Be not filled with envy
if your friend is richer,
if he is more clever, if he is more fair.
May his great successes,
and may his good fortune,
never fray the leather on the shoes you wear.
Speaking of hockey, every once in a while I have this “I should start a hockey opinion-themed substack” train of thought in my mind that I have to beat back, because I don’t actually care about hockey that much or know that much about it.
But unlike other topics I’m more well-versed or interested in, there is basically zero places for decent non-kneejerk discussion of the NHL, and I actually feel like I am smarter and have better opinions than most people who write about hockey, and this is not the case for anything else I’m interested in. It would be really nice to have something to read that would be aligned with my biases and also written by someone who’s good at writing and has a broad worldview, but ever since Ellen Etchingham disappeared off the internet it mostly just doesn’t exist, except for the occasional Sean McIndoe piece.
Maybe someone has some recommendations?
Every once in a while someone on here (or, actually in real life too) who seems like a regular person will turn out to be unexpectedly incredibly well-versed in the minutiae of American legal precedent, and it always gives me weird whiplash, probably similar to how @northshorewave mentioned feeling about people unexpectedly being really into hockey.
Every night for a month smaller but more numerous frogs came so that he always had the same amount to eat.
When other passers-by stepped around the bundle wrapped in white silk, the anonymous scholar of Hanchow took it home. Inside were three silver ingots and a froglike evil, which sat on the ingots.
Philosophers of science are annoyed at scientists because the latter have a very myopic view of how their own field progresses and have by and large sold themselves a self-serving fairytale. And I think this is largely fair. But conversely, as a science person, I’m pissed off that philosophy of science people mostly don’t understand the science and don’t think they need to in order to explain to us how the thing we are doing works. In this way, they are akin to the businesspeople who claim you don’t need to understand what a business does in order to figure out how best to run it, and inspire the same resentment at the smug condescension.
My compromise position is that only scientists should do philosophy of science, but they should, like, be better at it.
My wife is much better at predicting events in the Russia-Ukraine war than I am. Over a month before the invasion she started saying Russia was going to attack all of Ukraine, and my response was “no way they’re gonna attack all of Ukraine, it doesn’t work like the 19th century, this would be a really stupid and counterproductive thing to do!” And then for months she was like “this Prigozhin guy is surely gonna try to seize power” and I was like “no way, it’s not the 2nd century, he would have no chance to actually succeed so going for it would be monumentally dumb”.
And like I think I am starting to see the flaw in my analysis.
Those who like it don’t even like it that much to be honest
Forced to formally report a launch location for the Vostok spacecraft, the Soviets also created the fiction of a great new spaceport named" Baykonur. " A few days following Gagarin's mission, a team led by Maj. General Kerimov, the head of the Third Directorate in the Chief Directorate of Reactive Armaments of the Missile Forces, prepared a document to submit to the International Astronautical Federation on the details of the mission. Prohibited from mentioning Tyura-Tam [where Gagarin actually launched from], Kerimov and his assistants picked the small settlement of Baykonur, 370 kilometers northeast of the actual launch site. Although Western observers were quickly able to identify the real location with the aid of tracking data, the Soviets continued to insist on the Baykonur name for the launch area for close to thirty years. At first amused by the sudden fame of their native town, the inhabitants of the actual city of Baykonur tried to use the confusion over names to their own advantage. They put in orders for all sorts of scarce raw materials, such as cement and wood, to officials in Moscow, all of which they received in vast quantities. Moscow officials later stopped all such disbursements once they realized that they were the victims of a shrewd scam.
Apparently Yuri Levitansky wrote a whole cycle of parodies on his contemporaries in Soviet poetry writing variations of “раз два три четыре пять, вышел зайчик погулять” … which is a hilarious thing to exist in general, but also here is the Okudzhava parody
Прощание с Лёнькой Зайцевым
Словно бы на зависть грустным арбатским
мальчикам,
арбатские девочки, безнадежно влюбясь,
Леньку Зайцева называли ласково зайчиком —
ваше высочество, говорили,
и просто князь.
А когда погулять выходил он с черного хода,
сто прелестных охотниц
выбегали из своих засад,
розовые лошади били крылами,
начиналась охота,
из которой никто не старался вернуться назад.
А они в него корочкой, видите ли,
поджаристой,
пирогом с грибами — в семейный, извините,
круг.
А он на плечо шарманочку —
и пожалуйста,
потому что шофер в автобусе —
его лучший друг.
А он на свои на рыжие, как порфиру —
фуражку.
А он их сам, понимаете, убивал.
И последний троллейбус
развозил
по Сивцеву Вражку
ситцевых девочек, убитых им наповал.
Плакала на Смоленской флейта,
лесная дудочка.
Бил на Садово-Кудринской барабан любви.
Ночь опускалась,
короткая,
как мини-юбочка,
над белыми дворниками,
изящными, как соловьи.
И стоял, как замок отчаянья,
арбатский дворик,
жалуясь, печалуясь, безнадежно моля…
Плачьте, милые девочки,
пейте паригорик!
Пейте капли
датского короля!
