April 20, 2023
Nathan Lane Breaks Down His Broadway Career
In the inaugural entry to Playbill's new video series, "My Life in the Theatre," Lane sits down with a Playbill binder containing every Playbill from every show he's ever done on Broadway. [26m30s] Lane walks us through his career, including the time he asked Sondheim to write new songs for "The Frogs," how he almost changed his name to Norman Lane, and the production where he played a "thug version of Donald Trump."
“Don’t give away the papaya.”
There was another factor I hated to acknowledge as a freelance journalist. The work biases me toward odd and surprising narratives, the more dangerous the potential story, the more powerful its draw. This sensibility can be helpful when finding and exposing wrongdoing. But there are also those occasions when I only catch myself behaving like an aggressive and mercenary cynic. from Bad Tape by Dan Hernandez
The first thing he played us: Despacito.
He was actually a celebrity in Afghanistan, the violinist for the on-screen backup band for their version of American Idol (Single link Threadreader, original Twitter thread). He had heard through a friend about an Afghan violinist who had just escaped from Kabul and settled in LA (where I live). Problem was the guy had to leave his violin behind.
“It’s the end of the marriage between social media and news.”
Buzzfeed Shuts Down its News Division (NYT gift, archive.is), laying off 15% of its staff. Buzzfeed News won a Pulitzer (and was nominated on three other occasions), published the Steele dossier, and broke the story of Blippi pooping on his friend, but it was never profitable. [more inside]
This was a bad day to go into space
SpaceX's gigantic (and currently uncrewed) Starship rocket had its initial stacked launch, which started out great and then things got out of control, literally. The second link is video that starts about 30 seconds before launch and has a lot of reactions from the Space X staff watching the launch and their energy is, shall we say, uplifting to hear.
A defiant wuxia epic characterized by rapid, brutal combat
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty - the most approachable Soulslike to date [Kotaku] “The term “Soulslike” generates a specific kind of game in the mind. It conjures something that’s hard as hell, with fearsome bosses to beat, intricate levels to explore, tight combat to experience, and a world rife with enough lore to fill several tomes. You may call games in the genre alluring, unforgettable, and sometimes super cheap, but if there’s one word you likely wouldn’t use to describe Soulslikes, it’s “approachable.” Until now. [...] Wo Long is the latest Soulslike from action game aficionados Team Ninja, whose previous efforts in the genre comprise the Nioh franchise. Set in 184 AD during the Later Han Dynasty, the game tasks you with stamping out the Yellow Turban Rebellion, a peasant revolt that sought to disrupt ancient China. However, weaved into this mythically fictionalized retelling of the historical events of the Three Kingdoms period is an even greater threat than the poor, emboldened to rise up by some bad dude. Nah, it’s a mystical drug called Elixir that’s corrupting the lands, poisoning the people, and raising the dead.” [Gameplay Trailer] [more inside]
The Dankiest Sticky-Icky
Cannabis scientist Dr. Amber Wise answers Twitter's questions about cannabis in a seasonally-relevant video for WIRED. [more inside]
"the problem was Romania had run out of episodes of Columbo"
In 2021 a video featuring Peter Falk talking about the time he stopped a revolt in Romania went viral. This led Romanian YouTuber Radu Pericol Tiganas to do research, finding evidence which seemingly confirmed large parts of the story, recounting it in a Romanian-language video. Slate's Willa Paskin became interested, and found out that it was all a bit more complicated than it first appeared, laying out her findings in a pair of episodes of the Decoder Ring podcast which together are about the length of a single episode of Columbo.
Where is Home
As the Great Game Goes 'Round: Middle East Rapprochement & Realignment
Qatar and UAE in process of restoring diplomatic ties [ungated] - "The restoration of ties comes amid a broader regional push for reconciliation with Iran and Saudi Arabia agreeing last month to re-establish relations after years of hostility, which threatened instability in the Gulf and stoked the war in Yemen." [more inside]
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