I just updated the 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide, including some gifts for people you hate (ugly decanters, Baby Yoda s&p shakers). Years ago, a work colleague received a *turtle* as a wedding gift. What’s the worst gift you’ve ever given or received?
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Now Serving: Drinkable Mayonnaise
Lawson’s, a convenience store in Japan, has begun selling Nomu, a drinkable mayonnaise forgetting the important adage: all mayo is drinkable if you believe in yourself.
The only catch for pedantic mayonnaise lovers is that the label clarifies that Nomu mayo is a “mayonnaise-style drink” and “not mayonnaise”. Currently in a “test sale period”, it still remains to be seen if Nomu mayo actually appeals to Japanese customers, who are used to the thicker and richer taste of Japanese mayo, as opposed to more Western varieties.
Unrelated, the best idea I ever had for a reality television program was “Uh Oh, It’s Mayo!” The premise being kind of like Cake or Not Cake (though this idea is from 2008) where the host goes around offering people the opportunity to taste different food products with some of them being 100% mayonnaise. It even had a theme song, the tune of which you’ll have to imagine unless you want to text me so I can send you a voice memo of it, but the lyrics are, “What’s in the pie, I don’t know. Uh oh it’s mayo!” Call me, Bravo.
Holiday Terms & Conditions (A Christmas Album). Lyrics include: “It’s beginning to look a lot like lawsuits, everywhere you scroll…” and “I don’t want a lot for Christmas, just my intellectual property rights…”
Bryan Cranston Reads From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker
At an event last month marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, actor Bryan Cranston read a passage from the book (it’s about 13 minutes long):
From Literary Hub:
After some loving jabs at the devotion this book inspires and its notorious length (“There are only 50 chapters…”), Cranston reads from Power Broker’s opening pages. The performance is fun, and Cranston gets an ad-libbed laugh by archly reading “Shea Stadium,” a part of Moses’ legacy that was demolished and replaced in 2009. Cranston’s also reads some of the famous list sections that Caro rattles off in The Power Broker’s opening chapters. The drumbeat of names is Caro’s attempt to contextualize the scale of Moses’ impact, a technique cribbed from The Aeneid.
Recently found: a message in a bottle at an archaeological dig left there in 1825 by an archaeologist. “It was an absolutely magic moment. We knew there had been excavations here in the past, but to find this message from 200 years ago…”
Racing’s Deadliest Day. After the 1955 Le Mans disaster, “it would be another 40 years before Mercedes got back into racing”. (In the meantime, they pioneered “anti-lock brakes, anti-collision radar systems, and other consumer safety technologies”.)
Monument Valley 3 is out today on iOS & Android and is free to play with a Netflix subscription.
The Origin of Delay, Deny, Defend
In the wake of the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, a book published in 2010 by Rutgers Law professor Jay Feinman has hit the bestseller charts: Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. The book’s title is a reference to an insurance industry strategy of denying legitimate claims to boost profits. Bullet casings at the scene of the shooting referenced the same strategy: they were labelled “deny”, “defend”, and “depose”.
The introduction to the book is available online and it describes the origin of delay, deny, defend:
Delay, deny, defend violates the rules for handling claims that are recognized by every company, taught to adjusters, and embodied in law. Within the vast bureaucracy of insurance companies, actuaries assess risks, underwriters price policies and evaluate prospective policyholders, and agents market policies. The claims department’s only job is to pay what is owed, no more but no less. A classic text used to train adjusters, James Markham’s The Claims Environment, states the principle: “The essential function of a claim department is to fulfill the insurance company’s promise, as set forth in the insurance policy… The claim function should ensure the prompt, fair, and efficient delivery of this promise.”
Beginning in the 1990s, many major insurance companies reconsidered this understanding of the claims process. The insight was simple. An insurance company’s greatest expense is what it pays out in claims. If it pays out less in claims, it keeps more in profits. Therefore, the claims department became a profit center rather than the place that kept the company’s promise.
