#8. Born In a Diamond Mine

It's all around you, but you can't touch it.

There's a song that I like a lot by Arcade Fire, called "Creature Comfort". It's a pretty heavy song in parts, and last week's email about depression was heavy, so I'm not going to get into the details (though the video is below). But the song is aimed at young people, and about how they are trained to hate themselves. The opening verse says:

Some boys hate themselves

Spend their lives resenting their fathers

Some girls hate their bodies

Stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback

Saying, "God, make me famous

If you can′t, just make it painless"

Just make it painless

The thing is, life is really hard, and it's especially hard for young people, but it's also hard for 47 year old men named Rob. And a lot of the time we hate ourselves because of what we haven't done, what we aren't able to be, what we haven't accomplished, and just who we are.

I struggle a lot with self-esteem. My wife struggles with self-esteem. Several times a week one of us will start talking about how we've failed, and the other one of us says "If I was saying that I was a failure, what would you tell me?"

And of course, the answer is that we would tell each other that we're awesome. (She really is.)

Anyway, the song goes into some pretty heavy stuff before it reaches a final chant:

"Born in a diamond mine

It's all around us but you can't see it.

Born in a diamond mine

It's all around us but you can't touch it."

And that's the thing: while I absolutely acknowledge that there is a hell of a lot of suffering in the world, we're born in a diamond mine. We have so much at our fingertips, if we can just see it.

I may have schizophrenia and depression and a lot of struggles, but I have it so good! There were times in my life when I was so much sicker than I am now! I may be money problems, but I have a great job that I love! I almost lost my wife to a stroke--but yesterday she biked thirteen miles! There are a lot of good things in the world.

And that's not to discount anyone's feelings that life is rough--because life IS rough--but for so many of us, we're born in a diamond mine. We just need to be able to find it.

Interesting Things in the Universe

#1. Remember Croatoan? The word that was carved into a tree on Roanoke Island--the only trace of a lost colony that seemed to have vanished before a ship from England could come back to them? (It was the first real mystery I learned about in the second grade, and I was entranced by it.)

Well, archaeologists think they MIGHT know where all the colonists went. In digs starting in the 1990s, but continuing up to today, there have been artifacts found in two different tribal areas, about 50 miles away from Roanoke, including this 16th century gold ring. The hypothesis is that the colonists were getting desperate (because the colonists in the New World were always desperate) and they left Roanoke and assimilated into two native groups. It's not a certainty, but they have found some things--like a school slate--in these far-away tribal lands that would not have been traded as goods. No one trades a school slate for food, they take the slate with them when they leave their home.

#2. If you're like my wife, you love bird watching. And we're just about to enter migration season, where hundreds of millions of birds are going to be heading north to south. This article in Scientific American will tell you where to look for bird and how to identify them. In fact, you can use this app to record bird calls, and it will tell you what kind of bird it is! And, if you're a nut, you can join this competition to see who can identify the most birds in 24 hours.

#3. What you are looking at looks like lens flare--the circles emanating off of a pair of stars. But it isn't lens flare. It's actually concentric rings of dust that surround these stars, known together as Wolf-Rayet 140. It's 5000 light years away, and the James Webb Space Telescope is just a miracle of science that it can see this thing. So, yes, it's like a solar Saturn. Pretty friggin' neat.

#4. We have always heard that Roman gladiators fought wild animals, and there's Roman art which depicts gladiators fighting wild animals, but we've never seen actual evidence of it--until now. In 2004 this pelvic bone was dug up, in York, England, of all places, and it was obviously weird. But it was only recently that they teamed up with zoologists and learned: this gladiator was bitten on the butt by a lion. Yep, the Romans hauled a lion all the way to Britain, and it fought a gladiator and, presumably, killed him by taking a big chomp of his patoot.

Diversions and Distractions

We hear a lot from certain loud and rich people about how we need to colonize Mars. And Mars is neat, and landing on Mars would be a magnificent achievement! Movies like The Martian make it seem like life is possible on Mars. But this great video from Physics Girl shows how incredibly inhospitable Mars is to life, and how colonizing Mars is perhaps a hundred times harder than building a large sustainable city in Antarctica.

No massive commentary here. Just: David Tennant is awesome, and this is his introduction for the BAFTAs.

Want to see something absolutely unhinged? We all know that Alice in Wonderland is kind of bananas, and we all know that the 1980s were a very strange time. Well, Carol Channing, in all her Carol Channingness, performed this bizarre song in this Made For TV version of Through the Lookingglass. You just have to watch it.

And that's about it! Read more about me here.