Birthday Celebrations
This month marks a year since we finally managed to land an offer on a house. The house. This house. We closed in September and moved in in October. It feels like a cascade of anniversaries.
This one-year marker follows a couple of better established milestones: our birthdays. My wife and I are years apart in age, but days apart in our annual celebrations. They are just close enough together that it feels a bit like weeks of birthday celebrations without either of our days feeling stepped on.
We don’t tend to give gifts as the main event. We’re both bigger on experiences, so those tend to be the focus of our plans. This being my wife’s first birthday since we moved cross-country to our new home, I really wanted to give our plans a local flavor. I think it went off quite well.
We had some incredibly fine sushi and ramen on the actual day. There’s a place downtown we’ve been wanted to try for ages and it only just reopened for the first time since 2020. It lived up to the hype, and would have been a thorough celebration any other year, but it didn’t quite feel enough like Maine.
The local flavor came out a good deal more in days 2 and 3 of the celebration. Portland is home to a Minor League, Double-A baseball team: the Seadogs. I’m not a huge baseball fan, and neither is my wife, but we both grew up on the sport. My teams as a kid were the Rangers and the ‘Stros, and I am just old enough to have seen the greatest pitcher of all time, Nolan Ryan, finish off a stellar career. I was never a die-hard fan, but the odd baseball game demanded attention and the slower pace of baseball compared to other sports mades for a great family visit. My wife grew up at just the right time, and in just the right part of the country, to follow the Red Sox through their historic, curse breaking year.
Contemporary fans or no, it was high time we took in our first baseball game as new New Englanders. I had no idea until we sat down that it was my wife’s first in person baseball game ever (note: she found out from her family this was not true). It was an absolute blast, and we had fantastic seats (not to mention seat mates) for not only the game but the fireworks show after.
Truly, it could not have gone better, nor could have day 3.
We drove up the coast in the morning for parts unknown (to her). When we met, my wife had no taste for sushi and had yet to try an oyster. In the years since, she’s come to adore both. I dunno if you’re aware, but in addition to lobster, Maine has the finest oysters in the country. If you don’t agree, I’m terribly sorry to tell you that you are misguided. We’ve been wanting to visit a local oyster farm since we got here. We toured one in Croatia a couple of years ago and had an incredible time, and this time was no different.
There were plenty of highlights. The tour was modest but tour host was perfectly lovely. The farm store sold beer, wine, local provisions, and many kinds of oysters for a dang good price. The weather was phenomenal, as was the drive up and back again. One thing stands out, however. After driving though multiple unfamiliar small towns, along gorgeous rural roads, my wife had to chuckle as she saw the sign and finally understood where we were going.
“What’s funny, love?,” I asked.
She took a moment to stop laughing. “I booked this exact tour for your birthday. This exact farm.”
Great minds, aye? There are quite a few oyster farms up the coast, and plenty of other incredible things we want to do around Maine, yet somehow our birthday plans for one another perfectly overlapped in this one, lovely little spot.
Well, we both nailed it. The spot was incredible, and we’re gonna pop in for my birthday—still forthcoming as of this writing—just as she planned to take some jumbos home to grill.
Revisiting Enclosure
The vast majority of exercise today, at least in the West, is taken indoors. Gyms, fitness centers, yoga studios, martial arts facilities, etc. Sometimes it’s simply in the home, as has become the norm for many more people over the past ~18 months. Despite living in Maine, which can feel like one big park, I get more than half of my exercise indoors.
This is, in part, a problem of access (in general if not for me). Those living in urban centers are often far from adequate outdoor space for recreation of public spaces or else have limited access due to long working hours, lack of transportation, and previously public land being increasingly privatized. (There is also a status and comfort component, but I’ll leave that be for now).
I wrote previously about use restrictions on land, the right to roam, and policies of enclosure in Ephemeral Punch Card #8under the heading “Allemansrätten and Good Neighbors.” The topic has been much on my mind since, in part for reasons I mentioned in that issue, but lately because of an excellent interview on the subject.
In a recent episode of A World to Winwith Grace Blakely, she interviewed Nick Hayes, author of The Book of Trespass, “about the relationship between enclosure and capitalism – and how we can protect our right to roam.” I learned a number of things, one of which serves as a minor correction.
In that previous newsletter issue, I slightly oversimplified English enclosure. I said then that the legal process of enclosure began in the 13th century. While it’s true that the mass consolidation of the commons in England occurred in the 13th century, Nick Hayes points to the Norman Invasion of England in the 11th century as the starting point for introducing the idea of consolidation, enclosure, and most importantly restricted access to what was previously considered the English commons. Trespassers faced the penalty of death for trespassing starting nearly a millennia ago. I find this fascinating, as it means the idea of enclosure, a European import, is nearly as old as the unification of the island itself.
Today, despite early 20th century campaigns by “ramblers” to return the right to roam, the vast majority of land in England is individually held—largely by the descendants of the landed gentry—and inaccessible, not least because it is far away from city centers. Only about 8% of land is open to ordinary people.
Hayes notes that the mid-century shift in labor priorities away from pursuits of leisure and towards pursuits of healthcare and wages resulted in many places in an immediately restoration of enclosure policies so recently overturned.