A major step in this shift occurred when Allstate and other companies hired the megaconsulting firm McKinsey & Company to develop new strategies for handling claims. McKinsey saw claims as a “zero-sum game,” with the policyholder and the company competing for the same dollars. No longer would each claim be treated on its merits. Instead, computer systems would be put in place to set the amounts policyholders would be offered, claimants would be deterred from hiring lawyers to help with their claims, and settlements would be offered on a take-it-or-litigate basis. If Allstate moved from “Good Hands” to “Boxing Gloves,” as McKinsey described it, policyholders would either take a lowball offer from the good hands people or face the boxing gloves of extended litigation.
I don’t know about you, but the violence implied by the “Boxing Gloves” metaphor is particularly galling — but also germane to the national conversation we’re currently having about violence, culpability, and who is and isn’t sanctioned by the state to decide who suffers or dies.
Check Out the 2025 Moon Phases
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has released a pair of visualizations of the phases the Moon will go through in 2025, one for the northern hemisphere above and one for the southern hemisphere below:
Look at that sucker wobble! Each frame of the 4K video represents one hour and there are lots of locations labeled on the map, including the landing sites of the Apollo missions.
But also: How have I never noticed that the Moon is upside-down in the southern hemisphere?! I mean, it makes total sense but I’ve just never noticed or thought it through. 🤯 (via the kid should see this)
If you haven’t had the pleasure, you should double back and read the comments on this post from readers who have noticed things everyone else hasn’t. Not surprised to have gathered a community of extreme noticers.
The old school Oregon Trail video game is being adapted into an action-comedy movie. “The movie will feature a couple of original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie.”
In Training: A Book of Bonsai Photos
I was reminded recently of Stephen Voss’s lovely book, In Training: a book of bonsai photos (Amazon). Voss has a number of bonsai photo prints for sale as well as some videos of bonsai on his blog. This one is of a tree called Goshin, which has been in training since 1953:
A very simple little browser game: open the microwave door as close to the timer hitting 0:00 as you can without the bell dinging. (My best: 9500.)
Straight White Male, the Game of Life’s Lowest Difficulty Setting
Using a video game metaphor, John Scalzi explains straight white male privilege for those straight white males who get hung up on the word “privilege”.
Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.
The New Rules of Media. “Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small.” (No thank you.)
Willem Dafoe interviewed by Matt Zoller Seitz. “If you make it about you, you’re limited. You have to make it about other people and go toward that.” Great stuff in here about the ‘why’ of craft.
“ProPublica’s Claim File Helper lets you customize a letter requesting the notes and documents your insurer used when deciding to deny you coverage.” Greatest nation in the world, etc.
Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis? Multinational corporations are destroying Earth for profit. If we want real change, we have to be willing to threaten those profits.
A thread of some letters people wrote to each other on clay tablets in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. “I am the servant of my lord. May my lord not withhold a chariot from me.”
What’s The One Thing Only You Noticed?
As you know, I am passionate about sweet things. All different kinds. So imagine my dismay back in 2017 when I discovered the recipe for Heath Bar Klondike had been changed to remove any trace of Heath Bar bits from the Klondike. It wasn’t just one box of Heathless wonders neither, it was box after box, which I kept buying like some kind of fool. This post has a point past petty dessert-themed grievances, I stg, bear with me. But first, look at this nonsense. (If you want the point, just skip to the last paragraph.)
2017 was a time when Google still worked so I searched to see if anyone else had noticed this change and didn’t find anything. I am not a narcissist, but I can spin a yarn, so the narrative I told myself was I was the only person in the world with the following traits: 1) cares a lot about desserts 2) likes Heath Bar Klondike Bars 3) is stubborn enough to buy a product multiple times after being so wronged and 4) is perceptive enough to notice the lack of Heath Bar bits on the Heath Bar Klondikes.
I did what was customary at the time and complained to Klondike on Twitter. Klondike put me in touch with customer service who insisted my lying eyes hadn’t seen what they saw, and the recipe hadn’t been changed at all. It clearly had because sometime in late 2018, I tried another box and the Heath Bar bits were back. Still not as prevalent as they had been, but back nonetheless.
All this to say at some point, my friend Mike, on the other side of the country, also noticed the lack of bits on his bars and mentioned something about it, which thus made me feel less crazy for noticing it. I was no longer alone.
