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Japanese Music Sirens
A lengthy post at airRaidSirens.net details the mechanical Yamaha Music Sirens of Japan. These can be played with a keyboard, but sadness: "some were being removed or are going to run until they die and will not be repaired." And if they're replaced, it will naturally be with something electronic. They play familiar old tunes which signal the start of a factory's working day, etc. There's a link to a playlist embedded in the article.
"No ideas but in things" is an idea not a thing
No the CIA Didn't Invent "Show Don't Tell".
Or maybe they did? Perhaps the effects of CIA money on the Iowa Writer's Workshop are overblown, but this piece in Current Affairs makes a strong case how the CIA has influenced "literature" in America. (previously)
“Everything That’s Bad, We Do in Tela"
Dan Exton, the head of research at Operation Wallacea, recalls standing on the beach in Tela with Antal for the first time and thinking there couldn’t possibly be a coral reef beneath the murky water. “I almost cancelled the dive,” he said. But as soon as he descended, Exton saw “mind-blowing coral. I’d never seen a reef like that. Everywhere you looked, something unusual was happening.” from The Mystery of the Healthy Coral Reef [Nautilus; ungated]
Dashing Diva Nails Abandoned MLM Plans After Executive Rant Sent to ALL
I'm a guy, so I have never heard of Dashing Diva, which I understand has a cult following for its high-quality pre-made nails with great color selection, and reasonable prices, and they sell direct as well as in major drugstores and supermarkets.
However, I do track MLMs at times, and I was surprised to see a mention on BehindMLM.com that DashingDivas had abandoned their attempt to go MLM after major member backlash.
And the story indeed had less to do with MLM, and more to do with one man's hubris...
The trunnions support the rotor in the turret structure
War Thunder is an MMO about tanks and guns and things. Its playerbase has a lot of overlap with people who use tanks and guns for a living, as evidenced by how they won't stop leaking classified documents to ask for changes to the video game.
A lungful of air is like a multifunction toolkit for humpback whales
For Humpbacks, Bubbles Can Be Tools (Doug Perrine, Hakai Magazine, 2022-12-20)
"Hollywood Fireball" like no other
Nikki Finke, "Hollywood's most reviled reporter" died last October, and was just as good at breaking power structures as she was in burning bridges...
"She could be rude, aggressive, highhanded — so it wasn’t a shock that, mixed into the respectful newspaper obituaries and affectionate tributes, there were harsh takedowns." [Warning: SLNYT]
🎉Fundraising Wrap-Up: You've put MetaFilter on the road to Revival!
A few months ago we came to you with information we had just learned about the dire financial state of MetaFilter. The site was losing money every month and the cash reserves keeping it afloat had run dry. The situation was grim. But MeFites, you stepped up in a big, big way: recurring contributions have gone up by $9,863.10 and we have received $78,857.91 in one-time contributions (both figures are net). This means that according to our targets MetaFilter has more than enough budget to Survive, and is within striking distance of Revive!
There are more details inside about the specifics of the fundraiser and how the funds will be used, so please keep reading…
I love you so bad.
It's the coolest mutual admiration society event ever. On The Amber Ruffin Show - John Oliver Explains How The Brits Do Christmas, and We Have Questions [YT 13:25]. Crackers and minced pie are covered. And, how do they really feel about giant red bows in car commercials and It's a Wonderful Life?
A Marxist View of Tolkien’s Middle Earth
“A Marxist View of Tolkien’s Middle Earth” by John Molyneux, 11 January 2023
J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy world is a medieval utopia with poverty and oppression airbrushed out of the picture. But Tolkien’s work also contains a romantic critique of industrial capitalism that is an important part of its vast popular appeal.
The Little Cajun Saint
The Miraculous Life and Afterlife of Charlene Richard. In 1959, a bright and devout young girl died of leukemia in Lafayette, Louisiana. Over the next sixty years, her story was transformed, beginning with folk sainthood in America's most Catholic country and traveling through the machinations of creating saints in an embattled modern Church.
NYT Magazine longread with option to listen; gift link.
NYT Magazine longread with option to listen; gift link.
