Craving Order

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It is said that Albert Einstein once asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what are we to think of an empty desk?” While not famous for his quips—although E=mc2 is the soul of wit in its brevity—this neatly captures the perspective of a person who kept his desk almost confrontationally cluttered.

The human mind is an organizer, the greatest one we happen to know, the one that all of our tools and machines are built in an attempt to replicate its principles and imagined actions. Nature itself does not organize. Every organizing structure we come up with is an imposition on nature and is thus radically random, at least as far as nature is concerned: No method of organizing is more “correct” than any other.
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Today in History: August 4

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Some achievements in sports are noteworthy for being firsts or lasts or mosts, and other achievements are more trivial, are simply items in the news that make people remember something about any given August 4, or perhaps the August 4 that took place in 1982.

Among fans of the New York Mets, Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies, and Montreal Expos, the date August 4, 1982, and the name Joel Youngblood will forever be linked. He awoke that day an outfielder for the Mets and went to bed that night an Expo. Now, many baseball players have been traded mid-season; it is happening right now. Youngblood got a hit for two different teams in two different games in two different cities in one day, however, and he remains the only player to have ever accomplished this.
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A Muse to a Talent to Amuse

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

From 1995 till 1997, I wrote a humor column titled “The Gad About Town,” for a great weekly newspaper in Sullivan County, New York. (It, the newspaper, still exists, and so do I apparently.)

“The Gad About Town” held the distinction of being the only column in the newspaper that did not generate even one response letter from our readers. Another editorial columnist, a sweet, genial, elderly man, wrote the most innocuous pieces each week, yet he received the most vituperative letters from readers who took exception with everything he wrote. I admired that this only amused him.
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