My most recent example of this phenomenon, is Irish Spring changing the formula in 2022, which many people have mentioned online because the scent changed. I don’t care about any of that, but what does bug me is you used to be able to marry an old bar with a new bar. That is, if you put the sliver of your old bar on to the new bar, it would melt into the new bar. After the formula change this doesn’t happen anymore. You stick the old bar on the new bar and never the twain shall meet. IT DRIVES ME CRAZY.
Anyway, I was wondering if any of y’all have any bugaboos like this where you feel like you’re the only one who knows this is happening. Put it in the comments and feel less alone.
An analysis of the UX of Lego interface panels. “Armed with 52 different bricks, let’s see what they can teach us about the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.”
For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website. “It will only become more painfully clear how important sovereign websites are to protecting information and free expression.”
The Arresting Typography of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
Several years ago, Brandon Silverman become obsessed with the lettering and typography on the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Sanborn maps were designed to help insurance companies assess the fire risk of individual properties. They were highly detailed, showing the size, shape, and construction of buildings, as well as the materials used in their construction. This information was used by insurance companies to calculate the premium that a property owner would have to pay for fire insurance.
He even used the ornate, intricately designed covers as a model for his wedding invitation. Silverman recently launched a site dedicated to the design of these fire maps, collecting high-res digital scans of the art found on almost every cover and index page, over 3500 images in all. The cover pages are particularly beautiful. Oh, and you can order prints of all the images as well.
Fun fact: Silverman first learned about the fire insurance maps from a 2011 post on kottke.org.
The oldest known wild bird, Wisdom, a 74 year old Laysan albatross, has a new egg. Laysan albatrosses mate for life, but Wisdom’s mate hadn’t been seen in a few years. Last week, she landed in Hawaii and started cavorting with a new male.
No One Has to Settle for Bad Pizza Anymore. “Violinists have the Stradivarius. Sneakerheads have the Air Jordan 1. Pizza degenerates like me have the Ooni.”
Grand Theft Hamlet
Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, actors out of work during the pandemic, were playing Grand Theft Auto when they found the Pinewood Bowl amphitheater and decided to try staging a production of Hamlet within the game with other players voicing all the parts. Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary about the effort. It’s not streaming anywhere yet, but I hope it will be soon!
They audition all-comers: an uproarious business in which weird randoms show up with a tendency to destroy others by using a flame-thrower or rocket-launcher for no reason at all while the production is being explained to them.
They end up performing the play all over the city, “this is Shakespeare on a billion dollar budget,” not sticking to the amphitheater. The trailer looks great.
Vaccines have saved 150 million children over the last 50 years. “Every ten seconds, one child is saved by a vaccine against a fatal disease.” Almost 94 million from measles alone.
No surprise: conservatives are embracing media villains like Tony Soprano & Judge Dredd. “One’s model for justice should not be a fascist invented in part to illustrate the distinction between elite impunity and the brutality that ordinary people face.”
Your 2024 Therapy Wrapped. “2024 was a BUMPY ride…and your therapist was right there with you for every maternal microaggression and election-induced tummy ache. Let’s see how your neuroses stacked up…”
This Beautiful Day: Daily Wisdom from Mister Rogers
This Beautiful Day: Daily Wisdom from Mister Rogers (Bookshop) is exactly what it says on the tin: a book of daily reflections from the writings, stories, and shows of Fred Rogers. I would be chuffed to find this under the tree on Xmas morning.
“Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t [form] for no reason.” Guess who? Ronald Fucking Reagan! The government stopped enforcing price discrimination laws in the 80s & big chains thrived.
Just updated the 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide with suggestions from Kottke readers, a surprisingly popular Japanese nail clipper, a bonkers Criterion Collection box set, and a very unique timepiece.
It appears that the brutal reign of the Assad regime is over after more than 50 years. “Syrian rebels declared they had ousted President Bashar al-Assad after seizing control of Damascus on Sunday, forcing him to flee…”
Catherine Russell has starred in the same off-Broadway play for 37 years, runs the theater it plays in, teaches six days a week, manages a restaurant, and even works the box office one day a week. I’m tired just writing all that!
