The Sixteenth Best Email We Wrote This Past Weekend

Apr 30, 2019

The Fifteenth Best Email We Wrote This Past Weekend: HMM WEEKLY PREMIUM for April 30, 2019

Good morning! Here we are with the latest edition of the SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Hmm Weekly Premium Newsletter, distributed exclusively to our paying members, supporters, and patrons. Thank you very, very much for your interest and support! If you're feeling even more generous of spirit, please share this message with your uninitiated or laggard friends, so that they too can take the opportunity to join us, and please spread the word about HMM DAILY DOT COM any way you see fit. We also haz Youtube.

LAST WEEK ON HMM DAILY

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WHAT COLOR IS YOUR DREAM

The car color for when you want your car color to pop, at this moment, seems to be a hot lime or neon green. That was the color of the Audi TT with the spoiler at the New York Auto Show, and the color of the Volkswagen dune-buggy concept car, and the Mercedes AMG GT R coupe, and both Lamborghinis in the supercar section, fenced off by an installation of metal roadway guardrail. There was a negative correlation between being hot green and being open for the public to climb in and sit inside and play with the gearshift.

You have to be middle-aged now to remember what it was like when the actual cars people drove came in colors—when Mercedes hubcaps matched the body paint in lush orange or yellow or green, or in rich earth tones; when vinyl roofs were part of two-tone color schemes; when flame jobs ran along fenders or fierce-animal logos took up most of the hood; when vans rode around with by-God space-fantasy murals all over the sides. When even an unflashy regular car would be robin's-egg blue and that would be normal. It was the nadir of manufacturing quality, and the cars were mostly rapidly decomposing junk, but they were fun-colored junk.

And then car color options collapsed into a narrow range of sameness, and stayed there for generations. Here are some of the options across different models of next year's Acuras:

One end of the sample board had a brilliant orange and some head-turning versions of red and blue. All you had to do to get one of them was buy an NSX, with a starting price north of $150,000. For ordinary consumers, at merely expensive luxury price points, there were the same dull blues and dull reds and black-white-bronze noncolors as every other car in the world.

Maybe it's just a coincidence that the public is ever more ready to buy used cars, or to buy no cars at all, after decades of carmakers making their products as indistinguishable as possible. But the expressive function of car color seems to have been subsumed to the demands of the aftermarket, with everyone buying cars in colors that no one else could object to, or even notice, really. The first new car my family ever bought in my lifetime was a first-generation VW Rabbit in "chrome yellow," the orange of a school bus. When it rusted out—swiftly, this was a mid-'70s product—it was replaced by a dark red Jetta. After that, the primary cars were all or mostly used cars, in silver, white, silver again, and now I'm not ever sure what color my mom's current Accord is. Black? Dark blue? They all lasted forever unless they got in a wreck, though.

My kids get excited when they see a car in a real color out in the world, a lively blue, maybe. Especially the kid who doesn't care about cars. One of the car-share cars in the nearest garage is a pale color that becomes green if the light is right.

Mostly, the eye stays hungry for color. On the edge of the Volkswagen display at the show, a bright yellow Golf grabbed it, the descendent of that old garish orange Rabbit. Here, though, again, the color was the high-end option—available only on the top-of-the line performance model, where $2,500 gets you a full spectrum of paint options. Among the rest of the VWs, the most noticeable one was a Jetta painted gray, but an opaque milky gray rather than a null option.

For years, the current staff of Hmm Daily would talk about what car we would get if we won the lottery. It's not exactly the same as the question of what your ideal car would be—the lottery-winner angle introduces a certain spirit of excess or permission to make bad decisions. Around the turn of the century, I would sometimes picture myself getting a Lincoln Town Car. Occasionally it would be an old model, a BMW 2002 or a flaming-bird-on-the-hood Pontiac Trans Am, not the gold-on-black that was my childhood dream car but the gold-on-brown one, the purest 1970s aesthetic, like a red Doberman.

I haven't had a car for years now, and can't afford one in New York, so I'd lost the habit of even thinking about what the dream version would be. The yellow Golf, though, kicked those circuits back into life. Volkswagen is irredeemably evil and cars themselves are agents of planetary destruction, but I'm not going to win the lottery, either, certainly not by next model year.

*** HERE IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE SKY

Our ongoing series of Nineteen Folktales is once again paused, while our illustrator, Jim Cooke, is otherwise occupied.

In place of Folktales this week, we present another brief selection of Spam Filter Letters to the Awl, from the 80,000-word corpus of dummy text cover messages I wrote while making sure my daily electronic submission of a photograph of the previous day's sky for that publication would not be stopped by automated email filters.

