Archive for December 2023

My Recent Media Diet, the End of 2023 Edition

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Over the past few months, I’ve had some time away from the computer and have taken several very long plane trips and some shorter car rides, which means a bit more reading, TV & movie watching, and podcast listening than usual. Oh, and holiday movies.

But the main story is how many things I’m currently in the midst of but haven’t finished: the latest season of the Great British Bake Off, season 3 of The Great, season 4 of For All Mankind, season 2 of Reservation Dogs, season 2 of The Gilded Age, the Big Dig podcast, On the Shortness of Life by Seneca, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly, and I’ve just dipped a toe into Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things. That’s five TV shows, one podcast, and three books. I’m looking forward to tackling some of that (and maybe a new Star Trek series) over the upcoming holiday weekend.

Anyway, here’s my recent media diet — a roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past few months.

The Killer. The excellent Michael Fassbender portrays a solitary, bored, and comfortable killer for hire who has a bit of a midlife crisis in fast forward when a job goes wrong. (A-)

Fortnite OG. I started playing Fortnite in earnest during Chapter 3, so it was fun to go back to Chapter 1 to see how the game worked back then. (B+)

Northern Thailand Walk and Talk. I’m going to write more soon but this was one of the best things I’ve ever done. (A+)

Edge of Tomorrow. Speaking of video games… Still love this under-appreciated film, despite a third act that falls a tiny bit flat. (A)

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. I did not enjoy this quite as much as Matrix — especially the last third — but Groff is one hell of a writer. (B+)

New Blue Sun. Good on André 3000 for not doing the expected thing and instead releasing an instrumental album on which he plays the flute. (A-)

Songs of Silence. I can’t remember who clued me into this lovely instrumental album by Vince Clarke (Erasure, Depeche Mode), but it’s been heavily in the rotation lately. (B+)

Trifecta. A.L.I.S.O.N.’s Deep Space Archives is a favorite chill work album for me and this one is nearly as good. (B+)

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Entertaining but lacks the zip and coherence of the first film. (B)

Shoulda Been Dead. I had no idea that Kevin Kelly appeared on an early episode of This American Life until someone mentioned it offhand on our Thailand walk. What a story…listen all the way to the end. (A)

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Oh the writing here is exquisite. (A)

Avengers: Infinity War & Avengers: Endgame. These are endlessly rewatchable for me. (A)

Elemental. Good but not great Pixar. (B)

The Wrong Trousers. I watched this with my 16-year-old son, who hadn’t seen it in like 9 or 10 years. We both loved it — it still has one of the best action movie sequences ever. (A+)

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Are AGI robots intelligent? Are octopuses? Are humans? This novel plays entertainingly with these ideas. (A-)

Myeongdong Kyoja. I stumbled upon this place, extremely cold and hungry, and after a brief wait in line, I was conducted to an open seat by the no-nonsense hostess running the dining room. The menu only has four items, conveniently pictured on the wall — I got the kalguksu and mandu. The hostess took my order and then, glancing at my frozen hands, reached down and briefly gave one of them a squeeze, accompanied by a concerned look that lasted barely half a second before she returned to bustling around the room. A delicious meal and a welcome moment of humanity in an unfamiliar land. (A)

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts. This made me want to give notice to my landlord and take off for somewhere else. (A-)

Barbie. Second viewing. Entertaining and funny, but this is a movie that has Something To Say and I still can’t figure out what that is. (B+)

Emily the Criminal. There were a few hiccups here and there, but I largely enjoyed this Aubrey Plaza vehicle. (A-)

Midnight in Paris. Not going to recommend a Woody Allen movie these days, but this is one of my comfort movies — I watch it every few months and love every second of it. (A)

Gran Turismo. Extremely predictable; they could have done more with this. (B)

The Rey/Ren Star Wars trilogy. I have lost any ability to determine if any of these movies are actually good — I just like them. 🤷‍♂️ (B+)

Loki (season two). This was kind of all over the place for me but finished pretty strong. Glorious purpose indeed. (B)

Die Hard. Still great. (A)

Home Alone. First time rewatching this in at least a decade? This movie would have worked just as well if Kevin were 15% less annoying. (B+)

The Grinch. My original review stands: “I wasn’t expecting to sympathize so much with The Grinch here. The social safety net constructed by the upper middle class Whos totally failed the most vulnerable member of their society in a particularly heartless way. Those Whos kinda had it coming.” (B+)

Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?

