Are you sitting down? Good, because they’ve turned whimsy into an adjective now. By they I of course mean the “they” in “that’s what they say,” which in turn means internet people earnestly explaining “how to dress whimsy” or “whimsy things I love.” The kids are into whimsy, it’s said, because they’re sick of optimization, despair, and grammar.

“Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.”
— Tom Robbins

Whimsy, in its current meaning of playful or spontaneous or simply wearing bright colours, is a near-lock for Word of the Year. This inevitability has an algorithmic dullness to it that is the opposite of whimsical. The YouTuber Ash Callaghan does a great job breaking down what she calls The Whimsy Paradox. “Whimsy now, rather than being defined by playful spontaneity and childlike imagination, is turned into a set of repeatable visual cues,” she explains. “And paradoxically, what was once characterized by unpredictability becomes recognizable through repetition.”

“I never saw a Purple Cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one.”
— Gelett Burgess

My longstanding discomfort with whimsy is that I almost love it, save for the fact that I don’t like it at all. It’s a phenomenon that lands somewhere between the idea of the uncanny valley and the Sloan lyric “It’s not the band I hate, it’s the fans.” It’s precious. It’s the distance between cute and cutesy. It’s Justin Trudeau’s colourful socks. It’s the Google Doodle. It’s work that pretends to be play.

“Ah yes! I wrote ‘The Purple Cow’ —
I’m Sorry, now, I Wrote it!
But I can Tell You, Anyhow,
I’ll Kill you if you Quote it!”
— Gelett Burgess

So I was primed for James Marriott’s recent screed on the evils of whimsy, specifically the British variety that gave us Count Binface, the masked intergalactic novelty who recently contested a by-election. “A nation that can’t be taken seriously shows itself superior to the world by laughing at it,” he wrote in the Times of London. “Worse, our national humour is increasingly laced with an unconvincing strain of smugness.” Here let me be convincingly and Canadianly smug about Angine de Poitrine, our masked intergalactic novelty that’s a much better joke precisely because they aren’t one.

“His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big,
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.”
— Edward Lear

Marriott writes that he was inspired by Kingsley Amis’s intense hatred of whimsy in the work of nonsense poet Edward Lear, because Lear’s lines “conjure up a vision of innumerable wool-clad, amber-beaded aunts and cousins all squealing, ‘Oh I say darling how perfectly super and spiffing and side-splitting!’ It is against that that we are fighting.” In a slantways fashion, yes. Whimsy disintegrates under scrutiny and cannot be bred in captivity. Let it run free! As long as it doesn’t run twee.

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“No man is exempt from saying silly things; the misfortune is to say them deliberately.”
— Michel de Montaigne

Why am I so hard on whimsy? Don’t I like fairy lights and googly eyes? Well, I did until I thought about them just now. And for next week?

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Approximately each month, my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, a suitably themed line from the excellent September issue of Harper’s, probably my favourite magazine at the moment:

“They behave ‘like the mythical oozlum bird flying in ever smaller circles until it has no place to go but up its own ass.’”

This from Jon Else’s book Frenchman Flat: The Rise and Fall of Atomic Bombs, explaining how the people who make nuclear weapons invariably think “that to ensure global peace they must make bombs that must never be used, all the while somehow demonstrating a willingness to use them.” That’s how I feel about polka-dot socks.

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Get Wit Quick No. 384 essentially argues that wit and whimsy are opposites. The mascot of this newsletter isn’t the Oozlum bird, at least not yet. It’s Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. It’d be soooo whimsy if you’d tap the ❤️ below.

Sb! That’s it!

That’s the chemical symbol for antimony! I didn’t know I knew that until it was excavated from the deepest recesses of my cranium during trivia night at the High Park Club. You know how despairing it can be to forget an obvious fact you just assumed you’d know forever? I posit that these moments of obscure revelation have the equal and opposite effect.

“The difference between what it feels like to know something that you didn’t know you knew and just thinking that you know it is something that you need to know, whether you know it or not.”
— Alan Connor

This is The Joy of Quiz, which is also the title of a zippy 2016 book by certified boffin Alan Connor, though as titles we also would have accepted The Unbearable Lightness of Quiz, All You Need Is Quiz, or Quiz That All There Is? Is “quiz” just a British way to say “trivia”? That’s a good example of a poorly framed trivia question, and no. As Drew Basile wrote in The Baffler earlier this year, “quiz is a species of especially rigorous trivia, with regimented online competitions and questions that tilt toward the obscure.” He concluded that elite quizzards are sad people. It’s lonely when you reach for the top and get too close; better not to know almost everything.

“Trivia must be noteworthy, novel or clever... ‘Comedian Albert Brooks attended Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh’ is a fact. But ‘Comedian Albert Brooks had to change his name because he was born Albert Einstein’? That’s trivia.”
— Ken Jennings

Connor’s book kicks off with an entertaining account of the creation of Trivial Pursuit by Montreal journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, truly a part of our Canadian heritage. My favourite piece of meta-trivia: The board game languished in obscurity until Glenn Close brought a copy to the set of The Big Chill, where her co-stars in that boomer epic enjoyed the game so much they gave boxes away on the press tour.

“Trivia is a game which is played by countless young adults who, on the one hand, realize that they have misspent their youth and yet, on the other hand, do not want to let go of it.”
— Edwin Goodgold

There are two key types of Trivial Pursuit questions: The snapper and the stopper. The snapper is a question with a clever kick, like “Who is the only US President to have worn a Nazi uniform?” The stopper is a question, that in the words of Abbott, “nobody in his right mind will know — but somebody will.” His example was the number of the hospital room that Ed Norton stayed in The Honeymooners after being injured in a sewer explosion, and the answer is not worth knowing. The snapper is of course The Gipper: Ronald Reagan played a U.S. airman behind enemy lines and thus in need of a disguise in the 1942 war movie Desperate Journey.

“I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.”
— William Safire

There are no mountweazels in trivia. A mountweazel, as all trivialists know, is a made-up word inserted into a dictionary to catch copycats. When Fred L. Worth compiled The Trivia Encyclopedia in 1974, he included a fake fact, just in case: The apocryphal first name of Detective Columbo in the eponymous detective series. That name was (not) Philip; when it showed up in Trivial Pursuit, Worth figured he had a lucrative lawsuit on his hands. And though he estimated that 32% of Trivial Pursuit was based on his book, the courts sided with Haney and Abbott’s guileless response: Isn’t the wholesale borrowing of facts exactly why encyclopedias exist?

“The grain of real knowledge is concealed in a vast deal of esoteric chaff.”
— Alfred Rupert Hall

If trivia is having a resurgence at the moment — and you can find plenty of anecdotal evidence that it is — why might that be the case? Adrienne Raphel wrote a great little taxonomy of all the Jeopardy! variations out there, which I most admire for how she backed into this excellent nerd joke: “The growth is exponential, as though that trademarked exclamation point had taken on the mathematical property of a factorial, multiplying the game into so many more versions than seemed possible.”

“I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.”
— Sherlock Holmes (as written by Arthur Conan Doyle)

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman posits that crossword puzzles became a sensation in the Victorian age just as “the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized fact.” People no longer had an actual use for all these knowledge knuggets, so using them to fill out grids in the newspaper scratched an itch. Extending that theory, the popularity of Trivial Pursuit coincided with the beginning of cable news. Now we have a universe of information, misinformation, and disinformation at our fingertips; there has to be a reason, right? It’s the Chekhov’s Gun theory of trivia: Why would I learn in the first act that the animal on the Japan Airlines logo is a stork if not to use that fact in the third act’s quiz?

“Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”
— Chuck Palahniuk

To conclude, a quiz on trivia as provided by Craig Courtice, the top quiz host in all the Emirates and my source for much of the above:

1. Alex Trebek hosted this American TV game show for 37 seasons until his death. Warning: your answer must be in the form of a question.

2. In the board game Trivial Pursuit, what color represents the “history” category?

3. The Guinness Book of World Records began as a way to settle disputes in the pub after the managing director of the brewery got into an argument about what the fastest game bird is. But what was it: a golden pheasant, a grey partridge, or a red-breasted merganser?

4. The song “Jai Ho” was from what 2009 movie about a teenager from the slums of Mumbai who ends up on an Indian quiz show?

5. What man, probably the first well-known trivia creator, authored “Champs and Chumps,” which was later renamed “Believe It or Not!” in 1932?

6. When it was first used in the 1780s, this word meant “an odd or eccentric person; or a person whose appearance is peculiar or ridiculous.”

7. The creator of what British quiz show was inspired by his experiences being interrogated by the Gestapo in World War Two?

8. In a 2016 poll, what percentage of British adults said they watch, listen to, or take part in quizzes at least once a week: 22 percent, 44 percent or 66 percent?

9. In the movie Quiz Show, what actor plays Charles Van Doren, a TV game show contestant who receives the answers in advance? Hint: he has been nominated for Oscars for Schindler’s List, English Patient and Conclave.

10. Sharon Burns and Tom Porter founded a weekly quiz league in southern England that grew from 30 teams to over 10,000. In what decade?
    

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“Who are three people who’ve never been in my kitchen?”
— Cliff Clavin

When John Ratzenberger’s mailman character appeared on Jeopardy! in a 1990 episode of Cheers, he bet it all on his question to this answer “Archibald Leach, Bernard Schwartz and Lucille LeSueur.” Though these are the real names of Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, and Joan Crawford, Clavin wasn’t wrong. Which is a reminder that the setter of the question, not the host or the contestant, is the true master of quiz. And for next week?

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Approximately each month, my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, the (Neil) Postman Always Rings Twice!

In Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, the title of Chapter 7 is “Now…This.” It’s a phrase…

“...commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly — for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening — that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, ‘Now . . . this.’”

