❮❮prevnext❯❯

TIL: Wislawa Szymborska, the author of of one my favorite poems Four in the Morning, is a woman. I think I had heard it read by a gruff man's voice once and assumed it was the author, and knew Eastern Europe is sometimes more free with its vowels... funny how it somewhat changes the texture of the work for me.

Anyway, this TED Talk by Rives sets up the Museum of 4 In the Morning:

I've noticed you can divide a year into 4 parts, with varying degrees and types of utility:

• "financial quarters", which are easy to think about (well, mostly)
• "astronomical seasons" which most closely map to the clock work of the earth but not to the weather or the month boundaries
• "meteorological seasons", my favorite, inscribed in my heart ever since always starting school years "in the fall" in September

Similarly you can have multiple options to think of where one day starts and the next begins:

• midnight - technically inarguable but not faithful to much of human experience, especially if one hasn't yet gone to bed
• bedtime - this is great and very human if one is fortunate enough to sleep through the night, but still too subjective to be useful
• 4am - the inflection point. If you've stayed awake, you're beyond just staying up too late. The old day has ended and the new one is struggling to begin.

I've always been for more human forms of keep timing, in the umpty-umpth age of clockwork, and well into the era of digital readout. Numbers helped the trains line up their schedules and people to arrange meetings, but besides that they're not really how humans should do time.

Some day I'll make Timish, my digital clockface that uses approximate words, a physical item and not just a javascript mockup.)

---

Comedy Catch Phrases that Caught.

---

Two things that [American Nazis] love: silence and violence.
When we're silent, sweep it under the rug, they grow.
When we're violent, they use that as a narrative.

---