i "quit" algorithmically-generated music recommendations (ie discover weekly or any radio function on spotify) and it's resulted in a lot more music-oriented conversations with friends, a deepening love of dj-driven radio, and the discovery of more music i really love. i get that a lot of my friends may recommend music to me that spotify or some other algorithm recommends, but there's also social capital generated in this approach, which really does mean something. so...if you are ever need some more serendipity in your life JUST ASK.
I’ve always liked the concept of serendipity, even more since being involved in the early days of coworking, where we used the term “accelerated serendipity” quite a bit. The idea that, through the creation of a welcoming space and a diversified and thriving community, you could accelerate (or concentrate) “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” (Oxford English Dictionary)
So it’s probably a mix of Baader-Meinhof effect and well, serendipity, that these two articles grabbed my attention. In The Serendipity Engine, Gianfranco Chicco explains that he quit his job and will use the time to purposefully built up serendipity, seek fields he knows little about, learn new things, read an eclectic mix of books, be open to meeting strangers, visit new cities, etc. “Slowing down and renewing the commitment to a series of personal rituals.”
The Serendipity Engine works just like an internal combustion engine and, like with a high performance muscle car, you need to feed it with the right kind of propellant. In this analogy, the fuel is made of different activities, skills, and conversations. In my case I select them so that they are deliberately out of or tangential to my current professional domain. The engine also requires maintenance and fine tuning via iterations and changes to the activities or skills I become involved with.
He also connects his engine vision with Steven B. Johnson’s use of the concept of the adjacent possible, describing how different elements and ideas can be combined in various ways to create new elements and ideas.
The Serendipity Engine operates in a similar way, adding new stimulus into my life allow new and unexpected things to emerge.
Dan Cohen on the other hand, realized that he’s missing serendipity in the redesign of The New York Times app. Between the algorithmic “For you” tab and the pseudo old-school but very siloed “Sections,” he feels that he can’t bump into something new, he’s either presented with typecasted suggestions or enclosed in sections that don’t flow together, drawing you in from one to the next, like actual old-school paper newspapers did. For the sake of engagement, the NYT forfeits serendipity.
The engagement of For You—which joins the countless For Yous that now dominate our online media landscape—is the enemy of serendipity, which is the chance encounter that leads to a longer, richer interaction with a topic or idea. […]
Engagement isn’t a form of serendipity through algorithmically personalized feeds; it’s the repeated satisfaction of Present You with your myopically current loves and interests, at the expense of Future You, who will want new curiosities, hobbies, and experiences.
In a related idea, Kyle Chayka mourns some cancelled Netflix shows which were never presented to him because viewers are only shown a supposedly algorithmic homepage on Netflix (and elsewhere). In reality, that selection is corrupted by the business incentives of the company, pushing some shows to us, independent of our interests.
Sometimes there’s an algorithmic mismatch: your recommendations don’t line up with your actual desires or they match them too late for you to participate in the Cultural Moment. It induces a dysphoria or a feeling of misunderstanding—you don’t see yourself in the mirror that Netflix shows you.
One way to interpret all of this is that, even though we are supposed to be well served by algorithms, we end up not only missing some randomness, but we even have to actively seek it, busting our bubbles and building our own versions of Chicco’s engine. Or, as Chayka says below—and likely one of the reasons you are reading this blog:
Often we have to turn to other sources to get a good enough guide, however. Journalists, critics, and human curators are still good at telling us what we like, and have less incentive to follow the finances of the company delivering the content to us.
Eleanor Lutz is one of my favorite data visualizers (previously) and she’s about ready to drop her new project: An Atlas of Space.
I’m excited to finally share a new design project this week! Over the past year and a half I’ve been working on a collection of ten maps on planets, moons, and outer space. To name a few, I’ve made an animated map of the seasons on Earth, a map of Mars geology, and a map of everything in the solar system bigger than 10km.
Over the next few weeks I want to share each map alongside the open-source Python code and detailed tutorials for recreating the design. All of the astronomy data comes from publicly available sources like NASA and the USGS, so I thought this would be the perfect project for writing design tutorials (which I’ve been meaning to do for a while).
