July 26, 2019
Metafilter: a certain type of mildly cultured person
“Oh, god,” says one friend when I bring up Taco Tinder. Within a few minutes, she’s sent me a handful of screenshots from Hinge mentioning tacos that she’d swiped through at that very moment. Other friends — men and women, most of them straight — say tacos were mentioned in anywhere from a third to 80 percent of bios they see.Why is everyone on Tinder so obsessed with tacos?
The tech of the 2019 Tour de France
Flying Squirrels? - Are Technica looks at the intense technological and technical flight skills required to provide the iconic travel-guide-style coverage of today's Tour de France. [more inside]
PoolOS 2.0
Jump in the pool and step back to 1986 with poolside.fm 2.0, with your music and video clips now infused with classic Mac OS flavor. [more inside]
Rosie the Riveter with renovations
Redesigning Women is the debut single from country music supergroup The Highwomen: Grammy winner Brandi Carlile, Americana star Amanda Shires, Grammy winner Maren Morris, and Grammy nominee Natalie Hemby. The video features the band and friends (a veritable who's who of female country stars, including Tanya Tucker, and Wynonna Judd) making a bonfire from the detritus of feminine stereotypes. [more inside]
Scam PACs ignore facts for fat stacks, then slack
Hollywood to Hengdian
Every Windows 3.1 theme
Ethylene glycol poisoning is extremely slow and lethal
Thirteen mystery writers discuss their favorite murders from their own works. Content advisory: Brief descriptions of deaths, ranging from amusing to icky to horrible. Also, spoilers galore. [more inside]
The Death of the Middlebrow Legal Thriller
Twenty-five years ago, Hollywood was enjoying a pipeline to success as clean and unobstructed as any. The paperback legal thrillers of author John Grisham featured in supermarkets across the nation, and starting with The Firm in 1993, were taking over movie theaters, too. [more inside]
Look for the helpers. Here are two.
Helping Underprivileged Kids:
Dale Schroeder lived simply for his entire life. He grew up poor, never married or had kids, and worked as a carpenter at the same company for 67 years. He owned just two pair of jeans and drove a rusty old Chevrolet truck. Shortly before his death in 2005, Schroeder told his attorney, Steve Nielsen, that he wanted to use his savings to help poor students in Iowa go to college. "I said, 'How much are we talking about, Dale?'" Nielsen told KCCI. "And he said, 'Oh, just shy of $3 million.' I nearly fell out of my chair."Helping Homeless People:
Make an appointment at Steller Hair Company and owner Katie Steller will offer you a seat in one of ten flame-red chairs. All are stationary. Her eleventh chair - the one she hauls to street corners in the back of her Nissan - is not. “If fear is contagious, why can’t kindness be?” the hair stylist asks.
Organic Beans, Hand-picked
Meet Balam.
Balam.
Loves .
Coffee.
He's not a big fan of Disney. He suffers for his art, his adoring public, the demands of fame, but relies on the love and support of his mom. You can learn more with #ConversationsWithBalam.
Just don't mention the sweater.
Balam.
Loves .
Coffee.
He's not a big fan of Disney. He suffers for his art, his adoring public, the demands of fame, but relies on the love and support of his mom. You can learn more with #ConversationsWithBalam.
Just don't mention the sweater.
Matthew Dear - "Bunny's Dream"
Matthew Dear - "Bunny's Dream" // A delightfully psychedelic music video for Matthew Dear from NYC-based Sam Rolfes (previously)., where he controls the characters and camera all at once. [more inside]
Reader, She Married Him *
In 2011, a 19-year-old college student named Zach Wahls delivered an impassioned defense of marriage equality in front of the Iowa House of Representatives. Wahls's speech, which cited his experience growing up as the son of a lesbian couple, went viral and caught the eye of then-23-year-old Chloe Angyal, who wrote for the irreverent feminist blog Feministing. Her post about Wahls's video was entitled Marry Me, Zach Wahls. Wahls declined the proposal but agreed to meet for an interview the next time he was in New York, after which he and Angyal stayed in touch. This week, after a multi-year, largely-long-distance relationship, the couple announced their engagement. [more inside]
"Sometimes all of us just reason sloppily"
In 2016, philosopher Eleanor Gordon-Smith decided to stop and persuade the men who catcalled her on the streets of Sydney to reconsider their behavior. She had mixed success, making for a compelling radio segment on This American Life. Ultimately her experience led to her new book Stop Being Reasonable, a study of the limits of reasoning, how we often get it fundamentally wrong, and how some of us change our minds.