All of which added a new layer of context to “And Now This,” the superedits of local news that are a regular segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver:

Oh, and here are the quiz answers:

1. What is Jeopardy!?
2. Yellow
3. The mer-GAN-ser can reach speeds of 130 km/h vs. pheasant: up to 70 km/h and partridge: 60 km/h
4. Slumdog Millionaire
5. Robert Ripley
6. Quiz
7. Mastermind
8. 44%
9. Ralph Fiennes
10. 1970s

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Get Wit Quick No. 383 falls under the category of “grab bag.” I just checked last week’s Quote Vote and though Trivia was in the lead, I must sheepishly The Odyssey ended up the actual winner. Remember that when filling out your Oscar pool ballots! To recover from that blunder, let’s hope the Trickster wins next week. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Please exchange quiz books with the subscriber sitting to your left and tap the ❤️ below.

Few quips of our era have travelled so cleanly from social-media post to household aphorism as this one:

“In every relationship, there’s one person who loads the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect and one who loads it like a raccoon on meth.”

Everyone can relate to this, though likely more so the Nordic precisionists than the drug-addled trash pandas. It brings to mind Tom Stoppard’s great observation that if you write a perfect cricket bat, you can throw an idea in the air, give it a knock, and it will travel an unexpectedly great distance. But why this observation? What is it, exactly, about dishwashers?

“Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while cleaning them.”
— Karl Kraus

The first reason is technology. These machines and the powders, pods, and potions with which we fill them have become remarkably more advanced in our lifetimes. That means if you do it the way you were taught, you’re probably doing it wrong. Detergents used to contain phosphates, which produced both sparkling dishes and suffocating algae blooms. About 15 years ago, they were replaced by enzymes that chew up what’s left on your plates — and thus require dishes to actually be dirty. The result is that this classic bit of observational humour no longer applies:

“I learned that you don’t take dishes from the table to the dishwasher; you have to rinse them first. I think that’s stupid because I don’t go out in the back yard and hose off before taking a shower.”
— Bill Engvall

More important is the fact that the dishwasher is increasingly everyone’s job. When it was the exclusive domain of the woman of the house, no one cared how she loaded and unloaded it. In the typical American household in 1965, women did 38 hours of housework a week and men did five. By 2010, women logged 18 hours of drudgery while men averaged 10. In that time, the percentage of homes with dishwashers went from 14% to 70%. So it’s safe to say that more people than ever before have opinions on what’s going on inside that waterproof box.

“Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”
— P.J. O’Rourke

The best scene in the 2008 film Rachel Getting Married is the dishwasher loading competition between the father of the bride and the groom-to-be, which director Jenny Lumet apparently based on a competition between her father Sidney Lumet and the choreographer Bob Fosse.

“You know,” Fosse observed back in the 1970s, “if you put the containers from Zabar’s in the top rack, you’ll have 10% more room for other stuff in the bottom.”

Those were fighting words; the two men spent the next hour loading, unloading, and cursing. In Jenny Lumet’s recollection of the event, “it was really disturbing.”

“Sidney, you’re a nice young man. You make a lot of money and the world is your oyster. But you don’t know shit about loading a dishwasher.”
— Paul (Bill Irwin) in Rachel Getting Married

“I find it touching but ultimately sad when the warriors of yesteryear are reluctant to lay down their plastic containers from Zabar’s and retire gracefully.”
— Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe) in Rachel Getting Married

In my time as dishwasher war correspondent, the most useful advice I’ve come across was in this blog post by Uri Bram, in which he pointed out that the solution to the raccoon vs. architect battle is — wait for it — value pluralism. You see, the Architects (High Tidiers, in Bram’s usage) need to let go of their insistence that there’s only one way (your way) to do things. Or in his words,“if you’re a High Tidier, and you treat your partner like an idiot who can’t even load a dishwasher right, but you still want them to do 1/2 the housework, you’ve changed the problem they’re solving from ‘how do I keep this home tidy for both of us’ to ‘how do I keep my High Tidier partner from being mad at me?’ Which is really bad for both of you, because it inevitably means the Low Tidier will be turning to you for approval on all domestic tasks and how they were done, which is extremely infantilizing, and which both of you will resent.”

So instead of seeing the two options as right or wrong, he suggests, see them as pizza or sushi: Both great when judged on their merits but horrible if you expect them to be the other thing.

All of which is humane and useful and wise … at least until you slide open the top rack and see this:

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“Freud is all nonsense; the secret of neurosis is to be found in the family battle of wills to see who can refuse the longest to help with the dishes.”
— Julian Mitchell

It occurs to me with a shudder that some of my readers might not see the issue with the above picture. Never having examined the workings of the dishwasher, these delightful Raccoons might assume the mugs can be positioned any which way for optimal results. Why, some of those readers may even live in my house! Value pluralism, I say through gritted teeth. Value pluralism! I scream it like Frank Costanza screaming “Serenity now!” And for next week?

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Approximately each month, my paid subscribers and I partyishly exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, one of those random synchronicities that happens while grazing through enough interesting material. First, this exchange from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library:

‘Do you live in London all the time?’ I asked him partyishly.

He thought about this: ‘I do, though I’m often elsewhere – in my thoughts. At my age it doesn’t matter where you live. Passent les jours, passent les semaines, as the Frenchman said. I blank a lot, you know. Do you blank?’

‘You mean, just let your mind go blank? Yes, I suppose I do. Or at least, I like letting my mind wander.’

‘There you are. You see, I’ve had such an interesting life and now it’s so bloody dull and everyone’s dead and I can’t remember what I’m saying and all that sort of thing.’ He seemed to lose his thread.

And then this eternally great bit from a 2016 GQ interview with Matt Damon:

Julia Stiles: After The Bourne Ultimatum came out, there was a premiere in London. Prince actually came to it, then got tickets for the cast to come see him [perform]. We were summoned into a room to meet him [after the show]. Matt said, “So you live in Minnesota? I hear you live in Minnesota.”

Matt Damon: Prince said, “I live inside my own heart, Matt Damon.”

Where, pray tell, do you live? Me, I’m in the dishwasher, checking for flaws.

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Get Wit Quick No. 382 is top-rack safe. The Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that washing the dishes can be a regular exercise in mindfulness, a way to connect with your ancestors and see the galaxy in a spoon. I love that for anyone who can achieve it; just don’t forget to clean out the filter from time to time. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. I find the express cycle never really works. Tap the ❤️ below for Extra Shine.

All great art is made of foibles, though sometimes they also use paint. The artist has to show us the human condition, warts and all. But if those warts are so unappealing, so gnarly, so repugnant that we can’t relate to them, we can’t connect. So instead the best artists depict a gentle fault, the ones we can manage to see in ourselves and thus forgive, a lovable wart: A foible.

“Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.”
— Elbert Hubbard

For every foible, there is a forte. That’s not a law of human character but a simple fact of fencing, from whence those two F-words originate. The forte of your blade is the bottom third, the strongest part of the steel. The foible is the tip of the sword, the weakest part. And while it would be wonderful if there were an elegant French word for the middle of the sword, between foible and forte, a metaphor for how we shuffle through most of the world most of the time, the official name is, unfortunately, the medium. Thanks, fencing.

“People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”
— Isaac Asimov

Not to brag, but I was in Amsterdam a few years ago on a carefully orchestrated work-trip layover and paid a visit to the Rijksmuseum to see all the Rijks. They had a big exhibition on Frans Hals, the painter whose copyright-free work has so often graced the top of this newsletter. It was quite wonderful: The Dutch master’s portraits feature subjects with mischievous smiles, twinkle-filled eyes, shiny red noses, and the distinct impression they know something you don’t.

There’s life in them there Dutchies! How did he do it? With his paintbrush, duh. But more specifically, as the panels explained: “Frans Hals is the indisputable master of the loose touch, his brushstrokes dancing across the canvas. This free and expressive painting style was unique at the time, as most of his contemporaries favoured precision and a smooth surface.” He embraced foibles!

“There is, perhaps no surer mark of folly, than an attempt to correct the natural infirmities of those we love.”
— Henry James

“Contemporaries spoke of a rough style, which might seem easy to imitate at first glance,” the program reported. “Connoisseurs, though, understood that this style was far more challenging than a polished, clean one.”

His subjects didn’t just sit for him; they also laughed, joked, played music, and drank. And that’s how the haters got Old Frans: Don’t you think it’s just a bit suspicious that this guy is so good at painting drunks? Or as the curators put it, “in the 19th century, his technique was more often associated with his fondness for alcohol, a perception heightened by his paintings featuring merry drinkers.”

“An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.”
— Dylan Thomas

Frans Hals died penniless and spent a couple hundred years in obscurity, his ability to capture the human condition used against him until his genius was finally recognized. A foible is a lovable flaw, which means the line between fault and folly is drawn by the observer. Contemporaries may look askance; connoisseurs may look twice. Is that a charming quirk or a red flag? More often than not, it’s up to you.

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“As he resigned himself to the acidiae of mortal illness, he was beginning to acquire the foibles of old age: a liking for a small treat, a fussiness about routine, a reluctance to bother with even his oldest acquaintances, an indolence which makes even dressing and bathing a burden, a preoccupation with his bodily functions.”
— P.D. James

I know you all wonder why I include Dishwashers here week after week. Am I, you might ask, yanking your chain? I am not! Is this a foible? Yes! I found some compelling source material on this subject and I think there’s something there. But also I got swept up in The Odyssey and would be ready to dip my toe into that wine-dark sea. Decisions!

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Approximately each month, my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks.

This week, some clever graphic design that could change the way you cook, as shared by my pal Tyler. As everyone who’s ever looked up a recipe online knows, the perverse incentives of the early internet pushed chefs and bakers to lard their instructions with useless backstory and SEO-optimized digressions.

But then, even traditional cookbookery is counterintuitive. As Tyler texted, his father “used to complain about Gourmet magazine and how they never listed the ingredients, they just revealed them in a narrative. ‘Once the water is boiling, add the skin of seven oranges.’ Oh, I need oranges, okay.”

Enter Juan Buis’s Recipe Tables, a format that renders every recipe into a simple chart you follow as you go. Drop any recipe or link into the site and it’ll tableize it for you. It’s an engineer’s idea through and through, and your results may vary. But even as someone who loves narrative, sometimes you just want to make the damn banana bread.

