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Brandon Semenuk Flipping His Bicycle Off the Side of a Mountain

The thing about going out into the badlands of Alberta and riding your bicycle off the side of the mountain and doing flips where you kick your legs out and such, is the flips isn’t really the hardest part here. The hard part is making it look as great and stylish as Brandon Semenuk does here in Afterlife.

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The Marlins will energize their stadium this year by telling fans to bring their instruments. The notice forbids pots and pans, but doesn’t say shit about keytars. The team only wants instrument playing during certain moments, to which I say good luck.

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NPR Tiny Desk Concert 2024 Submission of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra

The Boston Typewriter Orchestra is “a collective endeavor which engages in rhythmic typewriter manipulation combined with elements of performance, comedy and satire.” They recently submitted to be on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts with Selectric Funeral, their first piece to feature an electric typewriter.

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Writer Adam Sharp has made a list of how you’d say couch potato in 8 other languages including divine hag of the ashes (Irish), slipper guy (Italian), and armchair fungus (Flemish). Collect all 8!

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How Would You Turn This Dial To Make The Freezer Colder

Imagine you own an ice cream shop and the thermostat on your dipping cabinet, which is the freezer ice cream is dipped (scooped) out of, is set to 4, which is too warm, and you want to make the freezer colder. Are you setting this dial to 3 or to 5 to make the freezer colder? I asked the Gracie’s followers on Instagram earlier this year and there was lots of discussion. Comment below with your answer unless you already follow Gracie’s on Instagram, in which case, zip it, buster.

confusingfreezerdial.jpg

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Bears in a Boat

A bear enclosure at Woburn Safari Park in Bedfordshire flooded so the zookeepers gave the bears a swan boat to entertain them because as everyone knows, black bears are often mollified by large watercraft shaped like other animals, though you never want to give them a boat shaped like a vole for obvious reasons. The bears are called Harvard, Maple, Colorado, and Aspen, and I might be losing my mind because I stg there are 5 bears in this picture? Deputy Head of Carnivores, Tommy Babbington mused the bears were “immediately intrigued” by the boat, though admittedly I only quoted him here so I could use the phrase Deputy Head of Carnivores, Tommy Babbington, which is about the most best combination of job title and name I’ve ever heard.

But for real, how many bears do you see?

bearsinswanboat.jpg

(via Present & Correct)

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We’ve Only Been Roasting Veggies Since the 80s

According to this 2014 article in Slate, roasting vegetables is a cooking technique popularized only in the 80s/90s.

The concept of roasting as a general vegetable technique seems to have originated in a famous Italian restaurant: Johanne Killeen and George Germon’s Al Forno, which opened in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1980. Forno means oven in Italian, and the critically acclaimed chefs made ample use of that apparatus.

This is a fact, which makes me feel old because I lived through it and makes me feel young because I lived through it. Old because I can remember a time before roasting vegetables was how anyone who is anyone prepared them, and young because what other cooking techniques are we going to invent during my lifetime? It’s a little like watching cities develop. For example, I used to work down in Fort Point in Boston and there were a ton of parking lots and then the guy who owned the parking lots sold them, bought the Los Angeles Baseball Dodgers and those parking lots have become a huge and glitzy neighborhood (?) with condos and offices and commerce

As another aside, there’s a 1993 NYT article quoted in the Slate piece and I’m quoting the first three sentences here for reasons I will expound upon afterward.

Roasting wafts through the senses. In culinary terms it is freighted with mouthwatering aroma, comforting warmth, a crisping sizzle and anticipated succulence. And lately it is more appreciated than ever.

Anyway, the use of “freighted” just reminded me of the Emily Dickinson quotation, “The freight should be proportioned to the groove” from the poem That Love is all there is. It’s a delightful poem and you can read it in about 3 seconds and think about it for the rest of your life.

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Jalapeños are less spicy now because big pepper product producers procure alternate heat for their products anyway and farmers generally produce what the big pepper product producers want. (At least Brussels sprouts taste better, too.)

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Hello, Everyone, Let’s Have A Week

I am excited to be back editing Kottke.org this week for the first time in one thousand years, and I am also scared because what if I don’t remember how to write on the internet? Everything has changed from how it used to be and also has it really? As long as they still make skateboarding videos, we’ll be OK I’m sure.

