February 2022

This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.

You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.

“I would like to go on the roof”

The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back

A good song or album - or novel or painting - seems authoritative and inevitable, as if it just had to be that way, but it rarely feels like that to the people making it. Art involves a kind of conjuring trick in which the artist conceals her false starts, her procrastination, her self-doubts, her confusion, behind the finished article. The Beatles did so well at effacing their efforts that we are suspicious they actually had to make any, which is why the words “magic” and “genius” get used so much around them. A work of genius inspires awe in a lesser artist, but it’s not necessarily inspiring. In Get Back, we are allowed into The Beatles’ process. We see the mess; we live the boredom. We watch them struggle, and somehow it doesn’t diminish the magic at all. In a sense, Paul has finally got his wish: Let It Be is not just an album anymore. Joined up with Get Back, it is an exploration of the artistic journey - that long and winding road. It is about how hard it is to create something from nothing, and why we do it, despite everything.

Drive to Thrive

Learning About Work Ethic From My High School Driving Instructor

Bob notices things that I suppose only a long-time driving instructor could notice, like how you could tell that a driver was from Hoboken by the way the screws framing their license plates are scratched and worn from having parked so many times in the city’s tight, unmarked spaces. He has an uncanny memory for driving situations. He is constantly telling these insanely detailed and tedious stories, like the one about a student who back in 2006 took the curve too fast on Summit Avenue just north of Hillcrest – Bob said the student had a tendency to accelerate into turns – and nearly skidded off the road, but managed to stick it out because the town council had recently repaved the street with an expensive grippy top-coating. There are no climaxes in these stories. In fact they’re not so much stories as nerdy shoptalk, the thinking-out-loud of an intensely interested man. […] One incident stands out in particular. We were about an hour into the lesson and had just graduated from the backroads of the student’s hometown to a two-lane street with steady traffic. The car in front of us had slowed down, signaled, pulled over toward the shoulder, and made a smooth right turn into a shopping complex. Bob was impressed. “See how nicely he positioned that car?” He explained to the girl that that was exactly how it was done. And then a while later, long after the moment had passed, he said quietly, more to himself than to either of us, “I really liked the way he did that.” It had the ring of nostalgia to it.

Dookie

Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field

Dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the North–South axis under calm magnetic field conditions. This directional behavior was abolished under unstable magnetic field. The best predictor of the behavioral switch was the rate of change in declination, i.e., polar orientation of the magnetic field.

Wordle

These may spoil your fun:

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Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

How kind of you to make your way down here.

A bit about me: I can be interested in anything, for better or worse. I love photography, travel, golf, and baseball. My latest pursuit is learning the guitar. I write a rad newsletter that I publish monthly.