Today in Tedium: The odds are that, based on my recent schedule, this will be the last issue of Tedium before the 2024 presidential election. I’m not really expecting a lot of breaking news in the market for tedium. (As our about page states, tedium is noted for its pattern of stillness, which one cannot say about an election.) But I do think there is something to be said about a moment of zen amid chaos. I am not perfect at this. Some people meditate or spend entire weekends in the woods. I, instead, like digging into Tedium. And with that in mind, tonight’s pre-election Tedium attempts to make the case for Tedium as a palate cleanser. Because, let’s be honest, we need it right now. — Ernie @ Tedium
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It’s harder for someone else to flood the zone with you-know-what if you’re limiting access to the floodzone. (Paolo Chiabrando/Unsplash)
The value of random facts as a weapon against chaos
Tedium, to me, is a tool. It is the feeling one gets when being able to separate out the complexity and chaos of the world from what we already know has happened.
Old or useless facts can be valuable, but they’re often neutralized. They may have hurt people in the past, as the glass from an exploding soda bottle did to Anne Murray in the late 1970s, but they cannot hurt you now.
Some of these moments might be funny or humorous, or even eye-opening. But the thing that they do more than anything else is that they take up space. They offer up points of conversation as alternatives to talking about the noise that constantly fills up our eardrums and our social media feeds.
These are the kinds of things that fill up the moments where noise, try as it might, fails to extinguish the silence. If you’re stressed out, do some research on some obscure thing that you’ve never thought about much before. My recent piece on Butterfingers is an excellent example of this. I started with the question in my head: Man, these things seem like they easily break, why is that? And then I did a little digging and tried to answer it.
By starting with the nagging question, which won’t be found on social media or in the latest headlines, you’re forcing yourself to dig in a different direction, away from the chaos. And that process can, as a result, carry unique rewards for those willing to put in the time.
Obviously, what’s happening in the broader world matters, but often, we struggle to right-place much of it. And the reason for that is that the information just keeps coming, and that makes it difficult to parse. It makes even the news literate victims of misinformation and addicts them to information that doesn’t always pass the smell test.
One thing that was nice about newspapers, for all their heft and post-mortem fish-wrap status, is that they never forgot this. Picking up a Sunday newspaper often meant that you were getting a chance to dive into many different colors of information, distributed at slightly quieter tones than a front page. In this culture, we have lost much of this editorial diversity, in part because the noise tends to flow in one or two directions.
It’s a busy world and there’s a lot going on, but too often, much of it gets ignored based on what draws eyeballs and attention. As a result, tedium is a necessary palate cleanser, whether someone’s sending it to you, or you find it yourself.
Below is a nice long list of tedious things, all of which you can click on and ensure that you will find unusual stories. If you have a question about something tedious, don’t be afraid of doing a little digging. You might be in disbelief at what you find.
If you consider TV static relaxing, this list of tedious things is probably for you.
20 things I've learned about Tedium since the last presidential election
- Coupons have clearing houses, just like checks. One has existed since the 1950s, and it was developed by the A.C. Nielsen company. At one point in their history, they had so many spent coupons that the only way they could get rid of them was by polluting the nearby water. (We didn’t always care about conservation!)
- The secret to NyQuil’s success is that it’s not a single drug. Rather, the root cause of NyQuil’s market success was its combination of a bunch of off-the-shelf drugs (including alcohol) into something that worked like a new kind of drug.
- It takes about a day for sealants like caulk to fully cure. Caulk, a form of sealant, has existed in various forms for hundreds of years, but the materials have kept improving to the point that it’s seen as essential for weather-sealing.
- Minute Rice walked so instant stuffing could run. The success of Minute Rice made General Foods (Edit: Not General Mills, sorry) realize that there was a market opportunity for stuffing, and that led to the creation of Stove Top.
- Modern pharmaceuticals have three separate names. Each prescription drug you see on the shelf or on a pharmacy scrip is referred to in three separate ways—the chemical name, the generic name, and the brand name. They often have unusual names with rarely used letters in part because it’s the easiest way to avoid picking names that may be used for other reasons, or that have different cultural meanings.
- Inventors want a piece of the coaster action. Despite the object being one of the most common you’ll find on literally any given table, drink coasters are often the target of patent filings, often with novel ornamental designs or electronic novelties at their center.
- Apple introduced “natural scrolling” in response to the release of the iPad. Previously, we all scrolled on our trackpads the other way. It wasn’t even an issue anyone cared about until Steve Jobs pointed it out, and then made it the default on his company’s computers.