Tags: books · food · media diet · movies · music · podcasts · travel · TV · video

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Wes Anderson and his production company have launched a digital film club...

Wes Anderson and his production company have launched a digital film club...

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Wes Anderson and his production company have launched a digital film club called Galerie. They call it “your guided journey through the world of film” and it’ll offer a “new curator every month, in-depth essays, original videos and exclusive live events”.

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52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023

52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023

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Inspired by Tom Whitwell’s annual list, I kept track of some things I learned this year, one for each week. Here we go:

  1. Ciabatta was invented in 1982.
  2. “If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture into space, at least using rockets for transport.”
  3. Purple Heart medals that were made for the planned (and then cancelled) invasion of Japan in 1945 are still being given out to wounded US military personnel.
  4. More than 100,000 public school students in NYC were homeless during the 2021-22 school year.
  5. The San Francisco subway system still runs on 5 1/4-inch floppies.
  6. NYPL librarians have discovered that “up to 75 percent of books published before 1964 may now be in the public domain”.
  7. Gangkhar Puensum, a mountain in Bhutan with an elevation of 24,836 feet (7,570 m), is the tallest unclimbed mountain in the world. (Mountaineering has been banned in Bhutan since 2003.)
  8. The founder of Lululemon picked that name for the company because he thought it would be funny to hear Japanese speakers try to say it. What an asshole.
  9. Eigengrau is the name of the dark grey color people see in the absence of light.
  10. Bees can make green honey.
  11. Baby scorpions are called scorplings.
  12. Alaskan finishers of the Iditarod can get a custom license plate.
  13. Any Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves.
  14. Hurricanes don’t cross the equator.
  15. Lake Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela sees almost 300 thunderstorms a year.
  16. Premier League referees are forbidden to work games played by their favorite teams (or their close rivals).
  17. The climate crisis has cost $16 million per hour in extreme weather damage over the past 20 years.
  18. The word for computer in Iceland translates to “prophetess of numbers”.
  19. All but two of the moons of Uranus are named after Shakespeare characters — the remaining two are from a poem by Alexander Pope.
  20. Bottled water has an expiration date — it’s the bottle not the water that expires.
  21. There are satellites that were launched in the early to mid 60s that are still operational.
  22. Multicellular life developed on Earth more than 25 separate times.
  23. US citizens or permanent residents with permanent disabilities can get a free lifetime pass to US National Parks (and other federal lands).
  24. If you try to pack information on a hard drive more densely than 10^69 bits/m^2, the hard drive will collapse into a black hole.
  25. Queen Victoria had a dog named “Looty” that was stolen from China by a British soldier while looting a palace in Peking in 1860.
  26. Colorado is not a rectangle — it actually has 697 sides.
  27. Horseshoe crabs are older than Saturn’s rings.
  28. Inmate is the ninth most common household type in America.
  29. Humans have pumped so much groundwater out of the ground that it’s changed the tilt of the Earth’s axis 31.5 inches to the east.
  30. “By 1920, the network of interurbans in the US was so dense that a determined commuter could hop interlinked streetcars from Waterville, Maine, to Sheboygan, Wisconsin — a journey of 1,000 miles — exclusively by electric trolley.”
  31. The Great British Kettle Surge is the simultaneous putting-on of the kettle in British households during commercial breaks of particularly popular TV programs, resulting in electricity surges.
  32. The Parker Solar Probe is the fastest object ever built by humans — at its closest approach to the Sun, it will reach speeds of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h), or 0.064% the speed of light.
  33. The top speed of zeppelins was about 80 mph (129 km/h).
  34. Ernest Hemingway only used 59 exclamation points across his entire collection of works.
  35. TIL there’s a whole genus of South American spiders whose species are named after people and things in the 1987 movie Predator, e.g. “Predatoroonops schwarzeneggeri”.
  36. Robert Butler, who died this year aged 95, directed the initial episodes for Batman, Star Trek, Moonlighting, Hill Street Blues, Hogan’s Heroes, and Remington Steele.
  37. I cannot believe this is the first I’ve heard of this: in the original Super Mario Bros., you can continue where you left off in the last game by holding A down when you press Start. This would have saved me so much time as a kid.
  38. Thomas Smallwood, an African American shoemaker, coined the term “Underground Railroad” in 1842.
  39. Swedish criminal gangs are using fake Spotify streams to launder money.
  40. Human ancestors almost went extinct 900,000 years ago. “A new technique analysing modern genetic data suggests that pre-humans survived in a group of only 1,280 individuals.”
  41. “People who enroll in genetic studies are genetically predisposed to do so.”
  42. MLB broadcaster Vin Scully’s career lasted 67 seasons, during which he called a game managed by Connie Mack (born in 1862) and one Julio Urías (born in 1996) played in.
  43. When the Regimbartia attenuata beetle gets eaten by a frog, rather than accepting its fate to be digested, it crawls through the frog’s bowels and emerges through its butt. “The quickest run from mouth to anus was just six minutes.”
  44. The rarest single-game event in baseball is not the perfect game but hitting two grand slams in one inning, which has only been done once in more than 235,000 games.
  45. Crab-like bodies have evolved at least five separate times in the past 250 million years.
  46. Almost 800,000 Maryland licence plates include a URL that now points to an online casino in the Philippines because someone let the domain registration lapse.
  47. From 1999 to 2020, there were 1.63 million excess deaths among Black Americans (when compared to the death rates of white Americans).
  48. Almost 75% of all films from the golden age of silent films (1912-1929) have been lost.
  49. For years beginning in 2018, every copy of macOS has included a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper.
  50. This San Francisco barbershop has a “silent mode” for patrons who don’t want to chat with barbers.
  51. According to America’s Test Kitchen, you can use your SodaStream to double the life of your salad greens.
  52. Deadline’s chief film critic had never played or even heard of Tetris before seeing the film about the game’s genesis.

