A challenge

I've been enjoying the cryptic puzzles in Harper's for decades.  After you figure out the cleverly-constructed clues, entering the answer often involves another step, as in this case.

I've not embedded the entire puzzle, because blogging ethics standards on TYWKIWDBI are to drive readers to the source, not steal from the source.  If any wordsmiths out there would like to tackle this very challenging grid, the full puzzle is available in the August issue of Harper's Magazine, available online or in your local library.

Trinket trade boxes

Bloomington nurse and mom Roze Mulen poses with her trinket trade box, where people can swap figurines and toys. 

(Roze Mulen/Provided)

The trinket trade is taking root thanks in part to America’s trending obsession with blind boxes. The Asian retail craze drives shoppers to gamble on purchases of collectible toys and figurines. But buyers don’t know which item is in the box until they open it.

Roze Mulen, a nurse and mom in Bloomington, said her office is packed full of trinkets, including duplicates she’s unknowingly bought in blind boxes. After scrolling on TikTok and seeing people across the country start trinket swaps, she decided to bring the idea to the Twin Cities suburbs...

Trinket trade boxes have lately been popping up across the Twin Cities and in the suburbs especially, as parents and artists like Ross aim to add more whimsy to their residential streets and subdivisions sometimes known for their sameness.

“I wanted to build an interactive community-wide art piece where everyone gets to feel that childhood magic,” Ross said. “It’s not just about trading items. It’s about trading moments of joy.”

Buying boxes of unknown products on the internet seems to me a chancy proposition, but moments of joy are in short supply these days, so if this variant of the Little Free Library does bring joy to others, good for them.  More info at the Star Tribune.

Add "crack spread" to your economic vocabulary

I found the "recent work" that Jonathan Ferro is referring to in his introduction to Jeffrey Currie.  Couldn't find a text version to summarize, but here's a longwatch video interview that has extensive details about the matters being discussed:

The essence of the interview is a question about why the price of oil (as reflected by Brent crude and WTI (West Texas Intermediate) has remained (relatively) stable despite the ongoing conflict in the Gulf.  Those prices went way up when the "hot war" started, then moderated back down when the "memorandum of understanding" was executed, and now they are heading back up in a gradual fashion.

I have not previously been aware of Jeffrey Currie, but his reply (starting at the 1:15 mark of the second video) is exactly what I've been thinking - so I assume he is a brilliant genius.  His Wikipedia page indicates that he is a highly-respected economist at the University of Chicago.  Listen to as much of that interview as you have time for.  I heard the same arguments presented live to Jonathan Ferro this morning on Bloomber's Surveillance program in the pre-market and I was blown away by the insights.

For the TLDR and TLDW crowd, I'll add some more nuggets.  First the definition of "crack spread":

Crack spread is a term used on the oil industry and futures trading for the differential between the price of crude oil and petroleum products extracted from it. The spread approximates the profit margin that an oil refinery can expect to make by "cracking" the long-chain hydrocarbons of crude oil into useful shorter-chain petroleum products.

And before I move on, one note.  Any juvenile salacious comments about "crack spread" will be instantly vaporized on review.  The comment section here is for serious discussions of the world economy.

Here is an inadequate quick summary for those without the patience to watch the videos.  The news media and the general public focus on the "price of oil," but nobody actually uses crude oil.  People use gasoline, farmers and truckers and businesses use diesel, everyone uses plastic - but those are all products, not creude material.  The only entities that use crude oil are refiners, who are now working at maximum capacity and unable to ramp up further production.  The demand for these end products persists [unless demand destruction occurs - a separate issue], so right now the price for the products is huge.  His rough example is that while Brent oil is USD70/bbl, the price for the products averages USD140/bbl - that "crack spread" is the highest he has seen in 30 years.   Meanwhile, Ukraine has been hammering Russian oil reserves and Russia's refining capacity and the earthquake in Venezuela took out part of their refining capacity.  Crude oil prices dropped when the "memorandum of understanding" was signed because a flood of tankers left the Strait of Hormuz, but without a continuing flow the price is edging back up and there is currently no reason for that to change.  When this conflict started, the U.S. and other countries started to harvest their strategic petroleum reserves, which are now getting low (some other countries have exhausted theirs or have never had petroleum reserves in storage).  If the U.S. continues to empty its strategic petroleum reserve to cover up the shortages of crude exiting the gulf, the potential scenario is catastrophic.

