Bookmarks (724)

"I've no fixed place on account of I'm often late from my shift." "Churched" by Maria Farrell is a short story that is about, among other things, "the marooned generations of Irish in London – people who came over from the 1950s onward, pushed out by economic and social stagnation, and who rarely got home again." And resolving a little mystery about a man...

The truth is, the Marcos victory was largely a democratic outcome in the narrow electoral sense, and the challenge for progressives is to understand why the runaway majority of the electorate voted to bring an unrepentant thieving family back to power after 36 years. How could democracy produce such a wayward outcome? See also the Last Week Tonight episode on the Philippines (and the...

David Cronenberg goes to a video store and talks about some of his favorite movies. (23-minute video, includes a few NSFW film clips)

The Calgary Stampede has released its lineup of midway food for 2022. From Bad-Breath Lemonade ("ice-cold lemonade with a smooth, delicious garlic and caramelized onion finish") to Kraft Dinner soft serve ("the familiar taste of macaroni and cheese combined with a creamy coolness of soft-serve ice cream), stunt foods are well-represented along with twists on old classics, such as Nanaimo bar mini donuts ("mini...

A number of restaurants are betting that Americans want to get gussied up again, but not everyone is thrilled about the fashion screening. "There are rules and then there are rules," she said. "You know when Tom Fontana comes here, he is a neighborhood regular, he wrote 'Oz,' he is a good friend of our house. Tom comes, he forgets a jacket, we will...

The war continues. The illegal and criminal Russian invasion of Ukraine nears the third month of fighting. It's not going super well for them, with minimal gains in the east and significant withdrawals around Karkhiv, towards the Russian border. Ukraine counterattacks are expected to continue. The USA and many other countries continues to give billions in support and weapons. But Ukraine has suffered intensely...

SLYT, ~2 min. Metal spheres swinging and bouncing off each other in increasingly inventive ways, all synchronized to music -- idk, it's just a lot of fun to watch!

Art professor Kim Beil in Lapham's Quarterly on the advent of color photography and the complicated questions of the perception of color. Color is among the most challenging aspects of our experience to describe. Spectrophotometers and colorimeters can quantify light waves, yet their measurements have little impact on our feeling for color. As the philosopher Zeno Vendler put it, "Vincent van Gogh loved the...

While I was scrolling deep in the trenches of TikTok one morning, I had a visceral reaction to a video—with what I can only describe as chaotic good energy—about a design trend called "cluttercore." Taking off during the pandemic, the hashtag has reached 49.6 million views on TikTok (and 23,703 tags on Instagram), and spawned more videos than any of my devices can load....

The diminutive Wheelie is an Autobot child / But don't let your guard down; he gets pretty wild! He's often sold short and gets called hurtful things / But Wheelie won't suffer such arrows and slings! Of all of the years he's spent fighting in space / With Sharkticon goons and the Quintesson race. Keeping things peaceful gets a bit tricky / When he...

Buried in These Hands for Years: Thomas Dolby's 'The Golden Age of Wireless' Turns 40 Europa and the Pirate Twins Flying North Weightless Leipzig Windpower Commercial Breakup Urges Airwaves Radio Silence Cloudburst at Shingle Street One of Our Submarines She Blinded Me With Science [The track listing is kind of arbitrary as there was a plethora of release versions of the album] Waiting for...

Put your skills to the test and solve thirty-two Wordles at once! You have 37 guesses to solve all 32 words.

RAMMSTEIN - Amerika (WAY TOO AMERICAN Cover) This is what happens when it two Italian multi-instrumentalist musicians decide to cover big hits in often very unsuitable styles. Either they are "way too" or "cyberpunk" and if you're looking for something nice and calming for a hot summer Sunday, why not acoustic versions of Metal songs?

"The only reason it's sold is to have some alternative [to pseudoephedrine] to offer consumers, even if it's a worthless one." Pharmaceutical blogger Derek Lowe of In the Pipeline (previously) discusses phenylephrine, which does not work as a decongestant and is "indistinguishable from placebo in conditions like allergic rhinitis", saying it is "is of no real use and does not deserve its FDA listing."...