      Here are my lists from 2022 and 2021.

      Tags: lists

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An Artist Creates the Family Xmas Card, From Age 3 to 36

An Artist Creates the Family Xmas Card, From Age 3 to 36

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Since he was a toddler, artist C.W. Moss has made the artwork for his family’s Christmas card. Here are some early installments from when he was three & seven:

two little kid drawings of Christmas cards

Some from when Moss was 17 and 29:

Two Christmas cards. The one on the left is a dense doodle-like drawing with a four-pointed star near the center. The right one is titled 'The 365 of 2016' and it repeats 'NOT CHRISTMAS' until it gets to 'MERRY CHRISTMAS'

And the most recent one from age 36 (you can watch how he draws it):

a Christmas card that says 'Joy or Else' on it

It’s fascinating to see his artistic sense grow and shift over the years, not only increasing in artistic skill as he gets older but also moving from simple depictions of holiday scenes to more conceptual creations.

Tags: art · C.W. Moss · Christmas · holidays · illustration

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Watch the Newly Remastered Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special (1988) on YouTube

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The entire episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special (1988) is on YouTube, fully remastered in 1080p HD. Special guests include Annette Funicello, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Whoopi Goldberg, Magic Johnson, Grace Jones, Little Richard, and Joan Rivers. From a Vulture piece on the special:

Christmas at Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the 1988 primetime CBS special from comedian and actor Paul Reubens, is one of the strangest, most glorious, most improbable, most confident pieces of entertainment to appear on television. Thirty-five years after it aired, and in a period of reconsideration after Paul Reubens’s death, the Pee-wee Herman Christmas special still looks like one of the major pinnacles of Reubens as an artist, full of silly delight and winking subversion, all framed inside the relative safety of a big sparkly Christmas extravaganza.