The long video also includes some discussion about how China (allied with Iran) also has control of much of the worlds critical metals, plus they are leading the world in energy storage (batteries) and in wind and nuclear technologies.  IMHO the future belongs to China, which staffs their administration with scientists.

Do you remember the "alphabet game" ?

My father's career was as a traveling salesman, driving five states selling electrical equipment to local utilities.  So when our family went on vacation, it was by car, not by plane.  We drove from Minnesota to visit family in Pennsylvania or Florida or Nevada, and on those seemingly endless days on the highway (most of them in the pre-interstate highway era) we played games, including the "alphabet game" which required one to find the letters of the alphabet consecutively on signs, license plates, etc.  Those with similar memories will appreciate this modern billboard posted by the Sign Appreciation Society on Facebook.

At some future time I want to write a post about Burma Shave signs.

How does music become "popular" ?

Do you ever get the sense that many of the so-called mainstream pop stars whose images you unwittingly encounter dozens of times a day aren’t as “mainstream” or “popular” as you’re told they are? Do you give one eighth of a fuck about Dua Lipa, Zara Larsson, Childish Gambino, Bebe Rexha, or Shawn Mendes? Does your mother? Your little cousin? Your boss? The person delivering your mail? Your barista? Have you (or has anyone close to you) ever spent real money on anything these artists are selling? Do you, or anyone around you, follow them with any interest in what they make or do?...

And Spelman said: “In the past, a label and management team would do a great job getting their artist on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J, post it, and then kind of wait, and the comments would come in: terrible cover choice, voice sounds terrible, all that. What we do at Chaotic Good with our management clients is this: the second the SNL performance drops at midnight, you should post one hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year. The question is how you do that at scale. It takes a lot of work and infrastructure, but controlling the narrative is really, really important.”...

This is precisely how contemporary digital-music marketing operates, less as targeted exposure or coercion and more as the quiet reconstruction of the conditions under which discovery appears to occur. Not by introducing music to listeners but by staging the conditions in which it feels as though it arrived on its own.

More details in the "Getting Shilled" article in the June issue of Harper's Magazine.

Just for fun: "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die"

I watched this DVD from our library last night and thoroughly enjoyed it (rated it 3.5 on my 0-4 scale, which means "good enough to recommend" but not "worth watching again", which requires a 4.0).

From the trailer it should be evident that the storyline presents over-the-top craziness involving a future dystopic apocalypse - which is oddly enough a pleasant relief from scanning the internet for info re politics and the Gulf war.  I was going to call it a "screwball comedy" but that term I will reserve for Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell et al in Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday et al.

The premise here is that the protagonist is in a Groundhog Day loop trying to prevent a worldwide catastrophe triggered by social media and cellphones.  If you can roll with that, you can enjoy the movie.  Sam Rockwell is joined by Juno Temple (Ted Lasso, Fargo fifth season) and the perhaps underappreciated Haley Lu Richardson (superb in Columbus).

Two interesting numbers about teenagers

Percentage of Americans who were paid to babysit as teenagers: 56

Who say they would trust a teenager to babysit today: 11

Numbers from the June issue of Harper's magazine.  As phrased it's not clear to me whether the 11% is of Americans or of Americans who babysat as teenagers.  In either case the discrepancy is striking.

Fears of "weather modification"

A radar tower stands alone in northeast Oklahoma City, surrounded by a green field. It is one hundred feet tall and topped with a smooth, white orb. Hidden inside the orb, an antenna rotates while pulsing electromagnetic waves into the distance, waiting for a faint bounce to arrive back in the dish. It is not quite an all-seeing eye. The tower can identify hail, rain drops, a cloud of cicadas, the spiraling debris in tornadic winds from more than one hundred miles away. 