- WD-40 exists because we stopped making airplanes with wood. Suddenly, the aerospace industry needed a way to avoid rust and corrosion, and WD-40 was the thing that pulled it off. It was a pure accident that this also happened to be extremely useful for regular people.
- Ted Turner started a music network to compete with MTV. It didn’t work, partly because of its utterly square presentation, and partly because cable providers weren’t feeling it. The network only lasted a month in its initial form and proved successful only after he sold it to MTV, which turned it into VH1. (Turner must still be smarting that VH1 figured out the market that eluded him.)
- School TV carts weren’t originally built for TVs. TV carts, infamous for their fall-hazard risk, were originally used for film projectors before television became a common part of classrooms the world over. The rise of the VHS tape, and later the DVD, helped make them a good fit for students.
- Voice actors love ISDN. The technology, an attempt by the telecom industry to shape the future of the landline, failed to catch on with most audiences, in part because its benefits were modest in most cases. But the clear quality of the audio that ISDN lines could produce made it a massive favorite of talk radio networks and voice actors on animated shows like The Simpsons.
- The “no symbol” was literally designed by committee. The red circle with a slash in it, used on road signage the world over (along with literally everywhere you shouldn’t smoke), only found its way into existence in the early 1930s, when the League of Nations convened the Convention Concerning the Unification of Road Signs. One such road sign decided upon during that meeting? The predecessor to the modern no-parking sign.
- The first affordable standalone digital camera was a Barbie toy. Back in the late ’90s, Mattel decided to market a device called the Barbie Photo Designer. It was able to take photos, which you could then manipulate using a CD-ROM after the fact. The whole package was $70—expensive for a toy, but very cheap for a digital camera at the time. (One reason? No LCD screen. Hope you took it right the first time.)
- Optical mice existed before mice with balls. We take optical mice for granted, but during the 1980s and 1990s, it was common to find a weighted ball bearing in most mice. This was despite the fact that some of the earliest mice, created by Xerox and Mouse Systems, were optical in nature. Why didn’t they become hits? Easy? They required a special mousepad, and ball mice didn’t.
- Reusable grocery bags mostly weren’t a thing before the ’90s. The trend became common and even legally enforced starting in the mid-2000s, but the concept was slow to take off, minus a short period in the early 1970s when a paper shortage caused some grocery stores to buy back bags in an attempt to fill a temporary gap.
- Rear-projection TVs were being made in the 1930s. Despite being associated with home-cinema viewing between the 1980s and 2000s, the rear-projection format was tested by some TV manufacturers as early as 1937, though it took until the 1970s for the idea to go mainstream.
- Radios used to have their own unique power outlets. While a very rare use case today, some homes once used power outlets that plugged radios directly into an outdoor antenna in an effort to get better signals. Odds are, if an electrician sees one today they’re going to excessively scratch their head.
- Channel 37 was off limits because of a single radio telescope. The University of Illinois built a radio telescope—the Vermilion River Observatory in Danville, Illinois—that scanned for extraterrestrial signals on the 610 MHz frequency, which just so happened to be where the channel 37 on UHF TVs sat. The FCC tried giving some leeway to station owners, but the scientists wouldn’t budge. So, until the digital TV went on the air, no channel 37.
- Modern charcoal exists is a byproduct of auto manufacturing. On the hunt for wood to use for siding in vehicles, Henry Ford found a supply in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and put a factory around it. He put his cousin-in-law, Edward G. Kingsford, in charge of it, but ran into a problem—excess sawdust. Rather than let it go to waste, Ford had Thomas Edison develop a second factory to turn the sawdust into charcoal, which later came to carry Kingsford’s name.
- Key changes are now a rarity on the pop charts. Once extremely common, they now represent just a tiny portion of all number-one hits, which is likely in part a reflection of shifts in how pop music gets produced in the 21st century.
This is Tedium’s third presidential election, and its mission has evolved somewhat with the times.
It is not a publication built for chaotic moments, many of which we’ve seen crop up in numerous settings. During the 2016 election, I referred this newsletter as a sleep aid, and in 2020, I emphasized the wide network of contributors and how they experienced tedium … which has admittedly constricted in recent years.
These days, I write more stuff reacting to the world around me, while still keeping in mind its roots as a history publication and its association with the old internet. I’d be lying if it hasn’t been influenced by some of the chaos. I hope, as the next four years pass us by, it is less influenced by chaos, and more influenced by the stuff that got us into this mess in the first place: A desire for curiosity about the things that stand out to us.
Anyway, if you can, go vote. I’ll see you on the other side of the ballot box, mostly (and hopefully) not writing about politics.
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Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! Back at this again, probably after election day, barring any breaking Tedium.