And after declaring “This special is one of the gayest things I’ve ever seen”:

What’s so brilliant about it as a piece of queer art is that it is presented so earnestly, and the iconography they’re playing with is Americana. It plays as camp to our modern view of over-the-top earnestness. But it’s a mix of camp aesthetic and an alternative comedy aesthetic of laughing at bad jokes, like the series of fruitcake jokes, which were at the time a cliché, that fruitcake was bad. Why are we going to make this joke about fruitcake over and over again? Because it’s stupid!

(via austin kleon)

Tags: Christmas · holidays · Pee-wee Herman · TV · video

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The Drawings of Virginia Frances Sterrett

The Drawings of Virginia Frances Sterrett

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an illustration of a woman hugging a deer next to a cat

a small man in red cowers under a huge green man

I love these drawings by Virginia Frances Sterrett.

At fourteen, unthoughtful of achievement and ambition, friends persuaded her to send her drawings to the Kansas State Fair. To her surprise, she won first prize in three different categories. The originality of her drawings — which, throughout her life, came to her as visions she felt she was merely channeling onto the page with her pen and brush — captivated two successful local artists, who encouraged her to pursue formal study.

Tags: Virginia Frances Sterrett · art



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The Fruit Shaped Bus Stops in Nagasaki, Japan

The Fruit Shaped Bus Stops in Nagasaki, Japan

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bus stop shaped like a strawberry

bus stop shaped like a melon

bus stop shaped like a tomato

The small town of Konagai in Nagasaki Prefecture has a number of whimsical bus stops shaped like fruits.

Today, there are 5 kinds of fruit-shaped bus stops; strawberry, watermelon, cantaloupe, orange and tomato. The area of the highway is now referred to as “Tokimeki Fruits Basutei Dori”, or “Tokimeki Fruit-shaped Bus Stop Avenue”.

Tags: Japan

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World of Goo 2!

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{Hyperventilating slightly} They’re making a World of Goo 2 15 years after the original one was released?! Holy smokes! I loved World of Goo back in the day and I can’t wait to play this sequel. (via waxy)

Tags: trailers · video · video games · World of Goo

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This is perhaps a little specific, but since I’m expecting Baby No....

This is perhaps a little specific, but since I’m expecting Baby No....

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This is perhaps a little specific, but since I’m expecting Baby No. 2 in about two weeks, and we have a two-year-old at home, I found this Cup of Jo post helpful and reassuring: “Going From One Kid to Two.” Especially this bit from the comments: “Very few people have two young kids because they’re excited about having a newborn and a toddler at the same time. The payoff comes later.”

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Single-Item Gift Guide

Single-Item Gift Guide

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grapefruit1.jpg
Every year my mom sends us a box of grapefruit for the holidays (and beyond), and I can’t think of a gift I’ve enjoyed more. On a low-burn, daily enjoyment level, anyway. Also it’s just so welcome and refreshing in the winter. Plus the grapefruit is delicious and pretty. She gets hers from Hale Groves, in Florida, but I imagine many vendors are offering excellent grapefruit this time of year.

TIL: Grapefruit are called grapefruit because they grow in bunches like grapes.