Ahhh, look at those colors! Lutz is going to be posting a new map from the project periodically over the next few weeks so follow her on Tabletop Whale, Twitter, or Tumblr to tune in.
i love this series (and song) very much. you do too. WATCH THIS and be amused.
In the latest episode of Earworm, Estelle Caswell and Jacob Collier break down Stevie Wonder’s Sir Duke, in which he pays tribute to the jazz artists that inspired him, both in lyric and in the arrangement of the music. As someone who isn’t musical but has experience programming, writing, designing, and doing science, it’s fun to see a similar borrow/remix/homage process at work on a virtuoso level.
hi friends. as your chicago/midwest reader cultural correspondent, it's important that you know the TRUTH about chicago-style pizza: 1) it's amazing drunk food. 2) it's hardly pizza and it's **in no way** the best kind of pizza in chicago. what is the best? this article will fill you in. if nothing else, the pizza pics will move your stomach in the right direction.
i had no ideas gongs sound like this either. the cartoon-y crash sound really does this cool instrument a disservice. let's overcome this, everyone.
Listen in as “Gong Master Sven” plays a gong that’s 7 feet across. (No seriously, listen…it’s wild. Headphones recommended.)
Ok, show of hands. How many of you of thought it was going to sound like that? I had no idea! He barely hits it! The whole thing sounded like a horror movie soundtrack or slowed-down pop songs. Here’s another demonstration, with some slightly harder hits:
The Memphis Gong Chamber looks like an amazing place. Watching this on YouTube, we’re missing out on a lot of the low-end sounds:
And if you were actually standing here like I am, you can feel all your internal organs being massaged by the vibrations from this. It’s really quite the experience.
This guy drags some objects over a large gong and it sounds like whale song:
Ok well, there’s a new item for the bucket list. (via @tedgioia)
Japanese artist/musician doooo created this fantastically creepy coin purse so he can really put his money where his mouth is. Previous works include the flesh phone case and a finger hanko (stamp), below.
wait. WHAT? (throat singing starts about a minute in) how is this real?
Throat singing, aka overtone singing, is a well known practice in the traditional music of Mongolian, Tibetan, and other indigenous people around the world. Surprisingly, you can also hear it on "Lonely Cowboy," a fantastic 78 RPM shellac record from 1927 by cowboy singer Arthur Miles that also features some lovely yodeling!
friend promo. i can share with you that this album is SO potent and fiery that you may find music you've heard before a little boring or drab, even. results may not vary. it will blow your mind.
Hey just runnin’ a small business over here - perhaps you’d like to support us? All ya gotta do is pre-order our record from this website and thus receive a physical copy of this creation that I feel so proud of called TWELVE NUDES. We got the vinyl, the CD, the digital, what chu neeeeed. There are worthwhile liner notes, cool art, lyrics, a gatefold thingy. All done in collaboration with Cristina Daura, amazing Spanish artist who visually captured the particular visceral madness of this record with her iconic drawings.
I’m proud of what we’ve created! Get in on this! Hell, buy a T-shirt while you’re at it! (BTW: “12 Nudes”-related shirt designs coming soon, they are super cool yer gonna love em but so are the old designs so don’t be shy)
3. ‘Girl’ could originally be used to refer to a child of any gender — it didn’t specifically denote a female child until the late 14th century.
12. The best thing I’ve learned from the Allusionist is that the dictionary is a record and not a rule book! And language is too dynamic and complex for there to be a right and a wrong.
14. Dictionaries: can’t trust them, they’ve got deliberately fake words, or mountweazels, as copyright traps.
20. A few more quick eponyms: the saxophone is named after its inventor Adolphe Sax. He also invented the saxhorn, saxotromba, and saxtuba which didn’t all catch on.
27. Words like laser, scuba, taser — and the care in ‘care package’, those are all acronyms. [Whoa, I did not know about CARE package! -j]
45. I looked up the step in stepchild or stepparent and found it meant ‘grief’. I know some of you use different terms; since the episode, I’ve been borrowing ‘bonus’.
54. My favourite portmanteau discovery: ‘Velcro’ is a portmanteau — of velour and crochet.
56. Also very literal: ‘log in’, after the log on a knotted rope that would be thrown overboard from a ship to measure its speed — calculated by the length of rope unspooled over a particular time — and that would be logged in the log book.
ooh this is a good burn...that will take *at least* 30 min to read.
