If you live north of the Equator, Sunday is the longest day of the year. Here in New York, we’ll get about 15 hours of daylight. In Sommaroy, Norway, it’s 24 — as it is every day from mid-May to late July. Given these many weeks when the sun never sets, Sommaroy in 2019 petitioned the government to dispense with clocks and establish a “time-free zone.” It turned out the whole thing was a hoax to gin up tourism, but I’m still intrigued by the notion of living without time. Here are some ideas for using up all that extra daylight this week.
On this week’s list:
1. A memory workout
2. A game that’s just challenging enough
3. Endless playlist
4. Knicks on Broadway
5. From ‘pingy clack’ to ’rounded thock’
6. An antidote to worry
John Basinger, believed to be the only person to have memorized all 10,565 lines of John Milton’s poem “Paradise Lost,” died recently at 92. In his obituary, we learned that Basinger “devoted himself to pursuits that some would have dismissed as fanciful.” One example: walking from New York to San Francisco. (I have a lot of questions about this walk! How long did it take? Highways or surface roads? In what shoes?)
It took Basinger nearly nine years to nail “Paradise Lost.” His method was integrated into his gym routine, as the obituary describes in some detail:
He would memorize seven new lines on the exercise bike and, while lifting weights, would review the last 14 lines he had studied, leaving with a sweaty command of 21 lines of verse.
How smart — if he struggled with a verse, I imagine, he had to keep working out until he got it right, so he’d have the added benefit of extra exercise. Basinger called his undertaking a “12-step program against Alzheimer’s.”
My own practice of going over poems in the shower, repeating the lines until I get the verse perfect, seems terribly inefficient. I get extra clean, but I waste a lot of water.
I can attest, in any case, to the satisfaction that comes from being able to recite a favorite poem, and it’s a good party trick at a certain kind of party. If you want help getting started, try The Times’s poetry challenge.
2.
A game that’s just challenging enough
The New Yorker has a new game called Catalogues, in which you have to place a collection of items in order, after figuring out the theme. So once I deduce that the theme is “Number of steps,” I know that “Alfred Hitchcock movie title” (“The 39 Steps”) comes before “Popular daily walking goal” (10,000 steps) but after “Alcoholics Anonymous” (12 steps). It’s fun! Sort of like Connections meets TimeLine. Yet it’s accessible enough that I don’t suspect its obscurity will make me as insane as either of those games do.
3.
Endless playlist
David started in those lonely dark days of 2020 with the goal of filling gaps in his music knowledge, so the playlist is heavy on jazz and reggae. He used Piero Scaruffi’s website (a giant, one-man music-review repository that The Times once called “the greatest website of all time”) as a jumping-off point. David would sample an album that Scaruffi praised, and if he liked any tunes on it, add them to the “Endless” playlist.
Next, David looked to see what other Spotify playlists these songs appeared on, discovering a bunch of music in the process. He acknowledged that the algorithm can be uninspiring in its suggestions, but, he said, “if you commit to it with your own curiosity, it’s the most amazing thing in the world.” That might be the most optimistic thing I’ve heard anyone say about the robot D.J.s controlling our streaming diets.
4.
Knicks on Broadway
The tiny ways in which Knicks fever has seeped into the fabric of New York City are thrilling. The Empire State Building lit up blue and orange. The chalkboards outside bars and cafes, working basketball into their inducements to buy beer or lattes.
And on Broadway, the cast of “Hamilton” led the audience in a rendition of “New York, New York.” Mariska Hargitay, the actress (and Knicks superfan) starring in “Every Brilliant Thing,” unboxed a Jalen Brunson jersey during a scene where her character rifles through old stuff. The star of “& Juliet” took her curtain call in Brunson’s No. 11. The team also got special mentions in “Chicago,” “Maybe Happy Ending,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Schmigadoon!”
What a great reminder of the dynamism of live theater, of how a script can be rejiggered in real time in order to reflect the moment! It’s so exciting to be implicated in live performance, the way a touring musician yells, “I love you Detroit!,” and you, in the audience in Detroit, feel seen for an instant.
5.
From ‘pingy clack’ to ’rounded thock’
If you’ve never gotten tangled up in the hobbyist’s thicket that is the world of mechanical computer keyboards, I hesitate to encourage you, as I have known more than one person who’s lost weeks, months of his life in pursuit of the ideal clack. Mechanical keyboards use individual switches under each key instead of a rubber mat, the way most modern keyboards do. This results in a different feel and sound when typing.
My journey into mechanical keyboard subculture occurred during the pandemic, when I thought, innocently, “I’d like a keyboard that sounds like the old IBM keyboard at my first internship.” This led me to the r/MechanicalKeyboards subreddit, where I inhaled posts like “Do you guys like your keyboards Thocky or Quacky?,” where devotees take soldering irons to their keys in pursuit of the perfect typing apparatus. I ended up with a reasonable facsimile of the old keyboard I coveted, but after a short time I got sick of it and reverted to my laptop.
I was nonetheless charmed to learn of the Listening Museum, a site where visitors can bask in the sounds of 36 keyboards and typewriters. The specimens are tagged with quirky designations for the sounds they make, like “pingy clack,” “bright click” and “rounded thock.” It’s not the same as pressing the keys with your fingers, but if you wear headphones, you can tap away without irritating your office mates.
6.
An antidote to worry
The atomic unit of worry is the “What if” statement: What if an event that I fear comes to pass? What if I don’t get this thing that I really want? What if my best-laid plans go awry? What if the worst happens? To be human is to lie awake in the night, mind wrapped around the axle of a “what if.”
I have a note taped to my kitchen cabinet that reads “What if it all works out?” We’re very good at imagining worst-case scenarios. If we remind ourselves that the best-case scenario (or at least a tolerable-case scenario) is just as likely to eventuate, we can redirect our energy and imaginations in less troubling directions. It might not all work out, but that’s just as plausible an outcome as the disaster I’m so skilled at conjuring. Sometimes just inserting “What if it all works out” into the stew of agitation provides enough interruption to stop the swirling.
One more thing: Stephanie Ruedlin, a reader from St. Louis, has a ritual for adding happiness to her life:
Every day I treat myself to a “birthday minute.” I was born on Feb. 23, so if I happen to notice the clock at 2:23 p.m., I take a minute to celebrate me. Sometimes I do a little happy dance, or a quick shimmy, whatever. It costs nothing and makes me smile, and when the minute is up, I tell myself, “See ya tomorrow!”