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Get Wit Quick No. 381 was only irritating if you read it wrong. When my son returned from camp, even his loud chewing was somehow lovable. The misophonia became misophilia! That can’t last, of course. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. Tap the ❤️ below if you would like your frailties to be appreciated. If you lack foibles, don’t tap!

Serendipity, I’m sorry to report, is a sham. The concept of finding just what you needed when you weren’t even looking for it — a very useful idea, especially in the realm of scientific discovery — has a rich and colourful etymology that, upon examination, doesn’t make any sense. But in a way, that makes it even better.

“I define serendipity as the art of making an unsought finding.”
— Pek Van Andel

Serendipity means to be Sri Lankan, more or less. Serendip is the ancient Persian word for that island, the setting for an Italian fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. In that story, first published in Venice in 1557, a king sends his three wonderful sons abroad to become wise in the ways of the world. They carefully observe all that they encounter, a habit that gets them into trouble when they meet a merchant whose camel has been stolen.

“One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”
— Thomas Schelling

The merchant asks if they’ve seen his camel, and the boys in turn ask if the dromedary in question was blind in one eye, missing a tooth, carrying a load of butter on one side and honey on the other, and ridden by a pregnant woman. Yes, the merchant replies, that’s my camel! Oh, we haven’t seen it, the brothers reply. This response lands like a load of ungulate dung and the boys are soon hauled before the court as camel thieves. How could they know so much? Is this, you might suspect, serendipity?

“I like the way you manage to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery.”
— Gore Vidal

It is not. Rather, it’s the sort of ludicrously fine-grained detective work most associated with Sherlock Holmes. You see, the brothers had seen camel prints and noticed that the grass had been grazed upon one side of the road, suggesting partial blindness of a beast of burden. They spotted clumps of grass on the ground that could have fallen out of a toothhole. They noticed flies on one side of the road thanks to the honey and ants on the other for the butter. And then, weirdly, they came across the location of the rider’s rest stop and sniffed out urine with “a sort of carnal concupiscence,” which suggested a pregnant woman. Hey, it was the 1500s.

“Art must take reality by surprise.”
— Françoise Sagan

This is … interesting, but not serendipitous by our definition of the term. Still, the writer Horace Walpole misremembered the story and, in a 1754 letter to another guy named Horace, described this “silly fairy tale” about princes “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of” to describe his recent research about a detail of a painting. This, he proclaimed, required a new word: Serendipity!

“Serendipity is jumping into a haystack to search for a needle, and coming up with the farmer’s daughter.”
— Julius Comroe

So this concept credited for the discovery of everything from penicillin to popsicles was coined by someone who didn’t remember his source material to describe something so inconsequential it barely qualified. But somehow, this miscarriage of etymology created a word once voted the best in the English language. That’s serendipity!

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“So what is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth, lush greenery and hummingbirds, seawashed, sunbasted? Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound, cold, a world of flint and stone. Call it Zembla. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.”
— William Boyd

I’m not sure I totally get this one, but I know I have some major Boydheads in my readership (hi Jake!) and perhaps they can pop off in the comments. For next week, maybe it’s finally time for some foibles with a capital F?

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Approximately each month, my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This month’s issue went out on Monday and it’s full of delightful and short summer novels!

And this week, I came across an enjoyably turned phrase and a loving parody.

First, in a daring piece of lifestyle journalism, Sam Anderson tried to find out if buying very expensive clothes would improve his life. I don’t want to ruin it (here’s a gift link), but I loved this sentence about trying on a hat and will now think of it every time I slice open an alligator pear:

“It was plain blue, no logo, and it fit my head like an avocado fits its pit.”

And second, this interview with the singer-comedian Kyle Gordon was as entertaining to read as his new video Mr. Jambo is to watch. It’s a genre parody of Paul Simon’s Graceland and perfectly encapsulates how if you make fun the right way, you actually create more fun in the world. Or as Gordon put it:

“Let me just say for the record: Graceland is one of my favorite albums, and I think it’s one of the greatest pop albums of all time. It’s a stunning masterpiece. But the lyrics are essentially him singing over Ladysmith Black Mambazo and then singing about how he’s depressed because he got divorced from Princess Leia and he’s awkward at Upper West Side parties.”

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Get Wit Quick No. 380 is, like the love you seek, in the valley of the soul. If you found this newsletter by accident, you have fulfilled the prophecy. If you subscribed a long time ago and finally read one of these emails down to the end, that also works. The Camel Case subtitle was too clever by half. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If you accidentally tap the ❤️ below whilst trying to delete this email, I’ll know you’ve stolen my pregnant camel.

For Pete’s sake, how about those sports? A whole unceasing month of men chasing a ball around for glory — but alas, the ball was so hard to see! So it’s great to learn that Moses G. Crane solved this problem back in the 1890s. The Massachusetts inventor was befuddled by the game of American football, and not just because it’s played with hands (not feet) and is the shape of an egg (not a ball). No, Crane’s beef(uddlement) was that the football was too damn small! His idea:

“If the ball were only made large, yes, large enough so that a player on one side could not see who was on the other, you would then have a chance to interest spectators in watching the whole game and in introducing much merriment, as well as skill.”

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We are almost certainly in the middle of a golden age — but of what? There is compelling evidence that this is a wonderful time for home coffee grinding, ignorance, streaming whodunits, cataract surgery, smut, Costco and rum. If it’s all of the above, we may be living in the golden age of golden ages.

“The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”
— Randall Jarrell

But even the abundance of smutty rum that defines our era pales in comparison to the original golden age, as identified by the Greek poet Hesiod. That was before we discovered fire, back when the Earth produced more food than we knew what to do with, no one suffered any sort of hardship or pain, and when death eventually arrived, it did so gently while you were sleeping. As a level-setting exercise, it’s worth pointing out that this never actually happened.

“Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.”
— Michael Chabon

Also, what did any of that have to do with gold? The incorruptible and rust-free metal was a metaphor for godliness, but nothing was actually made of the substance in this prelapsarian idyll. On the contrary, the poets remind us, the more actual gold changes hands, the less golden the age:

“Truly now is the golden age; the highest honour comes by means of gold; by gold love is procured.”
— Ovid, displaying the sort of sass that got him exiled

“The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.”
— G.K. Chesterton

And our modern understanding of golden ages as periods of fantastic innovation and artistry has a clear link to filthy lucre, or rather a sudden lack of it. The writer Ian Leslie suggests golden ages occur when capitalism and creativity are in rare alignment: An old system of making money has crumbled and interesting new forms of expression suddenly become wise investments. Between art in the Belle Époque and television’s recent golden age, it all ends once shareholders find safer bets. “Only when nobody knows anything does a creative industry bet on its creators,” Leslie writes. “Golden ages come to an end when everybody knows something.”

“Many a crown of wisdom is but the golden chamberpot of success, worn with pompous dignity.”
— Paul Eldridge

Naturally, your opinion of the age we’re in has much to do with the age you are. As Douglas Adams put it in The Salmon of Doubt, any technology that exists when you’re born is normal and ordinary; any technology invented when you are between the ages of 15 and 35 is “new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it”; and anything after that is against the natural order of things.

“The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve.”
— Peter Graham

As such, my conception of a golden age was the 1990s, after the Berlin Wall had fallen but before the first tech boom. But was it that great? The foundational text of that time, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, suggested the term “legislated nostalgia” for when you “force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess.” But I distinctly recall reading that book under a fruit-laden tree and clear blue skies, not knowing anything about anything, serenely unbothered, having zero notifications on any sort of device, and loving it.

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“The past, the Golden Age of the past — what a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don’t want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.”
— D.H. Lawrence

The bad thing about the present day is that any number of bad things might happen; the good thing about the past is that a finite number of bad things did happen and we know what they were. The best thing about the future is that it’s not here yet, but when it arrives next week the subject will be one of the following:

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, I serendipitously (re)discovered Carol Brown, a song by Flight of the Conchords that’s a parodic homage (or homagic parody) of Paul Simon’s 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. Whereas the original only lists five distinct ways to get out of town, the parmage clocks in at 19 and features a bonus subplot about cereal.

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Get Wit Quick No. 379 was written under partially golden skies, which aren’t as pleasant as they sound. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck, because I’m a big music guy. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Tap the ❤️ below to hasten the arrival of, if not the golden age, then at least an age of more heart taps.

Why do people ask if it’s hot enough for you as though it were a witticism? Is the twist that you, the subject of the jibe, are always bragging about your high tolerance for heat and have finally now been brought to heel? Or perhaps it’s to suggest that our individual preferences melt into one communal puddle at a certain temperature, a reminder that you’re no cooler than anyone else? No, this inane question that’s been asked since Victorian times is actually an indicator that it’s too sweltering for original thought. It’s the brain’s attempt at self-regulation.

“Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel certain that they mean something else.”
— Oscar Wilde

When you’re plotting a climactic scene, it’s always helpful to set it during a heat wave. Feverish delirium can then be explained away; perhaps the gun went off because his hands were so sweaty. In The Great Gatsby, the big showdown happens on the hottest day of the year, when everyone loses their composure and says what they really think, which in the case of a sweaty train conductor is “Some weather! hot! hot! hot! Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it ... ?”

“What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.”
— Jane Austen

And then there’s the eternal quest to fry an egg on the sidewalk during a heat wave. Do asphalt-cooked eggs taste better? Of course not. Does pavement ever really get hot enough, without the help of metal pans or sun-focusing mirrors? No. But like the half-witted question about whether it’s hot enough for you, this concept has also been around since the 1800s.

“One moves slowly through the days and nights, pretending to be more than half-alive.”
— M.F.K. Fisher

Humans don’t have a monopoly on moronic responses to hot weather. Southern pied babblers lose their ability to solve simple puzzles; zebra finches can’t get mealworms out of transparent tubes; mice forget what they did yesterday; guppies can’t get through mazes; and bumblebees fumble simple colour recognition tests. All this I learned from Marta Zaraska’s article with the excellent headline “They call it stupid hot for a reason.”

