Category: Friday Unrelated Information

1. It’s never too late: Norma Geddes took her first stained glass class at age 69. “Now 82, Geddes spends up to eight hours a day, seven days a week working in her studio.” Living the dream!

2. I can confirm from personal experience this is true (also these are great colors for a crazy stripe sweater):

3. The idea of leaves being criminals just makes me laugh (good tips in the post):

4. And finally, this is the best description of Afternoon Writers Brain I’ve ever heard:

 

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1. New career goal alert: Scent designer. “Where a perfumer blends alluring scents for the body, [Tasha] Marks creates custom-made odours for spaces – usually museums, galleries and historic buildings.”

2. Would you like to look at 217 Tiki postcards from the past? You probably would (via my friend!).

3. This has been in my head for a while now:

 

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1. Speaking of illustrated mail, how about The Postcards That Picasso Illustrated and Sent to Jean Cocteau, Apollinaire & Gertrude Stein? I love how the messages sound exactly like how friends text: “I don’t see you anymore. Are you dead?”

2. I just learned about the GERMAN FORKLIFT CHAMPIONSHIPS?!

3. Who knew Edo fish could convey so much? (I’m #3.)

Which Edo fish distressed by current events are you?

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— Dr. Paula R. Curtis (@paularcurtis.bsky.social) Aug 3, 2024 at 11:29 AM

Monday is, of course, US Labor Day and I”ll also be gone Tuesday (Doc’s usual day off)  to go have one last adventure of the summer. See you Wednesday!

1. Japanese bathhouse cutaway illustrations? That’s a combo of words that I will immediately click on. Check out Isometric Drawings of Sento, Kissaten and other Japanese Establishments by Honami Enya.

2. Herman Melville probably worked as a pinsetter in a bowling alley in Honolulu? This 2019 NY Review article gives the evidence and a lot of the history of bowling. (Archived link to get around their paywall.)

3. I can’t stop watching this:

 

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1. More Costco: This NYT piece (gift link) is full of staggering facts, such as “Costco sells half the world’s cashews” and “It has been estimated that Costco sells some $200 million in gold [bars] a month.” Also has a brief history of Costco and an analysis of their market perception (positive!).

2. This is fun: live streams of watering holes in the Namibian desert. If it’s dark when you check it, you can always rewind.

3. This is mesmerizing: a circular sock machine in action. I immediately looked up the manufacturer but the machines are a mortgage payment. Guess it’s hand-knitting for me!

 

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Some very niche links today:

1. A book documenting Japanese public toilets, with an excellent name: Toilets a Go Go

2. A tumblr collecting different skies from video games: Video Games Skies.

3. “Every Time This Biographer of the Brontë Family Calls Them Unemployable.” Ha!

This is my last “summer Friday” and Doc goes back to work next week. Why do the fun months seem so much shorter than the hard ones? (Looking at you, January.)

1. We’re big Costco fans for appliances and home stuff (just got a new mattress!) and would definitely use Costco Travel. So reading about someone’s Costco trip to Cancun in The Paris Review of all places was extremely my jam (emphasis mine):

This is the Costco psychology: quality over brand; value over status. To be ripped off is to be taken for a sucker. It is to have your resources wasted, your hard-earned cash sucked into a delusion of taste, timeliness, or class. It is to be left with nothing; or worse, to be haunted by an alternate timeline in which you saved more money. Costco is a fortress against this loss, and the only vacation that my parents would allow is one that safeguarded against that mentality.

2. This story is so wholesome: The Gay Supermarket Sweep “Business Partners” From the ’90s Have a Wilder Story Than You Know

3. Perfect, no notes:

1. It’s August 1 already? Time to celebrate Lughnasa–climb a mountain, have a feast, thank the god Lugh for a good harvest.

2. I, for one, am here for Dems finally going low, not high. Call those weirdos weird! As Vanity Fair puts it, “while voters may disagree with one another on points at the policy level, there’s room for everyone to unite under the banner of pettiness.”

3. Speaking of calling weird controlling white guys weird controlling white guys, one of this week’s Garbage Day emails really summed up the (dare I say) vibe shift of the last two weeks:

I don’t know if it was the horror of the Trump assassination attempt, Harris launching her campaign, or just the the subtle shifts of history, but something has broken in me. A threshold crossed. I’m not scared of these people, I’m not even interested in them. At one point in the last few weeks, I woke up and just felt, in my bones, that I was done. We have spent the last 10 years living in fear of some of the worst, most annoying people on the planet. And they are, and have been from the start, hateful, lonely weirdos who don’t even know how to wear their own clothes properly. And, sure, there will assuredly be new political threats to come, but whatever this all was is ending. And no matter what comes next, it does honestly feel extremely freeing to finally say it. Republicans are deeply unpopular weirdos.

We’re going to the ski resort spa tomorrow, so we’ll be around mountains but in no way in them or in danger of getting lost. So here are some long weekend links!

1. We had a long and unpleasant hike, but at least we weren’t sick and trying to do 20 miles a day–Rusty Foster’s writeup of the first stretch of the Appalachian Trail just confirms my desire to never thru-hike.

2. The 80s News Screens account is really worth a look:

3. This is absolutely the vibe right now:

Doc started his 20-year sabbatical this week so I’m taking Fridays off for the next month (I’d joke that I wish I could be off the whole month, too, but work just had a round of layoffs). Anyway, some links and a quote that made me feel better.

1. An insider view of why buying a car is SO scammy and bad (and a reminder that “how to buy a car over email” WORKS, I helped my friend do it).

2. I didn’t know our Swoly Father Arnold starred in Japanese commercials until my friend shared a compilation. Amazing.

3. From The Marginalian: “One man sent a distressed letter to E.B. White…lamenting that he had lost faith in humanity.” Here’s the whole reply because it was a high point in a weird week:

Dear Mr. Nadeau:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,

E. B. White