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“And no, you cannot opt out. Because fuck you. What’re your options? MatterMost? 🖕😂🖕”

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How to Drive in Iowan Winters

If you rarely drive on snow, just pretend you’re taking your grandma to church. There’s a platter of biscuits and 2 gallons of sweet tea in glass jars in the back seat. She’s wearing a new dress and holding a crock pot full of gravy.

@Chadsu42

The First Thing Ever Bought Online was Weed.

Of course. Well, the transaction was in person and in cash (of course.)

It was just a little bag of weed sold through an Arpanet account in Stanford’s artificial intelligence lab in 1972. It’s not clear who was in on the sale aside from the students, but despite the underhanded nature of the deal, anyone with knowledge of the sale who wasn’t a square must have been excited about the implications of this early use of the Internet.

As the article clarifies:

The first online sale that we’d recognize as such today, complete with credit card information and the United States Postal Service, wasn’t until 1994. On August 11 that year, Dan Kohn sold a copy of the Sting album Ten Summoner’s Tales to a man in Philadelphia for $12.48 plus shipping, paid via encrypted credit card. Kohn later bragged, “Even if the N.S.A. was listening in, they couldn’t get his credit card number.”

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Tenet

Tenet (2020)

IMDb

Rating: B

Watched with CK. The plot doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. But very, very entertaining. Anyone who claims to understand what’s going on after the first 32 viewings is a damned liar. A perfect one-line review:

So suit up […] for what may not be Nolan at his best, but is definitely Nolan at his most.

Honest Trailers

Excellent soundtrack by Ludwig Göransson (first came by his work when watching The Mandalorian and just knew he was something special.)

Also the Sator Square for a standard dose of Nolan apophenia1. See also: The pitch meeting.

  1. It has no goddamn ‘meaning’ other than being a middle-school palindromic curiosity (and contributes nothing other than names to the plot.)↩︎

Tampography

Using a Bloopy Thing to print on all sorts of materials is called “Pad Printing” or tampography. Here’s a Big Bloopy Thing printing a very beautiful pattern onto a bowl (and here’s two of them going at the same time.)

You can use the same technique on all sorts of things: plastic bins, pens, keychains, golf balls, pills. The silicone/bloop conforms to the shape of the object to print on rather easily.

Quality Logo Products has a quick explanation:

“I want you to take a step back and COVER YOUR FACE”

I wish they would blare portions of Tom Cruise’s COVID meltdown at all grocery stores in my lovely state. Someone on /r/desmoines posted an anti-masker patriot at our Costco who could use this message.

I’m on the phone with every f–king studio at night, insurance companies, producers, and they’re looking at us and using us to make their movies. We are creating thousands of jobs you motherf–kers.

I don’t ever want to see it again, ever! And if you don’t do it you’re fired, if I see you do it again you’re f–king gone. And if anyone in this crew does it – that’s it, and you too and you too. And you, don’t you ever f–king do it again.

That’s it! No apologies. You can tell it to the people that are losing their f-ing homes because our industry is shut down. It’s not going to put food on their table or pay for their college education.

That’s what I sleep with every night. The future of this f–king industry! So I’m sorry I am beyond your apologies. I have told you and now I want it and if you don’t do it you’re out. We are not shutting this f–king movie down! Is it understood?

If I see it again you’re f–king gone — and you are — so you’re going to cost him his job, if I see it on the set you’re gone and you’re gone.

That’s it. Am I clear?

Do you understand what I want? Do you understand the responsibility that you have? Because I will deal with your reason. And if you can’t be reasonable and I can’t deal with your logic, you’re fired. That’s it. That is it.

I trust you guys to be here. That’s it. That’s it guys. Have a little think about it. . . [inaudible].

That’s what I think of Universal and Paramount. Warner Brothers. Movies are going because of us. If we shut down it’s going to cost people f–king jobs, their home, their family. That’s what’s happening.

All the way down the line. And I care about you guys, but if you’re not going to help me you’re gone. OK? Do you see that stick? How many meters is that?

When people are standing around a f–king computer and hanging out around here, what are you doing? And if they don’t comply then send their names to Matt Spooner. That’s it.

Man on Fire

Man on Fire (2004)

IMDb

Rating: D

Watched because Denzel and Revenge. Not sure why I bothered finishing it. Absolutely awful. The cinematographer appears to have borrowed the ghastly verdigris-like palette from this terribly photoshopped poster, and keeps twitching the camera with the giddiness of a raver who’s taken two of them Mitsubishi pills that were in vogue at the time.

Dakota Fanning is the only other reason to endure this. She was only ten in 2004 but acted like she’d been at it for at least three decades.

“Where are the Turks?”

Bilal Göregen (YouTube, Instagram) is the Turkish street musician in my favorite video of 2020.

He sounds like a very positive, gracious, and sweet human being on this KnowYourMeme interview1 which features this delightful nugget (emphasis mine):

Q: How has the response been from your previous fans and followers that were around before the meme? Also, have you received any interesting or wholesome messages from fans since your meme went viral that you can share with us?

A: When I read the comments section after my video went viral, I see that my Turkish followers still do not understand the meme, and they ask questions like, “Is the channel stolen? Why are there so many foreigners here? Where are the Turks?”

Assorted Bilal things: Here’s a ten-hour version of his viral hit. And here’s him making a lot of Indian people very happy. And lest I forget, this is the original Finnish folk song he’s covering:

  1. Which TIL has an editorials section…↩︎

The Nest

The Nest (2020)

IMDb

Rating: A-

Watched with LD. Reminded me of “Hereditary” (it’s a slow burn) but with The Evil being this chimera of financial insolvency, really bad trust issues, childhood trauma, and severe affluenza. Jude Law was perfect, but Carrie Coon was so fucking good as the beleagured yet passively complicit partner and mostly grieving person. The scene shot from the stable facing the manor was genius. Sean Durkin (writer and director) stuck the landing perfectly. Lovely stuff.

