Week 101: Planet baby

August 8, 2020

Greetings from planet baby. Don’t mind the smell - it’s just rancid breastmilk, it’s coming from me, the baby, and every absorbent surface of my home!
Here are some things I learnt this week through the magic of TV and podcasts:
1. [From the documentary Jurgen Klopp: Germany’s Greatest Export] Jurgen Klopp got his start as a football manager because the team he played for (Mainz) kept on losing under many many managers, to the point they were deemed unmanageable. So the [people who decide this?] decided maybe one of the players should become the next manager as the other players might respect him more. It turned out he was an amazing manager and leader and all the players loved him and the team started winning! Jurgen went on to manage Dortmund and transformed them in to a winning team, and now he’s just taken Liverpool to the top of the premier league for the first time in 32 years.
2. [From One Husband, Three Wives on Netflix (this is trash, don’t actually watch it)] Fundamentalist Mormons believe polygamy will bring them closer to god. For men, it is god-like to manage a huge family with lots of wives and children, and for wives, if they can get over the pain and jealousy they feel toward the other wives then they will have an increased capacity to love others.
3. [From Revisionist History] Napalm and the atom bomb were developed at the same time. Malcolm Gladwell has done four revisionist history episodes about Napalm. Lots of interesting bits but the part that I’ve felt the need to tell people is the difference he makes between the glamorous and sexy physicists who were developing the atom bomb in a ranch in New Mexico and the nerdy and repressed chemists who were developing incendiary bombs at Harvard. If I had more time - or more accurately as I have plenty of time - if writing better weeknotes was a priority against all the other things I want to spend time doing - I would go find the quote from an episode about how Malcolm covers this because it’s funny. But you’ll just have to listen to it for yourself.