Comet Caught
When God mows planets, the comets fly out. Ground apples from the Galaxy.
Coo-Coo for Duckstack puffs
Its that time of the year again, the cosmic jam dealer has come to our little corner of the galaxy. Children love to point up in the sky as he passes by in his space ship, playing a jaunty jingle to signal his presence. “I have jam” is what that jingle says. And you know it must be true. Long and hard experience has taught us that anyone who plays the jam song must possess jam, and this knowledge has been passed down for generations. Hopefully you didn't forget.
Anyway, it actually looks like he's only got like, Apricot there. Not a whole lot of variety. And the markup is like $100 to pay for quantum solar fuel cells. Regardless, if any readers are right this moment finding themselves in a jam emergency, it is available if desired. I know I’ve got some toasted bread here, and I for one can’t wait to pay the premium for this once in a lifetime opportunity. Also, he’s kind of desperate to make sales so if you know anyone who needs jam please let us know
Attention: Cement
A quick message from our sponsors
Sidewalk is everywhere. Your walls, your windows. Even your hands are sidewalks, in a sense1. Its a wonder we have anything that's not made of cement at all, once you think of it. Today’s Duckstack is brought to you by sidewalk cracks: One of the only things not made of cement.
The Virtue of Office
We aren’t talking about cubicles here. There’s no honor in that.
My friends at Jr Ganymede like doing virtue charts, and sometimes enjoy tracking down nameless virtues, and there’s a virtue we have a sense of in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints because we reference it often, but we don’t have a concise word for it, so I’m not sure we realize we reference it so often, but I think its fair to say Latter-Day Saints have a more attuned conscience about this, which is the virtue of stewardship, or lineage, or of “magnifying your calling”, or of “multiplying your talents”- the virtue of leaving something better than you found it, but also to voluntarily take ownership of wild and abandoned places, and beautifying it. It is the virtue that corresponds to God’s charge to Adam to be a caretaker of the Earth.
I think about this a lot with our house, which is roughly a century old, and built by a man who put his heart into it. Whenever I undertake to fix some part of it up, I can feel the soul put into building it, and I feel in my bones that I am doing something exceedingly righteous- even though its just putting up some fresh paint. I’m not related to the man who built our house, but by working on it as he would, and loving it as he would, we become linked and joined. I believe this to be one of God’s fundamental desires for mankind.
When you see a corner of the internet or some business or institution in a state of horrible disrepair or even deliberate degeneration, you may be sure that our society has lost the virtue of stewardship. I experienced this with Youtube recently, which has become nearly unusable over the years. It went from a tech giant that you could learn anything on, to a sort of cluttered mess of a platform, bombarding you with irrelevant things and setting you on deliberate loops to keep you away from anything useful. For some reason they’ve made it so instead of displaying search results and paginating them, it just shows the same 6 videos over and over with an ad and some “recommended” videos2, and then as you scroll it shows you the 6 videos again. The site actively blocks you from digging deeper to find what you’re looking for- it deliberately makes itself useless. And I think this can’t be explained by simple accident- the choices to cannibalize functionality were deliberate, just as they always are. I’ve written about this degeneracy in the past, and I will write about it again- it seems to me that this is one of the greatest crises facing our time. Nobody is trying to leave things better than they found them. Everyone is focused on plundering and looting, and the plunderers and looters are running out of inertia to parasitize.
It is as if society itself has become a massive cryptocurrency ponzi scheme- everyone wants everyone else to invest, and then to get out as fast as they can. Nobody wants to be left holding the bag.
Some may accuse me of trying to get other people to play the sucker here- after all, one person can’t possibly shoulder the burden of the entire backwards force of the culture. But I believe Christ can, and I believe it is through our trying that we are able to channel our faith in him, and bring about much good in the world.
Announcing: Duckstack Car
Duckstack engineers have been working around the clock building this new car, with all the bells and whistles. MSRP $13
Let me tell you about this thing. First, you might notice all the bells and whistles. This are absolutely necessary for safety, since we removed all other safety features, its important that people know that you are coming.
