Cassie and I survived our 20-minute, -8°C walk a few minutes ago. For some reason I feel like I need a nap. Meanwhile:
Finally, I want to end with Ross Douthat's latest (subscriber-only) newsletter, taking Vivek Ramaswamy to task for suggesting American kids need more intense competition in order for the US to stay ahead of its peers. I'll just focus on one paragraph, where he suggests Ramaswamy's end goal may not be a place we really want to go:
[T]he atmosphere he’s describing in South Korea, the frantic cycle of educational competition, isn’t just a seeming contributing factor to that country’s social misery; it’s almost certainly a contributing factor to the literal collapse of South Korea’s population, the steep economic rise that Munger describes giving way to an equally steep demographic decline. So for societies no less than individuals, it appears possible to basically burn out on competition, to cram-school your way to misery, pessimism and collapse — something that any advocate of intensified meritocratic competition would do well to keep in mind.
As I have more and more contact with kids born after 1995, I find so many of them who either have flat personalities, an inability to function independently, and an alarming lack of emotional resilience, or who have vitality, intelligence, and an ability to function in the world but no ambition. The last 30 years have crushed the elite-adjacent kids whose parents want them to enter the elite, whatever they think "elite" means. As a kid who traveled alone on public transit to Downtown Chicago at age 7, and managed to get from O'Hare security to LAX security without help by age 8, I feel sorry for these incompetent, despondent children.
We have warm (10°C) windy (24 knot gusts) weather in Chicago right now, and even have some sun peeking out from the clouds, making it feel a lot more like late March than mid-December. Winds are blowing elsewhere in the world, too:
Finally, the Washington Post says I read 628 stories this year on 22 different topics. That's less than 2 a day. I really need to step up my game.
The History Channel sends me a newsletter every morning listing a bunch of things that happened "this day in history." Today we had a bunch of anniversaries:
And finally, today is the 958th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which is the reason this blog is written in a Celtic-Norse-Germanic-French creole, not just a Celtic-Norse-Germanic creole.
I decamped to Marseille on my last full day in France last week, since I had a flight before 11 am and didn't want to add another hour coming from Aix. I will have to visit the city again, hopefully before I'm too old to negotiate the steps to the train station:
I walked around a bit, up through the Panier district, where I caught this view of the Vieux Port:
But this is probably a better view:
I finished the evening at this little corner bar near my hotel. If it were in Chicago, it would just have an Old Style sign out front:
And that's it for Europe, for now. I'll aim to get back to Provence in 2 years or so, and I'll bring my real camera.
A week ago Sunday, my friends picked me up in Aix-en-Provence and took me to their house in St-Martin-de-la-Brasque, about 30 km north, just south of the Luberon massif. I can see the appeal:
We then drove about 10 km to the Commune of Lourmarin, which may be even prettier than Aix:
Yes, Provence really does look like that. I really need to go back.
Let me tell you how much I suffered in Aix-en-Provence. I mean, just look at this stuff, starting with the street my hotel was on:
The Passage Agard, off Cours Mirabeau:
The Fontaine du Roi René at the east end of Cours Mirabeau:
Rue Aumône Vielle:
Finally, the Palais de Justice (the local courthouse) just past 9am on the 23rd:
Tomorrow: Lourmarin and St-Martin-de-la-Brasque.
I can scarcely believe I took these 10 days ago, on Friday the 20th. I already posted about my walk from Borough Market back to King's X; this is where I started:
You can get a lovely snack there for just a few quid. In my case, a container of fresh olives, some bread, and some cheese set me back about £6. Next time, I'll try something from Mei Mei.
Later, I scored one of the rare pork baps at Southampton Arms. Someone else really wanted a bite, too:
Sorry, little guy, I can't give you any of this—oh darn I just dropped a bit of pork on the ground. (Lucky dog.)
Finally, this screen shot shows why I love Europe so much. (It's in French because I switched my phone's language settings to help practice while I was preparing for the trip.) The blue dot in the center-left shows where my train was at 20:06 France time (18:06 UTC) on Saturday the 21st. The stuff in the upper-right corner shows my phone's GPS utility. If you look at the left side of that box, you can see "Vitesse 303;" i.e., a speed of 303 km/h, or 190 mph. And that isn't even the train's top normal operating speed.
If we elect people in this country who actually care about climate change, we could have trains like that here, too. But given the proportion of the electorate who plan to vote for the convicted-felon rapist demented geriatric XPOTUS in five weeks, I am not optimistic.
I had the opportunity, but not the energy, to bugger off from Heathrow for an hour and a half or so connecting from Marseille. Instead I found a vacant privacy pod in the Galleries South lounge, and had a decent lunch. Plus I'm about to have a G&T.
I've loaded up my Surface with a few articles, but I really only want to call attention to one of them. Bruce Schneier has an op-ed in the New York Times with his perspective on the Hezbollah pager attack and supply-chain vulnerabilities in general. I may even read that before turning my Surface off.
Next stop: Chicago, home, and dog.
I've arrived in Marseille, after a short but perfectly pleasant trip from Aix-en-Provence by basic commuter train. I didn't realize the Gare Marseille was on a hill, however, so it took me a few minutes to sort out how to get to ground level.
Just going to dump three photos from yesterday and this morning, then figure out what to explore in the 2 hours of daylight I have left. The principal goal: scoring a slice of the famed Marseille-style pizza that the New York Times assures me is second-best in Europe after Napoli.
Anyway, this is the view across the street from my friends' house, which they built at the edge of their small village about 40 km north of Aix:
We drove for a bit after lunch to Lourmarin for ice cream and a stroll:
Back in Aix, we had some pretty heavy rain come through overnight, leaving behind clear blue skies and lots of (not too hot) sun:
Once I get back to Chicago I'll have the tools to organize and process my photos better. Now, though: exploring Marseille.
I love actually experiencing the 21st Century. Right now I'm hurtling through the suburbs of Lyon at 265 km/h (down from 300 km/h earlier) on my way to Provence. The Eurostar from London started with an insane scrum at St Pancras—they really mean it when they advise you to arrive 75 minutes before departure—but it arrived at Paris Gare du Nord a minute early. The only impediment to getting onto this train came in the form of several consecutive people who couldn't figure out how to get RER tickets from the machine. Pro tip: use exact change. Also, note to SNCF: your tickent machine UI sucks.
I expect I'll have more interesting things to write about tomorrow as I explore Aix-in-Provence. Monday mid-day I'll relocate to Marseille, then fly back to Chicago through Heathrow on Tuesday.
For now, I'm going back to my book.