Why do the credits at the end of every movie say: “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental”? Because of Rasputin.
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According to this chart, I’ve only ever been boomer successful, but for 15 years, my boss has been a very handsome dumb idiot, my ice cream shop is 10 years old this month, and I’ve got two lovely kids who are mean to me. Feels like a success to me.
In ancient Mesopotamia, people rarely wrote about preparing food… “Out of hundreds of thousands of cuneiform documents, they are the only food recipes that exist. We don’t have an explanation.”
“Small patches of wildflowers sown in cities can be a good substitute for a natural meadow, according to a study which showed butterflies, bees and hoverflies like them just as much.” I love wildlflowers, that’s the post.
Johanna Under the Ice
Johanna Nordblad is a free diver who specializes in cold water dives. After being injured in a biking accident, her recovery involved ice water baths and she developed an interest in cold water. Ian Derry filmed Nordblad doing a dive for this gorgeous short video.
There is no place for fear, no place for panic, no place for mistakes. Under the ice, you need total control of the place, the time, and to trust yourself completely.
(via @daveg)
Not normal: Lions are climbing trees in Botswana. “It appears that climbing trees can be a big advantage for hunting, resting, and beating the heat.”
Josh’s Albums of the Year
My friend Josh LaFayette spends the very last part of the year making fan art for his favorite albums of the year and despite all the pieces being visually different there’s a through line which make all of them immediately recognizable to me as his art. He’s putting out a few a week on his Instagram, but I grabbed these two because I also loved these albums.
Laura Jane Grace’s - Hole in My Head
My favorite part of this series is all of the pieces are physical, not just a file on the computer. Every piece is a reference to the design language present in the age of accessible digital printing—they’re inspired by what some might call “naïve” or “uniformed” designs that are common in the American visual vernacular. The Moreland piece is a take on the flyers for psychics you see all over and the LJG piece is your favorite hippie soap.
Infinite Content
Animator & filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt on the difference between crate digging & streaming from a recent interview:
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done — it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.
See also surfing the web vs. *waves hands around at whatever it is we’re soaking in here*. (via @coelasquid.bsky.social)
Tetris Forever is, well, kind of hard to explain. It’s a documentary about the history of Tetris but also a collection of playable historical Tetris games, from the very first Soviet-era version to a new multiplayer version called Tetris Time Warp.
NYT asks, “Is the Northeast Entering Its Wildfire Era?” “It might be time to do the kind of fire safety planning in the Northeast that is more common in California.” It’s raining today in Boston, finally, but it’s been droughty.
Neon, The Most Noble Of Signs
I loved this article about NeonWorks which seems to be the last neon artisan in the Bay Area. The owner, Jim Rizzo is a character, and the article is full of nuggets like:
“I think the love of neon is still there, but because budgets are tight, people are going to LED fake neon. Have you seen that stuff? It’s trying to look like neon, but it’s plastic with little diodes embedded in it. … Nobody makes it in America.”
Rizzo handles the installations, which means he often finds himself hanging 16 stories up in a bosun chair tinkering with hotel signs. He can handle the dizzying elevation: “I love heights.” What he can’t stand are the pigeons. “I will kill a pigeon in a heartbeat, I hate them,” he jokes. “The Avenue Theatre sign (in San Francisco) was so dilapidated and filled with pigeons that every day we pulled up to it, we were just like, ‘Uhhhhhgh.’”
“Tube bending” is the term for heating and shaping neon tubes with almost medieval-like flame torches – the trade is full of such wonderful terms, including “slumping” (when a tube sinks down from gravity), “blockout paint” (black pigment used to create the illusion of letter breaks) and “bombarding” (electrifying a tube to clean out impurities).
Flush is an app for finding public bathrooms. “Search through over 200,000 public loos all around the world!” Available for iOS and Android. Seems indispensable for parents of young kids.
Baker’s Chocolate Wasn’t Made For Bakers
I hope this doesn’t ruin your day, but Baker’s Chocolate wasn’t created for bakers, it’s chocolate originally produced in Dorchester, MA by John Hannon with his partner Dr. James Baker. Hannon sailed to the West Indies in 1779 and never came back, so Dr. Baker changed the name to the Baker Chocolate Company.
Additionally, German Chocolate Cake isn’t German. A homemaker from Dallas sent the Dallas Morning News a recipe for German’s Chocolate Cake made with a sweet baking chocolate invented by Samuel German in 1853. (I’m not including the name of the homemaker because she’s listed everywhere as Mrs. Husband’s Name and YOU KNOW that guy never picked up a sifter to help.) I personally don’t believe coconut or nuts belong in dessert so I don’t fw German Chocolate Cake if I can help it.
