October 16, 2023
His Shows Get Bleaker by the Second
Jamie’s 5 Ingredient Meals has the air of an educational state broadcast made to raise morale after a national catastrophe – inevitably, perhaps, because that’s more or less what it is. (SL Guardian)
"curiosity"
The Way We Love Now: What Does a Romance Novel Look Like?
"So what’s featured on [romance novel] covers today? We looked at over 1,400 covers featured in Publishers Weekly from 2011 to 2023 to find out.....The specificity of stories offered by a glance of today’s covers broadens the world of who and what we consider to be part of romance." What Does A Happily Ever After Look Like? By Alice Liang. [more inside]
Spooky atmospheres for every mood
Haunted Forest is the most creepy of what is offered here, with an hour of creaking forest limbs and unexplained noises in a misty forest. Haunted Cemetery Ambience is two hours of a light drizzle, lingering background thunder, some rustling and murmurings and other transient "what's that" noises. Spooky Halloween Fireplace with Rain on Windows Sound is, at eight hours, the least scary and most cozy, with comforting candlelit pumpkins and fireplace crackling backed with rain upon windowpanes.
"There's a lot going on in here."
Ever wondered how an old pinball machine works ? Technology Connections has you covered: Old pinball machines are amazingly complex.
Gravity-free (thread)
Fred Richard's Floor Exercise @ 2023 World Gymnastics Championships. Unfettered by earthly bonds (especially starting at :30). You might not be able to flip like Fred, but you can participate in this week's free thread! [more inside]
Scholastic's "bigot button"
'[T]his year, facing pressure from right-wing ideologues, Scholastic is facilitating the exclusion of books that feature people of color and/or LGBTQ characters. Scholastic has grouped many of these titles in a collection called "Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice." School officials are then given the option to exclude the entire set of books from the book fair. Scholastic has, in the words of one librarian, given schools a "bigot button" to exclude these books and mollify intolerant pressure groups.'
I'm gonna trick ya!
Once again (previously, previouslier) the Spanish band Broken Peach has released a Halloween Video in their classic style.
“You know how many times of the day I answer questions about poop?”
Though hot dog eating isn’t immune to any of the friction that greater American culture is—in some cases, it might even magnify it—none of this is enough to keep its passionate community out of the game. Despite their wildly different day-to-day lives, pro eaters remain close throughout the year, with the Nathan’s Contest as a cherished annual summit. from Everything You Never Knew About Competitive Eating
David Attenborough, Alive and Narrating Planet Earth 3
Film Sir David on location. Do not let him climb stairs without a defibrillator. Do not place Sir David too close to seabirds. [more inside]
Surely a shoe-in for an Ig Nobel
48 people flipped 46 different kinds of coins a total of 350,757 times [PDF] to demonstrate that a flipped coin has a 50.8% chance of landing on the same side it started. This confirms a theoretical result from 2007 [PDF] which took into account precession, which is the fact that "the direction of the axis of rotation changes as the coin goes through its trajectory". [more inside]
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