As Jason mentioned, I own an ice cream shop called Gracie’s and an ice cream shop that is also a bar called Earnest Drinks, and you should come to them. A few years ago, I put out a kids’ book called Salty Avocado with Chris, I’m hoping to put out another kids’ book this year, and like Jason said, I’m almost done with a novel I hope you get to read sometime.

This week we’re gonna have some videos of people doing stuff and also other internet about food and animals, we’re gonna say mean things about Intuit, we’re gonna quote Eli Cash, and maybe we’ll do something about ice cream if y’all want to because it’s something about which I know a good amount. If you see any typos, no you didn’t. The last time I edited for a week, there were lots of websites still, and now it feels like there are hardly any, so if you see any good links, please send them over on Blue Sky.

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Welcome Aaron Cohen Back to the Site

a group of people posing 'Hard Style' for a photo

Hey, Jason here. I’m off this week (Mar 25-29) to spend some time with family (and Edith is working on Drawing Media), so my friend and ice cream impresario Aaron Cohen will be taking over the site again (he previously guest edited a couple of times in the ’10s). He owns and operates Gracie’s Ice Cream & Earnest Drinks and I hear he’s working on a novel.

As an ice cream man, Aaron keeps things fun — he takes Hard Style photos with patrons (he’s the one in hat above), makes ice cream tribute flavors for Carly Rae Jepsen (Call Me PB and Carlymel Rae Jepsen), writes a linky newsletter for the shops, and has cool merch.

Welcome back, Aaron!

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An FTC report says large grocery chains “used rising costs as an opportunity to further hike prices” and “pressured suppliers to favor them over competitors” during pandemic supply chain disruptions, while posting strong profits.

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Hands and Feet, Full of Color

I’m happy to run across the illustrations of Lui Ferreyra again, particularly his drawings of hands and feet.

colored pencil drawing of a hand

colored pencil drawing of a pair of hands grabbing ankles

(via colossal)

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Impressively realistic build of a full-size 3D printed Macintosh 128K. It boots from a floppy and everything.

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Chappell Roan’s Tiny Desk Concert


Lately I’ve been hearing a lot about Chappell Roan, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter from Missouri, so I watched her NPR Tiny Desk Concert and loved it.

(Bizarrely, I first heard of her while chasing down info about Sinéad O’Connor: I saw mention that there was a Sinéad-themed Bratz Doll, but it turned out there was just a rendering of Sinéad as a Bratz Doll — no actual physical doll — as part of their Women’s History Month programming. Sinéad was the second female icon to be Bratz-ified; Chappell Roan was the first.)

In an article from earlier this week, Rolling Stone called Roan “the future of pop.” Her musicians are fabulous, too.

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A good read: master tailor Martin Greenfield’s obituary. “Two ripped Nazi shirts helped this Jew build America’s most famous and successful custom-suit company.”

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I Am the New York Times’ Paywall, and If I Let Any Non-Subscribers in, They’ll Kill My Family. “That’s right, just type the password in the box. Nice and easy.”

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1000% agreement from me on this: Don’t Miss This Eclipse. “So, if you can, go see it. The spectacle will be worth it.”

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From bassist Colin Greenwood, How to Disappear — a Portrait of Radiohead (Amazon). “Including 97 behind the scenes photographs of Radiohead, most of which are previously unseen, and a 10,000-word intimate essay by Colin Greenwood on life in Radiohead.”

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Ghanaian Fantasy Coffin Maker Paa Joe

a human-sized coffin shaped like a Sony Walkman

a human-sized coffin shaped like an NYC taxi cab

a human-sized coffin shaped like a bottle of medicine

a human-sized coffin shaped like a lion

Ghanaian sculptor Paa Joe makes coffins (both human-sized and mini sculptures) modeled after real-life objects that were important to the deceased. He just opened his first NYC solo show at Superhouse; from their description of his work:

Paa Joe is a second-generation fantasy coffin maker, contributing to an artistic tradition of great importance around Ghana’s capital, Accra. Known as abeduu adeka, or proverb boxes, these end-of-life vessels illustrate Ghanaian beliefs concerning life and death. Since the 1960s, the artist has meticulously carved and painted figurative coffins, representing various living and inanimate objects symbolizing the deceased (an onion for a farmer, an eagle for a community leader, a sardine for a fisherman, etc.).