I don’t mention this to cast either fight as more important than the other. Mid-century wages and universal healthcare were incredible improvements to the life of everyday English folk. What it does highlight to me is the incredibly frustrating process of fighting for a better life at the edges. When we move on from one fight to another, we often lose hard won ground. This seems to me one more bit of evidence that the most difficult fight, to upend the systems from which such inequities stem, is often the most salient.
Bases 10, 12, & 60, for a Start
Even wondered why we divide a day into 24 hours made up of 60 minutes, which are in turn made up of 60 seconds, but don’t count anything else in this bizarre way?
We arrived at a 24-hour day by way of the Egyptians. Historians generally agree that the Egyptians were the first civilization to divide the day into smaller parts, and for a number of reasons the Egyptians used a duodecimal, or base 12, counting system.
Among the likely reasons are the number of lunar cycles, and eventually months, in a year and the ability to count to twelve using the joints of the fingers. If you have the standard number of fingers, use your thumb as a pointer to count the joints of your hand, palm up. You’ll come up with 12. I’m going to anticipate some resistance here, since one can also easily count to 10 (the basis of our decimal system of counting) using fingers or toes. All I can say is that you can’t easily divide the year using a decimal counting system.
So the Egyptians observed the 12 lunar cycles, developed norms based on a base 12 counting system and applied that to a day. Easy enough. But what about the 60 minutes and seconds? Sixty is divisible by 12, but not by 24. Where did this come from?
The Greeks employed techniques developed by the Babylonians who inherited their base 60, or sexagesimal, counting system from Egypt’s ancient neighbor to the south, Sumer. The Sumerians used a base 60 system beginning somewhere between 3500 and 2000 BCE.
We don’t know why the base 60 system was adopted originally, but there are strong theories regarding factors and, again, the length of a year. Sixty has 11 factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, & 30), making subdivision of grain and time very easy. (Meanwhile a base 12 system has only 5 factors and base 10 has only 8 factors). As for the length of a year, by their observations, Sumerians divided the year into 360 days, a number divisible by 60. With better measurements, we’ve only adjusted from this count a bit with our current year of 365.25 days/year.
There’s much which we will likely never know because of what has and has not been preserved in the centuries since, but what we know for sure is that the Greeks took up a bit of Egypt’s duodecimal system and a bit of Sumer’s sexagesimal system to divide the world into latitudes and longitudes and a circle into degrees (and thus a day into hours measured on a sundial, another invention of ancient Egypt the Greeks developed upon further).
It would be centuries more before those hours were divided into minutes, and centuries more still before anyone but the most learned and ascendant would have any reason to care for such detail, but that is more or less the basis of how we break down time. There have been many attempts, during the French Revolution and since, to decimalize time and bring it into agreement with the base 10 counting system we use for everything else (unless you live in one of the 3 countries that refuses to adopt the metric system), but none have lasted long or ever seen anything beyond niche adoption. Some things just get stuck because we started doing them when there were a few million of us and can’t quite figure out how to change now that there are billions of us.
For more about the history of time, see here, or if you want more on the attempts of 18th century France to change the clock, here. And lest we believe that the weight of oppression that a clock often represents is something new, I highly recommend this short piece about the first sundial erected in Rome.
Local News
In an effort to better immerse myself in my new home, immediately after arriving I started making connections with local campaigns, reading up on the region’s history, and looking for local, independent news sources.
I’ve so appreciated two local publications that I read every thing they print/post. Mainer, published by the Mainer News Cooperative, is a monthly online and print magazine. It covers news and art in and around the Casco Bay area with a focus on “[challenging] mainstream media narratives, [exposing] injustice, and [exploring] paths to a more equitable, sustainable and peaceful future.
Mainer recently did an in-depth piece on Mathew’s Pub, a bar in Portland that has been playing host to local Proud Boys, a chauvinist hate group, and a former bartender there who was fired for raising a flag about the problematic clientele. The piece is absolutely excellent and has stirred some action on the peninsula.
Pine & Rosesis an online publication from the Maine Democratic Socialists of America. It hosts news, analysis, and opinion from socialists “dedicated to building solidarity with working-class, feminist, anti-racist, indigenous, ecological, immigrant, LGTBQ, housing, and education struggles from Kittery to Calais, from Madawaska to Rumford.” I am familiar with a number of the contributing authors, but my endorsement for the (volunteer) work they do is predicated purely on the quality of their investigations and write-ups.
In addition to their own bit of writing about Mathew’s, they recently published pieces on the seemingly purposeful lack of clarity around funding for the Charter Commission’s work (I wrote previously about the Charter Commission in issues #9 & 11; I am happy to report by just prior to publishing this newsletter, the Commission received $75K to fund their work), anti-vaccine protests, state money allocated towards green housing construction, and a lot more.
The phrase “local news” often brings to mind, for me at least, the drudgery and doomsaying of the evening television news. It shouldn’t. There are still vibrant, incisive, and deeply committed journalists and reporters doing incredible, editorially independent work. Hat’s off to them.
re: enclosure, this episode on the enclosure of the commons and primitive accumulation (same thing but broader) is EXCELLENT, i stumbled on it completely randomly because i was googling a perfume called Honey and the Moon' (this episode is called Moon Hermit) and it's now one of my favourite podcasts
It's leftist but with a lot of gentle English whimsy
https://mandatoryredistributionparty.podbean.com/e/moon-hermit-046/