Tags: fruit · gifts · grapefruit

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ASMR Recommendations: Ecuador Live & Moonlight Cottage

ASMR Recommendations: Ecuador Live & Moonlight Cottage

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asmr1.jpg
I’m hesitant to write much about ASMR videos, because the experience feels so personal, but I usually watch (or, listen) for a half hour each night, usually to fall asleep. I go through phases of enjoying different ASMRtists, but lately it’s been Ecuador Live (above left) and Moonlight Cottage (above right). Doña Esperanza from Ecuador Live has maybe the most peaceful voice in the world, and Diane from Moonlight Cottage is on another level with her sets and art direction. But mostly it’s just her voice, too. (I thought this one might be too weird, but it was not.) If there’s an ASMR Review newsletter out there, I’d love to know about it.

For what it’s worth, I’m not sure I get the signature ASMR “tingles,” but these videos do put me to sleep.

Tags: asmr · youtube

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Out Today

Out Today

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My daughter is home sick, so there will be fewer posts from me today. But I will be back tomorrow, I hope!

PS: Please feel free to ask me any questions, either here in the comments or in an email. Tuesday will be my last day, and I enjoy posting these mini Q&As. Turns out I miss chatting and blogging! Questions could be about anything. How do you know Jason? Initially through blogging and living in NYC, and now slightly more because we live vaguely close to each other in upstate New York and Vermont. How old are you? 40! How did you meet your husband? Bumble! But we had a mutual friend, which helped break the ice. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?? Hmm let me think….

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Millennial Mom-hood

Millennial Mom-hood

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“I know some women who have decided to forgo motherhood altogether — not out of an empowered certainty that they want to remain child-free, but because the alternative seems impossibly daunting. Others are still choosing motherhood, but with profound apprehension that it will require them to sacrifice everything that brings them pleasure.” In Vox, Rachel M. Cohen writes about “How Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood.”

As an old millennial, I feel compelled to say that being a mom is awesome and easily one of the most interesting and meaningful things that’s ever happened to me! But talking about how great it is can feel like tempting the gods. As Cohen notes in her piece, “When I started asking women about their experiences as mothers, I was startled by the number who sheepishly admitted, and only after being pressed, that they had pretty equitable arrangements with their partners, and even loved being moms, but were unlikely to say any of that publicly.”

Tags: parenting

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Great Kids’ Book: Little Witch Hazel

Great Kids’ Book: Little Witch Hazel

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Yesterday at our library’s Story Time, the reader chose a book that knocked my socks off: Little Witch Hazel: A Year in the Woods, by Phoebe Wahl, from 2021. (Trailer above.) It’s about a tiny witch who lives in the forest, and it follows her on her adventures through the seasons. (The book is divided into four sections.) The kids in the crowd — ages two through five — were mostly entranced.

witchhazel-summer.jpg

Two of the book’s most beautiful pages are available as prints; my favorite is above.

Wahl’s website also led me to an illustrated editorial she did for the NYT last year: “The Joys of Swimming While Fat.”

Tags: books · kids · little witch hazel

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Tricycle Magazine and an Essay About Stuttering

Tricycle Magazine and an Essay About Stuttering

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I’m not a Buddhist or a meditator, but I’ve subscribed to Buddhist magazine Tricycle for the past few years. They send a “Daily Dharma” newsletter each morning, with a single line from an archived story. I love these and maybe someday I’ll actually start meditating. Here’s one from last month:

daily-dharma-screenshot.png

But a story from a 2022 issue has especially stuck with me: psychiatrist (and Buddhist) Mark Epstein’s personal essay on having a speech impediment and “How Meditation Failed Me.”

… I was instructed to read the book as perfectly as I could, without rustling or coughing, speeding up or slowing down, or messing up in any way. I had done this once before with a previous book, and I was proud of having accomplished it smoothly. …

On this occasion, however, my old speech impediment came back to haunt me. Going to Pieces begins with the word “In” — a strange sound, when one isolates it and stops to think about it and convinces oneself that it cannot be said.

Each time I’ve read this essay, the ending overwhelms me. “It seemed important, at first, to find someone or something to blame…”

My only criticism of the magazine is that I wish there were more visuals to use other than Buddhas.