Jia Tolentino on the sometimes celebratory reaction to the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and what it says about business & violence in America. “A denied health-insurance claim can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death.”
A fantastic interactive feature about the newly restored Notre-Dame cathedral. “Each day we have 20 difficulties. But it’s different when you work on a building that has a soul. Beauty makes everything easier.”
A Bluesky starter pack of major news outlets that have joined the platform, including CNN, The Guardian, Reuters, NPR, Financial Times, WSJ, Wired, and USA Today.
This Is What The Internet’s For
I wonder if, when Bobby Internet invented the internet, he imagined it would be used for videos like this. There’s something so fun about watching people crack up at work. See also SNL actors breaking. They also have fun accents, which I maybe shouldn’t say because kottke.org is worldwide and if you live in Australia, you probably just think the videos are funny without any special notice of the accent.
Anyway, I was watching this and my eight year old saw it over my shoulder and said excitedly, “I’ve seen that!” I thought he was watching mostly Bluey so I asked him what he searched to find this and he said, “Balloon popping videos,” matter of factly, so I guess we’re kind of the same and that’s a perfectly understandable thing for an 8-year-old to be searching for on YouTube. Then we watched a video of these guys throwing things off a Swiss dam.
404 Media, reporting on 404’d media: big health insurance companies are removing information about their executive leadership teams from their websites.
98-Year-Old Dick Van Dyke Stars in Lovely New Coldplay Video
Coldplay tapped Spike Jonze & Mary Wigmore to direct the music video for a song called All My Love from their latest album and the pair decided to turn it into an early 99th birthday celebration of Dick Van Dyke. Van Dyke danced a bit, sung a bit, was swarmed by his family, and ruminated on nearing the end of his life:
I’m acutely aware that I could go any day now, but I don’t know why it doesn’t concern me. I’m not afraid of it. I have the feeling — totally against anything intellectual I have — that I’m gonna be alright.
The video is really quite moving — what a splendid human. Watch until the end, when Chris Martin composes a song on the spot for an absolutely delighted Van Dyke. (via @danielgray.com)
“The sound of traffic and a uniform sea of barley have been replaced by the most beautiful meadows, full of wildflowers, young saplings and the buzz of bees.” The bees will come back if you give them flowers.
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age. “We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth. Every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit.”
After almost 25 years, Paul Krugman is retiring as a NYT opinion columnist. Krugman: “I decided to leave in search of more freedom in terms of both style and content.”
NASA’s Rocket Engine Fireplace
Oh, this is so good: NASA has an 8-hour cozy fireplace video in 4K that’s actually a rocket engine (in a fireplace).
This glowing mood-setter is brought to you by the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket that launched Artemis I on its mission around the Moon and back on Nov. 16, 2022. 8.8 million pounds of total thrust – and a couple glasses of eggnog – might just be enough to make your holidays merry.
“subtle foreshadowing” — I laughed unbelievably hard at this, just absolutely gasping to breathe. Academy Award winner for best editing right here.
Looney Tunes Backgrounds
This Instagram account posts the backgrounds of Looney Tunes cartoons with the Looney Tunes characters removed. As @presentcorrect.bsky.social remarks, these images are also a great resource for color palettes.
Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink. “This guide outlines concrete strategies and tactics that collectively will help us limit harm, win in 2026, and throw MAGA out in 2028.”
You don’t actually have to stay on Twitter. “There are many better tools to persuade people with, organize with, frame arguments with, and have fun with.”
An unidentified disease (“Disease X”) in the Democratic Republic of Congo has infected 376 people, killed 79 people (mostly children), and “appears to be airborne”. They hope to have an ID by the weekend. This seems bad?
Vintage Hand-Drawn VHS Labels
This person posted a bunch of images of their dad’s old VHS tapes with lovingly hand-drawn labels indicating their contents. Kids, this is what people did before the internet.
Also, it’s weird/interesting that CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, LaserDisc, cassettes, MiniDisc, and 8-tracks are all played on devices named for the media (e.g. CD player) but VHS tapes are played on VCRs. We could have easily started calling them “VCR tapes” or “VHS players” en masse, but we mostly collectively stuck to the “correct” terminology. (thx, david)
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