Agent Palmer

Are we as clean today as our parents were? As our grandparents? What about our great grandparents? Probably not. Are we healthier? I don’t know.

I can answer the first questions, though, because I just finished reading Suellen Hoy’s Chasing Dirt, which “is about us as a people, a people who developed and nurtured over a century and a half a love affair with cleanliness. This book is, in fact, the first general history of cleanliness in the United States.”

Twenty Twenty-Two. No jetpacks, no faster-than-light traveling, no flying cars (at least not mass produced and widely available or reliable). In short, this isn’t the Jetsons future we thought it might be.

Why does that matter? Because by any metric for arguably anyone born on the other side of Y2K, 2022 was the future. Well, the future is now, and it’s not living up to expectations, I can tell you that. So let’s look back on the year as it was, and ignore the things it would or should have been.

You know the movie, and perhaps you know the series. Both of those, however, were based upon the best-selling Tom Wolfe penned The Right Stuff. The book, as the movie and the series are, is based around the early beginnings of the space race, and it follows the exploits of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, test pilots, and the cultural issues surrounding the men and engineers tasked to get it done.

Wolfe paints the portraits of the Mercury program as a large landscape on which he can include a little editorial here and there as trees that dot the scope of the picture.

Not all documentaries are cinematic. Sometimes it’s the perspective or narrative that makes it more informative and less entertaining, and sometimes it’s just the story. But when a documentary is truly cinematic, it is something to behold. That is what Untold: The Race of the Century is.

The official Netflix description for the episode of their Untold documentary series about The Race of the Century states, “The Australia II yacht crew looks back on the motivation, dedication and innovation that led to their historic victory at the 1983 America’s Cup.”

Do you know who Terry Fox is? If you live below the 49th Parallel there is a good chance you don’t. To the North, however, he’s not only an inspiration, he’s on the money.

Terry: Terry Fox and His Marathon of Hope by Douglas Coupland is so much more than another coffee table book. Yes, it’s the same size as the two previous Coupland coffee table books, Souvenir of Canada and Souvenir of Canada 2, but there is so much more.

This isn’t just a book about Terry Fox, even though he is the titular man.