Hand of God

Hand of God (2014)

IMDb

Rating: D

Tedious, uneven, rushed, and a colossal waste of an interesting premise and the talents of several amazing actors (Ron Perlman, Dana Delany, Andre Royo, Alona Tal, and a brilliant Garret Dillahunt.) You can skip the latter half of the episodes in the first season (here’s a recap) and skip-watch all but the last three episdoes of the second, and still know what’s going on. It’s as if they were told there wasn’t going to be a third

An 18,000-year Old Pupper

This is Dogor 🐾, an 18,000-year old puppy preserved in Siberian permafrost. His name means “friend.” He was discovered as a lump of frozen mud near Yakutsk and lies at a private museum.

Dogor left the wilderness as a lump of soil and ice, but scientists could make out the head and paws of what they believed at first to be a young wolf.

Fyodorov told The Washington Post that he carefully cleaned off dirt and debris to reveal near-intact fur — “extremely rare for animals of that time period.”

“It’s an amazing feeling, to see, touch and feel the history of earth,” he said.

Hannah Knowles and Kayla Epstein, “Ice preserved a tiny puppy in near-perfect condition for 18,000 years. Scientists are fascinated.”, The Washington Post

Frozen puppy or wolf: teeth

Other researchers, affiliated with the Centre for Paleogenetics in Stockholm (Twitter), think he could be “part of the evolutionary bridge that turned a fierce wild animal into man’s best friend.”

Testing on a rib bone has revealed the animal’s age: about two months, said Stanton, a postdoctoral scholar who has been working for more than a year on a broader attempt to answer lingering questions about canine history.

The analysis also put Dogor’s short life at a particularly interesting period of time, right around when many wolf lineages were going extinct and dogs are thought to have emerged. Exactly how and when they evolved from wolves is unclear; one recent study estimates between 20,000 to 40,000 years ago.

Frozen puppy or wolf

Frozen puppy or wolf

Raj on Hell’s Kitchen

Tapped this YouTube suggestion on a lazy Sunday. This man pushed my capacities for sympathy and empathy to their breaking points in this 20-minute highlight reel. I don’t know what to type here other than quote the very first sentence of his Fandom wiki page:

Raj is widely regarded as one of the worst and most useless chefs in Hell’s Kitchen history.

I don’t watch the show and don’t have a full context. But the most charitable assessment I can offer after sitting through the highlight reel below is this: The man is wired very, very differently, which I suppose makes for engaging (cruel?) television 🤷‍♂️

Sleeping Octopus

You could almost just narrate the body changes and narrate the dream. So here she’s asleep. She sees a crab and her color starts to change a little bit then she turns all dark. Octopuses will do that when they leave the bottom. This is a camouflage like she’s just subdued a crab and now she’s going to sit there and eat it and she doesn’t want anyone to notice her. It’s a very unusual behavior to see the color come and go on her mantle like that. I mean, just to be able to see all the different color patterns just flashing one after another… you don’t usually see that when an animal’s sleeping which really is fascinating.

But yeah if she’s dreaming that’s the dream.

– David Scheel

Resolution versus Magnification

Was looking for a portable iPhone microscope and came by this one on Amazon. Doubted the “50x-1000x magnification” claim and landed on this video by Oliver Kim (here’s his channel on YouTube) on how to make sense of that feature.

The key idea here is to think of a microscope as a device that resolves hitherto unseen things. It’s simply not just a magnifier of small things our eyes cannot resolve. This is the difference between the 2x optical zoom on your iPhone versus the 10x you can slide it up to.

So I don’t doubt that the product on Amazon can do 50x, which is fine for my needs. I just don’t believe that the upper bound (1000x) can provide anything useful.

Naughty Letter Frequencies in English

Here’s a community-maintained "List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words" across various languages on Github. I was curious about a naïve frequency distribution of consonants across the English-language corpus (NSFW, obviously) and wrote a small script. Here are the results:

Letter Count
t 211
s 208
n 193
r 186
l 167
g 147
c 124
b 121
p 116
h 97
d 91
m 91
k 72
y 70
f 48
w 41
v 29
j 21
x 19
z 7
q 5

Not sure what I’m going to do with this information but here it is. 🤬

Mirzapur - Season 2

Mirzapur - Season 2 (2020)

IMDb

Rating: B-

A bit sloppy compared to the first season but still quite the entertainer (or maybe I just love the surfeit of bad language, of which there is plenty ♥️)

Excellent stuff from the main cast, especially Sheeba Chaddha and Rasika Dugal.

But Pankaj Tripathi could read the backs of shampoo bottles in 40-minute episodes and I’d still binge the ‘show’ and write encomiums about how good a performer he is.

Fred Rogers and his Children

Mentioned this to NB. Saving here for later.

On this event:

Yes, at seventy years old and 143 pounds, Mister Rogers still fights, and indeed, early this year, when television handed him its highest honor, he responded by telling television—gently, of course—to just shut up for once, and television listened. He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are….Ten seconds of silence.” And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, “I’ll watch the time,” and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked…and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds…and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, “May God be with you” to all his vanquished children.

Tom Junod, “Can You Say… Hero?”12

I often wonder what people like him would think of our times.

  1. This is the article the movie is based on.↩︎

  2. Cached. “Yes, at seventy years old and 143 pounds, Mister Rogers still fights, and indeed, early this year, when television handed him its highest honor, he responded by telling television—gently, of course—to just shut up for once, and television listened.”↩︎