“Heat, ma’am! It was so dreadful that I found there was nothing for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.”
— Sydney Smith

All of the above plus the fact it’ll be 28 degrees today (for my readers who don’t use Celsius, that’s 301.15 Kelvin) leads to one obvious conclusion: As the world gets hotter, we are getting dumber. We are certainly stupidifying: The Flynn Effect, wherein IQ scores rise over time, has been in reverse for almost 20 years. We know this because as it backs up, it makes a loud beeping noise — and sadly, people still get run over by the Reverse Flynn Effect. Idiots!

“I can out sweat all the big local sweaters and they are going to bring in outside competition and have me sweat derrier grosse motos.”
— Ernest Hemingway, who had me until those last three words

What is to be done? As usual, Irving Berlin has the answer. In his 1933 standard Heat Wave, he identifies the cause of our discomfort: A sultry dancer from Martinique. “She started a heat wave,” he asserts without evidence, “by letting her seat wave / And in such a way that / the customers say that / She certainly can / can-can.” Now that we know the truth, we can switch our ACs for heat pumps, stop cracking eggs on the street, and limit our exposure to high-kicking cabaret dance at least until the autumn.

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“If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?”
— Steven Wright

You know those smug Swedes or Germans or Brits who say there’s no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing? Well, doesn’t that whole precious line of argumentation wilt when the mercury gets high enough? And next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, I’ve been thinking about this observation on the power of satire:

“Those wonderful Berlin cabarets, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.”
— Peter Cook

… specifically with respect to The Onion’s successful wrangling of InfoWars.com from the ghoulish Alex Jones in a Texas bankruptcy court. The comedian Tim Heidecker and Onion CEO Ben Collins explained the project well on The Daily podcast this week, including how they’ll share the proceeds of this new venture with the families of the Sandy Hook victims. So far, the site has declared that Jones popped like a balloon in his car two months ago, alongside parodies of the scammy ads that kept Jones afloat such as Skull Coning to Maximize Your Intellect and Truth-Knowing, Crab Salts Ultra, and Win a Chance to Become A Car. Could this be both funny and an actual force for good in the world? And if Crab Salts Ultra are 60x more powerful than regular Crab Salts, why was I wasting my time with regular Crab Salts?

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Get Wit Quick No. 378 was slightly delayed when my computer evaporated in the heat, but once it condensed we were good to go. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck, because I’m a big music guy. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If it’s too hot to tap the ❤️ where you are, tap the one in this email.

Are bartenders privy to the secret of life? They soak up the spilled guts of all manner of patrons, loosening lips as a professional service. What does that teach them? While glancing through the staff picks shelf at City Lights in San Francisco last week, I spotted The Dim Light Bar Guide, a distinctly 1990s-looking volume by Jack “The Hat” Yaghubian that promised on its cover “No mention of any bar by name” and “Absolutely no drink recipes.” This was the second edition, claiming to be “20% more scathing.” I was convinced.

“Everything I viewed as a perk when I first became a bartender, I now recognize as an occupational hazard.”
— Jack “The Hat” Yaghubian

Who is Yaghubian? He was born in 1949 and has tended bar since 1986, but beyond that the book is light on biography and heavy on bartending wisdom. If you ask Jack what’s good here, he says beer. What do you like? Beer. What’s your specialty? Beer. What do you like making? Beer. Surprise me! (Beer.)

“Philistine: what a German bartender does.
— Robert E. Lewis

How do I know this funny little book is the real deal? I would never serve a below-proof newsletter, so I cross-referenced Yaghubian with H.L. Mencken’s writing on bartenders and confirmed he’s a first-rate representative of the breed. For starters, they always call themselves bartenders, “a lowly word but a sound one.” Further, Mencken wrote, though bartenders are “probably the most adept practical psychologists on earth,” they aren’t much for fancy language. “At least 95% of them, in speaking of the tools and materia of their craft, use the threadbare jargon of the day.” An arm to pour, an ear to listen, a shoulder to cry on, sure, but a silver tongue isn’t in the job description.

“A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.”
— Jim Bishop

And that’s Yaghubian. He has no use for tiki drinks, smartphones, beer snobs, credit cards, or anyone who treats his garnish tray as a salad bar. In his world, there are only two mixed drinks: The classic cocktails so well known he doesn’t bother to list them, and the gorilla tits. This is the industry term for an end-of-evening concoction made from the last drops of the last bottles, and in his telling, it’s interchangeable with any non-classic cocktail: Generally drinkable but not actually good. In his view, long-forgotten drinks deserve their obscurity.

“Ever since a man down from them on Jackson Road lost his job as an undertaker’s assistant and became a bartender, Rabbit thinks of the two professions as related; men in both talk softly and are always seen standing up.”
— John Updike

And so we arrive at the mixologist, the bartender’s natural enemy. They do not represent sophistication, Yaghubian writes, but rather “unsophisticated drinking in times of growing hedonism.” Mixologists talk plenty about drinks but not about religion, sex, or politics. They precisely measure every ingredient out of a commitment to nothing more than the bottom line. A mixologist is a “silly made-up word for a job done standing on your feet.” In that he echoes Mencken, who says “even so silly a term as mixologist was devised not by a practicing bartender but by some forgotten journalist … He intended it sportively and it has remained on that level ever since, along with colonel for a whiskey drummer [salesman] and professor for a kneader of pugilists.”

“All regulars tip; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be regulars, they’d just be annoying customers.”
— Jack “The Hat” Yaghubian

I’ll end my interaction with this bartender in the correct way, with a tip on tips, which is: Tip! To which a bartender may knock their knuckles on the bar, a practice borrowed from card dealers and a way of saying thank you, of announcing that this is their money to fairly take, and of letting the stiffs waiting for service know that this is how it’s done.

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“I told Rodney [Dangerfield] that when I felt the whole world was against me, I’d find a tavern, where a bartender would always lend an understanding ear. But Rodney said he tried that once and that when he asked the bartender for a double, the bartender brought out a guy who looked just like Rodney.”
— Norm Macdonald

To be honest, I’m equally happy with a mixologist, a bartender, or Rodney Dangerfield. Also, I self-identify as a fruit bat, one of those weirdos who eats the garnish off the drinks. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks.

This week, I’ll close the loop on a question I asked last month: What’s your response when someone says a casual sorry on the street? As a Canadian, I maintain that you should say sorry right back. But I’ve noticed an increasing American proclivity to say “you’re good!” and I used the Canada Day pages of The Globe and Mail to say that this is not how we do it up here. Here’s the gift link!

And here’s my key argument, offered with much respect to my American readers:

[“You’re good”] is how many Americans respond to “sorry,” and in that minor distinction is an emblem of what makes our countries different. “You’re good” is also a de-escalation, but it’s on the speaker’s terms. They are the arbiter of your goodness, not only accepting your apology but rendering a verdict on your standing. It’s presumptuous and individualistic; in other words, American. As we’ve been repeatedly and painfully reminded throughout our history – and constantly in the past year – the single most defining trait of Canadian identity, the one thing that bound this country together from the start, is that we are not them.

Or just say “no worries” and keep the peace on all fronts!

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Get Wit Quick No. 377, like all issues of this newsletter, aims to be bangers only. This self-explanatory term comes from Allegory, a bar in Washington, D.C., whose philosophy is explained in Schott’s Significa as “making cocktails that are focused on being delicious. If your drink is complicated from a flavour or technical standpoint then it better taste amazing.” Surely bartenders and mixologists can agree on that! The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting. As the algorithm told the bartender, I’ll have what everyone else is having, and it’ll know better if you tap the ❤️ below.

No matter whether you call it soccer, football, Canadian football, footie, footsie, Australian no-rules football, rugby, ruggers, rugelach, New Zealand some-rules football, pickleball, kickabout, or calcio, there can be no denying that the one where they kick a ball is truly The Beautiful Game.

“In Brazil no one doubts that the ball is a woman.”
— Eduard Galeano

It’s well documented that FIFA (the Football International Football Association, redundant but that’s the price of globalization) is one of the most corrupt organizations on earth, though competition is ever intensifying. Think how much money the IOC could make by selling naming rights to each of the five Olympic rings! If you squint, this can be seen as a testament to the beauty of seeing the world bond over sport, a connection so heartwarming and emotional that a little embezzlement seems like the cost of doing business.

“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.”
— Eugene McCarthy

In 2014, the terrific FT columnist Simon Kuper got it wrong in the best way as he described the recent history of the World Cup as watching “planet’s biggest nationalist spectacle evolve into a cosmopolitan party.” The fact that the best players were “transnational elite more at home in first-class airport lounges than in the streets of their own countries” and that fans chose teams based on preference rather than bloodline exemplified “the worldwide retreat from nationalism.” Then history went and happened again, but still: A great thesis.

“Football is like chess, only without the dice.”
— Lukas Podolski

One charming byproduct of globalized soccer is hearing pasty Brits yell “Vamos!” at one another. As linguist Txuss Martin told The Athletic: “The sequence is highly sonorous and easy to project. Crucially, either of the two vowels can be prolonged for several seconds: ‘vamooooos!’ That makes it particularly well suited to chants, celebrations and collective displays of enthusiasm.”

“The ball is round, the game lasts ninety minutes, and everything else is just theory.”
— Sepp Herberger

People always ask me, what is the greatest game of football ever played? And I say my money is on the Fiorentina vs. Pistoiese game of October 27, 1954, when 10,000 Tuscan fans witnessed a group of cigar-shaped UFOs hover over the field and sprinkle silvery glitter all about. As Jehan Azad explained this week, the most plausible earth-bound explanation was some sort of spider migration, though a chemical analysis of the “glitter” suggested that wasn’t quite right. This is where Ziggy Stardust found his Spiders from Mars, and since the game was called on account of extraterrestrial excretions, we can say the aliens won.

“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre

Once, in North America, soccer was the ideal sport for people who didn’t care for sports. Now, we need to find something else. Vamoooos rugelach!