Here’s where you’re about to get really mad. Here’s where you’re about to blow a gasket. Here’s the thing what will make you absolutely furious like me. Guess which company’s sales increased 73% after the popularization of German Chocolate Cake as a thing Americans were making regularly? That’s right, it’s Baker’s Chocolate Company, Samuel German’s employer in 1853 when he invented the chocolate. (via @parsnip.bsky.social)
A world map of where you don’t need a permit to buy a gun. This belongs to a class of maps in which the US is (inexplicably, infuriatingly) highlighted and almost everywhere else isn’t.
McRib Sauce Ice Cream
No one.
Absolutely no one.
Not one single person.
Jason: HEY, AARON, WHAT IF YOU MADE McRIB SAUCE ICE CREAM AT YOUR ICE CREAM SHOP?
According to Food & Wine, McDonald’s will be selling half gallon jugs of McRib sauce alongside the annual limited release of the McRib sandwich.
The sauce goes on sale November 25th at 10AM and I will surely forget to buy some then, but if I don’t, I’ll make Jason some McRib sauce ice cream in December. We’ve already made pickle and Frank’s Red Hot ice cream so why not.
Missed the shuttle. “It was night but the tarmac was illuminated with spotlights and lights from vehicles and planes. These giant jets were taking off real close on either side of me. I’ve never seen a plane that big up close at lift off.”
The World-Changing Impact of Vaccines
Back in 2015, Tynan DeBold and Dov Friedman created a series of graphics for the WSJ showing the impact of the introduction of vaccines in the US. Here’s the infographic for measles:
And for polio:
Vaccines are in the running for the greatest human invention ever. You can see the rest of the charts (for hepatitis A, mumps, pertussis, rubella, and smallpox) here.
See also The stunning success of vaccines in America, in one chart.
A great idea for a list: The 25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years. Includes caesar salad, the last word cocktail, Marcella Hazen’s tomato sauce, Julia Child’s beef bourg, no-knead bread, and Kenji’s reverse-sear steak. What’s missing?
Augusta Britt, secret teenaged muse of a middle-aged Cormac McCarthy, sounds like a fascinating person but this profile of her in Vanity Fair does not do her justice.
The winners of the National Book Awards were announced last night — Percival Everett’s fantastic James deservedly took the prize for fiction. Full list of the winners here.
Cheese Crime
People like stealing fontina fortunes worth of cheese because it’s easy to sell on the black market and is hard to track. The mascarpone market probably doesn’t even have to be super dark for creamy criminals to launder their pinched cheese through conventional cheddar channels thus allowing the roquefort rapscallions to bathe forever in ill-gotten ricotta riches. Cheese is the most stolen food in the world, so let’s read about some cheese crime, shall we? (Unrelated, cheese fire.)
England, 2024: An arrest was made recently in the case of massive cheese theft suffered by Neal’s Yard Dairy who lost 950 wheels of cheese weighing a total of 48,500 pounds.
2017, Wisconsin (3 of them!): “Why would someone steal a truck stocked with thousands of pounds of yellow cheddar? Police and industry experts say it’s all about resale value. The cheese from Marshfield had an estimated retail value of $90,000. The other two stolen loads were worth $70,000 and $46,000 respectively.”
This could go on and on. By the way, did you know cheese.com has a whole list with nothin’ on it but different cheeses? You could just look at different cheeses ALL DAY!
Cher’s New Memoir
Cher has a book coming out, Cher, The Memoir, Part One, and Vulture has an excerpt about meeting Sonny Bono.
In my mind I was thinking, Yeah, OK, this old line. But I must have had a look on my face because he shook his head and laughed. “Don’t worry, I’ve got twin beds,” he said. With a grin he added, “And honestly, I don’t find you particularly attractive.” I was both insulted and relieved. And that’s how I became the potty-mouthed sidekick to a man eleven years older than me who was in the middle of a divorce.
I hadn’t realized Sonny was so much older than Cher, who was 16 when they met, which, uh, yeah. (via @georgehahn.bksy.social)
A report from the European championship of tram drivers. This was one of the tests: “Drivers had to come to a stop so gently that water did not slosh out of a bowl that was filled to the brim.”
Photos by Noah Kalina of the oldest forest in the world (a 385-million-year-old forest in Cairo, New York) and the paleobotanist who discovered it. “Holy cats! These were roots and that’s where a tree stood 385 million years ago.”
