I can’t believe this only has 32,000 views, but it’s a delightful video essay about writing, told through a compilation of clips from Wes Anderson movies (video)
I have long believed that one of the best ways to start your day is to pour a cup of coffee and listen to the first three or so minutes of “So What” by Miles Davis, or just the whole album while you’re drinking coffee. Now, through the magic of someone’s mega-playlist on YouTube, I think I have found its companion for cooking dinner, which is this recording of a radio broadcast of Miles Davis with the René Urtreger Quartet on Nov. 30, 1957 at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. Something about the first few bars of “Bags’ Groove” with the lofi recording just makes it feel even cooler.
I was listening to a podcast a couple years ago and someone was trying to argue that NFTs were great opportunities for collaborative creativity, and I am pretty sure the person said something like, “Imagine an Ernest Hemingway book, but only the first few pages have been written, and going off of that, people could just add on to it and collaboratively write the book,” and I was like, Well, that sounds horrible, no thank you. But then I saw this video of this guy absolutely and joyfully owning this roller skating rink, set to a mashup of The Who’s “Eminence Front” with the vocals from Metallica’s “Creeping Death” (and also Megadeth’s “Holy Wars … The Punishment Due”), and I’m still not into NFTs, but I think that person may have had a point about collaboration and remixes of art.
My friend Alex introduced me to Harrison Scott Key’s books a few years ago, and I still think his first book, The World’s Largest Man, is the funniest book I’ve ever read, and I can’t believe it’s not more successful (I think people maybe have a hard time remembering the exact title? who knows). I think his genius is partly that he can fill every paragraph of a story with jokes, but keep the story moving in a way that it doesn’t feel like it’s just a flimsy chain of one-liners. He wrote a wonderful, and of course hilarious, essay for the Bitter Southerner, about St. Patrick’s Day in his adopted hometown of Savannah, Georgia, and it is a shining example of why his writing is so entertaining.
I feel like one sign you’re getting older (or maybe just have an old soul?) is how excited you get about a really good weather app. I had never heard of the Dark Sky app until last fall, when I saw it on Hilary’s phone, and, showing my age, got really excited—only to find out it was being taken out of the app store and Apple was allegedly going to make it part of its Weather app. It turns out I, and other weather app geeks, am not alone in my excitement—as validated by this wonderful piece, “A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece.” (via Kottke.org)
How has your week been? Was it one of those kinds of weeks that made you feel like you need a story about the unlikely friendship between a bulldog and a goat, who were up for adoption—as a pair—at a DC-area animal shelter? With photos and video.
Even if you don’t care about baseball (happy Opening Day to all who celebrate!), this is a touching story, and you really don’t need to read the whole thing to get the point—just scroll to the embedded tweet to see the photo of the hat.
Every once in a while, I put together a Twitter thread. Here’s a screenshot of the one I did this week:
