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“According to Mr Peryer, it is not uncommon for geese to be bisexual, though he adds that the duo were the only pair in the Waikanae Estuary…It is also not unheard of for geese to mate with swans, with the offspring…known as a swoose.”

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  Recently Active Comment Threads

'I Will Always Love You' at 50
3 comments      Latest:

Big Bite Hot Dog Sparkling Water from 7-Eleven
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What Did You Learn How To Do This Year?
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When Whales Could Walk... Excuse Me?
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Phil and Phyllis Punxsutawney Had Babies
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Road Snacks #1
9 comments      Latest:

Dancing on My Own
8 comments      Latest:

Hello, Everyone, Let's Have A Week
12 comments      Latest:

Gou Miyagi Skates Very Mellow
1 comment      Latest:

How Would You Turn This Dial To Make The Freezer Colder
36 comments      Latest:

Brutal Lyon 25 Stair, Destroyer of Action Sport Dreams
4 comments      Latest:

Paris Waiters Race Run for the First Time in 13 Years
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‘I Will Always Love You’ at 50

Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ was released 50 years ago a couple weeks ago and it’s a very good song. We all know Parton famously wrote IWALY and Jolene on the same day, which, like, one time I made 4 batches of ice cream and packed them all into pints and cleaned the machine all in an hour and forty five minutes and that’s kind of the same thing if you squint. She wrote the song to let Porter Wagoner know she was leaving his show and striking out on her own and that makes me mad because imagine working with someone so annoying you have to write one of the best songs ever written to get out of it.

The year after it was released, Elvis was going to record it, but Tom Parker, his manager, insisted on half the publishing rights and Dolly said no, like a G. The whole germ for this post, my entire reason for being at this moment, was seeing that fact about Elvis and knowing Dolly teases IWALY not once, not twice, but, well, OK, only twice, on her duets album. It’s on Wrecking Ball, and she teases it AND sings about the whole episode on I Dreamed About Elvis. Priscilla Presley told Dolly Elvis loved the song so much and sang it to her on the day of their divorce. I do wish we could hear an Elvis recording of IWALY.

Dolly rerecorded the song for Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, but when Whitney covered IWALY, Dolly called it “One of the biggest thrills and one of the most overwhelming feelings I’ve ever had about anything in my life,” but that almost didn’t happen, too, twice, because they were going to do ‘What Becomes of the Broken Hearted’ before that song got featured in Steel Magnolias (starring Dolly, wtf) and then Whitney was set to cover the Linda Ronstadt version which leaves off a verse at the end, but Dolly interceded at the last moment to set them straight.

Finally, my bar in Cambridge has a Dolly Parton-themed bathroom which has 5 stars on google maps and was written up in the New York Times.

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Phil and Phyllis Punxsutawney Had Babies

Punxsutawney Phil and his mate Phyllis have had babies and both of the articles I read about this deeply weirded me out. Listen, I get it, you don’t get to be President of The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club Inner Circle by being normal about groundhogs, but it feels a little culty to me.

To wit:
“[Dunkel] has a special cane that lets him speak “Groundhogease”.”

“He added that Phil’s children will not inherit his seer of seers or prognosticator abilities because, simply, there’s only one Phil.” Bro, what? Why wouldn’t the children inherit the mirth?

“[Phil] receives a special elixir to extend his life.” (Dunkel is at least better than the previous president who said in 2020 Phil was 134 years old, able to live forever because of the elixir, while Dunkel smartly refused to age the groundhog. (wood)Chuck Everlasting imo.)

The article says groundhogs don’t mate in captivity, but I can’t find proof of that one way or another. That said, this is the first time in the 138 year history of the PGC the groundhogs have mated. Finally, the Inner Circle is, of course, all men, though the Executive Director of the PGC is a woman and appears to have honorary membership on this honorary council.

Because I like using blog posts as opportunities for learning new stuff I said to myself while I was writing this post, “I bet people would find it helpful if I told them what the difference between a groundhog and a woodchuck is,” because it seems like the kind of thing people would want to know and I always thought they were the same thing, but I’m also the dumb bitch who just found out last night whales used to walk around land and evolved from land mammals so I googled it, and yeah, no, woodchucks and groundhogs are the same thing. I was right about that one.

When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.

(via @igallupd.bsky.social)

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When Whales Could Walk… Excuse Me?

At the beginning of this documentary, the narrator says something about “how did whales end up in the ocean,” and to be honest that fucked me up because whales make sense to me if I think of them as something that’s always been in the ocean, and if I have to reorient my mind around the fact that maybe they used to not be in the ocean, I’ve got to re-think a lot of things. On the other hand, the documentary is called When Whales Could Walk, so that’s on me. I should have seen that coming. I did that to myself. And now I’m doing it to you.

This fossil graveyard, millions of years old, is known as the “Valley of the Whales.” Now, paleontologists have unearthed a whole new species of ancient whale dating to 43 million years ago, and this predator wasn’t just able to swim – it also had four legs and could walk.

(via @propcazhpm.bsky.social)

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Goat farmers traveling from MN to CA got stuck in traffic in UT and goats must be milked every 12 hours, so when traffic cleared they stopped at Tractor Supply where the community learned to milk goats and sent the farmers home with freshly milked goats.

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Ms. Sharr proposed that Olga move into their Cambridge home temporarily so the system could get to know her better. They would support her, they said… She was floored by their generosity. “There really are people who are angels,” she said.”

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Gou Miyagi Skates Very Mellow

I like the skate videos where the skaters show how high or fast or far they can go and the control they have over their bodies while flying through the air, but I also like the videos where the skaters put their feet on the ground sometimes and use the board as more than something to ride on, as a prop. Gou Miyagi does a lot of tricks like that, riding up to a set of steps, running up the rail, sliding down on his butt, and landing on the board, and skating off, things of that nature. It all looks very nice.

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Road Snacks #1

Because I don’t hardly blog anymore, I turned the email newsletter for my ice cream shop into kind of a blog where sure I talk about ice cream a good amount, but I also tell stories about when I was a tour manager for a band, document how terribly hostile Intuit is towards their business customer base, and share internet ephemera my customers might not have seen. It’s been feeling a little stale lately, because after three years I think I finally told all my tour stories so I wanted to do something new.

The new thing is Road Snacks, a semi-regular feature where an ice cream shop interviews a touring musician asking questions about the food situation on tour. I think it’s changed a lot and probably not too much since I was doing it. The first interview ran today featuring Cary Ann Hearst from the Charleston band Shovels & Rope, who is great. Click through to read the whole thing. If you’d like to sign up for the newsletter, you can do that here, and we’ll see if it’s interesting even if you don’t live in Boston.

How has eating on tour changed for you since you first started touring?

Eating definitely changes! We used to just eat pizza everyday after the show, but that will kill you eventually so we changed! Everyone watching their water and their fiber intake. It’s wild - we pop vitamins now. But in Indy the other night a man made us pizza in his shop after the show. Sam’s Square Pies?! The best pizza I have ever had. Detroit Style. We literally wrapped and froze individual pieces so that we wouldn’t waste a slice of the 30lbs of pie - thanks Jeff!

It’s 12:30am and you’re at the gas station before a five hour drive to the next city. What snacky treat(s) are you grabbing and why?

My trash snacks from the gas station are an Arizona Green Tea in a can, pork rinds, a bag of lemon heads and pack of bubble gum. We get a gallon of water and fill our canteens. I need a mix of sweet and savory - and since we only get the opportunity to indulge those trashy snack instincts every once in a while I indulge and then remember not to do that once my blood sugar crashes.

Jason doesn’t know it yet, but I’m probably gonna ask if I can run the interviews here, too.

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What Did You Learn How To Do This Year?

Hey, real quick, what’s something you always wanted to do, but only just started to learn how to do in the last year? I always wanted to learn how to play guitar and last year my son and I started taking guitar lessons together and now I can sort of play guitar a little.

If you’re trying to convince yourself to learn something you should just do it because you might still be shitty at whatever you’re learning 6 months from now, but you’ll be much better than you’d be if you didn’t start until 6 months from now. I think I saw someone say this more eloquently (obviously), but when I tried to find it, all I could find was someone saying imagine if you started 6 months ago, which I think is a recipe for making yourself feel bad, and I bet you don’t need any help doing that, do you?

So, what’d you learn how to do this year or if you haven’t learned anything new yet, what are you going to start learning how to do this year?

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Dancing on My Own

This 2013 Kings of Leon cover of Robyn’s Dancing on My Own inspired Callum Scott to sing Dancing on My Own for his audition for Britain’s Got Talent, which eventually lead to Scott’s version of the song hitting #2 on the UK charts in 2016 and becoming the #1 download in the UK that summer. The original version topped out at 8.

Here’s the original.


Here’s a country version.


Here’s a punk cover validating my theory stating pop songs usually sound good as punk songs.

Anyway, I was thinking about this because a few years ago I made a playlist for the kids of all the covers of Dancing on My Own I could find and there were 56 back then. Today I added all the ones which were added to Apple Music in the last few years and now there are 91 total on the list, though 2 or 3 are remixes.


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Big Bite Hot Dog Sparkling Water from 7-Eleven

I get furious every spring there isn’t an iced tea soda because I just want to try it once even though I know it would probably be terrible and we have chocolate milk soda and I can’t get iced tea soda? It’s madness is what it is.

The lack of iced tea soda is only an aside to the main news of this post, offered as preamble, because you can’t really just jump into something like hot dog seltzer water without some sort of sweetener, some sort of softening the ground ahead of the news, an amuse bouche if you will.

I’m pretty angry about this because it’s probably an April Fools joke announced early and corporations fucking lie all the time, but the least they could do is not pre-announce an April Fools joke. Now that April Fools has been coopted by try-hard brands, uh, trying too hard, a really good and cool thing for a brand to do would be to announce something what seems like a joke on April Fools and then actually deliver. No more phony bologna. If the Big Bite Hot Dog Sparkling Water is not a figment of commercial japery, if it is not a form of incorporated jackassery, if it actually exists on April 2nd, I’ll eat my hat drink one.

hotdogseltzer.jpg

The Big Bite Hot Dog Sparkling Water promises to encapsulate the essence of the iconic 7-Eleven hot dog experience, complete with the flavors of ketchup and mustard. This innovative beverage aims to transform the traditional pairing of hot dogs and sodas, allowing consumers to enjoy the essence of their favorite snack in a refreshing bubbly form.

(via @kdzwierzynski.bsky.social)

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“The suspect…told his probation officer about his activity. The probation officer tipped off the SPCA after attending a training module called “Recognizing Animal Cruelty” and realizing…spray-painting squirrels qualified as animal cruelty.”

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Here’s a cat holding on for dear life to a pint of ice cream and it’s illustrative of a quirk of cats where you can’t tell if the cat really loves the pint or is furious at it. Peep the bloody hand at the end. Pints only do this when they’re in distress.

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Brutal Lyon 25 Stair, Destroyer of Action Sport Dreams

I love Australian pro skater Ricky Glaser’s narration of all the videos he could find of people attempting to jump a famous set of 25 stairs in Lyon. Aaron “Jaws” Homoki (no relation), was the first to do it despite injuring himself on the stairs previously. At 6:15 the scooter carnage starts, “Like is he alive after that?” We can also appreciate Glaser’s criticism of the camera work at about 9:50. This is truly a masterpiece.

By the way, you may have heard of Ricky Glaser, as he is the world record holder for most kick flips in a minute, 36, which is just about 3 per second if my math is right.

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Paris Waiters Race Run for the First Time in 13 Years

There was a race in Paris where waiters from all the restaurants and cafes and hotels rush through the streets carrying trays with water, croissants, and empty cups of coffee. The race started around 1914, but then it stopped for the last 13 years and now they’re doing it again because of the Olympics next this year. The runners can switch hands, but they can’t carry the tray with two hands, and if their glass has less than 10cm of water when they finish, they get 30 seconds added to their finish time. Congratulations to this year’s winners, Pauline Van Wymeersch and Samy Lamrous. At the end of the race the guy said, “You’re finished!” And the winners said, “No, we’re French.”

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You can make friends with crows, and this thread from Carl T Bergstrom will tell you how. I want crow friends, but we’ve only got robins and sparrows. “It’s so much fun to have bird friends who recognize you.”

