Dump So You Don’t Cry
Good afternoon readers.
Have you ever been guilty of making the type of “why did I learn X in school; I shoulda learned Y” strawman argument? For example, “Why did Ms. Granger teach me about Geometry proofs; I shoulda learned about taxes” is one I hear a lot.
I get the idea.
On some level, I am sympathetic to the argument. If I had a dollar for everything I wish I had learned in school but have no understanding, my tax guy would have a lot more taxable income to be messing around with and keeping from the IRS.
Personally, my strawman is not “tax guidance.” There are professionals who do taxes for a living, and our tax code is so idiotic, intricate, and context-specific that it’d be useless to teach. Because you’d end up having to do the “give each student a fake persona” thing, where you pretend to be Brian, a divorcee with two kids and an income of $89,000. But he and his wife, Amantha, have some setup where each of them gets to claim one kid, and one set of tax credits applies to Lincoln, but the others apply to Bryce. Brian recently purchased a condo but has to pay extra for heated parking and a kitchen island. Last year, he took a bath on some of his investments in NFTs and REITs. So now he’s trying to make sure that he maxed out his Roth IRA and his child’s 529, but he’s just offshoring it so that banshee of an ex-wife can’t make him fork it over in divorce proceedings.
Anyway, by the time you became a real adult, nothing you had to learn about Brian, Bryce, Lincoln, or Amantha would be pertinent, and you’d end up paying someone $400 to do your taxes anyway, so I mean, what are we doing here complaining about taxes.
On the other hand, why did no one teach me how to tie knots? I bet I need to knot something at least twice a week, so I just pretend it is shoelaces and hope it holds. Seems like an absolute failure of American Education that I, a 35-year-old high school and college graduate, can’t tie a knot without watching six youtube videos and hoping. I currently have two tarp-like things hanging in my backyard, and by hanging, I mean drooping low enough that Eliot has to duck under them. Knots. Why don’t I know knots? Knots are my taxes.
No one, and I mean NO ONE, took me up on the “let’s start a long email where we talk about all the things we would talk about if we didn’t have iMessage,” so now, you, dear reader, get some of these long-form thoughts I would happily share there. Your loss is also your gain. Funny how that works out.
What news do I have? Great question. Thanks for asking.
Roman, now walking on trampolines.
Roman started walking recently. We kept him home from daycare for a suspected pink eye flare-up. He and I were just hanging out in the basement when he started walking. I took him upstairs to show Leen, and he strolled across the kitchen to grab her leg. It was adorable. Good work, Roman. He’s now showing us some signs of getting ready to talk. He is big at pointing at himself and saying: Bee-bee. And he tips his head back and says Up and then squats down and says, Don. If you ask him what a cow says, he says, “mmmmmmm.” Just need to get that ‘oooo’ sound out there, and we’ll be on the way to an entire barnyard of sounds.
Eliot is just a dude. Since we potty trained him, he’s got this great Lil habit of getting his day started with a morning whizz at around 5:30. He’s still a bit obsessed with footy-pajamas, which means the guy can’t get in and out of those quickly. So he needs some help.
Occasionally I pop into his room at like 4:45 in an attempt to nip the early wake-up in the bud, and when I am lucky, that means I end up sleeping on the floor in there. You’d think that could really do a number on my shoulders, but since I had my most recent surgery five years ago, floor sleeping no longer pains me! I can sleep on my side on hard surfaces with no problems.
That’s the gist of what we’ve got going on over here. If you know other news you think I am leaving out, remind me, and I can try to include it next time.
And now: the dumps.
I was in an elevator with a coworker recently, and she looked and me and asked: so, how tall are you actually? I am confident in my 5’11” plus change-ness. No one wants to hear someone call themself 5’11” and a half. But not long ago, my doctor told me I was 6’1” at a physical, without shoes. I was lightly floored by this news, though unsure and pretty skeptical.
Limb-lengthening starts with lunch
So what to tell my coworker who asked?
I went with six feet, on the nose, on a good day. If I lay down, that’s how far away from me you’re supposed to social distance.