Nice Tall Glass of Weinstein and Kumquat Trees
JaboOody Dubs has been kicking around the internet for a while. Previously noted in metafilter comments for old-school bite-size Billy Mays, Anthony Sullivan, and other informercial dubs. There are dozens. But what do comedy dubbers and Youtube personalities with so much time on their hands do when they're not doing infomercials? Endless game playthroughs, MST3K-style B-movie riffs, and this delightful gem, a brutal 7-hour deconstruction of Super Seducer, which is "the world’s most realistic seduction simulator" by "renowned seduction guru Richard La Ruina", who gets his just desserts here. And then another 5 hours of Super Seducer 2. So if you like cathartically cringing for 12 hours at the cringiest PUA creep on earth, this is for you. NOT SAFE FOR WORK, children, non-fans of depressingly stupid manchild humor, or anyone really.
Maybe It's Lyme
What happens when [chronic lyme disease] becomes an identity? This version of Lyme has no consistent symptoms, no fixed criteria, and no accurate test. This Lyme is a kind of identity. Lyme is a label for a state of being, a word that conveys your understanding of your lived experience. Lyme provides the language to articulate that experience and join with others who share it. In the world of chronic Lyme, doctors are trustworthy (or not) based on their willingness to treat Lyme. Tests are trustworthy (or not) based on their ability to confirm Lyme. Lyme is the fundamental fact, and you work backward from there. Lyme is a community with a cause: the recognition of its sufferers’ suffering — and, with it, the recognition of Lyme. [more inside]
How to catch a monster fish: use a lasso
Two kids in suburban Minneapolis spotted a gigantic fish while tubing down the creek and decided to catch it with some rope. They succeeded, and there was much rejoicing. [more inside]
South Dakota Violates First Amendment
Public school students in South Dakota will notice something different on their first day back to school — the national motto, "In God We Trust," prominently inscribed on walls in stencil or paint. [more inside]
The bright shining light of archaeological method and conscience
Pioneering Scottish archaeologist Alexander Henry Rhind was born on this day in 1833. Often overlooked due to his early death aged 29, Rhind is best known due to the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, the most extensive mathematical document preserved from ancient Egypt. He was also the first to systematically excavate a broch, a type of Iron Age drystone hollow-walled structure unique to northern Scotland, publishing a detailed plan and the finds from Kettleburn. Suffering from tuberculosis, Rhind travelled to Egypt and his Thebes, Its Tombs and Their Tenants became the first publication of a systematically excavated and recorded ancient Egyptian tomb. [more inside]
Everything Else is Child's Play
Take an $8800, NASA-approved interface glove (GECO) running on $250,000 worth of computer hardware, then replicate the performance in a consumer-grade toy with parts costing less than $26 (commercial). The twist? “We had about nine months to get it done,” Chris Gentile, one of the engineers behind Mattel’s fondly-remembered (clip from The Wizard) but ineffectual Power Glove (playing Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!), tells mental_floss. An Oral History of Nintendo's Power Glove (2017) Another video: the gaming historian spends a half hour to tell the story.
Prepare the standard "Rich and Famous" contract!
"The Muppet Movie is 40 now. And I could tell you that makes me feel old, but it doesn't. It oddly makes me feel just right. The music has been with me from when I was little until right now, and I can still listen to it and discover new things. How could you not?" Mefi's own Linda Holmes writes about the glories of The Muppet Movie and its music, 40 years on. [more inside]
You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record baby
Hey, do you want to see things spinning? Sometimes lots of things? Sometimes a few things? Sometimes in orbit! Look no further! Click things to make them bigger! Keep clicking to add them to your Spinventory and get a fresh set of Spinning Things! [more inside]
That blue ribbon buzz
Craft brew sales are up and major brew sales are down. PBR tries its hand at hard coffee to recapture some lost ground. Made with alcoholic malt beverage, PBR's hard coffee "kind of tastes like Starbucks' Frappuccino, honestly" and is being trialled in limited US markets to mixed reviews. "I could probably take it to work and no one would know!" says one taster.
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