Questionable Bloodletting • Learning highlife guitar • Ketchup etymology • Designer Dreams • Brazilian Hand Lettering • Epic Knowledge Transfer • Paul McCartney’s Sweater Vest
Dream engineers, you have my attention. This start up (Dust Systems) is hacking your dreams with the intention of improving your life. Here’s a page about their work designing dreams for creative joy. One staff person is listed as a “Anesthesia Dreaming Pioneer.”
Notably, you can try this yourself.
Salvador Dali described his dreaming technique in his memoir—
Sit in a chair.
Hold a coin.
Take a nap.
As you fall asleep, the coin should fall and hit the floor.
In the space between the coin falling and making a sound as it hits the floor, the artist thought dreams could be manipulated. Dust Systems is leveraging similar cognitive mechanisms to coerce dreams in a particular direction.
When I'm putting the kids down, Eli will often ask me to "give him a dream." Some of the more successful dream narratives involve large scale gummy bears.
During the medieval era, bloodletting was a common cure for acute stress. I heard about this on a podcast about Martin Luther, who was treated in this fashion for recurring episodes of panic attacks. Luther was putting his literal life on the line for his ideas, which has been known to be … unsettling. Bloodletting was a cure-all for a broad range of ailments at the time — headaches, fever, and general gloominess. I feel fortunate to be living in a time when more precise treatments are available. Now, as a modern day cure for worries, we just bleed our money for meditation apps and nootropic drinks.
And yet.
If we forecast the future and consider the mindset of humans living 100 years from now, what treatments that we rely on today will look crude or primitive in retrospect?
Risograph and bossa nova. Biabum studio did a really nice job with this identity for a Brazilian bar in Rio di Janiero. I can almost hear the sound of the bar when I look at the prints — gentle chatter, kitchen sounds, bossa nova. The designers reference the phrase “vernacular lettering” as a source of inspiration. It’s so refreshing to see anything hand-lettered in a world dominated by the predictability of web fonts.
The world’s most monumental transfer of knowledge. For the last 30-40 years, the entire human race has been coordinating, organically and independently, towards the common goal of digitizing the world’s information. Scanning, uploading, cataloguing. Every book, every movie, every recipe, every song, every street, every language, every ripple of the earth’s surface, every line of our genetic code. It’s all there. The scale is bloody wild. I work in this industry and I gotta say, I’m surprised we don’t talk about the epic-ness of this decentralized effort more often. The internet appeared and every human on earth coordinated to compile all the information ever created and enter it online.
97% of Americans have a bottle of Ketchup in the fridge. Less than 5%, I’m guessing, know that the word “ketchup” is derived from kê-tsiap, a southeast asian word for fermented fish sauce. Fermentation nor fish are included in the recipe. Neither are cucumbers, despite the symbol on historic labels.
It’s her birthday. So Dad plays her a song and she dances. Is anything sweeter? This Ghanaian guitarist’s youtube channel is great. In some videos, he’ll teach you basic highlife chords and Ghanaian rhythms. I love how proud he is of his country’s music. I hope his follow-count grows to exceed his most ambitious dreams.
Wait, you have more than one?
Book club concept: Diamond Dogs, a Jared Diamond book club. We take one calendar year to read every major Jared Diamond publication, in chronological order, for a total number of 9 books. Who’s in? We take summers off. First meeting is at the bar. Last one is in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.
Knit replica of Paul McCartney’s sweater vest from the Magical Mystery Tour. Who knew, there’s a mini cult dedicated to this sweater (via Reddit). And maybe it’s a little early for the holidays, but you can actually purchase one on Etsy for $419.36, a weird and specific price.
They’re called “reading sweaters”.
They’re not, but that’s what I told Cal and Eli. And it stuck. Now everyone calls them reading sweaters. A good reading sweater should be thick, chunky, real wool, and ideally, sourced from the British Isles. For a reading sweater acquisition hack, I can recommend searching “merino fisherman’s sweater” on ebay. Cheap yet heirloom.
As the chill winds come down from the north, reaching for a good reading sweater is the appropriate response.
—Michael Neault • I tried to publish this from Little Presque Isle, Marquette, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, on the coast of Lake Superior, but we were very much off-grid • Next week I’ll do a recap of Marquette and what life looks like along the largest freshwater lake in the world.