For some men, this handy 6-foot metric isn’t attainable; they’re what the internet has called Short Kings. This story is about short kings taking measures to get taller. It’s called limb lengthening, and it can increase your height by 8 cm. How? Well, it involves breaking your femurs, then inserting a rod, and then slowly, slowly, slowly engaging that rod to extend over the course of a year to take you from 5’7” to 5’10”. This, for short kings, makes a world of difference. It’s apparently excruciating, but again, incredibly worth it. Imagine one day looking at one row of tiles in your shower. And then, a surgery, a painful recovery, a shitton of money, and a year later being able to look at a whole different row of tiles in your shower. Game changer.
I cannot speak directly to the impact of being short, but if the man profiled in this story is in any way representative of what it’s like (down there), then it involves lots of jokes (like the one I just made) and lots of crying.
This is also a story about OnlyFans and FinDom, but I’ll let you discover how much this procedure costs (hint: It is north of 50K). The primary doctor featured is a TikTok superstar who has become a bit of a cosmetic surgery celebrity. He hopes that one day, limb lengthening takes its proper place in the ordinary world of nose jobs, boob jobs, lipo, and botox.
Dream big, Dr. Mahboubian, or at least tall.
Does anyone really have it in them to read a gigantic three-part unauthorized profile of Tucker Carlson? I bet you — like me— thought about reading this when it came out in May. He is, after all, pretty important! You know, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. But then, even still, I suspect you never got around to reading this. Well, that’s what I am here for. To read the Tucker profiles, so you don’t have to.
As a side note, does anyone know what happened to Tucker Max without googling it? He was an early blogger and shit heel that gained notoriety when I was in college for any number of stupid and childlike amusements. I’d put a pretty good wager on him being an early early early “victim” of cancel culture and suspect he got hit with some amount of lawsuits or legal charges that left him broke. Maybe he’s on Cameo now. That’s my guess. Someone else sully their google history with this, and let me know what you find. I am curious but not curious enough to look!
Tucker Carlson, though. What a turd. The first piece of the three piecer details all his failings. All his iterations and attempts to MAKE IT BIG and how he failed and flopped but studied and learned. I’ll give him that. Tucker is no dummy and clearly has some pretty good political instincts, albeit ones that make me slightly sick to my stomach.
Part two of the profile is where things go from “Who is Tucker” to more of “Why is Tucker.” It details his friendship with Lachlan Murdoch and his ability to see the difference between Trump and Trump supporters. Part two explains why Tucker et al. pivoted so hard to covering things like Migrant Caravans and pushing white replacement stories in primetime, elevating the fringe to the mainstream.
If nothing else, Tucker is a populist. He correctly identified that many Fox viewers were deathly afraid of the Other. But, of course, there was always a “latent” fear of the other in the Obama years. That fear existed since 9/11, and I am sure before that too, but Tucker took the quiet part and said it loudly. Unabashedly.
He started covering WHITE FARM MURDERS in South Africa to say: look at what’s happening there. South Africa, I suspect, is one of those countries that even some of our lesser geography-friendly Americans could point to on a map. More so than any of the other 53 countries in Africa, at least. But it’s still very far from Toledo, Biloxi, or Tuscon. And yet, Tucker knew that his viewers were becoming obsessed with being replaced. So it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Does Tucker drive the bus to crazy, or does Tucker just ride the bus that is already going crazy?
However you see it, it’s hard to argue that he hasn’t at least just sped up the bus. He has no shame in saying the quiet parts loud. In fact, Tucker, from his private gated compound in Maine, is all too happy to scream the quiet parts loud because that’s what the audience wants.
The story details how Tucker is obsessed with minute-by-minute reports of who watches and turns off the tv. It used to be that primetime got reports like this on the quarter, but Tucker amplified the process, took ratings to the analytics department, and said: let’s do what works. And so, dear reader, that is why you can find Tucker Carlson raging about White Replacement Theory.
I can’t get to the bottom of whether or not the guy believes any of this shit he says or if he just says it because it works.
And ultimately, I don’t think I care. Fuck that guy. This links to part II; honestly, I didn’t get to part III. Maybe it’s like the BuzzFeed story I read a few years ago posited Tucker is likely to be president sometime, and that story still lives rent-free in my head. I shudder to think.
