Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
At this point I would just give up and get new subscriptions, but it is the principle of the thing, and also I find the letters are a bit faster to write this way, although they'd be even faster if all copies of The Economist spontaneously caught fire, here's hoping.
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Hurrah! Our staff is up to complement, and I am able to defy the Omnicron Directive and start having days off again. I had thought to talk a bit about the economics of sealing, but it does not appear that there is much to say in this regard. The story of sealing industries is often told in terms of local extinctions, but there are more seals than ever. It is true that the classic long-distance sealing industry was always depopulating rookeries, while the coastal industries summarily disposed of by Brigitte Bardot were perhaps only semi-sustainable, but the only industry I am aware of actually exterminating the local population is the Caribbean one. So it is unique, maybe?
Recorded long distance sealing is associated with whaling, and makes a dramatic and easily documented intrusion into the south Atlantic, so that overwintering sealers are known on South George as late as "the eighteenth century," while a sealer may have been the first human to set foot in Antarctica, admittedly the Antarctic Peninsula, which only barely counts, but still. There is probably a great deal more to be said about the way in which the world's fur industry was able to absorb a sudden boom in seal pelts at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, but that is not where this post ended up, as it was distracted by the story of one member of the floating proletariat. And, to be fair, a SUNY Press author who was kind enough to post a large portion of her book. (I never fail to be amazed at the way in which university press publications come to appear on the website without a readily identifiable author. If you go to the previous link, you are reading Lynette Russell's Roving Mariners. )
The Omicron Variant isn't just a rejected Michael Crichton manuscript. It's also eaten my weekend! But I did want to post something today, and given the rate of typos in just the paragraph I've already written, it sure better be low effort. Fortunately, there's an interesting question that has been weighing on me. It's even tangentially related to an epidemic of swabbed rapid tests! Have we caught up with the ancestral genetics of the island Atlantic now that everyone is asking 23andMe to do their genealogy homework for them? We haven't.