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“Intellectual football-lovers are a beleaguered crew, despised by intellectuals and football-lovers alike.”
— Martin Amis

These days, what crew isn’t beleaguered? Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. As a reader service, I generally avoid sharing anything about modern politics, but I’ll make an exception for two great pieces I read in the last week.

First, an investigation from The Fence and Bungalow (they’ve never heard of you either) into whether the short-fingered vulgarian is in fact that. How has no one done this before? The best line:

“When he’s not gesturing, they hang from his sleeves like crepe rubber gloves filled with yoghurt.”

And as a chaser, Tina Brown’s caustically even-handed comparison of recent events on both sides of the aisle. A pox on both their White Houses:

“Maybe it’s a law of history: as empires begin to die of misrule, their rulers build monuments, a hopeful lie to fool future historians.”

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Get Wit Quick No. 376 was an edge-of-your-seat nailbiter that ended in a score of nil-zilch, meaning everyone continues into next week. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Before you leave, please clean up the stands like Japanese fans and tap the ❤️ below.

We live in the age of the celebratory queue. In the bad old days, people were forced to stand in line for necessities. Now, they thrill to line up for luxuries.

“To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of power, age-old pastime of humanity.”
— Roland Barthes

Why did we rediscover patience? Jonah Weiner of recently waited 90 minutes for baked goods in Oakland, California, which gave him plenty of time to formulate a grand unified theory for what he calls the QTBAT (Queue to buy a Treat), or “business friendly loitering with intent to purchase.” His four trenchant explanations:

1. It’s an egalitarian experience in our increasingly stratified society.

2. It’s meaningful, as measured by the fact everyone else is doing it.

3. It’s not on your phone. Hurrah for the meatspace!

4. It’s communal. We used to go to temple; now we go for bagels.

“There is something wrong when you wait in line thirty minutes to get a hamburger that was cooked for ninety seconds an hour ago.”
— Lewis Grizzard

The English must be given credit for their exceptional queuing ability, a talent the BBC dates back to the 1940s. But then, they have a universally understood word that works as a verb and noun. Queuing may be descriptive and prescriptive, ensuring future generations know that if you dare cut the queue, you’ll be on the next slow boat to Australia (where life expectancy, average income, and marsupial concentration is significantly better because crime pays.)

“An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”
— George Mikes

It’s widely said that Disney has the best queues, as old Walt knew that was how his guests would spend most of their time in his theme park. And so he entertains you in line, never lets you see exactly how long it is, and gives you a slightly inflated estimate of how long it will take so you think you’ve beat the system. But that was before Lightning Lanes, the expensive queue-jumping pass that Disney resisted for years (to paraphrase a cricket, when you wish upon a star, your net worth shouldn’t matter). Now that this three-fingered white-glove service has generated roughly a billion dollars for the House of Mouse, there’s no going back. Meanwhile, Walt’s corpse waits patiently on dry ice below the Pirates of the Caribbean ride until medical science finds a way to revive him. (Not really.)

“The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.”
— Will Rogers

In the middle period between post-war scarcity queuing and the modern celebratory queue (which may have begun with the first iPhone in 2007), it seemed like the existence of perpetual lines said something important about a city. Montreal pretty much always had a queue in front of Schwartz’s Delicatessen, even if you could get a reasonable facsimile right across the street at The Main, RIP (Rest in Pickles). But what did people line up for in Toronto? Maybe Dutch Dreams ice cream on a summer night, but beyond that? Now, denizens of these cities and most others can spend their leisure time waiting for all manner of treats. We did it! Once again, hurrah for the meatspace.

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“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.”
— H.L. Mencken

You know the rule of thumb about how you should read 100 pages minus your age of any new book, given that your reading time is dwindling with each passing year? The same goes for lineups, though we need a formula. Wait for 60 minutes minus your age, perhaps? So if you’re in your golden years, they ought to wait for you. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, a sampling from Futility Closet, the book of the excellent blog:

What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft?
A-flat minor.

Which is the family-friendly ancestor of Kendrick Lamar Duckworth’s line about Aubrey “Drake” Graham:

Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor.

More of this flotsam and jetsam coming soon in the June edition!

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Get Wit Quick No. 375 wants to know: What do you happily wait for? Tell me in the comments below. Also, thank you for last week’s contributions of how you respond to an everyday sorry! More on that project coming soon. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Just this once, you can jump to the front of the line to tap the ❤️ below.

When you can’t get to sleep, try coming up with some aphorisms about your condition. This will pay it forward, helping newsletter writers of the future get wit quicker and thus hit the sack sooner.

“I haven’t slept for ten days, because that would be too long.”
— Mitch Hedberg

The upside of insomnia is more time to work, though this might only make your brain spin faster and sleep ever more elusive. Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Proust, and Kafka all suffered, perhaps none more than the Pessimist of Prague. It’s been argued that the “the oppressive, enigmatic and bizarre atmosphere of Kafka’s literary works” is a result of his eternal fatigue, so at least it created a mood. Though his decision to go all in on afternoon naps led to hallucinations, so don’t do that.

“Insomnia, a dreaded blight,
Might well become a boon
If it could be transferred from night
To afternoon.”
— Richard Armour

Lewis Carroll’s stated cure for insomnia was math, though his real solution was being equally happy sawing or solving logs. The Jabberwockist matter-of-factly reasoned that the choice was “either to submit to the fruitless self-torture of going through some worrying topic, over and over again, or else to dictate to myself some topic sufficiently absorbing to keep the worry at bay.” He was clever enough to decide that, even if it meant less sleep, “an hour of calculation is much better for me than half-an-hour of worry.”

“He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.”
— Vladimir Nabokov

Another upside of insomnia, Groucho Marx found, was that people loved to hear about it. After losing a small fortune in the stock market crash of 1929, he developed “galloping insomnia, and in my social circle sleeplessness now began to replace the stock market as the chief topic of conversation.” In those anxious times, he reported in his memoirs, everyone wanted to discuss being underslumbered. At parties, “guests who had been half asleep for hours would shake themselves back to consciousness and with bloodshot eyes listen with both ears to the victim’s detailed account of last night’s harrowing hours.” Groucho’s best advice was that “what cures one man is another man’s poison.” Less helpfully, he offered this:

“Many people get a good night’s rest by counting sheep. If possible, it’s advisable to have the sheep in the bedroom. However, if you are allergic to wool (and most of the woolen sweaters I buy seem to be), you can also court sleep by counting panthers. Of course, there is always the danger that the panthers may eat you, but if you suffer from insomnia that is really the best thing that can happen to you.”

They say darkness helps you nod off, and you can’t get much darker than Emil Cioran. The French-Romanian miserabilist wrote comically bleak aphorisms and books like The Heights of Despair and The Problem With Being Born. He credited insomnia for his dour outlook, explaining quite eloquently that when you get a good night’s sleep, it’s like being reborn, but when you can’t sleep, you’re forced to continue in the same consciousness, over and over, until you start saying things like:

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
— Emil Cioran

But just as it’s always darkest before the dawn, there was some welcome relief for Cioran. He took up cycling by chance, and realized that extreme exercise cured his insomnia. As he told an interviewer, “When you do a hundred kilometers a day, there’s no way you’re not going to sleep, it’s out of the question.” Which makes this an unexpected sequel to last week’s Wit’s Guide to Bicycles. “And so,” Cioran reported, “this providential bicycle saved me.”

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“I only sleep with people I love, which is why I have insomnia.”
— Emilie Autumn

For some reason this week’s newsletter made me alarmingly dozy. If it has that effect on you, I guess that’s good? But keep your naps to 20 minutes and try not to turn into a giant bug. Next week?

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Oh, here’s a random question for a piece I’m writing…

When someone bumps into you on the street, holds up a line, or otherwise commits a tiny social transgression in Canada, they say sorry.
What do you say in response?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, I realized that, though I have been on some form of the internet for the majority of my lifetime, I have still missed memes that were allegedly everywhere and that directly pertain to my interests. Is there a word for this?

I learned yesterday of the “We should improve society somewhat” meme, which is celebrating its 10-year anniversary with a Kickstartered book about its impact, use, and misuse:

Imagine, a whole decade of me not knowing about this or even such remixes as:

This is why we need to bring back the monoculture. (Yet I have a Substack. Curious!) With your support, I pledge to do just that.

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Get Wit Quick No. 374 was cooler than the other side of the pillow. Interestingly, I found a precursor to the Nabokov line about needing a third side on which to sleep in the work of Langston Hughes, whose character Simple offers this lament: “Two sides are not enough. I’m tired of sleeping on either my left side, or on my right side, so I wish I had two or three more sides to change off on. Also, if I sleep on my left side, I am facing my wife, then I have to turn over to see the clock in the morning to find out what time it is. If I sleep on my right side, I am facing the window so the light wakes me up before it is time to get up. If I sleep on my back, I snores, and disturbs my wife. And my stomach is out for sleeping, due to reasons which I mentioned. In the merchant marine, sailors are always talking about the port side and the starboard side of a ship. A human should have not only a left side and a right side, but also a port side and a starboard side.” I agree; let’s get a Kickstarter going! The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the multi-sided magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Tap the ❤️ below to avoid insomnia, maybe.

Are things getting better or are they getting worse? Consider this question from behind the handlebars of a bicycle. The philosopher Ivan Illich, whomst even casual readers will remember from GWQ No. 284 (“Merrymaking, or, not trivial to be convivial”), held up the bicycle as one of his Tools for Conviviality, those devices that increase our autonomy and creativity rather than reducing it. Everything that followed the bicycle, namely the Dodge Challenger, went in reverse. So, worse?

“When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And, unlike subsequent inventions for man’s convenience, the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man’s brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle.”
— Elizabeth West

By that reading, the 1880s were the pinnacle of civilization, which will be cold comfort to anyone in need of penicillin, insulin, or Fruit by the Foot (though those last two cancel each other out.) Imagine an era when something as simple and astonishing as the bicycle was just invented? It meant that the luminaries of the Victorian era had to learn to ride as adults.

