Dandelions, again

The mower has been “serviced” and cuts beautifully. But I’m frustrated. Headless dandelions tower over our lawn not two days after its trimming. The neighbors’ yards also are plagued. Is this how it’ll always be? Will the infestation be worse every summer? Is it caused by the warming of the Earth? Are dandelions mutating into super-dandelions?

Karin’s colleague keeps his dandelions in check. He constantly plucks and re-seeds his lawn. But he’s a childless bachelor with nothing better to do.

It was gusty a few days ago, and our useless, gigantic aerial blew off our house and hung, as if impaled, upon our fence. Our neighbor, Luis, kindly sawed it into bits for us. The weather is fine today, slightly less gusty, and I hope to coax the children out to the back yard.

I’ve begun my “weather disaster” reading with Maclean’s Young Men & Fire.

I intend, also, this year, to read all the novels by Agatha Christie that I haven’t finished: one each month. These include the novels that she wrote as “Mary Westmacott.” The first is Giant’s Bread.

Mowing; puzzling; sketching; x-raying

Earlier today: a difficult mowing, with dull blades, in the August heat.

I haven’t entirely recovered.

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Samuel has been learning the parts of speech. He discourses on pronouns, adjectives, and prepositions. His interest was sparked by Mad Lib-type activities.

He also likes crosswords. He doesn’t solve them himself. He forces his parents to fill them in. It’d been years since I’d done any. This week, I filled in four.

I see how a person could get addicted to doing crosswords. Each correct answer lets in a brief flood of dopamine.

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“Say a ‘A’,” Daniel requests – he means write or draw, not say – and I draw an “A” upon the screen of the children’s Etch A Sketch Doodle. It delights him. He gets his dopamine hit.

“Say a ‘B’,” he says.

And so on. “Say ‘Mercury’. Say ‘Venus’. … ”

Samuel takes the device and draws two thick parallel lines. “I made an x-ray of my legs,” he says.

It turns out that, spiritually, I am Berkeleyan

We received our annual taste reports from Spotify (“Your 2023 Wrapped”). My listening habits were likened to those of the people of Berkeley, California; Karin’s, to those of the residents of Provo, Utah.

So, what do they listen to at BYU? Broadway tunes and Disney.

What do the liberal kids at UC Berkeley listen to? Evidently, Joe Hisaishi’s cartoon music. (Not so different from the Mormons, then.)

Other musicians who got lots of Spotify play from me in 2023: Boards of Canada, Stelvio Cipriani, Vangelis, Silver Convention, and Aphex Twin. And, too late to make the list, Enigma. I should note that it’s Samuel who asks to listen to much of this. “I want to hear Mix-Mad by Enigma,” he says (the album is MCXMD a.D.).

For nerds

The latest video from Un mundo inmenso takes us on a quick tour through utopian social theory, with mentions of Plato, More, Bellamy, and Nozick …

… as a prelude to discussion of a homegrown work, Arjirópolis or Argirópolis (1850) by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the author of Facundo.

Sarmiento wrote a lot of things. Even so, I’m a little shocked that I hadn’t heard of this book. I’m especially shocked that there’s no mention of it in the best English edition of Facundo.

I’m not shocked that Argirópolis wasn’t translated until recently, or that the translation’s price is $70. But there’s no fee attached to the Spanish original, in which Sarmiento uses utopian spelling (Arjentina, Uruguai, fewer accent marks, i rather than y, etc., etc.).

To call this book “utopian” is a bit misleading. A utopia is a no-place, or a no-place-in-particular, but the new country is precisely situated: it’s a confederation formed from Paraguay, Uruguay, and river-adjacent parts of Argentina, with a new capital on an island in the Río de la Plata. As in Facundo, the local geography determines the politics; the new land subscribes to no replicable political philosophy, though certain countries (e.g., the USA) serve as its models.

This is perhaps one of the more prescient “utopian” works, anticipating and even recommending the subservient role that Latin American countries would assume in global trade. Sarmiento is said to have been a Latin American apologist for neoliberalism well ahead of his time. To assess whether this is fair, I’d have to read the book.

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If the world had only twenty countries of roughly equal surface area, what would they be?, Un mundo inmenso asks in another recent video.

So: the channel has turned to counterfactual speculation. I hope it isn’t running out of things from actuality to discuss. This is an immense world, after all.