If you want to sound smart
- Jul 6
- 3 min read
Monday 7/6/26
The Bunker Hill Monument is 221.5 feet tall. Why are you telling us this? I'm just telling you.
I saw this video of a shark that wanted to eat a turtle. The shark swims over, opens its jaws, and the turtle flips itself sideways, so that the shark couldn't make a bite because its jaws wouldn't open that much. The turtle did this with great calm and ease. The shark seemed confused. The turtle swam away and, as it was doing so, ate something floating the water as if this was all part of a low stress, standard routine. You can't convince me that we're smarter than that turtle.
I was watching this documentary about these guys who used to climb up the outsides of buildings. People would watch them, like they were at a baseball game. No harnesses, no nets. I'd be terrible at this. It might be the thing I'm least suited for. Then again, there's the corporate world. There are probably some other things. I'm terrified of heights. I could never go in a chairlift. That film Frozen? Which I'll be writing about for the horror film book. I had a hard time watching that and not just for the ("Don't let her look!") wolf stuff.
Anyway, these fellows could be paid $200 a climb, which is what other men made in a month at the time. One guy would heighten the drama. He'd make his climb, and at strategic points, he'd shoot out a foot pretending to slip. Everyone would gasp. Then he'd resume climbing, perhaps chuckling to himself. The documentary didn't say. Then one time, his foot shot out, and it wasn't a pretend slip. He fell to his death and almost landed on some of the women who were watching, except a cop pushed them out of the way.
I know we're a society where it's cool and encouraged to be illiterate, but "apart" and "a part" is one of those that you really do have to know. Then again, no one else does either, so what am I even saying here? My bad, don't mind me. Illiteracy forever!
We have breaking news...
It seems that what once would have thought to be impossible is true...there is no such word as "everytime."
You don't say. Are you sure? Can it really be?
Hey! If you want to sound smart, maybe you should say, "binary," or "Two things can be true," or "Inflection point," or "fever dream," or "deep cut," some more times? Maybe the trick is saying them thousands of times rather than hundreds? Do you think you can do that? I mean, you want to sound smart, don't you?
The push and pull between the seasons of summer and winter in the Pogues' "Dark Streets of London." "Dear dirty delightful old drunken old days." (Do you hear the rise and fall of his voice in that line? Life.) Winter is something that comes down, like a veil covering all. The singer likes the summer--or the part of it that has him walking in the breeze, by himself, thinking--but he loves the winter--at first--with the men singing of the return of flowers. As his life goes on, the cold that comes at Christmastime becomes too much for him. We don't sense this is on account of age. Physical age. He hasn't the money to walk the streets as in times past. He thinks of summer, but not walks in the breeze--which we presume occurred at night, because that's when you'd walk alone and visit "the dead old trees"--but rather the facility where he was given ECT, the looks in the faces of a variant on T.S. Eliot's hollow men (for thine is the kingdom), and now nothing--or so he claims--means anything to him anymore.
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