Stored Transmissions from a Slower World

Getting a hell of a lot of press these days, and rightly so, is an excellent blog called Letters of Note.  Some British blokes decided to post historic and/or notable letters from or concerning famous people and events, and offer little background blurbs.  Very simple, like many good ideas.

It’s a bit odd, glorifying a dead medium on the medium that killed it.  Like a murderer making a shrine to his victim.  But the value of the blog comes through instantly and powerfully.  Seeing the handwriting or typewriter impressions of famous hands stirs something up.  These letters would cover much space and time before reaching their desired audience, and so their words were chosen very carefully.  Like with a painting, there’s much more of the author’s vague, intangible presence in the letter- than say, in an email from a coworker, which can be copied, and forwarded, and archived, and instantly retrieved.  It’s almost tantamount to the difference between poems and simple utterances.

If I’m talking too big I apologize- I suffered a minor head injury this morning.

Everything Is Weird

When an individual suddenly reemerges after a period of absence, there is always a kind of “prodigal son” feeling to it; equal parts redemption story and affirmation of status quo.  It prompts both, “Oh he’s back,” and “He’s still doing this?”  Still, the triumphant satisfaction of return is hard to turn down, if only because it’s a cheap and easy way to turn heads.  I remember in second grade I had an appendectomy that kept me out of school for a week- I still cherish the memory of my mid-school day return to class as a top ten moment in my personal history of narcissism.  Of course, back then my public presence was limited to the Claypitt Hill Elementary.  As a modern man gets older his identity gets split up among family, high school friends, college friends, work associates, and, in this age, the internet.  Odd that one can feel guilty for neglecting a purely online aspect of one’s persona.  Odder still that one would sense importance in writing a long post on a blog nobody visits, after a long caesura wherein even fewer people visited.  It’s weird.  But then, everything is weird.

And here is the weirdest thing I’ve found this week: oil workers in the Gulf of Mexico recently filmed a strange squid living in the depths of the ocean, where very little light gets.  If giant squids are the kings of animal weirdness, this guy is Genghis Khan.  Did that analogy work?  No, I suspect it didn’t.

Up there is a crude diagram of the scary bastard, which I stole from Google Image Search, which stole  it from a Digg thread, which, one can only assume, stole it from a blog somewhere.  Weird that such a crappy drawing would sail so far, but it gets the point across: it looks like it has motherfucking elbows.  Consider the idea of an alien with elbows, and then ask yourself if any human has ever even conceived of anything so bizarre, freaky, and utterly fascinating.  Yes, the word of the day is, ‘Weird.’  It’s a weird world.  It’s wonderful.

I highly advise you (I implore you) to watch the video here.