Category: Friday Unrelated Information

1. The Onion (yes the satire site) took out a full page ad in the New York Times last week to run this editorial mocking Congress’ cowardice. It is AMAZING:

Now is not the time for bravery or valor! This is the time for protecting your own hide and lining your pocket. Now is not the time for listening to your idiotic constituents drone on about what’s happening to their precious democracy. This is the time for getting down on all fours and groveling. Now is not the time to say, “Enough is enough,” and have the tough conversations about resisting the ongoing assaults on American liberty. This is the time to let the wave of apathy and indifference roll over you as you think about getting a really nice renovation to your house in Kalorama.

2. This was really fun to scroll around in: the Historical Tech Tree, “an interactive visualization of technology from 3 million years ago to today.” With links to Wikipedia and related technologies! (Just getting this link ready to post today, I clicked around and discovered Egyptian blue, the first synthetic pigment!)

3. This is the best train ad I’ve ever seen:

 

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I have tomorrow off for Juneteenth and took Friday off as well for a long weekend. When I was thinking about this week, I wanted to go to the pool in the afternoon and get some sewing in and organize a little bit in the basement and generally just chill.

Well, WE ARE NOT CHILL over here this week (but I haven’t gotten any new bed bug bites after two nights on the air mattress, hooray!) and I’m going to be pulling everything out of every closet and letting it bake in the car and vacuuming every baseboard and laser-focusing on any speck that MIGHT be a bug and generally Cleaning Through It.

Which is all a long way of saying, here are some links for the weekend!

1. This is the sound and face I make when I think about BUGS crawling over my FACE and feeding on my FLESH in the NIGHT:

 

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2. Yep.

3. There is a band on TikTok that is doing covers of songs but changing the lyrics to be about discount crab legs. I’ve had “You bought crab legs! Cheap crustaceans!” in my head for days now.

@crabsmackband “Smells Like Steamed Crablegs” Live from the WhiteHart Cafe #smellsliketeenspirit #nirvana #livemusic ♬ original sound – CrabSmack

1. Poe should have written a horror story about mosquitos in a house where you can’t see them and don’t know where they’re coming from yet you keep getting fresh bites regardless of whether the house is closed up or not and every bite itches for at least a week and it slowly drives you mad…

2. Ahem. I’m pretty sure I have a mosquito bite allergy, but the name of said allergy enrages me almost as much as the mystery and the itching: skeeter syndrome.

3. Mysteries I can get behind: List of unexplained sounds.

1. Since I liked a theme for getting dressed so much, maybe I need a theme for taking a walk to get myself to do it more.

2. … or I could stay inside and just keep scrolling, since yesterday was a really good day to Be Online.

3. This is a wonderful piece about deadlifts from The Guardian. Click through to see the first image, whatever you do.

1. I hadn’t even heard of Jan Todd before this! Jan Todd May Be the Reason You’re Lifting Weights

2. This column from a Harvard student to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is withering and amazing, down to the title (“Come At Me, Bro“):

Maybe it’s because I didn’t get married at 17, or because I’ve never witnessed my husband get his head shaved by Donald Trump on national television, or because my pedagogical experience leans more front-of-classroom, rather than distributing-bookmarks-featuring-scantily-clad-lady-wrestlers. Some way or another, I’ve never been quite able to figure out how you think.

Until now.

Secretary, you spent nearly three decades as a WWE executive, where you orchestrated such spectacles as “The Undertaker vs. Kane: WrestleMania XIV” and “WWF Badd Blood: In Your House.” Suffice to say, you respect a good fight. And thus I say: Come at me, bro.

3. Nothing like a little Ram Dass to remind me to stop spiraling about the near future of my job or buying a new house:

1. Happy long weekend! I can’t think of anything more fitting for Memorial Day than this:

TANK vs TESLA

“We’ve crushed fascism before and we’ll crush it again”

– ⁠WW2 veteran Ken, 98, in the tank

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— Led By Donkeys (@ledbydonkeys.org) May 7, 2025 at 10:46 AM

2. Raccoon amusement park. That is all.

3. I didn’t know T.S. Eliot was made a deputy sheriff (!) and “spoke to an audience in Dallas of 7,000 people in a sports arena” (!!).

1. I did some spiraling earlier this week, like I’m sure we all do. This didn’t make me feel better but it made me feel seen:

2. But there are still good things happening! Salt Lake City and Boise make pride flags official city emblems, skirting flag ban laws. We love to see a loophole closed like that.

3. This newsletter on having people over for dinner is really funny and accurate. Plus hanging out with your friends can fight the effects of all the stupid things going on out there.

I always forget that I like to host dinner parties. Always. The second there’s one on our calendar, I begin to preemptively resent it. In my head, a dinner party is this big stressful event requiring tons of prep and energy.

And that is… never true? It never is. We’re just having people over! And none of them care about anything except getting together! No one gives a shit about the food (as long as it’s edible), or the kind of wine we have, or the fact that the dogs patently need to brushed. And as long as the house is a baseline level of cleanish, no one ever notices the things that I notice about my house, like “there is dust on a bookshelf in a room that no guest would typically go in” or “there are too many sticks in the yard.”

No one cares! Everyone just wants to hang out and share a meal!

Yay it’s Friday! And I’m feeling better AND the sun is shining. How about some links?

1. Did you know you can look through Georgia O’Keefe’s recipe cards online? Her handwriting was amazing.

2. They bring up a good point: The kerning on Pope Francis’ tomb is really bad.

It really is quietly beautiful. But atop that marble is a tomb inscribed with the name “Franciscus.” Or what—due to terrible spacing between letters, known as kerning—reads something more like “F R A NCIS VS.”

3.  Speaking of popes:

Did I schedule this to publish because I will actually be on the road, bound for 36 hours in Moab, my first time in the desert since 2020? Maybe!

1. Who wants to go to Tokyo and go to the food halls in the basements of the big department stores? I do! (Via Japan Or Die, a wonderfully specific newsletter) (this week’s edition was about squeaky “nightingale” floors!).

2. Speaking of wonderfully specific, a designer saw a McDonald’s mural in rural Washington and went ALL IN on researching the artist.

3. A little something for taking some time off:

1. Absolutely delightful: Middle-Aged Man Trading Cards Go Viral in Rural Japan Town.

Take the Firewall card, for example. It features Mr. Honda (74), a former fire brigade chief who helped keep the town safe for decades. Then there’s Soba Master Mr. Takeshita (81), who runs a local soba noodle-making class and now holds legendary status among the town’s youth.

The most popular of them all is probably All-Rounder Mr. Fujii (68), a former prison officer turned community volunteer. His card is so sought after that local kids have even started asking him for autographs.

2. Feeling clicky? TV Garden lets you stream broadcast TV from around the world.

3. Why yes I DO need a little treat…for morale.