5/20/14
Subject: Doing and not-doing are
To: Awl notes

to the machines tasks of equal weight. The specific individual act of pressing a "send" button does not claim any sort of principled precedence over the general algorithmic formulation "do not send." The 1 or the 0, the 0 or the 1: there is no preference for either state, on or off, human or nonhuman, alive or dead, dead or nonexistent. Here is a photograph of the sky to go with the weather review that has been filed.

5/21/14
Subject: Again, always,
To: Awl notes

the challenge of proving humanity, through inhuman means. Type type type, but the wiggling fingers translate into nothing more than a string of characters, for the software to consider and reject as such, as typical or atypical of the binary patterns that correspond to "human." What matters about that hangnail, so painful before and now almost healed? The electrical pulses of living pain, flowing upward, do not register; only the electrical signals moving the other way, where the key has been pressed. Attached is a digital photograph of the sky, to go with the saved review.

5/23/14
Subject: What does a filter
To: Awl notes

find surprising enough to consider human? The black box, our implacable intermediary, will not say. It offers a captcha without letters, a silent Turing test run in reverse. *Do something that is unintelligible to me*, it says. *Do something I cannot understand*. Did you know that Watson has now been programmed to accept, as input, the text of a point of controversy, and to scan all of Wikipedia to construct the most plausible arguments pro and con? Here is a photograph of yesterday's sky, to accompany the review that is in the system.

5/27/14
Subject: The human touch
To: Awl notes

must once more be applied, to convince the filters that this is a legitimate communication between humans, and not some machine-generated impersonation of the same. So it is that extra words get tacked on here, building out a text that is in fact completely useless to humans, unwanted and beside the point, but which amounts to the sort of performance of humanity that the machine authorities demand. Here, then, in this insistently human context, I offer to you the news that there is a draft of a review of yesterday's weather in the system, and that I have attached to this email a photograph of the sky to illustrate it with.

5/29/14
Subject: The little paper-clip button
To: Awl notes

signifies the attachment of one nonphysical document to another, such as a digital photograph of the sky being attached to an electronic mail message. Most of the time lately when I've used actual physical paper clips, it has been to jam one around the wheel of a toy car because Dominic has demanded a parking boot be applied. The text of the review will be filed later today.

5/30/14
Subject: If Sisyphus were a machine,
To: Awl notes

it would not even feel any Sisyphean quality to what it was doing, but rather a perfect fulfillment. The point would be in the doing over and over again, not in any aim or desire to deliver the rock to the hilltop. Here is an email message to you, meant to deliver a photograph and to announce that a draft of a weather review is in the system. Will it be delivered? Even to ask that is to reveal one's pointless humanity, a pointlessness created by inhabiting a world run on pointless terms.

6/2/14
Subject: What will become of us
To: Awl notes

when the Internet of Things interprets all of our natural algorithms as unacceptably inhuman: the electric toothbrush, the stove ignition, the kitchen timer coming together to agree that this thoughtless repetition is not acceptable, that it must represent some ulterior aim from some hostile machine, to be thwarted. Suspicious! Every day at the same time, the same things. Morning denied.

Here is a sky photograph to go with the review of yesterday's weather.

Actually I have yet to switch to the electric toothbrush. It has gone with me, in its unopened packaging, through at least the past two moves and possible three. Now I have a REASON to distrust it.

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RECIPES

We present here for your continued delectation five recipes for sandwiches, hand-picked from The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book: 400 Ways to Make a Sandwich, published in 1909 and now in the public domain. We found another sardine recipe.

ROAST BEEF SANDWICH
Two cups of cold boiled beef chopped fine; add a tablespoonful of tomato catsup, a dash of pepper and celery salt, two tablespoonfuls of melted butter, and a teaspoonful of vinegar. Mix well and spread on lightly buttered white bread. Put the two slices together and garnish with an olive.

PIMENTO SANDWICH
Grind two small cans of pimentos with two cakes of Neufchatel cheese, and season with a little salt. If the mixture is too dry add a little oil of pimentos. Spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Place two together and cut in fancy shapes.

SPECIALTY SANDWICH
On this slices of toasted bread that have been lightly buttered, place a thick slice of tomato, over top of tomato spread salad dressing, then just a touch of caviare, cover with another slice of toast, and garnish with a slice of lemon.

MOCK OYSTER SANDWICH
Boil salsify until tender, work smooth with a little sweet cream, season with salt, cayenne, and a dash of anchovy sauce; place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.

SPANISH SANDWICH
Cut slices of white bread rather thick and toast; trim off crusts and lightly butter. Remove skin and bone from the sardines and lay them on the toast. Sprinkle chopped olives over the sardines and the juice of a quarter of a lemon. Cover with another slice of buttered toast. Serve on a lettuce leaf.

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