You read more about Paa Joe’s work and see more of his pieces at The Guardian:

“People celebrate death in Ghana. At a funeral, we have a passion for the person leaving us - there are a lot of people, and a lot of noise,” says Jacob, 28, who has worked with his father for eight years.

Far from seeing their work as morbid, Jacob says the coffins are celebratory and reflect west African attitudes to death. “It reminds people that life continues after death, that when someone dies they will go on in the afterlife, so it is important that they go in style.”

And at The Future Perfect, Fad, Hypebeast, and on Instagram. (via @presentandcorrect)

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In a study comparing the perceived scents of infants, toddlers, and adolescents: Toddlers Smell Like Flowers, Teens Smell ‘Goatlike’.

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John Green on how tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest disease, is completely curable and the roadblock to helping rid the world of it is money. “The tests are great. If only we could afford them.”

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The teaser trailer for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Catherine O’Hara all return.

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In case anyone is ever in the market for strange and cheerful custom rugs, I enthusiastically recommend Opal Rugs, handmade by the New Mexico-based Alyse Ronayne. (And here’s her website.) We have two, and they are gorgeous!

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Things That Don’t Work. For instance: “Fixing relationship problems by having a baby.” Also: “multivitamins” and “wanting to be liked.”

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On Returning to Childhood Hobbies

I really enjoyed this Cup of Jo essay about the pleasure of coming back to childhood hobbies as an adult:

The student in the session before mine is a hedge-fund guy in his 50s, and we giggle at each other in the doorway between our two lessons, as if we’re seeing through the graying hair and trench coats and wedding rings to greet our promising, 16-year-old selves.

I know I’ve mentioned this here before, but my own life transformed when I got back into what I loved as a kid (drawing!). I picked it up when I stopped drinking, and it’s since become one of the cornerstones of my day.

And then on the other end of the spectrum are the hobbies we discover in mid-life, when there’s less expectation of doing “well” or of turning anything into a career, and those rule, too. It’s never too late!

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The Majesty of Cold Mountain

coldmountain.jpg
Okay, the NY Times writer Ruth Graham recently tweeted this, and it’s so wonderful that I’m going to copy part of it word for word — the tweet is a photograph of the following letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review section (not online):

TO THE EDITOR:

Way back in 1997, when Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” was released, I was given a copy as a present. When I flipped it over, I was struck by a blurb that seemed excessive, bordering on parody. One Rick Bass said of the novel that it “is so magnificent — in every conceivable aspect, and others perviously unimagined — that it has occurred to me that the shadow of this book, and the joy I received in reading it, will fall over every other book I ever read.” It felt so hyperbolic that it put me off trusting blurbs on dust jackets forever.

So imagine my surprise when I opened the Feb. 4 By the Book feature to see Rick Bass answer the question “What books are on your night stand?” And he replied, “‘Cold Mountain (‘re-re-re-read).”” He has restored my faith in the humble, oft-dismissed blurb in one fell swoop. It was that important to him! Lesson learned.

Christopher Vyce
Cambridge, Mass.

As Ruth put it: “Pure and total delight! A perfect letter!” Here’s Bass’s By the Book interview, by the way. I haven’t read Cold Mountain, but I’m not sure if this makes me want to or not. I’d almost rather leave it as this legendary.

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Sitting here in an old Patagonia fleece, I couldn’t feel aesthetically further from these astonishing emeralds, but they sure are fun to look at.

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Diary Comics, Nov. 30-Dec.2

It’s another Thursday Afternoon With Edith, this time with a ton of journal comics because I feel emboldened by the new “show full post” option (thanks, Jason!), so I can hide things and not clutter up the homepage. These comics pick up from when I was guest-editing this site back in the fall.
nov30.jpg
dec1a.jpg
dec2header.jpg
dec2.jpg

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Making Connections

My teen daughter doesn’t care for crosswords or the Spelling Bee, but she does try to play Connections every day. We were working on this one together a few days ago and when I suggested SNAIL GALAXY CYCLONE SUNFLOWER as a group, she said “I was thinking spirals but sunflowers are round”. Which prompted a discussion about the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio (which she’d covered in math class) and a search for videos that explained how the sequence pops up in nature and, specifically, sunflowers.