[On July 6, 2025] At 9:35 pm, a bearded man approached the radar tower and began to climb the chain-link fence around it.  As he reached the top bar, the bearded man paused to rock back and forth and lean his head back, yelling into the night sky some unheard complaint. He gazed around and the lens of a security camera caught his face, retinas glowing back in the dark.

On the other side of the fence, he got to work. With a hammer, he snapped open the latch guarding the radar’s million-watt power supply. There were control panels, switches, meters. He destroyed them all. Content that the tower had been disabled, he walked around the facility systematically destroying each security camera. It is unclear whether he understood that destroying cameras would not destroy the images they had captured of him. On a bicycle, he disappeared back into the night...

The following day, Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, who is the leader of a militia named Veterans on Patrol, contacted media outlets and the Oklahoma City Police Department to take credit for the incident. He claimed that [Anthony Tyler] Mitchell was one of his followers, taking the direct action that Meyer had been threatening for months. The group believes that the latest generation of weather radar towers are “directed energy weapons” that the military have “pointed at the American people.” Meyer claimed that Veterans on Patrol would not stop at disabling one radar tower, that they had plans for taking down at least a dozen more.

In his statements to reporters at the time, Meyer insisted that his crusade was a divine one. The weather was being modified, there were powers out there that could control it, and this was against God.

“When the military plays God with the weather, they’re mocking our Heavenly Father,” he said.

The story about the "battle over weather modification" continues in the June issue of Harper's Magazine.

Interesting Swedish postal cancel

I've had this pair of stamps in my collection for decades, labeled "ventilator" cancels, which I assumed without research was a form of "disinfected mail."

Today when I checked for more information, I discovered that these "ventilations" were not designed to prevent the spread of contagious diseases, but rather to prevent the reuse of the stamps.  Here is some relevant information from the Swedish Postal Museum:

"The "ventilator" cancel (ventilatorstämpel) featured a specialized postmark wheel with built-in, fan-like rotating blades. When the postal clerk pressed the device onto a letter, the wheel spun and physically cut or punctured small, geometric slits directly into the paper fibers of the stamp. If anyone tried to steam or peel the stamp off the envelope to reuse it, the stamp would tear apart along those slits.  Because the security incisions resembled the radial slats of an air vent or ventilation fan, philatelists nicknamed it the "ventilator" cancel. Similar mechanical safety trials from that era included the bikupestämpel ("beehive" cancel) and the sågtandsstämpel ("saw-tooth" cancel)."  

I have some beehive cancels I can post in the future.  Sawtooth ones are apparently exceedingly rare, presumably because they were used only for a short period of time and because anyone trying to remove the stamp to put it in a collection would have wound up with a severely damaged stamp.  The green 5o stamp on the right has a small triangular defect best seen when viewed with my digital microscope:

A history of disinfected mail

As soon as humans became aware that infectious diseases could be transmitted by fomites (inanimate objects), attention was directed to developing methods of disinfection. Postal and public health authorities had to deal with a wide variety of extremely dangerous infections (cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, leprosy, anthrax), and applied a surprising variety of techniques to letters and packages sent through the mails, beginning as early as the 15th century in Venice.

A very informative philatelic exhibit presents examples of how the U.S. has dealth with potentially dangerous items.  Shown at the top, for example, are two letters from locations where yellow fever was present; they have been punctured to allow fumigating agents to reach the inside of the envelope.  The bottom envelope in this image -

- had its corners clipped off so that formaldehyde gas could be introduced to kill smallpox.  Other letters and postcards were autoclaved or steam sterilized, which could be deleterious to the letters inside.

These precautions were not limited to the preantibiotic era.  In 2001 threats of anthrax attacks were made in the United States, and a variety of special precautions, including x-irradiation, had to be undertaken, beginning at this page of the exhibit and continuing for a dozen pages thereafter.  And these letters from Hawaii in 1900 show how holes were punched in the envelopes -

- so that sulfur fumes could be insufflated before they were sent from areas quarantined for bubonic plague.  Other examples are shown of disinfection of mail from the Hawaiian leper colony.

