July 10, 2019
Pleasing
"Reckoning with my Mother's Kidnapper" (Gay Mag) - This haunting and hard story about a young woman, kidnapped and assaulted, has so many raw truths going for it. From Roxane Gay's new publishing endeavor with Medium, so you know it's very good.
"Pleasing is how smaller creatures slip away to safety. We flatten and wiggle, if we have to, to get away. We can’t charge or block, we must deflect instead. We must be a little slippery."
Pizza Hut Training Video 1988
Pizza Hut Training Video 1988 "I was the single camera operator for this instructional video series from 1987-88, that was produced in a Chicagoland area, industrial test kitchen for Pizza Hut/PepsiCo.. Original recording on 3/4 inch U-Matic videotape."
Pair of supermassive black holes discovered on a collision course
A galaxy roughly 2.5 billion light-years away has a pair of supermassive black holes The titanic duo can help astronomers predict when the historic first detection of the background 'hum' of gravitational waves from supermassive black holes will be made and whether there truly is a 'final parsec problem'
Smoke 'em inside.
Baseball pitcher and author Jim Bouton has passed away at 80, after a long battle with cerebral amyloid angiopathy. [more inside]
Rip Torn is no longer outliving anything
RIP Elmore "Rip" Torn. Rip Torn, a prolific actor best known for HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show” and the “Men in Black” franchise, died Tuesday at his home in Lakeville, Connecticut, his representatives said. He was 88. [more inside]
So on a dare, I picked paleontology.
Queer voices in palaeontology (Nature magazine) - "Riley Black, who came out as transgender and non-binary this year, describes the challenges of cultivating diversity in a discipline with an ‘Indiana Jones’ image.". [more inside]
Operating Without Human Intervention
Back To The Land: How “re-wilding” can help turn the tide of climate change (The Nib) A 4.5-million-hectare national park in Chile is being brought back to life by restoring the land to nature. (Al Jazeera) Rewilding complex ecosystems (Science, Harvard summary) Ditch the lawn and rewild your garden (Guardian) Lessons from my neighbor’s rewilded lawn (medium) How can cities rewild? The Depavement movement. Rewilding, previously.
"I intend to be disruptive not with my presence, but with my ideas"
Fifty years ago, at a time when America was divided on questions of war, race, and gender, Alice de Rivera decided that she was fed up with John Jay High School, the local public school in Brooklyn. She was especially strong in math and science, and she scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on a city-wide math examination, but her high school was poor in those subjects, where Stuyvesant High School, a nearby specialized public school, excelled in those topic. But it was boys-only. How a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools (New Yorker) [more inside]
“I had to join. It was almost like a calling.”
The First Responders - "The black men from Pittsburgh who made up America's original paramedic corps wanted to make history and save lives - starting with their own." [more inside]
Birds who put all their stat points into Has No Chill and Has Yes Volume
The adventures at Lazy E Farm (belated multiple link Tumblr): Today Goofus the Peacock killed a mouse | Their first great flirtation | It’s not that the peacocks are smarter, but for some reason they care about things that don’t matter. | And they're jumpy about things they don't understand [more inside]
Searching for Keith
A detective’s quest reveals how one idealistic fisheries observer may have collided with criminals and desperate migrants—and paid for it with his life. (cw: human trafficking, murder, rape) [more inside]
Finding a New Baseball Home in the KBO
“Tikka masala is tasty, regardless of one's species.”
A bright orange bird was rescued from the highway. Turns out it was just a seagull covered in curry. [CBS News] “When strangers reported finding a bright orange bird alongside a highway, a British wildlife hospital didn't know what to expect. As they later found out, the potentially exotic bird they thought they'd be encountering was actually just a seagull covered completely in curry. [...] The hospital even named him "Vinny" after Vindaloo curry. Members of the hospital's veterinary team "bravely" bathed him to clean his feathers. After some reluctance, he let them scrub him. Photos from the hospital show Vinny's dramatic transformation –– from orange to mostly white.” [more inside]
One gator gentrifying
A four foot long alligator has been spotted in Chicago's Humboldt Park Lagoon.
In the face of significant public interest, the Chicago PD gently discourages amateur reptile hunters from attempting a citizen's arrest.
Strong stories that don’t resort to the same old clichés.
"There is indeed a healthy audience for thrillers without violence towards women." The Staunch book prize is "For A Thriller In Which No Woman Is Beaten, Stalked, Sexually Exploited, Raped Or Murdered." It was launched in 2018 by Bridget Lawless (IMDB, Twitter, Amazon). [more inside]
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