Mottainai

The Practical Polymath #61

Hi Friends,

Greetings from Brooklyn!

Welcome to this new edition of the Practical Polymath. If you have any idea what this newsletter is about, please let me know.

See you in two weeks,

Florian

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Mottainai

My toaster has been broken for weeks. The press handle just won’t stay down which I learned is a common toaster affliction. 

I could try to fix it. There is no shortage of “fix-a-toaster-that-won’t-stay-down” videos on YouTube. But I don’t exactly trust my DIY skills. The toaster would likely not survive the procedure. 

I could order a new one. But It seems absurd to give up on an entire appliance because of a tiny faulty part. 

I’m probably experiencing what Japanese people call “Mottainai”. It’s an expression describing a feeling of regret at wasting something that still has value. 

Determined to give my wounded toaster another chance, I came up with a rather impractical contraption: holding the press handle down with a mug and jamming it between the toaster and the wall.

For a while, my wife and I enjoyed the Magrittean sight of a coffee mug suspended mid air on a toaster handle. Perhaps we also felt whatever the opposite of “Mottainai” is: the sense of fulfillment at extending the life of an object which by modern standards deserves a one-way ticket to the trash. 

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Weekly Wisdom

🎭 Charlie Hill: A great way to learn about interesting people that are no longer with us is to click on Google’s Doodles. This week, it paid tribute to Charlie Hill, a famous native American stand up comedian. He wasn’t a fan of the term “native American”. “We are older than America”, he said in an interview, “so how can we be native to something we are older than”. The video below is his first ever television appearance back in 1977. 

🧯How to burn a toast: As I was looking for tips on how to fix toasters, I stumbled upon this step-by-step guide to make burnt toast. It’s a great read and the kind of find that will make you grateful for the Internet.

✂ Remix: My friend Leo Mascaro’s newsletter Shuffle Sundays is a weekly source of musical and visual inspiration. In last week’s edition he shared the work of collage artist Shane Wheatcroft. It sent me down a collage art rabbit hole which ended with this amateurish-looking homage to Dr Anthony Fauci that I put together this afternoon.

My attempt at making a collage. Sorry, Doctor.

♻ Trashless Town: The Japanese town of Kamikatsu produces almost no trash. If you thought you had it hard sorting plastic, compost, glass and cardboard, Kamikatsu has no less than 45 different categories of recycling. When throwing something away is such a hassle, you inevitably try to avoid it. The short documentary below puts the spotlight on the people of Kamikatsu and how they made the best out of a draconian recycling regime.

Lateral Thought

“To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.”

Jill Lepore