Tags: buddhism · stuttering · tricycle magazine

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I Drink Water and Mind My Business

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Cool “old” songs, part two? This 2021 jam was used as background music in a TikTok or Instagram reel I came across last year, and it stopped me in my tracks. I looked it up immediately and don’t understand why it hasn’t become a worldwide hit: “Mind My Business,” by Trinidadian singer Patrice Roberts. I think about it all the time. There’s also a funny music video, but I kind of prefer just imagining. [Patrice Roberts on wikipedia/instagram]

Tags: music · music videos · patrice roberts

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The “Sunday Long Read” newsletter linked to two parenting-adjacent stories yesterday, on...

The “Sunday Long Read” newsletter linked to two parenting-adjacent stories yesterday, on...

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The “Sunday Long Read” newsletter linked to two parenting-adjacent stories yesterday, on opposite ends of the spectrum. One scared the crap out of me: an account of nearly dying shortly after a c-section, by Grace Glassman in Slate (“I gave birth at 45. It was a miracle that almost cost me everything”). The other was funny: David Sedaris on modern kids, in The Free Press (“Children now are like animals who have no natural predators left”).

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Reading NYT book critic Dwight Garner’s memories of the books that he...

Reading NYT book critic Dwight Garner’s memories of the books that he...

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Reading NYT book critic Dwight Garner’s memories of the books that he read/reviewed this past year (“I … remember making a fool of myself”) reminded me how much I also enjoyed his Grub Street Diet from a couple months ago. Without rereading it, and following the Sigrid Nunez prompt he used in the NYT book-memories article: I remember from that post that his apartment seemed creaky and comfortable, and that it seemed like he had a nice marriage. Also maybe something about oysters. […] Okay, no oysters, yes organ meat.

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How to Cook Turkey With Just Chicken and Cinnamon

How to Cook Turkey With Just Chicken and Cinnamon

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Right on time for all upcoming feasts, it’s “Holiday Recipes Dictated by Kindergarteners,” in the newsletter Bright Spots, by Chris Duffy. (His friend, a kindergarten teacher, had her students “collectively dictate to her how they believe their favorite Thanksgiving dishes were made.”) For instance, turkey:

turkey-by-kindergarteners.jpg

Click through for further instructions on how to prepare stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. Where was this two weeks ago?

Tags: holidays · kids · recipes · thanksgiving

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Lana Del Rey Covering “Take Me Home, Country Roads”

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As one YouTube commenter says: “The melancholy in her voice should be preserved in a nostalgic museum.”

Tags: lana del rey · music

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“Why’d I Take Speed for 20 Years?” … asks former Reply All...

“Why’d I Take Speed for 20 Years?” … asks former Reply All...

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“Why’d I Take Speed for 20 Years?” … asks former Reply All host PJ Vogt, in his new podcast Search Engine. “Dexedrine was like glasses, [the doctor said], but for my brain.” The episode looks at the history and rise of medical amphetamines, and I found it riveting. (Full disclosure: PJ is a friend of mine.) The podcast also has a newsletter, which I read more than I listen to the show. I’m not really a podcast person, although I also especially liked an earlier episode speculating about “what’s going on with Elon Musk?”

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“She has set her ego aside in exchange for something bigger and...

“She has set her ego aside in exchange for something bigger and...

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“She has set her ego aside in exchange for something bigger and better.” This is maybe a little out there, but a couple years ago I bought a session with a hypnotherapist (or, a subconscious success coach). I wanted to make money through my newsletter but felt weird about it and wondered if something psychological might be getting in the way. I don’t know if there was or not, and I am not here to recommend hypnotherapy. However I have remained on the hypnotherapist’s email newsletter, and the above was a single line from one of her recent “Two-Minute Transformation” emails. I might have just been in the right zone to receive it, and/or it might need more context, but it helped me see that much of what I fear is simply having my ego dented, which made it easier to imagine a path forward. Her name is Gaby Abrams.

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