Trevor McKendrick - A day late but never a dollar short

Hello & happy Tuesday!

Apologies for missing yesterday - I started feeling light headed while reading one of the articles I linked to below, and ended up having to go to bed instead of finishing the newsletter.

Yes that is a true story.

Onward!

Trevor

On blankfaces (article)

I finally have a word for the morons at the DMV and other places who stubbornly refuse to do the right thing in spite of all humanity & rationality.

“What exactly is a blankface? He or she is often a mid-level bureaucrat, but not every bureaucrat is a blankface, and not every blankface is a bureaucrat. A blankface is anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions.”

Having a name for a concept or idea is the first step to whatever progress you want to make with or against that idea. You have to brand it before you can think about it.

Giving this person a branded name will help me deal with them in the future, because it will be a reminder that that person is a specific type of entity who I need to actively focus on routing around.

Guys are getting surgery to become taller (article)

This is the article that made me sick. I can’t even give blood w/o lying down, so imagining someone breaking both my femurs and inserting a titanium rod into both legs made me so sick I had to go to bed. Embarrassing yes, but I aim to share the truth with you dear reader!

All that said, this is super fascinating to me. I stand all of 5’4” on a good day, and while being a short guy isn’t my identity like it seems to be for some of the people in the article, it’s definitely something I’ve thought a lot about, both in terms of how it affects the worlds’ perception of me and how it influences my own behavior.

I had no idea this type of thing was even possible - I’d be terrified if something went wrong, but it would absolutely be fascinating to suddenly be 3 inches taller.

Nothing like growing to the towering heights of checks notes 5’7” to really see what the tall people live like!

The Illustrated Guide to Plastic Straws (article)

The correct way to dispose of plastic straws: throw them away.

See also my ode to plastic straws here.

The Tragic Case of the Wrong Thomas James Is Finally Righted (article)

There are literally thousands of good causes one could be emotionally pulled into. Short of getting into a what about-ism debate, all of them are probably worthy of someone’s time and attention, even if there are other causes that could reduce more suffering.

I give that preamble of qualification to say that if I had to pick a pet cause to dedicate myself to it would be helping innocent people get out of prison. There’s something extra horrifying to me about sending innocent people to jail for decades - maybe because of how seemingly easy it feels like it should be to prevent.

Society doesn’t even have to do anything - we just have to stop doing something.

Anyway: the guy in the link was in prison for 32 years because he had the same name as the real suspect (who also turned out to not be the murderer).

The Way of Kings (book)

I finally finished it. First fantasy book I’ve read in years.

It was…. good. I really liked one of the main characters. I sort of realized that by reading this I’d have to also read the other 4 books in the serious, but now that’s feeling rather daunting. Should I keep going?

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