite him. But if Everton sneaks a look at any of these maps, he goes back to being a bus driver – a job he’s desperate to leave. He’s hoping a better life awaits him and his family if he can keep his eyes fixed straight ahead, and not let his nervousness cloud his brain. He really, really needs to think clearly right now. In a sense, this is a job interview – but it’s also one of the hardest memory tests in the world.
The examiner says: “Everton, where’s the London Edition Hotel?”
This question, and the following ones like it, requires him to remember specific locations from London’s roughly 100,000 landmarks. He has to know where these places are – and he has to know how to get there from anywhere else. The exam is called The Knowledge – and these days, Everton teaches it, in the school he set up after he successfully passed it in 2017. Most students take four or five years of study to get to the required level – or they drop out, or get disqualified (there’s a 70% fail rate). But the ones that succeed will earn anything from £15,000 to £30,000 more per year than any of London’s bus drivers.”