As beautiful as the sunflower is, isn’t it even lovelier knowing there is a deep mathematical order to it?

That quote reminds me of Richard Feynman’s thoughts on the beauty of nature:

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty.

First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees.

I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

Games, language, mathematics, the beauty of flowers, science, time spent together — Connections indeed.

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A nice remembrance of Lisa Lane, perhaps an inspiration for The Queen’s Gambit and the first chess player to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. “Lisa Lane was an icon and a woman far ahead of her time.”

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The sights and sounds of various video game systems being switched on, from the Atari 2600 up to the newest systems. The nostalgia! I hadn’t heard the NES power button sound in 20 years but it was instantly recognizable.

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1600-Person Pub Choir Sings Radiohead’s Creep

Pub Choir is an Australia-based organization that gets large crowds singing popular tunes, in three-part harmony no less.

Everybody can sing. Like, not well, but literally. Why should being average at something stop you from doing it!? It hasn’t yet… Singing is good for you, it’s EASY, and Pub Choir is here to show you how.

With a show that is equal parts music, comedy, and beer, Pub Choir is a euphoric sensation that transforms a crowd of tipsy strangers into a legendary choir.

By the end of the show the YOU will be belting out a popular song in three-part harmony.

In the video above, they get a crowd of 1600 people signing Creep by Radiohead. Beautiful.

You can find more of their performances on their YouTube channel, including Tina Turner’s The Best, Africa by Toto, and Free Fallin’ by Tom Petty.

See also Choir! Choir! Choir! and their performances of Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U and David Byrne singing David Bowie’s Heroes. (thx, matthew)

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It seems like there’s going to be a third Downton Abbey movie. The relatively low-budget movies made good money at the box office, so why not?

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A team at NASA is trying to reestablish communication with Voyager 1 after a malfunction left the probe broadcasting jibberish. The problem: debugging the issue from almost 1 light-day away is challenging!

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Welcome to Choppke’s, Your Wich Is My Command

A couple of years ago, frustrated by a takeout Italian sandwich with unevenly distributed fillings, I had a wonderful, life-changing idea: chopped sandwiches. It’s like what you get at those chopped salad places but instead of chopping up all the ingredients and putting them into a bowl, you put them between two slices of bread or in a hoagie roll or whatever. That way, you get all of the elements of the sandwich — cheese, tomato, lettuce, dressing/mayo, onion, whatever — in every single bite. Yum.

Chopwiches already exist — tuna salad, Philly cheesesteaks, chicken salad, egg salad — and they’re amazing because you get all of their deliciousness in every bite. I just wanted to extend that enjoyment to many other types of sandwich: banh mi, BLT, Italian sub, gyro, turkey club, and even the humble ham and cheese. Great idea, right? I wanted to open a chopped sandwich restaurant and change the world.

Then I made a mistake: I told people about my idea. And every single one of them laughed at me. To my face! My friends, my kids, everyone. It was a heartbreaking moment but as an entrepreneur, I knew I had to persist and follow my dream. Like Wayne Gretzky said: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” And I was going to win.

But the whole thing became a joke for awhile and I had to play along, biding my time. My friend Caroline came up with a name: Choppke’s. We brainstormed slogans and things the sandwich artists could say to patrons:

  • Choppke’s. You’ll Love It to Bits.
  • Welcome to Choppke’s, your wich is my command.
  • As you wich. [In response to any customer query.]
  • Welcome to Choppke’s! What can I get chopping for you today?

I asked ChatGPT to come up with a logo; this was my favorite one:

a logo for Choppke's

When (not if!) Choppke’s gets huge, there’s gonna be a corporate jet, so I wanted to see what that was going to look like:

a large jet airplane with a Choppke's logo on it

Caroline got me a custom-made hat for my birthday (actual hat and actual dopey human wearing it, not AI-generated):

Jason wearing a Choppke's hat

Ever so slowly, I was winning her over, despite every fiber of her being telling her that a chopped sandwich restaurant was the stupidest idea she’d ever heard and causing her to question the entire basis of our relationship. And if I could get one person on my side, a person who thought I was an idiot, the rest of the world would surely follow. Ideas + persistence = manifesting your reality.