“I think the most ridiculous sight in the world is a man on a bicycle, working away with his feet as hard as he possibly can, and believing that his horse is carrying him instead of, as anyone can see, he carrying the horse.”
— George Bernard Shaw

Shaw was an avidly atrocious cyclist. In the words of his biographer Michael Holroyd: “Many of his falls, from which he would prance away crying ‘I am not hurt,’ with black eyes, violet lips and a red face, acted as trials for his optimism.” In the most literal collision of great minds ever recorded, Shaw went on a bike ride with Bertrand Russell and smashed directly into his fellow philosopher. Shaw was thrown 20 feet from the collision but sustained no injuries. Russell’s bike was totaled and, Shaw gleefully reported, “his knickerbockers were demolished.” Russell had to take a slow train home, and at every stop Shaw was waiting at the station to jeer him. As Russell later recalled, “I suspect that he regarded the whole incident as proof of the virtues of vegetarianism.” Their friendship never recovered.

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”
— Mark Twain

Other famous bearded men of the era had similar experiences. Leo Tolstoy began to ride at the age of 67 and decided that the exercise was “a form of natural idiocy, that I don’t care what people think, that it is sinless and fun in a childlike way.” Though he passed his cycling test and got a license from the Moscow authorities, the Russian author’s journeys were not without incident.

“If I imagine an obstacle, I feel an insurmountable pull toward it, until a collision happens,” Tolstoy wrote to his daughter. “This is especially true regarding one fat woman, who is, like me, learning to ride the bike. She has a hat with feathers, and as soon as I look at them trembling in the wind, I feel my bike being pulled toward her. The woman yelps and tries to flee, but there is no use. If I don’t dismount from the bicycle in time, I end up hitting her. This happened several times.”

“I can think of no sincere, decent human being, male or female, young or old, saintly or sinful, who can resist the bicycle.”
— William Saroyan

But it’s not just men who like bicycles! Fish also need them. Oh wait, the line “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” is empirically true and remarkable in its origins. Often credited to Gloria Steinem, it’s been credibly sourced to an Australian activist named Irina Dunn, who scrawled it on two washroom walls in 1970. It was mentioned in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1975 and started showing up on posters in feminist bookstores around the world soon after. Which goes to show that the right phrase at the right time, even if unveiled next to a toilet that flushes the wrong way round, can travel the world.

“Marriage is a wonderful invention, but then so is a bicycle repair kit.”
— Billy Connolly

The main problem with bicycles, as set out by Flann O’Brien in his cult novel The Third Policeman, is that too much riding of them turns you into one. Come again? Yes, it’s just simple atomic theory. As Sergeant Pluck explains, “people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles.” The sad result is a lot of leaning against walls, discomfort indoors, and circular leg movements.

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hopes seem hardly worth having, just mount a bicycle and go for a good spin down the road, without thought of anything but the ride you are taking.”
— Arthur Conan Doyle

But are things getting better or worse? One vital data point in this vale of postmodern tears: Every major city now has a bike share program, allowing anyone with a phone and a few dollars to take their life in their handlebars and just go. Whizzing down a quiet leafy street on a humid summer night is one of the best feelings there is, and it’s now available pretty much anywhere. That’s better! Until you crash into the woman in the feathered hat, at which point things get worse.

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“Dear bicycle, I shall not call you bike, you were green like so many of your generation, I do not know why.”
— Samuel Beckett

Just as bike is short for bicycle, Mike isn’t short for Micycle. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, a new word that’s suddenly everywhere:

Choppelganger, n. A less attractive version of something or someone. Portmanteau of chopped (teenage slang for ugly) and doppelganger.

First Ilana Weitzman told Sarah Lazarovic about it at Toronto Climate Week, then Ingrid shared it with Fashion Club, and now I’m telling you: Three mentions make it a trend, by the hallowed rules of lifestyle journalism. But Get Wit Quick doesn’t stop there. I went the extra step and asked an actual teenager about this neologism. After the obligatory eyeroll, I was told that of course she’s heard it but no one actually says it. Instead, her friends will call people laide, from the French meaning ugly but also “spiritually wicked.” Much better, because even the glowiest glow up can’t hide moral rot.

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Get Wit Quick No. 373 must here call out Get Wit Quick No. 1, which covered the important question of what you ought to yell at a unicyclist. The answer in July 2019 is the answer now: Nothing at all. As Beckett said, every word hollered at a cycle of any sort is a stain on silence. But imagine if we’d kept calling them velocipedes? The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, which can prop up a kickstand. Tap the ❤️ below to avoid flat tires.

When the Grim Reaper comes a-knocking, the first question on his liplessness will be: How many books do you have left to read? If the number you offer is high enough (and if you remembered to leave out carrots for his reindeer), he’ll leave you be and go on his morbid way.

“The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity.”
— A. Edward Newton

This is false — I think, I’ll report back later — but it’s the subconscious justification for tsundoku. I’d like to say that this Japanese word for the tendency to buy books you never get around to reading comes from the same root as tsunami, bringing to mind an encroaching ocean of erudition, but my Japanese is too rusty to make such a claim. As far as I can tell, it’s from tsumu, meaning to pile up, and doku, meaning reading.

“The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.”
— Gabriel Zaid

The great thing about tsundoku is that it’s apparently not a judgmental term. They haven’t added it to the Japanese version of the DSM and you can’t be prescribed peptides for it. The closest English translation, bibliomania, has been pathologized as a subset of hoarding, which in turn falls under obsessive-compulsive behaviour, which is then grouped under the larger category of totally missing the point.

“A man loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books.”
— Francois Mitterrand

One question worth asking: Do you hoard other things? Is having more clothes than you can ever wear, more food than you can ever eat, or more houses than you can ever occupy a similar condition? Having more books than you can ever read is aspirational in a different way. Would you be a different person if you finally sailed in every yacht you owned? That reminds me that I’ve happily tsundokued the wonderfully titled Evan Osnos book The Haves and the Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.

“The thing about books is, there are quite a number you don’t have to read.”
— Donald Barthelme

It’s bad form to read a book called How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, but a quick scan of said book reveals the parable of Musil’s Librarian. In the modernist novel A Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, the character in question explains that the “secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents.” He doesn’t dare dig deeper. The love of all books, equally like children, forbids him from giving any one volume preferential treatment.

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
— W.H. Auden

In Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s The Black Swan — another book I haven’t read, this one probably because of the irritatingly precise jacket blurb that calls it “The most influential book of the past seventy-five years” — there is the story of Umberto Eco’s 30,000 book library and the idea that anyone who asked if he’d read them all just didn’t get it. “Read books are far less valuable than unread books,” Taleb writes, and then suggests that your collection of unread books be called your antilibrary.

“A library is thought in cold storage.”
— Herbert Samuel

And herein lies the solution for tsundoku: After removing atlases, dictionaries, almanacs, yearbooks, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and all other books that aren’t actually meant to be read, add the sum total of your library to your antilibrary. This is the actual number of books that you own. Isn’t that a relief? Just ensure that your library and your antilibrary never come into contact, obliterating all useful knowledge and thus forcing you to start watching Summer House.

“The book collector’s caveat: Never lend a book; never give a book away; never read a book.”
— John Sparrow

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“It is one of the misfortunes of life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them.”
— Thomas de Quincey

The concept of the antilibrary reminded me of Anti-Garry Gum from the classic British educational parody series Look Around You. Write that down in your copy book now. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. I just finished and enjoyed Ben Lerner’s Transcription, which is fundamentally about our phones and what they’ve done to us, but not at all in the preachy annoying way that sounds. I wouldn’t call it witty at the sentence level, but here are two highlights:

“I wondered if Thomas’s name and number would show up on her phone or if it would say ‘Spam Risk’ or ‘Unknown Caller,’ a phrase that sounded Victorian to me.”

“I was glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level, shamefully unresponsive to the old media that surrounded me: books, paintings, analog photographs, a vinyl record spinning somewhere in my mentor’s house.”

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Get Wit Quick No. 372 briefly considered Marie Kondo’s apocryphal suggestion to max out your library at 30 books, looked it in the eye, decided it did not spark joy, and thanked it for its service before taking it out behind the shed with the captive bolt pistol Javier Bardem used in No Country for Old Men. The mascot is Magnus the magpie, who had to be a magpie with a name like that. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, and you ought to own a whole pile of them. If you have or haven’t read it, let me know by tapping the ❤️ below.

Do people’s names define their life’s trajectory? One of the leading proponents of this theory was Carl Jung, though he only thought of it when he was old. He suggested this in his book Synchronicity, which is also the name of the greatest album by The Police, who never enforced any laws. So the answer is no.

“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”
— Marshall McLuhan

Fittingly, this phenomenon really took off when it found the proper name for itself. At the turn of the last century, they were called aptronyms and made for easy filler in items columns with reports of a cemetery keeper named William Graves and a firm of physicians called Gore & Trueblood. But was it aptronym or aptonym? And what did it mean, again?

“Although my father wanted me to become an engineer and my mother a bishop, I myself am quite contented to have become an adjective.”
— Federico Fellini

The legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen (said to have bested Robert Fulford for the longest-running column in the English language) often filled the inches with “namephreaks” such as fisherman Buzz Minnow, dentist Rodney Pain, piano teacher Patience Scales, etc. Obviously, no one has used the term namephreaks since.

“And there’s a nice youngster of excellent pith—
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Credit for nominative determinism goes to C. R. Cavonius, who submitted the phrase to John Hoyland’s Feedback column for New Scientist magazine in this 1994 column. Therein, it was noted that “Sidney Ray is one of the foremost British authorities on camera optics; R. A. Sparkes has written numerous textbooks on electronics; C. J. Berry is the expert on homemade wines; and Muriel Watt is a leading Australian researcher on solar power.”

“The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.”
— Elias Canetti

Once it had the right name, nominative determinism took off. When John Hoyland died in 2014, it was in the headline of his obituary. And people so glommed onto it that New Scientist keeps saying they will no longer accept examples; the deluge continues.

