The boots and skis are all cleaned and in their closet; we packed up the chairlift snacks to avoid feeding summer mice; on Monday night we drove off into the sunset from another excellent ski season. My kids found new challenge and independence on the hill. They made ski friends and, on more than a few Saturdays, we set them loose for the day with a pocket sandwich and a walkie-talkie. We had a few long runs down through the trees and fields out beside the mountain, behind the house; we hiked to the summit when the lifts weren't running, skiing down alone; the older two tried the end-of-season pond skim. I mounted and remounted several sets of bindings on different skis, finally emerging with a lightweight uphill setup for ski touring. There were the usual ups and downs of praying for snow only to see rain and of thinking nothing was coming, only to ski in a snowstorm all day. What a pastime!On Tuesday morning, we woke up, back in Massachusetts, and realized it was Spring. Down here on the North Shore, we're about a month ahead of Western Maine. The trees all along the commuter rail to Boston are in bud or beginning to leaf out. The bulbs and flowering shrubs are all in bloom. After months of waxing and sharpening skis, it's time to get the bonsai trees out of their winter home, a cold frame in the side of the yard, and begin the repotting, root pruning, and shaping for new growth. They seemed surprisingly green to me, after looking at the brown hills for months, both the new deciduous buds and the conifers' foliage coming out of dormancy read Spring—and life.
There's Spring cleaning energy to embrace. That's what I'll be doing this weekend. Time to get rid of the cobwebs from inside and the detritus of Winter from the yard. For the reading this week, I have three disjointed pieces from the stack of good stuff. Think of it as Spring cleaning for my list of links. There's a really well-written consideration of the iconic On Smarm—one wonders what a similar piece written about today's media's tone would be; there's an interesting essay about how we've become our own panopticon; and a fun romp through a gambling syndicate's exploitation of the Texas lottery (schadenfreude alert: the people who think the lottery "should be fair"). That's probably all the semicolons I can muster for today. Enjoy the reading and I hope you get to spend some time outside.
Reading
On One of the Most Influential Essays of the 21st Century: Of Snark and Smarm
Stephen Marche Considers the Long Tail of Tom Scocca's "On Smarm"
We are all Big Brother now
The largest system of surveillance isn't run by the government or corporations. It's the grassroots panopticon we’re using to judge one another.
How a Secretive Gambler Called ‘The Joker’ Took Down the Texas Lottery
A global team of gambling whizzes hatched a scheme to snag the jackpot; millions of tickets in 72 hours.