Ukraine war continuing into 2023
The war has been going on for close to 11 months, and yesterday another donor conference in Ramstein was concluded. There has been significant support pledged the week leading up to the conference, but the thing on most observer's minds have been the German government's unwillingness to greenlight Leopard 2 tank donations or sales. No resolution was reached during the conference, but Germany stated that they ware looking into what stocks were available in-country, while stating that anyone is free to provide Leopard 2 training to Ukrainian crews.
Providing fighter jets have seemed like a lost cause, but the Netherlands said that they were open to providing Ukraine with F-16s, re-igniting hope.
How boygenius Became the World’s Most Exciting Supergroup
On their own, Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus are three accomplished singer-songwriters. Together, they're a one-of-a-kind band powered by friendship, sick books, and sicker songs. [Rolling Stone / Archive, boygenius previously and previouslier]
"Baah!" "That's enough!"
Caterina Valente shows Dean Martin how to sing the one note samba.
An utterly charming performance.
If you want a literary award, simply attend Harvard
Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, later joined by Claire Grossman, began by noticing that poetry readings they regularly attended were held in “mainly white rooms.” They wanted to know why...Because prizes are a normative standard for success, they collected data on prizes — every prize since 1918 worth $10,000 or more in 2022 dollars. They recorded who won, what their gender and race were, where they earned their degrees, and who served as judges. Then they published what they found in a series of essays. What did they find?
Nightmare fuel
99 years-old artist Huang Yongyu designed the Year of the Rabbit (from Hell) zodiac stamp for the Chinese postal service. Huang actually came on livestream to talk about his red-eyed blue rabbit, expressing that drawing a rabbit is something fun, something celebratory, and that he just hoped his rabbit would make people happy. "But it doesn't," one person replied. From What's on Weibo founder Manya Koetse.
Geezer Happy Hour
NYT reporter Joe Bernstein and his wife were headed home early. It was cold out, and the club around the corner had music, so they stepped inside to wait for their cab. The band was playing primitive garage rock: fast, loud, hard. The place was packed. There were women in skintight red dresses, long-haired men sucking down bottles of beer and couples flirting in the alcove outside the bathrooms. In fact, just one thing distinguished the crowd from nearly any other rock n' roll show: almost everyone was over 65. Twitter thread. NYT article. Archive.
Tedious posts about infrastructure...
.. but in Antarctica! This is the premise of brr.fyi ⛄, a cool little blog written by an IT worker who is currently at the South Pole.
Duo Ruut
Duo Ruut are an Estonian duo who sing haunting melodies and rhythms together while playing a single Estonian zither between themselves--a traditional instrument played in a non-traditional way. Check out their songs Tuule sõnad and Nightingale.
Adrian Bliss: In the Body Compilation
"Hang on--Are you a dessert?"
A compilation of Adrian Bliss sketches about the body.
Nashua, NH meetup!
Edit: let's do this! Winter New England meetup
The miracle of the commons
Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. 3700 words from Michelle Nijhuis for Aeon Magazine [an update to a previous post]
How many pounds of weed inside my CD's?
When the Adams County Ohio Sherriff's Department raided Afroman's house, he turned the security footage of their fruitless raid into a music video.
Bye-Frois
Online literary magazine Berfrois is shutting down. Some of its contributors say farewell. The archive will remain available.
"It was revelatory for younger Asians"
In 1982, no-one had ever seen a British Asian teenager in a sari singing Indian music on Top of the Pops – until Chandra appeared, with a raga-influenced single that would inspire musicians for decades. The music video. The article.
A "person off the street" solves 20,000-year Ice Age drawings mystery
A London furniture conservator has been credited with a crucial discovery that has helped understand why Ice Age hunter-gatherers drew cave paintings. (BBC)
Styrofoam Boots 2:40
Jeremiah Green, founding member and drummer for Modest Mouse, has died at age 45.
Green performed only at the start of the band's 25th anniversary tour of their much-acclaimed album, The Lonesome Crowded West, and left to undergo treatment for cancer.
NAH LLC
White contractors wouldn’t remove Confederate statues. So a Black man did it.
He didn’t seek the job. He had never paid much attention to Civil War history. City and state officials said they turned to Team Henry Enterprises after a long list of bigger contractors — all White-owned — said they wanted no part of taking down Confederate statues.
it’s always worth pausing when we’re told “X University” “banned” Y
I don’t know if you heard, but Stanford University banned the word “Americans” (SL Substack from Stanford professor Adrian Daub).