Earth’s First Interstellar Transmission Is 50 Years Old
Oh wow, this is cool: an article in Scientific American about the Arecibo message, the first message purposely sent by humanity out into interstellar space. The piece is written by science writer Nadia Drake — the daughter of Frank Drake, who designed the message — and it digs into the details of how the whole thing came about.
I’ve somehow never read about the Arecibo message before. It was sent out from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico on November 16, 1974 towards global cluster M13. The message was in binary and when properly decoded upon receipt, should look like this:
The drawing on the right is Frank Drake’s recently discovered first draft of the message.
Dad targeted a globular cluster of stars called Messier 13 (M13), or the Great Cluster in the constellation of Hercules, because it would conveniently be overhead at the time of the ceremony (nestled in a sinkhole, Arecibo’s giant dish was not fully steerable). In about 25,000 years, Dad’s message will reach M13 — or at least part of it, because the majority of the cluster’s thousands of stars will have moved out of the telescope’s beam by then. But anyone who’s around to detect the Arecibo transmission, and who figures out how to decode it, will have a blueprint telling them a lot about us: what we look like, which chemical elements and biomolecules make up our DNA, what our planetary system is and how many of us existed in 1974. Dad’s transmission concluded with a binary encoded representation of the Arecibo dish itself.
Read the whole thing…it’s fascinating.
Btw, in addition to creating the Arecibo message, Frank Drake also designed the Drake equation (“a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy”), helped design the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, and generally kickstarted the whole SETI effort. (via @https://bsky.app/profile/astrokatie.com)
Today’s Work Music: A Groovy Autumn Mix
A few months ago, I posted about Lane 8’s seasonal mixes and I’m happy to report that the Fall 2024 Mixtape is now out. You can find it on Soundcloud, YouTube, and Apple Music. I’ve been listening for the past few days and it’s 🔥🔥.
Google & the US Forest Service are partnering to use machine learning to detect forest fires. “[FireSat] will provide global high resolution imagery that is updated every 20 minutes, enabling the detection of wildfires roughly the size of a classroom.”
Rafael Nadal has officially retired from professional tennis. One of the greatest to ever do it. “I’m not tired of playing tennis but my body doesn’t want to play anymore and you have to accept that.”
For the love of god, quit calling your newsletter “my Substack”. “You can talk about your work as *your work*. It’s your newsletter, or your email, or your blog. Or just your writing. But it sure as hell isn’t ‘your Substack.’”
Doomsday Fish
The oarfish is a very long fish people don’t normally see on account of it living deep, deep in the deep water, though three have washed up on the shores of Southern California in the last 3 months. The oarfish is referred to as the Doomsday Fish (a very cool name for a fish imo), because Japanese mythology considers seeing one of these fish, which can grow to be 30 feet, an omen of tsunamis or earthquakes. 12 washed up on the shores of Japan before the earthquake in 2011.
Don’t worry though because scientists looked into it and decided “the spatiotemporal relationship between deep‐sea fish appearances and earthquakes was hardly found.” Honestly, it’s a weird way to say “no the fish don’t mean an earthquake,” but it’s all we’ve got.
25 years after the much maligned DK Rap premiered to scorn in Nintendo’s Donkey Kong 64, the composer, Grant Kirkhope, has released a remix with the rapper Substantial that whips.
Every day, people go out and do the kind of stuff you’ve never imagined being possible, but they imagined it, and that’s what’s important.
You still have a couple of days left to back Kelli Anderson’s pop-up book about typography on Kickstarter. It looks incredible.
Purple Isn’t Real
So we all know the color purple has always been associated with royalty because the dye used to make it was extremely limited because you could only get it from the Phoenician city of Tyre where a tiny snail lived. Dye makers had to “crack open the snail’s shell, extract a purple-producing mucus and expose it to sunlight for a precise amount of time,” and it took 250K snails to make an ounce of dye. But did we know purple isn’t like all the other colors?
Most of you here probably know that our perception of color comes down to physics. Light is a type of radiation that our eyes can perceive, and it spans a certain range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Individual colors are like building blocks in white light: they are subdivisions of the visible spectrum. For us to perceive an object as being of a certain color, it needs to absorb some of the subdivisions in the light that falls on it (or all of them, for black). The parts it reflects (doesn’t absorb) are what gives it its color. But not so for purple, because it is a non-spectral color.
Hahahah. Yessssss. Pound sand, Harold!
Asheville, NC has lifted its boil water notice after 53 days. Hurricane Helene left high sediment levels contaminating 80% of the city’s drinking water.
