Lore and order

A dispatch from bewilderness

The beauty of lists is that they allow for big jumps between ideas — and a certain albeit rather random order, too. On our list today:

*A surprisingly huge (8% of the Sun’s mass, or 30,000 times bigger than the Earth) is moving fast. To acquire this much velocity and energy, something dramatic must have happened to it. Perhaps something traumatic. Perhaps post-traumatic space disorder.

*A rare deep sea squid was filmed alive for the first time today. As opposed to what? Being filmed dead? In any case, it was spotted swimming 7,000 feet below the surface of the Southern Ocean. Does a “spotted” squid mean it was spotted, as in, it’s attired in spots, or as in someone “spotted” it?

*By the late 1980s, thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals had left the United States and Europe for the ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of Latin America. In return for tons of toxins, the dumped-on “developing” countries were offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. (“Promised” does not always mean “delivered.”) Today, most waste travels under the guise of being recyclable, cloaked in the language of planetary salvation.

*In 2024, “brain rot” was announced as The Oxford Word of the Year. It was chosen based on public vote and language analysis, reflecting a perceived deterioration of mental state due to excessive consumption of online content (not including this stack). The other shortlisted words were "demure", "slop", "dynamic pricing", "romantasy", and "lore." Lore and demure surprised me.

*Sadly, I had to include RFK, Jr. From a list of his very own, including his false claims that vaccines cause autism (they don’t), or that HIV does not cause AIDS (it does), or that antidepressants are linked to mass shootings (they aren’t).

*As recently as the 1970s, The Washington Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean.

*Speaking of oceans, we now have The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirl of plastic twice the size of Texas, floating in the Pacific. Which, fyi, is our largest ocean. And, likely, home of the world’s largest patch of trash.

These spots that were not spotted on a spotted squid.