I think it was the legendary management guru Michael Scott (quoting IBM founder Steve Jobs) who said “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. Well, my long chopped sandwich skate has finally paid off — the puck is here! According to The Takeout, the chopped sandwich is all the rage on TikTok!

If you enjoy a good chopped salad, the kind where every component (veggies, cheese, protein) is chopped into uniformly forkable bites and then tossed in dressing, you’re halfway to a chopped salad sandwich, sometimes just referred to as a chopped sandwich. It’s simply any version of that same salad, just stuffed into a hinge-cut roll. The shape of the roll is crucial, as it prevents all the fillings from falling out the sides.

Yes, exactly. Wow. I’ve never felt so seen. What’s that smell? No, not a delicious chopped sandwich…it’s the sweet smell of V-I-N-D-I-C-A-T-I-O-N.

Nearly any filling is a candidate for a chopped salad sandwich, and that’s the part that appeals most to TikTok users. Beyond the go-to Italian sub, you can create chopped salad sandwiches that contain Vietnamese banh mi ingredients, wedge salads, Caesar salads, whatever your heart desires. And that versatility means it’s a goldmine for social media content.

A goldmine! You’re goddamn right it’s a goldmine! The time is right, the market is PRIMED, Gen Z is on board, it’s now or never. We’re gonna do it, Choppke’s is a go!

Now, just to properly calibrate expectations, I haven’t looked at any commercial real estate nor have I made a single chopped sandwich of any kind at home to test out whether they actually taste better or not because I just know they will. What I do have is the idea (which is amazing, as we’ve agreed), a janky misspelled AI logo, and a dream.

Right now, you’re probably wondering how you can help, how you can climb aboard this rocket ship, how you can secure a place in a better future for us all. Well, I’m happy to announce that you can join the movement for better, tastier sandwiches today by zhuzhing yourself up with an exclusive Choppke’s t-shirt!

a handsomer man than Jason wearing a Choppke's tshirt

All proceeds from shirt sales will be pumped into developing the Choppke’s franchise (or, if that doesn’t work out, buying myself sandwiches from the local deli). Thanks for the support everyone — even though I could have done it without you, I definitely couldn’t have done it without you.

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The Enablers

This is quite a paragraph from Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review (titled The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers (subhead: “The Nazi leader didn’t seize power; he was given it.”)) of Timothy Ryback’s new book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power:

Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.

I got this via Clayton Cubitt, who says “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”


An inexplicably deep dive into a little-watched sitcom called Til Death. “Since nobody was watching and nothing was at stake, the show’s writers went in some really weird directions just for the hell of it.”

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Celebrity Marathoners

marathonnumber.jpg

In case anyone saw the news that Lil Nas X ran a half-marathon last weekend and then thought, Hm I wonder if other celebrities have run marathons? (as I did), the answer is: Yes, a lot, and last fall Runners World put together a long list of them, with each of the runners’ times. Shoutout to Bryan Cranston for running a 3:20! 🔥

Elsewhere in marathon news, Romper has a good story about a marathoner recovering from a birth injury. (“I’m losing my mind a little bit.”)

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A dedicated community of gamers is racing to complete every uncleared level in Super Mario Maker before Nintendo shuts down the Wii U servers on April 8. They’ve cleared thousands of levels and are down to 1 particularly thorny level.

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Last year, MacKenzie Scott announced plans to give $250 million to nonprofit organizations through an open call process. Yesterday, she revealed the gifts will actually total $640 million. Scott has given away $17.3 billion in total.

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The Vela Supernova Remnant

an image of the Vela supernova remnant

This stunning 1.3 gigapixel image of the Vela supernova remnant comes to us courtesy of the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. From PetaPixel:

The Vela Supernova remnant, located about 800 light-years away from Earth, is the cosmic corpse of a massive star that exploded 11,000 years ago. It is one of the closest supernova remnants to Earth and the perfect subject for the remarkable Dark Energy Camera.

The supernova is a vast cosmic structure about 100 light-years across. For context, one would have to travel around the Earth 200 million times to have traveled a single light-year.

an image of the Vela supernova remnant that shows some of its structure

The full image of the supernova remnant is worth exploring. You can also watch this zoom-in of the image to observe the high level of detail available.