Second, we’ve got an emergency Nutella smell button, right on the dash console, with an unobtrusive secondary steering wheel control. If you need to smell Nutella the car can provide that on demand. None of our competitors can do that at this time, and I bet they never will. You can’t get this kind of power anywhere else.
The windshield wipers, of course, are disposable. This makes cleaning a cinch, and the windshield wipers come in per wipe, per ride, and per trip varieties. Additionally, the car comes with optional umbrella attachments, in case you want to opt for a longer term approach. Again, look at any other substack. Do they have something like this? I assure you they do not.
History
We went on a trip! Our boys had a trip (onto the ground, because they were running too fast). This did not affect the trip.
Last week, we took a vacation to New York, a city made of jack posts4. We had a lot of “travel errors”, for example Jethro flopped on the ground in the airport so now his brother has copied him and they are army crawling on the airport floor and I can’t do anything because I’m carrying three backpacks. Google maps, by the way, is really poor for giving you the routes you need to take to not miss your trains, because it thinks you can walk a half mile in five minutes when with two kids it takes about half an hour. So we missed a lot of trains.
We also rented the wrong car, and ended up with an electric vehicle rather than a gas one, so we had to figure out charging stations on the fly and spend a lot of time in places we didn’t really want to, but Jethro knows a lot about batteries now.
We did manage to make up a lot of time because the toddler decided to sprint through all the airport gates yelling “super fast!”
Once we got to New York, we had a number of valuable experiences, such as a “gender neutral” bathroom which un ironically had no diaper changing station, a girl with pink hair clutching her boyfriend and telling him (referring to our kids) “do not look at them, do not say how cute they are.”, and the toddler seeing pigeons outside St Patrick’s Cathedral and yelling “Chickens!”
While we explored, I pointed out the Empire state building to Jethro, or at least attempted to: “That’s the empire state building, the tallest building in the world.” Only for my wife to correct me: “No its not.” and so I added “…ish”, and she added “its not even close anymore.” So I told Jethro “That’s the empire state building. It used to be a tall building.” Almost impressive!
We visited Niagara falls, and rode the boat underneath the waterfall, we did not drown because we were protected by mist magic or something, I didn’t read too closely but it was fun. We also crossed over the border into Canada, which I hope rendered me legally illegible for the draft. There’s a giant tourist trap there, with dinosaur golf and Ferris wheels and arcades and haunted houses and it was all very expensive but the kids were content just to look at most of it. We also went to Strong’s Museum of Play, which I think is probably one of the most magical attractions in New York for kids and I would recommend it if anyone ends up in the area. The whole trip was possible thanks to the Nixon Strong Cancer Foundation - Jethro is still doing good, but his diagnosis remains, and it means a lot that we were able to share these experiences with him. So when you donate to cancer charities and stuff, just know that stuff makes an actual difference.
Now that we’re home, we watched some movies, I think it was Kubo and the Two Strings where Jethro exclaimed “I didn’t know that real magic could happen in this movie!” As real as movie magic gets, I suppose!
Every time we get home from anywhere, the kids see the ghosts hanging from our tree, which they made, and they yell: “Ahhh! Ghosts!”
We went to a pumpkin patch this week also. While I was carrying Jethro in, he pointed at them and yelled, “are those what I think they are?” and I was thinking “yea not many things look like pumpkins” so I told him yes and he was like “DINOSAUR EGGS?” I was so wrong. They were not what he thought they were. They were not even close.
The toddler has started saying good night when laying down for naps and bedtime. I treasure that immensely.
The toddler has taken to tucking his stuffed animals into bed. I caught him this week tucking a bouncy ball into bed. “Good night, balllllll” he said.
At a gas station, the toddler spilled chocolate milk everywhere. Very everywhere. Not the worst ever, but like lets just say both his shirt and pants went from white to brown. And so we were like “lets clean you up” and he hopped off his chair and started toddling towards the restroom and then he stopped, splaying his legs as far apart as possible, and exclaimed: “Ahh! Chocolate milk pants!”
“In what sense?” I will not say.
Recommended videos with nothing to recommend them
Its uh, just the picture. Don’t actually have a car to mail you, please don’t show up at my house
it is also made of car honks