#607 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Tuesday March 14)
Good morning,
Happy birthday to the “apple of my eye,” Lauren. Twenty-seven years ago, Andrea and I were blessed by the birth of our twins, Lauren and Bradley. [Side note: We rarely referred to them as “the twins,” taking pains to value them as individuals first and not primarily because they shared the same apartment for nine months.] While I always write about the loss of Bradley (for reasons that should be obvious), our love for Lauren is as vast and as deep. I will never forget my mother on the day of their birth. She looked at Lauren, turned to me with tears in her eyes and uttered two words: “She’s perfect.” I’m not going with “perfect,” but pretty darned excellent!
NFTs
I was thinking about how hobbies have changed over the years. Today, we have people buying (sometimes at exorbitant prices) Non-fungible Tokens (“NFTs”). These can take various forms “unique assets” that are representations, art or video that are somehow “owned” by someone and maintained online. Major artwork has been created as NFTs and sold to collectors with voracious appetites for the latest thing. Query, whether they ever will be able to resolve how to copyright these assets or what sort of intellectual property right might exist for these. Why someone wouldn’t opt for a piece of art that one can hang on the wall, always available to look at and to be shared by friends, is beyond me. Art is meant to exist in a three-dimensional world. In that three-dimensional world, artists can create depth and perspective, applying various thicknesses of paint or oil and including various mixed media. I think it’s all nuts, as I have felt about cryptocurrency. Then again, perhaps I’m just a Luddite and am missing the boat on this valuable asset class.
OTHER THINGS WORTH (?) COLLECTING
Most of us collect items of questionable value just because they are sentimental or a hobby. As opposed to NFTs, these sorts of things can be held in one’s hand and shared with others. There is a certain excitement in the pursuit of items one collects. The all-time weirdest of these has to be the spoons that were ubiquitous at national parks and museums. One imagines a room at someone’s home with thousands of these spoons hung on the wall…! As a kid, Lauren collected snow globes from places we visited. Jake used to collect playing cards and baseball memorabilia. Brad collected Pokemon and Magic cards and various magic tricks. And they all collected Junior Ranger badges from National Parks.
In my childhood, I collected baseball cards, theatre and sports programs, stamps, foreign coins and guidebooks. Baseball cards were in our generation a pursuit that was inexpensive and could be shared with friends. We could trade them, flip them, use them in our bicycle spokes, and memorize statistics from them. I still think many of us did not learn simple mathematics from the “new math” or the “old math.” We learned much from earned run averages and batting averages. To this day, I have many cards from the mid-60s through the early 80s.
Everything was simpler back then. Topps was the company that sold baseball cards. The packs came wrapped in printed wax paper, with an accompanying piece of mediocre bubble gum, often hardened from sitting on a shelf. The cards came out in five “series,” over the course of the season. What this meant was that everyone had most of the cards from the first few series. Few people collected cards from the last series, as that was late in the season and it was time to focus on school and football (not necessarily in that order). Over the years, cards from the fifth series, due to their rarity, have increased in value the most.
Today, it’s much more complex, with multiple issuers of baseball cards, each with sets beyond the “standard” set, often with pieces of uniform or slivers of bat embedded in the card. It is difficult for an adult (much less a kid) to decide which set to collect. And with the ubiquity of card sets and the blanketing of the market with all the cards early in the season, there is far less appreciation in the value of the cards. That said, the real value of the cards, as is the case with anything else that catches one’s eye and becomes a collectible, is in the pursuit of the “whole set,” games created with the cards through imagination, and the proud display of one’s favorite players.
And that isn’t something one can do when the cards are on a computer screen or are NFTs…
BOOK CORNER
I’m picking up Siddharta Mukherjee’s new book The Song of the Cell, published last year. It’s the story of the cell, from its discovery, through its history, mechanics, and abilities. There are other books of the human body and disease that I have read and you might consider:
The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry (he also wrote, Rising Tide, about the great Mississippi Flood of 1927). Perhaps some may say, “not right now.” This is a great book and a gripping story. Needless to say, Mr. Barry has become quite the desirable interview subject of late.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It’s a great book, albeit dense. Jake read it; I confess to only reading the first few chapters, skimming the middle and reading the end.
Polio, An American Story, winner of the Pulitzer in history, by David M. Oshinsky. Thoroughly enjoyable, offering insights into the times, the politics, the race for a vaccine, the Salk and Sabin rivalry; it’s all here. The New York Times review cites the book’s discussion of “the tension between sober scientists and sensationalistic media…” Sound familiar?
And for those who want to read happier things about the miracle of life, The Body, by Bill Bryson. Subtitled “A Guide for Occupants,” this is from the great Bill Bryson, who can take any subject and make it amazing. Of course, the human body is amazing, so his task shouldn’t have been that hard.
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, by Atul Gawande. Read the essays of a brilliant resident and writer, reflecting on medicine, its magic and its challenges. For a remarkable study of end of life issues, try Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. The questions of medical care and assisted living for terminally ill (or profoundly ill) patients near the end of life are ones that we will confront eventually—both individually and as a society.
Have a great day and stay healthy,
Glenn
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