Imagine you receive an invitation one day from your mayor, inviting you to serve as a member of your city's newly established permanent Citizens' Assembly. "You will be one of 100 others like you — people who are not politicians or even necessarily party members. All of you were drawn by lot through a fair and random process called a civic lottery. ... Important...

If It Feels Like a New Dark Age Is Falling... That's Because It Is. Why We're Entering a Dark Age Between Civilizations. What's Happening to America? A Theocratic-Fascist Revolution. When a Fanatical 30% Suddenly Seizes Control of Your Society, It's Called a Revolution. Umair Haque - love him or leave him. That his writing output is prolific is an understatement. He has been described...

These days you don't need to worry about not knowing stuff. Just type your personal failings into YouTube and there'll be a big, beardy American come along to explain that, hey, you simply fire up charcoal to about 4,000 degrees, then brush all the charred gunk off when it's cooled down. Another Guardian list of small ways to improve your life.

In last night's Eurovision Song Contest [Fanfare], the UK came second with the entry sung by Sam Ryder. Previous to this, the most recent UK finishing positions were 26th, 26th, 24th, 15th, 24th, 24th, coming last five times since 2005. BBC: How Sam Ryder turned things around for the UK. Andover Advertiser: "The new strategy included ensuring Ryder's single, Space Man, got played on...

Windows XP - 2022 Edition a mock-up mash-up of the Windows XP and Windows 11 design languages, by Addy Visuals

Challenging the school PTA fundraising norm, 12 of south Seattle's most diverse and low-income (Title 1) schools agreed not to compete against one another but instead to pool their earnings and share in them equally. The approach was designed to lessen the potentially disparate impact of fundraising and to support schools without sophisticated fundraising arms. "This isn't equitable," cofounder Christina Jiménez, a Graham Hill...

Olivia Colman Greatest Award Speeches | Compilation is ~17m long, but is an entire human journey of emotions several times over. It's pure and joyous and to be honest, I feel somehow cleansed after watching this. #VideoTherapy

Dinosaur Apocalypse Newly found fossils may reveal an unprecedented snapshot of the day the dinosaurs died. A two-part PBS NOVA (preview w/audio interview, written preview) featuring Sir David Attenborough. See also Riley Black's book The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (excerpt, interview), about the aftermath.

US grocery retailer Trader Joe's this year announced the winners of its 13th Annual Customer Choice Awards (podcast audio and PDF transcript; podcast is silly and includes a cooking segment). The podcast hosts mentioned that this year's overall winner has been "on the list as either the Favorite Frozen Product or the Favorite Entree, the favorite of whatever category in which it fits every...

The World's a Mess. So They've Stopped Saving for Tomorrow. "No, I'm not saving for retirement. I'm going to spend my money now, while we still have a supply chain at all." - archive.org mirror

Last February, Polygon published an article about the Video Game History Foundation's search for the creator of an Atari 2600 game, "Wabbit". Now, their search has come to fruition. A pretty obscure title from a pretty obscure publisher (Games by Apollo, later known just as Apollo), "Wabbit" has the distinction of being the first home console video game with a playable human female protagonist....

While the $800-a-month rent may seem steep for a stacked bunk bed pod, the average rental rate for a studio apartment near Stanford University, is currently around $2,400. Co-founder Christina Lennox has lived in a pod herself for the past year. "The wood kind of allows for relaxation, rather than like going inside of this futuristic-looking plastic object."

Naomi Judd, one-half of the musical duo The Judds with her daughter Wynonna, died April 30, 2022, one day before The Judds were to be inducted into The Country Music Hall of Fame. (CW: suicide) Today her other daughter, actress Ashley Judd, confirmed that the cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot. The daughter of a Kentucky gas station owner, Judd raised two daughters...

Remembering Ian Dury on what would have been his 80th birthday. Shall I mourn your decline/With some Thunderbird wine/And a black handkerchief? - Sweet Gene Vincent - Lyrics As national treasures go, Ian Dury was one of the unlikeliest. A cantankerous cripple with a penchant for pills and puns, he was a living breathing saucy seaside postcard, a master of the double or even...

Set to be released in 2024, 40 years after the original 'Spinal Tap': 'Spinal Tap II' On Tap As Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest & Harry Shearer Back For Encore: "They've played Albert Hall, played Wembley Stadium, all over the country and in Europe," Reiner said. "They haven't spent any time together recently, and that became the premise. The idea was that Ian...

