Antonym Clown Clusters Edition
Antonym Clown Clusters Edition
Five minutes reading you are unlikely to regret.
Dear Reader
There is still nervousness at Buckingham Palace about whether Boris Johnson will pull any more illegal power-grabs. That’s right, our almost centenarian Queen has a team of her own lawyers war-gaming what would happen if “Britain Trump” comes up with another crazy idea like the proroguing of parliament.
The solution: Send in the clowns. They will remove him from office. And in the process prove that he is not one of them, a slur that they vehemently object to the use of in connection to Johnson. Alan Beattie wrote about this important and under-reported corner of identity politics:
Britain’s community of professional clowns is fizzing with indignation that their calling is thus being traduced by association. Certainly, clowning uses techniques such as exaggerated movement and incongruous clothing, derived from centuries-old European traditions of rambunctious physical theatre. But true clowning is about more than slapstick. Jack Stark, a British clown well known on the theatre and cabaret circuit, says: “Clowns can be clumsy and gaffe-prone, and live in a world of chaos. But how they respond to that world is different. Clowns want to make things better. Boris uses his act to get himself out of troubles of his own making.”
Galactic vertigo
I remember when the Hubble started producing images of things most people had never imagined. Columns of dust millions of miles long where stars were born.
The James Webb telescope’s first images were released this week and gives similar temporal and cosmological vertigo. Pick any fact or paragraph from the NASA press release and consider it for more than a moment and you can tap into a swirling sense of the sublime.
For example this sentence is a compound mind expansion formula that unfolds as you read it:
The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying more distant galaxies, including some seen when the universe was less than a billion years old.
“Galaxy cluster”, “gravitational lens” and looking at light that is 13 billion years old. These are ideas you need to be sitting down when you hear them.
Damn. I think we’re going to need a little frivolous speck of humour to bring us all back to earth…
Something funny
This newsletter is not focused on politics, but some weeks are just too good to be true when it comes to material. Zoe Williams in the Guardian notes:
One day, we will stop laughing at the video bids for the Tory leadership long enough to be afraid of these maniacs. Today is not that day.
To that end, here’s Penny Mordaunt’s promotional video with the Little Britain Tom Baker voice over added:
Non-disposable luxury
Golden Goose trainers are £300-500 a pop. But they are made to last. And be repaired. Patagonia’s made a virtue of repairing its gear for reasonable rates or free, but this Italian trainer brand is making the craftspeople and repair stars of the show in its showrooms. This is a lovely article about them from the New York Times: Don’t Toss Those Old Sneakers
They are articulating their brand’s quality and building relationships with customers bey getting them to return to the store — not unlike the incredibly successful Apple model:
“That we also repair the products we sell increases a customer’s trust in us,” said Silvio Campara, Golden Goose’s chief executive.
“Someone who feels taken care of will always return, and repairs help keep my products in your life and in your memory,” he explained. Customers spend time in the store, tell people about their experience and, he said candidly, often buy more sneakers when they come in to spruce up their previous pair.
We’re here to create more long-term value, not just revenues,” he said. “You can’t sell if you don’t have any clients.”
This is not a sleep pod
Living in the era of permacrisis is tough. The economic and emotional pitching and rolling of years of Brexit uncertainty and currencies and markets’ were queasy enough. Then there was a pandemic. Then the war in Ukraine came, smashed up supply chains and hurried along the end of cheap money. It means that the reward for resilience seems to be just more rough waters. It’s exhausting isn’t it.
Just how exhausting, during one of the toughest weeks I’ve experienced in my career, came home to me in the oddest place.
As a volunteer for a scientific study I found myself at the University of Sussex this week going through a few hours of tests, including more than an hour in an MRI scanner. I’ve suffered from claustrophobia in the past and while I’m much more confident than I was, thanks to the practical magic of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), but sliding into a tube with very little room to move that makes very loud noises as it fires magnetic waves at you is a bit of a challenge.
I stayed calm with box-breathing (4-4-4-4 count of in, hold, out, hold) and even enjoyed it a bit. It felt a little like being in one of the sequences in First Man where Armstrong and his comrades are strapped into tiny spaces. There was something running through my mind about the machine exploring the inner universe, neurons and stars, micro and macro.
After a straight forward scan for about fifteen minutes, the functional bit began —reacting to images, focusing on words and parts of the body and rating intensity of feeling. During the last 20 minutes or so there was another scan, with the loudest of the noises. And it was at this stage I started to drift off to sleep. I went in and out a few times.
I’d a sense this might happen when I was asking the researcher questions at the start of the process. When I asked what would happen if I fell asleep she looked a little shocked. It was unlikely, she said.
Apparently in a few weeks I will do it all again. And there will be pictures to share, my friends. Can’t wait.If only for the chance to get a decent nap again.
The complexity of corpulence
A new generation of anti-obesity drugs are helping people lose 10-20% of their weight in six months and not put it back on, unless they stop taking the drug. An excellent bit of analysis in the Financial Times looks at the implications of this, from attitudes to being overweight being challenged by the science. The key, slightly depressing insight is that once a body reaches a point of being overweight it sets this as a kind of “personal best” and tries to get back to it as soon as your low calorie, time restricted eating, neo-paleo weight loss programme ends. Willpower vs fundamental instincts is never going to win.
This week I’ve been…
Watching
Tove. (BBC iPlayer) A story about the creator of the Moomins. More wonderful than I’d expected. Several love stories and an artist’s journey told with utter charm and zero sentimentality.
Black Bird. (Apple TV) Another Apple TV triumph if the first two episodes’ promise holds up. This is cinematic TV with three actors on top form. Taran Egorton and Paul Walter Hauser are both on excellent form. Meanwhile Liotta’s last performance is typically intense and sadly poignant.
Eating
Thanks to my Mum sending me a link to this Guardian article I made my first Gazpacho soup this week. “How to make perfect gazpacho soup” is part of a series by Felicity Cloake, and the articles are every bit as worth reading as the recipe. It’s a great format. This one takes in various controversies and takes from chefs and writers, even going back to the recipe’s mediaeval roots when there were—shock—no tomatoes in it!
Like many people described in the article, the idea of cold soup used to horrify my English soul, but some holidays in southern France and Spain, where they sell the stuff for pennies in most supermarkets won me over. The photo below is the before blending stage. The results were excellent, although I shouldn’t have given in to the temptation to up the garlic content by 50%.
Fin
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading and I hope you found something new.
Antony
P.S. Some other good stuff
FT Opinion | Web3 is just a fresh serving of the same old crypto nonsense
Apple Car project troubled by management demos and uncertain schedule
And a quote of the week, why not, to remind us that one thing at a time is best:
The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralise the term and start talking about priorities. — Essentialism