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Analyzing the analytics

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 Errol Morris recently said in an interview on The Pigeon Tunnel that he makes documentaries to learn something. I suppose I am of the same strain of artist, as I have been a listener since sitting at my grandfather’s knee. This interest in the personal narrative is one of the reasons that I went around the world in 2017, recording the experience of physician assistant-type providers. Morris also intimated, as many times before, that documentaries do not make money. This holds true more severely for me, of course; I have spent more than I have collected in donations or awards, and I have not managed to get over more than a few thousand views, let alone monetization. As my often lengthy videos seek to learn something about the lives of others, in the context of the world events and history, and are not industry promotions (do not show how to crayfish or play video games or take one on tours of tourist destinations or detail the latest progress of really big rockets), they are not s...

Infinite (De)coding, or “His wit’s as thick as a Tewkesbury mustard.”

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  At a high school reunion in what I will call the Year of the iPhone 16, a classmate recommended I read David Foster Wallace’s  Infinite Jest  (1996), which I promptly dismissed as pretentious. I majored in literature and have read some whopper works of fiction, including James Joyce’s  Ulysses  and Leo Tolstoy’s  War and Peace , but  Infinite Jest  is just the type of book I tend to eschew for its popularity among men who showboat really long books in the same way they measure the length of their Johnsons (a metaphor the character Rod “the God” Tine, Sr. would appreciate). Perhaps Wallace was hip to that metaphor, as well, and meant to have much of the book go over the unsuspecting knob’s head, cony-catching some numbskulls with his southpaws, Hal et al (See footnote 268 and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQThnv8c2uI ). I myself would not have understood the extent of his project, namely the conundrum of anonymity (disguised with Alcoholi...