"Most public criticisms of Uber have focused on narrow behavioral and cultural issues, including deceptive advertising and pricing, algorithmic manipulation, driver exploitation, deep-seated misogyny among executives, and disregard of laws and business norms. Such criticisms are valid, but these problems are not fixable aberrations. They were the inevitable result of pursuing “growth at all costs” without having any ability to fund that growth out of positive cash flow. And while Uber has taken steps to reduce negative publicity, it has not done—and cannot do—anything that could suddenly produce a sustainable, profitable business model."
i took a real taxi the other week b/c my phone was buried so deep in my bag. it was awesome. the driver knew every corner of the city. it reminded me of "the knowledge" test that cabbies in london take (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/t-magazine/london-taxi-test-knowledge.html). i don't mean to shift the argument to city geography trivia, but this shows that there is a mechanism for professionalization, advancement, and support within the taxi business...which i would guess is one of the stabilizing forces that made taxi companies profitable. end rant.
Since it began operations in 2010, Uber has grown to the point where it now collects over $45 billion in gross passenger revenue, and it has seized a major share of the urban car service market. But the widespread belief that it is a highly innovative and successful company has no basis in economic reality.
An examination of Uber’s economics suggests that it has no hope of ever earning sustainable urban car service profits in competitive markets. Its costs are simply much higher than the market is willing to pay, as its nine years of massive losses indicate. Uber not only lacks powerful competitive advantages, but it is actually less efficient than the competitors it has been driving out of business.
This is one of those articles where I want to excerpt the entire thing; it’s just so jammed packed with goodies about a company that represents everything I hate about “tech” and Silicon Valley.
In reality, Uber’s platform does not include any technological breakthroughs, and Uber has done nothing to “disrupt” the economics of providing urban car services. What Uber has disrupted is the idea that competitive consumer and capital markets will maximize overall economic welfare by rewarding companies with superior efficiency. Its multibillion dollar subsidies completely distorted marketplace price and service signals, leading to a massive misallocation of resources. Uber’s most important innovation has been to produce staggering levels of private wealth without creating any sustainable benefits for consumers, workers, the cities they serve, or anyone else.
A later section is titled “Uber’s Narratives Directly Copied Libertarian Propaganda”.
In the early 1990s, a coordinated campaign advocating taxi deregulation was conducted by a variety of pro-corporate/libertarian think tanks that all received funding from Charles and David Koch. This campaign pursued the same deregulation that Uber’s investors needed, and used classic political propaganda techniques. It emphasized emotive themes designed to engage tribal loyalties and convert complex issues into black-and-white moral battles where compromise was impossible. There was an emphasis on simple, attractive conclusions designed to obscure the actual objectives of the campaigners, and their lack of sound supporting evidence.
This campaign’s narratives, repeated across dozens of publications, included framing taxi deregulation as a heroic battle for progress, innovation, and economic freedom. Its main claims were that thousands of struggling entrepreneurial drivers had been blocked from job opportunities by the “cab cartel” and the corrupt regulators beholden to them, and that consumers would enjoy the same benefits that airline deregulation had produced. In a word, consumers were promised a free lunch. Taxi deregulation would lead to lower fares, solve the problems of long waits, provide much greater service (especially in neighborhoods where service was poor), and increase jobs and wages for drivers. Of course, no data or analysis of actual taxi economics showing how these wondrous benefits could be produced was included.
Horan reserves a healthy chunk of his criticism for the media, whose unwillingness to critically cover the company — “the press refuses to reconsider its narrative valorizing Uber as a heroic innovator that has created huge benefits for consumers and cities” — has provided a playbook for future investors to exploit for years to come. Blech. What a shitshow.
Liquidators clean the roof of the No. 3 reactor. At first, workers tried clearing the radioactive debris from the roof using West German, Japanese, and Russian robots, but the machines could not cope with the extreme radiation levels so authorities decided to use humans. In some areas, workers could not stay any longer than 40 seconds before the radiation they received reached the maximum authorized dose a human being should receive in his entire life.
"Default Filename feels quietly radical in 2019. The project imagines a YouTube without recommendation algorithms that think you only want to watch beauty tutorials, Avengers outtakes or product unboxings. It’s a glimpse of a timeline where Google and Facebook didn’t create and capitalize on a vast economy of tracking, prediction and control. Default Filename is a portal to an expansive, serendipitous internet — an internet that’s ours again."
man with birds. pig with ball. wholesome.