I am notorious for getting myself signed up for way too university mailing lists ...I also don’t delete emails. In those 29,000 emails [in Daub's inbox], the acronym “EHLI” or “elimination of harmful language” doesn’t appear once. If Stanford “announced” a policy “banning” use of the word “American”, surely it wouldn’t forget to tell its tenured faculty members.
Misogynist Monster Fucks Around, Finds Out
After having his Twitter account reinstated, alt-right influencer and misogynist Andrew Tate decided to pick a fight with climate activist Greta Thunberg, and quickly found himself on the wrong side of her acerbic wit. His reaction to her snark wound up being much more serious for Tate, as he revealed he was currently in Romania - where he was facing charges of kidnapping, rape, and human trafficking. Needless to say, the Romanian police responded by arresting Tate and his brother Tristan.
The Case for Team Non-Teeming
Why We Might Be Alone
David Kipping, of Columbia University, takes on the usual arguments for a universe that is “teeming with life” and finds them all wanting.
The Dear Diary rule
The story of how an unaired TV pilot
from David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada, Band of Brothers, etc.) starring Bebe Neuwirth won an Oscar. (Grainy YouTube video of the pilot included in the link.)
"I was wrong... And so was everyone"
Tom Scott apologises:
So it turns out the whole history about fire brigades not coming to put out fires if you're not insured with them wasn't true at all. (SLYT; 7 mins with link to the longer report, which is here)
The RECEPTIO-Rossi Affair
A specialist on medieval manuscript noticed a possible case of plagiarism. They started looking into it, and found out that nobody is real and nothing is real. The rest of the are worth looking into as well.
The worst-selling Microsoft product of all time
"One of my former colleagues spoke with the person who took over from him as the support specialist for OS/2 for Mach 20. According to that person’s memory (which given the amount time that has elapsed, means that we should basically be saying “according to legend” at this point), a total of eleven copies of “OS/2 for Mach 20” were ever sold, and eight of them were returned."
Explicitly Acknowledging All the Other Possible Routes, the Unread Books
Yet even as a “mode,” literature’s circulations still move well beyond any single reader’s reach. Any individual scholar is constrained by context and limited by their languages, and so overwhelmed by world literature writ large. In an essay a decade later, [David] Damrosch revisited the issues of scale and position: “At once exhilarating and unsettling, the range and variety of literatures now in view raise serious questions about scale, of translation and comprehension, and of persisting imbalances of economic and cultural power.” from World Literature Comes Full Circle, 1522–2022 by Kevin Riordan
last dance on the grey
Skeal is a short (about 3-5 minutes) browser game made in Unity. Sound required for the full effect.
The tiny Paris pastel shop that changed art history
"The Maison du Pastel shop, off rue Rambuteau, opens only on Thursday afternoons. In this small window of time, Isabelle and Margaret serve their customers like they are selling elixirs for the soul. They spend the rest of the week at their atelier in a village 60km outside Paris, where they live in a dilapidated house previously owned by Isabelle’s ancestors. There they make 1,800 shades by hand, using a method passed down from Henri Roché Sr, which has changed little since the 18th century." 'The tiny Paris pastel shop that changed art history,' (archive.ph here). (Stolen from today's Chartbook, I should confess!)
"I’m tired of losing outlets to conglomeration."
Bookforum magazine (previously (an incomplete list)), launched in 1994, recently announced that the current issue would be the last. An appreciation.
The Weird Joy of Chindogu
"Chindogu is a Japanese word meaning “weird tool.” These (almost) useless inventions might address a challenge, but they also create bigger problems....While inventions like these are usually not practical for their intended purpose, they can still be charming, evocative, and funny, and give us something that successful inventions can’t. They offer a moment’s deviation from some prescribed path to success, a pause in the slog of value creation, to allow a moment’s worth of weird joy....The Chindogu Society has published ten underlying – and surprisingly deep – tenets. They espouse an endearing earnestness, speak to the bizarre failures of late-stage capitalism, and underline Chindogu’s appeal across cultural and linguistic divides, offering more interesting musings on failure than most of our fables or motivational posters in the process."