Month: February 2020

1. Via OutsideOnline, some terrific photos of cowboys, from Brazil to Uruguay and North America. Really terrific photos.

2. Also via OutsideOnline, how a shipwrecked crew survived 10 days lost at sea:

On November 25, 2019, Chris Carney and his two-man crew, Pete Brown and Jun “Sumi” Sumiyama, set off from Japan on their way to Hawaii in a 42-foot sailboat, the Coco-Haz III. They had four weeks to cross the world’s largest ocean. The boat’s owner, a retired Japanese dentist, needed the trip done in a hurry—he’d lose a boat slip he’d rented if it didn’t arrive in time. Carney didn’t think they would make it on schedule, even if everything went right. But things went far worse than he imagined when two catastrophes left them stranded in the middle of the sea.

Here is Carney’s story, as told to Outside.

3. I’m absolutely team thigh and drumstick. Apparently team thigh is having a Renaissance, while team drumstick is being left behind. Bring them both to me. Via Taste, Big Chicken’s Drumstick Dilemma.

4. A camera, a log, and the animals who cross said log.

5. Via MessyNessy, a really interesting story about who was maybe the first man to reach the North Pole, an African-American desk clerk who was supremely talented.

1. Via Hyper Allergic, want to vist Athens, Greece thousands of years ago? Me too.

2. Want to buy books from local book shops rather than Amazon? (I don’t know why I’m asking so many questions this morning.) Via Forbes, go visit BookShop.org:

Bookshop.org, a website that went live at the end of January and is still in beta mode, is designed to be an alternative to Amazon, and to generate income for independent bookstores. And, perhaps more importantly, it seeks to give book reviewers, bloggers and publications who rely on affiliate income from “Buy now” links to Amazon a different option.

I don’t like digital books. I’ve always preferred the actual book, even if I have to bring a couple with me, I prefer owning a physical copy rather than just being granted a temporary digital license to read the book.

3. Via Wired, catching marathon cheaters.

4. Via OutsideOnline sometimes no matter how hard companies try, the stuff we buy may still be made in factories that don’t treat people like human beings. The takeaway is that there are companies who are trying to make conditions better, and that’s good. There’s always room to improve.

5. I don’t understand how this all happens in about a minute.

1. A short review of the TOZO T10 Bluetooth 5.0 headphones. I needed some new headphones to wear when I ran in the mornings at home on the treadmill. I had some headphones that were not waterproof and there was a cord and I sort of hated them. I still ran with them for over a year, but I received a $50 gift certificate and wanted some new headphones, all but certain that I’d have to spend $100+. Well, I can safely say that for $40, these are incredibly solid headphones, I’ve probably put a hundred or so miles on them and they don’t slip or fall out of my ears. They last for an hour-plus, as that’s about how long I run. I don’t know how much longer they last with each charge because I just haven’t tested past a shade over an hour. There is a newer version out that is $50 but obviously haven’t tested these. If they’re anything like the prior version, they’re probably pretty good. Anyway, I fully endorse these $40 wireless headphones.

2. Via BitterSoutherner, the boy, who is now a man, in the photo from 60 years ago at the Woolworth’s lunch counter from the Greensboro sit ins.

3. Via Slate, the trilogy of John Cusack movies Say Anything, High Fidelity, and Grosse Pointe Blank:

High Fidelity, which was released in 2000, doesn’t just reflect back on Cusack’s breakthrough movie. It functions as the close of an unofficial trilogy that begins in 1989 with Say Anything and continues through 1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank. In all three, Cusack plays a man who’s trying to figure out his life, not just who he is but what he stands for, and the later in life the story catches up with him, the more dire his situation becomes. Say Anything’s Lloyd Dobler is a high school senior struggling to figure out his next steps. Grosse Pointe Blank’s Martin Blank is a professional hit man thrown into a crisis of conscience by his imminent 10-year high school reunion. Rob Gordon is an aging hipster who realizes that leading the life of a “professional appreciator” has left him with few achievements of his own. It’s too much to say that he’s playing the same character in all three (although Martin Blank is definitely a Sliding Doors version of Lloyd Dobler), but there’s enough connecting them to make them feel like overlapping parts of a whole, a Venn diagram that verges on a single circle.

4. Bastards of Soul, The Waiting Time.

5. Via AtlasObscura, “When Squirrels Were One of America’s Most Popular Pets.”

1. Via Mel Magazine, the oral history of the Members Only jacket.

2. Not for the politics, but for the political theory, via Politico, that turnout wins elections, not swing voters.

3. Via The Conversation, 8 things we do that really confuse our dogs, including the idea that we leave them alone. I would like to never leave my dogs alone:

In these situations, naive dogs can’t be sure we’ll ever return to collect them. Only after experience are they likely to expect a reunion, and even then, their experience depends on the context.

4. Via Popular Mechanics, a fungus among us (well in Russia) that eats radiation. Don’t ever forget that science and nature are awesome.

How can this fungus process radiation in this way? Because it has tons of very dark melanin pigment that absorbs radiation and processes it in a harmless way to produce energy. Scientists believe this mechanism could be used to make biomimicking substances that both block radiation from penetrating and turn it into a renewable energy source.

5. Black Pumas, Dirty Dirty.

1. The Internet of Beefs. I don’t know that I’ve ever connected with something more than I’ve connected with this.

A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.

The connection to crash-only programming is more than cosmetic, but it will take some set-up before I can establish the conceptual bridge.

Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs.

The Internet of Beefs, or IoB, is everywhere, on all platforms, all the time. Meatspace is just a source of matériel to be deployed online, possibly after some tasteful editing, decontextualization, and now AI-assisted manipulation.

If you participate in online public life, you cannot entirely avoid the Internet of Beefs. It is too big, too ubiquitous, and too widely distributed and connected across platforms. To continue operating in public spaces without being drawn into the conflict, you have to build an arsenal of passive-aggressive behaviors like subtweeting, ghosting, blocking, and muting — all while ignoring beef-only thinkers calling you out furiously as dishonorable and cowardly, and trying to bait you into active aggression.

Your only other option is to retreat to a shadowy network of private spaces defended by blocks, restricted feeds, secret-group gatekeeping boundaries, and subscribers-only paywalls. A sort of underground Internet that I’ve previously called the CozyWeb.

2. Via The Manual, the best travel and adventure documentaries on Netflix (right now).

3. Via OutsideOnline, the frozen backyard ponds of Minnesota hockey in pictures.

4. A bird’s eye view of Paris from 1550? Yes please.

5. Take my hand, we’ll make it I swear.