December 8, 2020
64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney
"His finest work is undoubtedly frontloaded by the miraculous accident of The Beatles, but there are gems scattered throughout his career, right up to the present day. For sheer fecundity, I can’t, with the exception of Bob Dylan, think of any other songwriter who comes close. There are very few artists in history, in any field, who have produced so much work at a high level over such a span."
-64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney.
Man, Pinky And The Brain Got Dark
A single twitter link of a video [1m52s] of two voice actors reading a script for which their characters were never intended. And yet...
Bingeworthy TV series
Wondering what series to binge next? Try Bingeworthy.io This listing shows the Top 100 Shows as nominated by users of Bingeworthy.IO with at least 25 ratings. 4/4 is the best you can get. This site was created by Dave Winer (of RSS fame), and built by site users. If you login (linking your Twitter account) you can vote for shows. You can also add new shows via Metacritic. Some of the title names are a bit dodgy, and there's little granularity (eg. all seasons of Dr Who are listed as one title, but Battlestar Galactica series are listed twice (1978 and 2003)). Could be useful if you think you've seen all the good shows... [more inside]
Distant Thunder
Testing future pandemic vaccines in advance
"You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13." [more inside]
Like, how much else is pretend, if the debt isn’t real?
you didn't know you needed to see penguins going to the cinema
Aquarium staff in Chicago, USA, take the penguins on field trips around the city. Lots of cute video footage of curious penguins exploring theatres, sports stadiums, and art museums. Previously: penguins go for a hike in the woods.
I promised MeFi some information about singing mice a long time ago...
The Skeletons at the Lake
In a story bringing together archaeology, anthropology, genomics, history, hailstorms, and religion, Douglas Preston investigates the multiple mass-death events at Roopkund lake in the Himalayas, and the many differing and inconclusive theories about what happened there several centuries ago (The New Yorker) [more inside]
Boom Time
Outrageous Predictions for 2021
After an extraordinary year, the SaxoStrats are back with Outrageous Predictions for 2021. The events of 2020 have sent nearly every underlying social and technological supertrend into overdrive, bringing a once-distant future a quantum leap closer. But which "Future is Now" forecast do you think is most likely? [more inside]
"I feel so complete. Like really complete."
Decolonising The Arctic, One Tattoo At A Time (The Polar Connection): If Inuit tattooing once teetered on the brink of being lost, it is now returning as an integral part of Indigenous identity and culture in the Arctic. And this re-membering of not only tradition, but also a painful past, is a profound aspect of decolonisation. “We are just getting back to it, so give us a little bit of space to do that, to find what it is for us now. And then also, going forward, with the women we want so desperately to heal. If you are ‘woke’ and you admire the chin tattoos, understand that that’s because we need that healing and that we want it to be special for us.” The revival of Inuit hand-poke and skin-stitch tattooing has also lead to a book, Hovak Johnston's Reawakening Our Ancestors' Lines: Revitalizing Inuit Traditional Tattooing (Bookshop) -- which recently won an American Indian Youth Literature honor -- and documentaries like Tupik: Inuit Ink (Youtube) and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril's Tunniit: Retracing the Lines of Inuit Tattoos (Vimeo). More on Tunniit here. [more inside]
Doug Scott CBE, 29 May 1941 – 7 December 2020
Ikea catalog 1951-2020
The Ikea catalog is dead. Citing the rise of digital media over print, among other factors, Ikea says their 2020 print catalog will be its last annual edition. But with their browsable archive of seventy years of interior design, long live the Ikea catalog.
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