Two future free-soloists (Over Leen’s dead body.)
My guess is that you do not know who Alex Honnold is. Some of you may, sure, but most of you? No way. Now, if I said, “You know the Free-Solo guy?” the responses would be different. Well, what if I told you that Free Solo guy was now a parent! For those who watched the documentary about his ropeless ascent up El Capitan, you may recall his van-dwelling girlfriend. She seemed happy yet terribly nervous to be along for the ride.
In 2020, they got married and had a baby earlier this year. This is an interview done by Drew Magery, who prides himself on being a veteran dad interviewing a rookie dad. I think there is probably some level of “Wow, I can’t believe it, I am better at something than the guy who climbed that thing” in this, but Magery and Honnold combine to share a pretty insightful conversation about new parenthood, the risks one takes before children and the expected risks one takes after children.
Honnold, it should not surprise you, has not stopped climbing without ropes, but he is more aware of mortality than he was in the past, but when you’re the whole thing is doing wild shit, it’s hard to stop. Now you’re just a little more aware of the wife and child, hoping you don’t fall.
This is an excellent little read for the new dads, old dads, and rock climbers. Enjoy.
Not too long ago, one of my writer coworkers asked me to substitute an em dash for an en dash. When I offered a hyphen instead, she asked why I picked a hyphen when I asked for an en dash. And that was when I realized that there were three types of dashes worldwide.
I was unmoored. So often, I used a long dash — when I should have used a short one –, or maybe just a hyphen -. Is a hyphen a punctuation mark? We certainly don’t teach them along with commas, periods, and question marks. And that’s probably the problem. How could you know if no one taught you? I guess this goes back to that introduction point I made. Should our education system spend more time on dashes and taxes than dates and algebra? If I ever run for school board, maybe the defense of the dash will be a keyboard in my platform.
This text does note that the dash has a troubled past as a hyphenate. Irish-American, Italian-American, Arab-American. When used as pejorative, these hyphenates can denote a “less than” quality. Not coincidentally, many publications are removing hyphens from their style guides. This ties in nicely with that whole Tucker Carlson fear of the Other thing I mentioned above.
In 2007, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary removed hyphens from 16,000 words, shortening the dictionary and simplifying the language. It was in 2007 that you said hello to “bumblebees” and goodbye to “fig-leaves.” Why does any of this matter? I guess it doesn’t for the most part, but I think taking stock of what other people do to pass the time is important. I didn’t ponder that people were arguing to save or kill the hyphen until I read this story. Now, hopefully, you’ve learned something too.
Big news for the JCrew Crew, J. Crew is back. In 2019, Mickey Drexler, the man who dressed me for a decade, left the company. I bet if I searched the archives, I could find a dump where I discuss whatever adventure he is on now. For three years, J. Crew was in the woods. It lost market share to the Vuoris, Zaras, fast fashions, and direct-to-consumer clothiers who just did J.Crew, but faster, better, and cooler. So, where does a brand turn when it needs a revamp?
In this case, J. Crew turned to someone who used to work for Supreme, and if you know anything, you can look at that decision and say something like, yeah, that makes sense. So found here is a profile of the new creative director at J. Crew — Brendon Babenzien.
Babenzien and the interviewer spend a lot of time discussing what good fashion means and why it matters. He admits to being one of the millions of men who wore the Ludlow suit, and J.Crew chinos, even while working for and designing at one of the coolest brands on the planet. It’s an uphill climb that J. Crew is on as it tries to reclaim some of the space it lost atop a men’s fashion mountain. But I am here for it.
When I moved back into the country, I realized that all my clothes were teaching clothes, which seem to be vastly different than the clothes I need for my current position. Luckily, I am still working from home 90% of the time, so my athleisure works, but one day, maybe we will return to the office and I’ll need something fresh. Here’s hoping I can get it at a J. Crew outlet store in the Wisconsin Dells.
This entire outfit was probably J. Crew.
That’s all for today. Sorry for taking months between dumps here.
I went to Des Moines for vacation, and time just disappeared. Here’s hoping I get another one in your inbox before the first snowfall. Tata for now!
Sam
