Portico Darwin: Let's Play "Unintended Consequences"!
TODAY'S RAMBLINGS We interrupt this broadcast for an important announcement.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled broadcast.
This is a purely fun post. No, really - look at those shirts! But it's mostly about games, especially if you consider jillion-dollar war planes to be "games", as I do.
Tonight, our kick-ass SF Giants begin their run in the 2021 Major League Baseball playoffs, against the hated Dodgers. And then tomorrow, well, it's Fleet Week, and while I want less money spent on national defense and less pollution from planes, it's still a ton of fun - in fact, it's a highlight here.
But the post proper is about an imaginary game show, and it's not even my material. Rather, I'm pulling from an extended exchange I had with the creative thinker and Michael Pollan fan Dallas Money. This is his idea, but I am intrigued.
(Dallas, for those of you that aren't acquainted with this mysterious figure, is a very old [in both ways!] friend of ours. We've spent Thanksgivings together but somehow that wasn't enough to keep Mr. Money in town. 10 seconds of seriousness: he's set the standard for both early retirement and global travel.)
The game is this. Put something big out there. Then, ask others to predict the good and the bad that will come from it. And especially, predict the Unintended Consequences.
Here are some examples of kinda far-out ideas or events, yet they're not ridiculous or impossible. What would happen if:
There was a pill that allowed one to stay awake, safely and without physical harm, for 24 hours
Facebook were broken up
Fossil fuel extraction were prohibited
The US implemented a value-added tax (VAT, a.k.a., consumption tax; every other OECD nation has one)
Electric flying cars replace terrestrial ones
You get it. From Dallas himself:
"People love to predict People love to criticize someone else's idea People love to dream"
Unbelievable: Dallas is a great guy, a retirement vanguard, a true photographic artist . . . and a poet? And also a modern day Barry/Enright?
It's a great mental game. I welcome anyone to play Unintended Consequences.
FROM THE UNWASHED MASSES After departing The Sea Ranch (and before donning their new, supercool shirts back home), Arthur and Mrs. Crup hightailed it even farther away from reality, to a region known as "The Lost Coast". Arthur said
"compared to the Lost Coast, The Sea Ranch is a teeming metropolis."
That speaks highly for the Lost Coast, because it doesn't get much more mellow than The Sea Ranch. Judging by this and the other photos Mrs. Crup kindly shared, it does look perfectly chill.
(Note I've intentionally omitted Hunter Deuce's slam of my wife's guilty-pleasure enjoyment of "The Real Housewives" series - take that poison to Twitter, son. And this from a man who sees "The Simpsons" as a pinnacle in the artistic expression of mankind.)
From the discriminating Dr. Downs:
"Very informative, Portico!"
And this, from the host(ess) with the mostest, Byron Browne IV. He read my TV stuff and came up with a not-crazy idea:
"Wouldn’t it be cool to create an app that allows a user to pick the region they live in. The app would bring up all the channels that are available in that region with a variety of filtering options. The user could then click a box next to each channel they want without thinking about (its) source.
The app would organize the selections available from each service, the cost of that service and then spit out a report that says which combination of services to get them the best selection at (the) lowest price, along with other data points to help them decide.
The service would be ad supported.
Or I guess I could just call Portico Darwin 😀"
Thank you to any one that is reading this newsletter.
KLUF Play the game! Gosh, I love that song and how Freddy sings it. Here are a lot more Queen songs, sadly not in high resolution, but easily played by most via Spotify.
Would you say Queen is under- or overrated? Or are they at Goldilocks-levels of adoration? "Tie Your Mother Down" off of Live Killers remains an all-time favorite live track of mine, and they sure have some classics; I'd lean towards Goldilocks, if anything.
In the music section, is where this - just in from Mr. Deuce - belongs. It will also be the first exhibit in my new "Museum of Pretension", in which I am a featured artist.