Emoji Rain is a visualization of emoji use on Bluesky. “Emojis from longer messages fall more slowly!” 🦋 💧 🌧️ ☔️ 🌈 🦄
How to Survive Our Authoritarian Post-Truth Era
For The Observer, Carole Cadwalladr published a list of pointers on how to survive in Trumpist America, inspired by Timothy Snyder’s Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century that was published in the wake of the 2016 election. Some of these are excellent:
1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.
2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.
5 You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not. If you’re a US institution or organisation, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice.
15 Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: “If they try to normalize, let us try to denormalize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.”
This is a good time to revisit Snyder’s original list as well. Like Cadwalladr, I think about this one all the time:
1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
Note: Illustration by the awesome Chris Piascik.
Weight of the World
Premiering this Friday (Nov 22) on FX is a short documentary from The New York Times called Weight of the World about GLP-1 drugs. Here’s the synopsis:
As GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic soar in popularity for weight loss, this film follows three people on their own GLP-1 journeys and explores how decades of diet culture and society’s relentless pursuit of thinness paved the way for their rise.
The doc features Roxane Gay & Tressie McMillan Cottom and will will be available on Hulu on Nov 23.
Can A Bike Flip On A Train
Something I still think about is the “Can a plane take off on a treadmill,” so imagine my glee at discovering these superheroes trying to flip a bike on a moving train. Yes, it’s glee I felt. I’m gleeing all over the place right now. (Not to be violent, but I thought the plane taking off on a treadmill post was from 10 years ago, but it’s from 2006.)
Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics. “What do these scientists want us teaching our children? That the universe will continue to expand until it reaches eventual heat death?”
The trailer for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Tom Cruise…still running. I can’t wait to see what he falls off of, clings to, leaps onto, or is thrown from this time!
Less Uniform Social Media Experiences
In the MIT Technology Review, Mat Honan makes two points about changes in the world of social media with both Bluesky and Threads seeing massive growth in November accelerated by the election and people leaving Twitter. The era of everyone having a uniform social media experience is ending. And that’s good.
The first is that tech and politics are just entirely enmeshed at this point. That’s due to the extreme extent to which tech has captured culture and the economy. Everything is a tech story now, including and especially politics.
The second point is about what I see as a more long-term shift away from centralization. What’s more interesting to me than people fleeing a service because they don’t like its politics is the emergence of unique experiences and cultures across all three of these services, as well as other, smaller competitors.
I loved Twitter early on when it felt like everyone was building their own communities, and then it stopped feeling like that, and then it got worse and worse. For the most part, it seems like my better friends from Twitter went to Threads, but I can’t really figure out the vibe over there, which is annoying because I’m too old to make new friends. I’m on Bluesky and like it very much. One of the more helpful features is letting individual users create their own Starter Packs, so if you want to, for example follow a community of Carly Rae Jepsen fans, you can do that really easily because I made a starter pack for you.
90 seconds of Miss Piggy absolutely roasting Martha Stewart. “Oh, how obsessive!”
If you need a refresher, here’s the official 2-minute recap of Severance season one from Apple TV+.
What Is The Most Surprising Predator Prey Relationship?
OK, I see you have your hand up with an answer, but I’m going to take this one, alright? Killer whales hunt moose. Right? That’s the most surprising.
It is not terribly common, but in the Pacific Northwest, habitats of two of the more massive mammals intersect. Moose will swim to look for food or escape other predators and orcas will eat anything once, just like Jason. For more on the reasons orcas sometime eat moose, we turn now to noted naturalist publication, Forbes.
One documented incident occurred in 1992 in Alaska, when a hungry pod of four Biggs’ killer whales attacked a pair of swimming moose. They feasted on the larger of the two. The smaller one escaped the feeding frenzy, but it was wounded so badly that it was unable to keep swimming and drowned a little later.
So are killer whales, with their jerky tendencies and habit of toying with prey the bluejay of the sea? I say no. Bluejays have no redeeming qualities and orcas sink yachts for fun, anecdotally save humans from sharks, rescue trapped whales, and wash the dishes after dinner. I made up that last one, no clue if they do the dishes at not. I know for sure bluejays don’t, the bullies.
“In 2018, Nerds products brought in $40 million in sales. In the past calendar year, the company said, that number jumped to $800 million.” NERDS Gummy Clusters are good as hell and everyone’s talking about them.
Roxane Gay: “To suggest we should yield even a little to Mr. Trump’s odious politics, to suggest we should compromise on the rights of trans people, for instance, […] is unacceptable. It is shameful and cowardly.” Yes, yes, yes, 1000% this.
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