(via colossal)

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It’s one of those days when I’m thinking about the interactive hot springs map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Red = boiling, orange = hot, yellow = warm.

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Back in 2012, some French apiaries were producing blue, green, and brown honey because their bees were visiting a factory that was processing waste from making M&Ms.; Unsellable? Genius marketing idea you mean!

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Why Weather Forecasts Have Gotten So Good

You may not have noticed, but weather forecasts — temperature, precipitation, hurricane tracks — have improved greatly over the past few decades.

a graph that shows that weather forecasts have become much more accurate since 1981

Dr. Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data explains why.

The first big change is that the data has improved. More extensive and higher-resolution observations can be used as inputs into the weather models. This is because we have more and better satellite data, and because land-based stations are covering many more areas around the globe, and at a higher density. The precision of these instruments has improved, too.

These observations are then fed into numerical prediction models to forecast the weather. That brings us to the next two developments. The computers on which these models are run have gotten much faster. Faster speeds are crucial: the Met Office now chunks the world into grids of smaller and smaller squares. While they once modeled the world in 90-kilometer-wide squares, they are now down to a grid of 1.5-kilometer squares. That means many more calculations need to be run to get this high-resolution map. The methods to turn the observations into model outputs have also improved. We’ve gone from very simple visions of the world to methods that can capture the complexity of these systems in detail.

The final crucial factor is how these forecasts are communicated. Not long ago, you could only get daily updates in the daily newspaper. With the rise of radio and TV, you could get a few notices per day. Now, we can get minute-by-minute updates online or on our smartphones.

If you’re in the US, you can see how accurate the weather forecast is in your area by using ForecastAdvisor.

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On the cultural division of local and global fans of Premier League teams. “What happens to a community institution when the market drags it away from the community?”

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Don’t Be the Best. Be the Only.

I’ve been dipping in and out of Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier for the last few months and keep coming back to one of his tidbits of advice:

Don’t be the best. Be the only.

In a short clip from a longer interview, Kelly explains what he means by this:

You want to be doing something where it’s hard to explain to your mother what it is that you do. So it’s like, “What is it? Well, it’s not quite radio. I don’t know. It’s like talking.” And so that’s where you want to be. You want to be the only. You want to — and that’s a very high bar because it requires a tremendous amount of self-knowledge and awareness to get to that point, to really understand what it is that you do better than anybody else in the world. And for most of us, it takes all our lives to figure that out.

And we also, by the way, need family, friends, colleagues, customers, clients, everyone around us to help us understand what it is that we do better than anybody else because we can’t really get there by yourself. You can’t do thinkism, you can’t figure your way there, you have to try and live it out. And that’s why most people’s remarkable lives are full of detours and dead ends and right turns because it’s a very high bar. But if you can get there — you don’t need a resume, there’s no competition. And it’s easy for you because you’re doing it. You’re not looking over your shoulder, you’re just right there. So don’t aim to be the best. Be the only.

Although it works in many situations, my interpretation of this aphorism is from the point of view of a creative person. There’s a point in your work/career/journey when you reach an escape velocity of sorts from your peers and the world around you. What you offer to others is just different enough that you become your own category of one: nothing but you will do. Not better, different. I don’t know if I’m there yet in my creative trajectory, but it’s been a worthy goal to pursue — it takes you inside yourself (in a healthy way) and away from “comparison is the thief of joy” territory.

Kelly states in the foreword of his book that much of his advice was gleaned from elsewhere so I decided to track down where this one might have come from. Legendary concert promoter Bill Graham used a similar phrase in a banner describing the Grateful Dead at a 1991 concert for the band:

They’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what they do.

Grateful Dead: not the best, but the only. That sounds about right.

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The trailer for a new Star Wars series called The Acolyte. The series will debut in June on Disney+ and is set 100 years before the events of The Phantom Menace.

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Hans Zimmer and a group of musicians perform the Dune soundtrack live. Amazing to watch singer Loire Cotler do that piercing chant (you know the one).

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Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write. “Something as simple as a spell-checker…represents the culmination of a shared human effort, spanning centuries.” Thumbed through this over the weekend…looks really interesting.

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Dolly Parton’s cast iron cookware. Why not!

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