Philatelic exhibitions are conventionally mounted on a series of glass-fronted frames, with up to 16 letter-size pages in one frame, and in this case spread onto six frames.   This award-winning exhibit was created by William A. Sandrik of Arlington, Virginia.  The entire exhibit may be viewed at Exponet (frame 1, frame 2, frame 3, frame 4, frame 5, frame 6).

And those interested in philately (stamp and postal history collecting) should browse the Exponet site beginning at this index page.  Over 600 exhibits are accessible, on a huge variety of topics, in a wide variety of languages.

Reposted from 2011 because of its timely subject matter.   Today a New York Times article addresses the question of transmission of coronavirus by mail:

A representative for the U.S. Postal Service was unwilling to discuss current sanitization protocols. But the agency’s website reports that the only mail items receiving treatment are letters and parcels sent to ZIP codes beginning in 202, 203, 204 and 205, which serve federal government agencies in Washington, D.C. In a process that began shortly after the 2001 anthrax attacks, the Postal Service sends mail destined for those ZIP codes to New Jersey, where they are put on a conveyor belt and passed under a high-energy beam of ionizing radiation that kills bacteria and viruses. The letters and packages are then “aired out” for a while, before being forwarded to their destinations. The paper is left slightly faded and somewhat crispy, but sterile.

Should mail irradiation be extended beyond these exclusive ZIP codes, to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus? On CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, warned that SARS-CoV-2 could potentially be transmitted by contaminated objects. “This is a sticky virus,” he said. The structure of the coronavirus’s protective envelope helps it bond tightly to certain surfaces: skin in particular, as well as fabric and wood, but also plastic and steel...

David Partenheimer, a spokesman for the Postal Service, noted that the surgeon general, Dr. Jerome M. Adams, along with the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, has “indicated that there is currently no evidence that COVID-19 is being spread through the mail.”..

Then again, contact transmission is notoriously difficult to study and document...

Reposted from 2020 to accompany a newer and related post. 

This would be a MAJOR escalation in the war

When you see the words Bab al Mandab Strait in mainstream news sources, pay close attention.  This is the southern exit from the Red Sea and a major route for Saudi Arabia to export its oil.  If the Houthis effectively close it, expect the price of Brent and WTI to reach new highs quickly.

The world economy better pray that the U.S. generals can convince Trump not to escalate the bombing of Iran to civilian sites.

Pucker up

The image is of a giant clam in the Red Sea (credit Tahsin Ceylan / Anadolu / Getty).  It is interesting to me that they have evolved that sinuous orifice rather than the linear "lips" of a typical clam; probably some survival advantage to being structured in this way.

The price of in-flight snacks

"A passenger was removed from a Breeze Airways flight that traveled from New York to Florida after allegedly taking snacks from the beverage cart without paying, airline officials said...

Breeze sells a variety of snacks on board, including $5 options such as gummies, potato chips and popcorn, as well as $10 premium items including ramen noodles and cheese trays.

Magic trick props

Chinese guy explains how every magic trick works
by u/Adorable-Cattle-5128 in interestingasfuck

Apparently some people hate (or love) semicolons

TYWKIWDBI loves semicolons, so I was surprised and intrigued by the content of an article at Literary Hub: 

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. . . All they do is show you’ve been to college. "(Kurt Vonnegut)

"I suppose this is a trivial matter but I do want to object to the maddening fuss-fidget punctuation which one of your editors is attempting to impose on my story. I said it before but I’ll say it again, that unless necessary for clarity of meaning I would prefer a minimum of goddamn commas, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks and fucking (most obscene of all punctuation marks) semi-colons. I’ve had to waste hours erasing that storm of flyshit on the typescript" (Edward Abbey) [In reference to The Monkey Wrench Gang and preserved in Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast]

"With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semi-colon; it’s a useful little chap." (Abraham Lincoln)

"I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”" (Ursula LeGuin) [from The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination]

See also these previous posts:

Is the semicolon an endangered symbol [2025]

Semmicolon tattoos explained [2014]