“No, Groucho is not my real name. I’m breaking it in for a friend.”
— Groucho Marx

Despite its technical appellation, nominative determinism is entirely anecdotal. My favourite case: In 1986, the oil magnate Armand Hammer bought a stake in in the company that made Arm & Hammer baking soda because people kept asking if he owned it.

“No good can come of association with anything labelled Gwladys or Ysobel or Ethyl or Mabelle or Kathryn. But particularly Gwladys.”
— P.G. Wodehouse

There is also reverse nominative determinism, wherein the person changes their name to reflect their life’s work. Credit for this joke goes to Yuri Vishnevsky, who gave as his example Benoît Mandelbrot, the mathematician who discovered the recursive geometric shapes called fractals and gave himself the middle initial B, which (per his obituary) maybe stood for Benoit B. Mandelbrot? But the real joke is that this might be a case of reverse reverse nominative determinism, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that the Mandelbrot set of fractals contained many mandalas, the circular geometric patterns used in Eastern religions. And what’s more, Nelson Mandela may have enjoyed mandalas!

“A name is a road.”
— Iris Murdoch

And there’s nominative contradeterminism, wherein the person chooses a profession that is the opposite of what their name suggests. In addition to the oft-cited Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila, I’m partial to Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck, who devoted her academic study to uncommon names, refused to change hers, and uses neither of those products. Had Vandyck failed in her career, that would have been nominative deterrentism.

“I’ve always thought my creative life began the moment my mother named me Twyla.”
— Winston Churchill (just kidding, obviously Twyla Tharp)

The natural endpoint for this flavour of chicanery is monogrammatic determinism, in which your initials seal your fate. It was briefly found that having positive initials like VIP or ACE caused people to live longer than those with downer initials like PIG or DIE. Upon further review, scientists found that this theory was, like all of the above, quite ridiculous.

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“Bob Marley isn’t my name. I don’t even know my name yet.”
— Bob Marley

Has anyone ever cast a Bob Marley impersonator in the role of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol? Or a woman named Carol? A free idea I’ll just leave there for the taking. Next week? Is it finally tsundoku time? Loyal supporter , who is not a safecracker, is presumably hoping so!

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. In my interview with Tom Allen, master trombonist and compiler of the superb Classical Musick Almynack, I asked him about the story of Peter Maxwell Davies, the composer who recovered a swan that had been electrocuted by power lines near his home on the Orkney Islands. As Allen wrote, Davies “kept the wings for a future operatic costume, cooked the liver and was investigated for being in possession of the corpse of a protected species. When officers called, he offered them swan terrine, which, by his own admission, was ‘probably a mistake.’ He was eventually cleared of wrongdoing.”

Was this a knowing homage to Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl’s famous story of the woman who murders her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then feeds the weapon to the detectives investigating the case? Said Allen:

“I don’t think so, but I can imagine, had he still been alive, that Alfred Hitchcock could have done something darkly wonderful with the story of a composer, a pair of enormous wings and a terrine.”

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Get Wit Quick No. 371 will say this: If you name your son Thelonious Sphere Monk, he’s gonna do something interesting. The mascot is Magnus the magpie, who had to be a magpie with a name like that. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. My nickname for you is Tappy, so you’d better tap the ❤️ below.

If you’ve ever wondered why kids are so obsessed with dinosaurs, take a look in the mirror. Wait! I am not suggesting you, dear reader, are a dinosaur, but rather that our entire civilization is besotted with the terrible lizards who were long ago compressed into the liquid energy we call light sweet crude. Our whole world runs on dinosaur juice! The little ones are just teaching themselves modernity’s backstory. And extra credit if they use plastic toys to do so!

“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were roaring drunk on petroleum.”
— Kurt Vonnegut

Was it, in retrospect, a good idea to base all human activity on the burning of earth-bound hydrocarbons? You already know the answer to that question and likely try not to think about it. But let me offer this edge case, ideal for the marketing campaigns of the Pathways Alliance: It was once thought that petroleum saved the whales! Before we figured out how to get oil out of the ground, humans devised a way to take rickety wooden ships from Massachusetts into the middle of the Pacific, board even smaller, ricketier vessels, stab the largest mammals on the planet in the head, and scoop out all the foul-smelling substances therein. This, for a surprisingly long stretch of our history, was just something we did. And in the mid 1800s, when we discovered how to get oil out of the ground, it was estimated that the global whale population was about a decade away from extinction.

“If you haven’t struck oil in your first three minutes, stop boring!”
— George Jessel

Once we powered our boats with oil, we could really go after those whales, and that’s actually when we pushed them to the brink. So no, petroleum didn’t save the whales. You can’t make Chanel No. 5 without ambergris, and the only place to get this waxy bile is from the intestines of sperm whales, so what are you gonna do? Not have perfume?

“The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.”
— J. Paul Getty

So we swapped whales for dinosaurs, which at least did us the favour of being already dead and under dry land. Was this the work of God or Satan? In his zippy folio On Oil (part of Biblioasis’s fun Field Notes series), Don Gillmor lays out the arguments for each. In the hellish camp is Juan Pablo Perez Alphonszo, the founder of OPEC, who declared that his country of Venezuela was “drowning in the devil’s excrement.” It is, after all, located under our feet and emits sulphurous fumes. “When you strike oil, you let loose Hades,” says an East Texas oilman.

“The best business in the world is a well-run oil company. The second best business in the world is a badly run oil company.”
— John D. Rockefeller

On the side of the angels are John D. Rockefeller, John Howard Pew, and the early oil barons who argued that the Heavenly Father put the oil there for us. Ernest Manning, the Alberta premier who opened up the tar sands, spoke of “the oil which in the lamp of God’s Word produces a light that shines across the darkness of this world in order that men may find their way to Jesus Christ, the one who alone can save and who can solve their problems, whatever they may be.” As Gillmor writes, “Evangelical Christians like Tim Dunn believe that God alone can create a kingdom on earth. Instead, oil created a kingdom on earth, though it’s sometimes difficult to tell them apart. Both are omnipresent, mysterious, sustaining, and glimpsed by a privileged few.”

“The stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil.”
— Don Huberts

What if, after going to the ends of the earth for our energy, it was right here the whole time, warming our faces while we were harpooning whales, blowing through our hair while we were building pipelines. Wind and solar are becoming more efficient every day, and here’s a suggestion for their respective industry associations: License the pink Energizer Bunny from those classic ads in the 1990s, so whenever fossil fuel types say “but what about when it’s not sunny or windy?” you can remind them that we now have batteries. Good ones, too!

“History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.”
— Joseph Heller

Just imagine, energy delivered directly, without drilling or sailing or harpooning or (spoiler alert) canniballing. Every fossil fuel era — every era of magnificent, destructive ingenuity — was spent extracting energy from things that had stored it, rather than simply catching it as it arrives. Future generations, should they exist, will find this mildly amusing.

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“I like Chopin and Bizet
And the songs of yesterday
String quartets and Polynesian carols
But the music that excels
Is the sound of oil wells
As they slurp, slurp, slurp into the barrels.”
— Marve Fisher

Ounce for ounce, it’s hard to pack more energy into any other liquid. Even $17 green smoothies! In a sense, I emulate petroleum in this high-octane newsletter. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This month’s issue was a stone-cold classic with reader comments that made my week as well as an interview with Tom Allen, master trombonist and compiler of the superb Classical Musick Almynack. The choicest bit:

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Get Wit Quick No. 370 heartily recommends Into the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, one of the great whaling books that tells the true story behind Moby Dick. Also, this issue halfheartedly recommends the Ron Howard film adaptation of same, which is very corny but offers the chance to see Thor and Spider-Man as ancient mariners. Early on, Tom Holland isn’t sure he can climb the rigging, but come on, dude, you’re Spider-Man! The mascot is Magnus the magpie, whose plumage is oil black. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. The pipeline to my ❤️ can be turned on with a single tap.

Often you can’t see them coming.

One of my favourite movies is The Big Lebowski: Endlessly quotable dialogue, perfectly convoluted plot, threaded through with life lessons that ring true, and plenty of bowling.

So when Thomas Pynchon, one of the All Time Greats and a famous recluse who has cameoed with a paper bag on his head not once but twice on The Simpsons, wrote a Lebowski-coded Los Angeles detective novel called Inherent Vice, I thought, yes! More slacker noir! This is the milieu we need!

But it didn’t quite work. And neither did Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation. I willed it; it stayed a dream.

Of course, PTA hit a home run with One Battle After Another (which really should have been in this great New York Times story on the logbook of misremembered titles at the Lincoln Center cinema), based on Pynchon’s Vineland.

Meanwhile Pynchon went to Milwaukee for his most recent novel, Shadow Ticket. And this time, it worked.

He’s got his trademark ludicrous character names (Hop Wingdale…

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If you’re like me, you’re a precious little hothouse flower who can’t bear the thought of haggling over anything. But we’re doing it wrong! We need to get in the other guy’s face, threaten to take our business elsewhere, turn on our heels and walk right out that door, raise the stakes, and the rest of it. Honestly, I’m exhausted just having typed that.

“Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he has a firm handshake, is hiding something.”
— Clifton Fadiman

Life is a negotiation, right? That’s why, many years ago, I picked up a copy of the classic text Getting to Yes. I can see it on my shelf right now, and yet, I’ve never even opened it. Hence my book idea: Getting to Getting to Yes. If I can convince a publisher to buy it, just imagine the deal I won’t drive.

“The fellow who says he’ll meet you halfway usually thinks he’s standing on the dividing line.”
— Orlando Battista

All the behavioural psychology tips on negotiation suggest it’s best to just calm down. Show up with coffee and pastries, use language of collaboration, and if possible, sit in a higher chair, ensure the sun is shining, and — since so many of these suggestions have the whiff of irreplicable social science papers — show up doing the debunked Wonder Woman power pose.

“If two people agree all the time, one of them is unnecessary.”
— David Mahoney

But really, the main thing to bring to a negotiation, besides bear paws, is your BATNA, which stands for Needless Acronym Designed To Make Common Sense Seem Uncommon. In other words, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement means you already got a better deal elsewhere. At the very least, give the impression that this is the case.