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Musical Clock Museum in Utrecht

Jason’s only got one rule for guest editors and it’s, “If you’re going to post about Utrecht once, you have to post about Utrecht three times,” which is a bad rule imo and problematic for me because I don’t know anything about Utrecht except they got bones full of drugs there and a doorbell for fish.

Luckily, I am American and did the American thing of texting the only Dutch person I know when I saw the fish doorbell was opening up for the year, because obviously everyone from the Netherlands will already know about the fish doorbell. He didn’t know about the fish doorbell, but he did used to be an intern at the Musical Clock Museum in Utrecht, which is a museum focusing on self-playing instruments and musical clocks. The Museum Speelklok appears to contain the second largest such collection in the world behind the Musical Museum in Brentford, which has them beat on self-playing instruments, though it’s not clear how many musical clocks they’ve got at MM. Regardless, the Utrecht Musical Clock Museum appears delightful and you should visit after visiting the fish doorbell.

Update:
Thanks to Logan and Marc in the comments for pointing me to Wintergatan. The marble machine in the video below is exhibited at Museum Speelklok.

(Jason previously wrote about Martin Molin’s Wintergatan projects in 2020, which were inspired by Martin’s visit to Museum Speelklok in 2016.)

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Fish Doorbell in Utrecht

Fish in the Netherlands travel upstream to spawn in the spring, but unfortunately for the fish in Utrecht, the boat lock on the river through the city is closed in the spring. Ecologists put a camera on the bottom of the lock, and viewers around the world can watch a livestream of the camera and, when they see a fish, press a doorbell to open the lock allowing the fish the opportunity to continue swimming upstream to their destiny.

This is a YouTube livestream of the doorbell camera, which is what gets shown to viewers on days like today when more than 900 people are watching the camera, but fear not because they post a weekly highlight reel.

You probably missed the pike and ide, but perch, common roach, and freshwater bream should be swimming by around now.

PS the domain is visdeurbel.nl, which translates into English as Fish Doorbell, and I think Dutch is a very charming language.

(via @danirabaiotti.bsky.social)

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Old Bone Full of Old Drugs Found in Utrecht

Researchers from the Freie Universität Berlin working in the Netherlands recently found a little bone container full of drugs in a pile of 86,000 other bones they had found outside a farm in what is now the Dutch city of Utrecht. Initially the researchers missed the find because they weren’t looking for a first century C.E. bone full of drugs in a bone stack (that’s a needle in a haystack joke I was afraid you wouldn’t get, so I’m just pointing it out, but if you did get it, I’m sorry for not trusting you as a reader.).

The bone container, discovered when a birch pitch plug was dislodged, was full of black hebane seeds which back in the olden olden olden days was used for “relieving pain and helping with difficult pregnancies. Yet ingesting too much, one Roman author wrote, could lead to “alienation of [the] mind or madness”.”

Ancient Roman authors were clearly familiar with the plant. Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, and others wrote about black henbane, along with its closely related but less potent relatives, white and yellow henbane. These plants—in the form of ointments, potions, or burning smoke—were prescribed for everything from earaches and toothaches to flatulence and “pains of the womb.” Ancient scholars also warned against taking too much because of the potential for hallucinogenic effects; Pliny counseled physicians to avoid it entirely.

drugbone.jpg

This quotation submitted without comment: “When you think about how much was in there, your imagination really goes wild.”

This video submitted without comment, as well:

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Ilia Malinin Is Good As Hell At Ice Skating

Ilia Malinin is 19 and just won the world championship title of international ice skating or something by being an absolute wizard on ice skates. I’ve only been on ice skates 6 or 7 times in my life and I’m getting better, but I’m still kinda wobbly, so don’t take my word for it. Just watch him do all sorts of triple cows lutz axles better than anyone’s ever done it. My favorite part is when he does the two twisty jumps in a row, which he does at least 3 different times. Imagine being half this good at anything, let alone something as difficult as jumping in circles WITH RAZOR BLADES SCREWED TO YOUR DOC MARTENS.

Malinin landed a quadruple Axel, quad Lutz, quad loop, quad Salchow, another quad Lutz and a quad toe loop, then finished his four-minute skate with a a triple Lutz-triple Axel finale.

I don’t live too far from Salem, and they still put people on trial for this kind of sorcery there.

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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

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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.
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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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