Ethel Cain, Hayden Anhedönia's dark, evil twin, has released her first album, Preacher's Daughter, described by Paste as "a breathtaking account of a woman, her mysterious partner and her troubled family", and by thelineofbestfit as "If Flannery O'Connor had listened to more Witch House and spent time on r/FlorenceAndTheMachine, she might have ended up making a record as perfectly beautiful and haunting as Preacher's...

The story of the Nation State in five biscuits: Parle G, Milk Bikis, Karachi Bakery's Fruit Biscuit, Hide & Seek and Little Hearts by Sharanya Deepak for Vittles

"I send barrels home every six months," says Niko Bristol, who relocated from Grenada to Brooklyn two years ago. "I've sent laptops, juicers, generators, crockpots, clothes, groceries, and a bunch of other stuff back home."

The band Sub Sub, with Melanie Williams on guest vocals, scored a hit with Ain't no love (alternate). Then, life happened (dropped by label, studio burns down, the usual). But rather than staying with their old style, changes in direction happened. Kingdom of Rust (alternate), their 2009 single which also appeared in the film Zombieland.

Lisa Lindahl, Hinda Miller, and Polly Smith are among this year's inductees for the US National Inventors Hall of Fame because they created the first sports bra. Jogbra started in 1977 -- five years after Congress passed Title IX. This BBC article details the story and includes cool photos of old advertisements.

Upon casual listening, a magnificent spontaneity seems to permeate The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street (released 5/12/72). A closer perusal of the sixty-seven some minutes, however, reveals an unnerving sense of psychic dislocation. But then, that's not in the least surprising given the circumstances of the album's recording: although began in 1969, most of the work took place outside the iconic group's native...

The "earth-size" Event Horizon Telescope has captured a second image of a black hole and this time it's the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Sure, it looks a little blurry, but that's probably for the best, considering what a black hole sounds like.

La Conquista is an opera based, more or less, on a lost an score by Vivaldi about Moctezuma II and Cortés. It was performed in Nahuatl/Spanish/Mayan/etc in Mexico City in 2019. Xochicuicatl cuecuechtli is a contemporary opera that uses traditional instruments and was performed by people who probably grew up speaking Nahuatl.

What Makes a Great, or Terrible, Audiobook Performance? The case for doing less. Those of us who listen to audiobooks have our personal preferences, but one thing a lot of people seem to find grating is when the narrator seems to think their job is acting, not reading. (I will also editorialize by saying I also hate when people try to do accents, or...

Political strategist Steve Schmidt, who worked on campaigns for GW Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and most notably John McCain, put a letter on Substack Sunday in which he admits to lying for McCain to cover up an affair with lobbyist Vicki Iseman and to help kill a story about how McCain spent his 70th birthday on a Russian yacht. Schmidt's prime targets here are convicted...

The Untold Story of the White House's Weirdly Hip Record Collection Jimmy Carter's grandson is unlocking its mysteries (Washingtonian, Rob Brunner)

Professor Solomon gives us twelve principles for how to find something you've lost. Possibly one of the most useful sites on the internet. A step-by-step guide to find things. (And maybe life?) One of the most referred to websites in my house, Prof Solomon's 12 principles have helped us find the way to finding a thing many a time. Personal favorites are "it's where...

When they arrive in Thailand, the migratory vultures are often very tired from a long flight. They rest in big, tall trees, and then, like any good tourist, go find a local delicacy to try.

Helen Keller's Socialism Has Been Whitewashed. The politics of Helen Keller: Socialism and disability. How I Became a Socialist, from Out of the Dark.

Luigi Russolo's Cacophonous Futures is a thoughtful introduction to the Futurist composer and his mechanical noise makers, or intonarumori. In addition to pioneering the art of noises, and influencing rather a lot of later experimental music, he was a fascist and probably not have been a terribly nice person. He was also a palm reader and fan of the occult.

Joseph Pulitzer is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes, which were established in 1917 as a result of his endowment to Columbia University. The prizes are given annually to recognize and reward excellence in American journalism, photography, literature, history, poetry, music, and drama. Sometimes just seeing someone else's favorites is enough to make your day: 2022 Pulitzer Prize winners.