“When a man tells me he’s going to put all his cards on the table, I always look up his sleeve.”
— Isaac Hore-Belisha

There’s a great throwaway exchange in Christopher Guest’s 2000 mockumentary Best in Show wherein Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy’s characters visit the home of one of her many exes, this one played by the great character actor Larry Miller:

“It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.”
— Quentin Crisp

As usual, Ben Folds has all the answers. Every negotiation is a cover of his 1997 classic, The Battle of Who Could Care Less, which is really just a clever reiteration of the principle of least interest, meaning the person with the least amount of interest in a relationship has the most power. “Sucks me in when you’re aloof,” he sings, “It sucks, it works.” No one wants to help the person who needs help! Also, Mr. Folds posits the idea of creating fine pewter portraits of General Apathy and Major Boredom and selling them to — his words, not mine — “the Franklin fuckin’ Mint.” This was truly the anthem of a generation.

“A banker is a person who is willing to make a loan if you present sufficient evidence to show you don’t need it.”
— Herbert V. Prochnow

So here’s your problem: You care too much. You want to avoid the awkwardness of negotiation? Good! Pretend you’re not negotiating at all. Exhale, space out, eat all the crullers, stare at the ceiling, and double your salary, just like that. Whatever and ever, amen.

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“There are very honest people who do not think they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.”
— Anatole France

Given all my references and generational stereotypes, you might conclude that Generation X are the best negotiators. In fact, they/we (I identify as an Xennial) couldn’t even convince Coca-Cola to keep OK Soda on the shelves. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. New issue landing soon! With the knowledge that the composer John Cage was a renowned mushroom expert who once won five million lire on an Italian game show for correctly naming the 24 mushrooms of the species Agarici in alphabetical order. Also, because he believed catsup was too thin, he invented a mushroom-based condiment he called dogsup. Which means he almost invented the classic Updog joke! I learned this from Tom Allen’s very entertaining Classical Musick Almynack, more on which soon!

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Get Wit Quick No. 369 found your old ID and you’re all dressed up like The Cure. Is that worth another week of vacation? The mascot is Magnus the magpie, collector of shiny bits of ephemera. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Tap the ❤️ below or don’t, I don’t care … or do I? (I do!)

Is there truly no such thing as a free lunch? That axiom may well be true if you’re the hungry person looking for a complimentary meal. Should you be the sandwich maker, though, you can dispense as many free lunches as you please. And so it becomes less of an immutable law of economics and more of a personal choice, like announcing “I never share my sandwiches.” But you could!

“The free lunch was originated by saloonkeepers during the Depression. Free verse also often originates during depression. If this happens to you, try to nip it in the bud by taking a drink.”
— Fran Lebowitz

My Substack pal loves to celebrate the work of his hero Mitch Hedberg, and recently shared this gem:

“I got a business card because I wanna win some lunches. That’s what my business card says: ‘Mitch Hedberg, Potential Lunch Winner.’ Gimme a call, maybe we’ll have lunch. If I’m lucky!”
— Mitch Hedberg

As Kaplan wrote, this entirely plausible joke turns “the business card into a PLEASURE card,” one that transforms an analog data harvesting technique used by restaurants in olden times into a reason for being. Free lunch! And to think, he shared this for free!

“After all, doesn’t free love cost the most?”
— Tom Masson

Many freebies are provided under duress. The baker’s dozen, by which you get 13 loaves for the price of 12, dates back to a 1266 English law that punished bakers who shortchanged their customers. The weight of the bread was pegged to the fluctuating price of grain and the penalties for shortchanging customers were severe, so the “vantage loaf” was a way to err on the side of extra carbs. They didn’t want to give away free bread, but they really didn’t want to be flogged.

“The best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive.”
— Coco Chanel

This month’s Atlantic cover story is some cleverly calculated counterprogramming to everything in the news right now in which Caity Weaver sets out to find the best free restaurant bread in America. (In the spirit of freebies, that’s a free gift link.) Why do they give you free bread? Because in the days of tavern dining, you paid a flat fee for everything, and since bread was cheap, that was the first thing you were offered. The tradition has been hard to shake, though most of the food professionals she talked to hate it if they’ll even deign to opine. We regular schlubs, on the other hand, love it: “No one outside the food industry ever tells me they’d prefer paying for excellent bread to receiving mediocre bread for free. Most people just want to be given bread they have not paid for.” Best thing I learned from Weaver’s gluten-rich reportage: At Lambert’s Cafe in Missouri and Alabama, they throw the free bread at you!

“People seldom read a book which is given to them. The way to spread a work is to sell it at a low price.”
— Samuel Johnson

If something is thrown at you for free, does that mean you’re the product? It’s a good shorthand for the attention economy, one that Will Oremus dated back to the glory days of network television in a 2018 Slate investigation. But he argues strenuously against the idea that social media is free, arguing that we pay in time, data, and attention. The real sleight of hand is the idea of free time; someone’s always monetizing it.

“I haven’t heard of anybody who wants to stop living on account of the cost.”
— Kin Hubbard

Once, at the start of a fancy meal on the Iberian peninsula and possibly suffering from sunstroke, I invoked the ancient figure of Don Phillip Onabreda. He haunts us still. Would a restaurant called Do Fill Up On Bread be a smashing success or instant bankruptcy? I leave the concept here, free for the taking.

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“You can always judge a man by what he eats, and therefore a country in which there is no free lunch is no longer a free country.”
— Arthur Baer

Freedom isn’t free, goes Trey Parker’s profane song from Team America: World Police that got stuck in my head this week. Freedom costs a buck o’ five. Still pretty cheap! Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. The April edition will be landing soon (albeit in a month we’ll call Second April for accounting purposes), and it’s full of gems like this sticker from Evan Doherty, the Toronto genius behind Arcane Bullshit and founding father of the bumper sticker renaissance:

I find myself mumbling “these blems have indeed gone pro” and I honestly don’t mind.

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Get Wit Quick No. 368 cost you four minutes of reading time but provided fodder for 12 minutes of conversation, which via space-time conversion means it was worth 0.008 acres of your attention. What a deal! The mascot is Magnus the magpie, collector of shiny freebies. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. I won’t charge you to tap the ❤️ below.

Every story about a hermit is the story of someone being bothered specifically because they’d been asked to be left alone. When The Guardian set out to find five modern-day hermits, they shone a light on people who had left the glare of public life behind. They’re the human particles of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: By knowing them, we undermine them. Rachel Denton, their lead hermit, has been interviewed and photographed by Reuters, the BBC, the Washington Post, and many others: Please tell us more about your seclusion! You might even get to meet the Pope!

“You can’t find a hermit to teach you herming, because of course that rather spoils the whole thing.”
— Terry Pratchett

But maybe that’s the point of hermits. It worked for Will Cuppy, the funniest modern example. He moved to a shack on the outskirts of New York City in the 1920s and proceeded to write a series of humorous sketches of hermit life for popular magazines of the day. He became a hermit for the publicity, and he got it with a bestselling book called How To Be A Hermit: Or, a Bachelor Keeps House. So much so that Robert Moses, that infamous leveler of neighbourhoods, made an exception for Cuppy’s hermitage.

“A hermit is simply a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself.”
— Will Cuppy

Early in his quasi-solitude, Cuppy questioned his convictions in a dreamed conversation with a cat named Finnegan:

“I’m not so sure about the place of asceticism in modern life. Morality, you know, is essentially social. Life—”

“A lot you know about life,” said Finnegan. “Life is within and no man hath seen it. I guess I read that somewhere, too. Anyway, you’re not going to be so damned ascetic!”

“Right,” I agreed. “I really don’t want to be a cenobite or an eremite just at present. I want to be good, in moderation, but you’ll have to let me go to literary teas in New York every few weeks.”

The word eremite is a synonym for hermit and comes from the same Greek word for desert, originally used to describe Moses wandering in the desert for forty years. A cenobite, by contrast, is a member of a monastic religious order that transmutes the silent companionship of others into excellent beer and cheese.

“Hermits have no peer pressure.”
— Steven Wright

The best modern source for all hermit knowledge is hermitary.com, a charmingly maintained website from back when the internet appeared to be a benevolent or at least neutral force in the world. The homepage disclaimer says it all: “Hermitary does not use social media, telephone, or physical address.” The contact form goes directly into a cave, one assumes.

“If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.”
— Jean Cocteau

The goofiest turn in eremetic history was the ornamental hermit craze of 18th-century England. It was a time of elaborately landscaped gardens, writes Gordon Campbell in his history, and the best of them featured a genuine hermit living on your property as a sort of glorification of the simple life. Of one of these hermits, a Father Francis, Campbell writes:

“Nothing is known of Father Francis save that he had the secret of eternal age and only worked in the summer. There is some evidence, however, that Father Francis was from time to time replaced by a stuffed hermit.”

Unless you’re going to go full hermit, the choice to retreat from society is a matter of degree. Here I was going to make some vague moralizing suggestion about getting off social media, but if hermit life is a retreat into the self, maybe the true modern hermit is the person who posts only selfies. That’s why I’m building a shack in my backyard, stuffing it with digital hermits, and waiting for The Guardian to come calling.

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“The hermit’s strength is measured not by how far away he has gone to live, but by the scant distance he requires to detach himself from the city, without ever losing sight of it.”
— Italo Calvino

Introverts have so much to teach us, if they could just become extroverts. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week I want to call out Futility Closet, a survivor of the golden age of blogs that’s still a regular source of delight. Just yesterday Greg Ross introduced me to Paul Hindemith’s 1942 piano work Ludus Tonalis, or Game of Tones, in which the postlude is the prelude, but backwards and upside down.

It’s a sonic ambigram and as such is best listened to on SONOS speakers!

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The best nugget of Get Wit Quick No. 367 is Gordon Campbell’s theory that garden gnomes are the direct descendants of ornamental hermits. The above painting features a distant relative of Magnus the magpie, the mascot of this newsletter, though they aren’t on speaking terms. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. To really commune with the eternal consciousness of things, it certainly couldn’t hurt to tap the ❤️ below.