A man wearing a red flannel shirt and brown suspenders walks into a clearing. His beard is well kempt, the same off-white as the snowmelt behind him. “Good afternoon,” he says to the camera. “It’s Friday, Oct. 12.” Slowly, he extends his arms. Two birds swoop down from the trees, alighting on his hands. “You can see how much I love my whiskey jacks. I’m feeding them my home-baked bread,” he says. The whiskey jacks peck, then take off with their spoils. “Gotta love it,” the man says. “They’ve been my friends for years.” A small wave at the camera: “I hope you have a great day where you live.”
Well, I am having a great day where I live, Mr. Whiskey Jack. How could I not be knowing now that Snow White not only lives (albeit in the guise of a soft-spoken lumberjack) but is on YouTube?
That video is one of my favorite clips that I’ve seen while watching Default Filename TV, a website launched in March by artist Everest Pipkin. The site’s design is simple — a rectangular video embed floats in the middle of a black page26 and plays random YouTube videos that were uploaded straight from the camera, without an edit to the original file name. Most of the videos that I’ve watched on the site have fewer than 10 or 15 views. In “IMG 7313 Small,” a bear that seems to be in distress is tended to by a woman, who appears to be blowing air into the unconscious animal’s mouth. The video’s 34-second runtime leaves us no chance to process — “MOV 6092” begins to play, and we’re knee-high in a crop field watching what appears to be an industrial sprinkler sweep past the camera, a rainbow forming in its mist. When I watch the site, I am CCTV, omniscient and invisible. I am Superman hearing the cries of a newborn halfway around the world. I am the creep in “American Beauty” marveling at a plastic bag dancing in the wind. Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world … I feel like I can’t take it.27
Default Filename feels quietly radical in 2019. The project imagines a YouTube without recommendation algorithms that think you only want to watch beauty tutorials, Avengers outtakes or product unboxings. It’s a glimpse of a timeline where Google and Facebook didn’t create and capitalize on a vast economy of tracking, prediction and control. Default Filename is a portal to an expansive, serendipitous internet — an internet that’s ours again.
When YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded the site’s first video in 2005, the web looked a little bit like that vision. At first, YouTube’s users weren’t able to choose which video played next. Instead, the site queued up a random clip. That kind of chaos used to be a feature of the web. From AOL’s anonymous chat rooms to StumbleUpon and Chatroulette, developers built a world that let people see something new and meet people they might otherwise never encounter.
“I think it was one of the great promises, especially of the early aughts internet,” Pipkin said. “You could find anything, anywhere. … You put in some words and then ‘dot com’ and saw what came up.”
That promise seems largely to have disappeared. Cookies and analytics power recommendations that keep users comfortable and clicking. StumbleUpon, a suite of tools that surprised users with a new website every time they clicked a button, was at one point among the top social media sites in the nation. It shut down last year. The popularity of Chatroulette, which connects strangers28 via webcam and was once the subject of New York Times and New Yorker articles, has fallen — it now ranks lower than 25,000 other websites in traffic and engagement in the United States.29 Meanwhile, YouTube, which Google bought in 2006, announced last year that recommended videos account for more than 70 percent of the time people spend watching the site’s videos.
Default Filename stands as a scrappy experiment on YouTube’s unprofitable fringes. I have yet to see any advertisement before the videos. And although watching a massive pig named Crackling play with a red ball for two minutes can’t erase decades of surveillance, at least my clicks on Default Filename probably won’t come back to haunt me.
Shoshana Zuboff describes this desire to hide from the algorithms as a “right to sanctuary” in her new book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School, argues that a mutant form of capitalism spawned when Google and Facebook began to analyze users’ “behavioral surplus” data and used it to power their advertising products in a largely unregulated marketplace.
YouTube, the second-most-popular site on the web, is an important pipeline for Google, Zuboff told me in an interview: “It tells Google so much about us: what we’re feeling, thinking, doing. And from that, they’re able to discern what we’re likely to do.” Zuboff sees artists like Pipkin as dedicating “their genius to the prospects of human invisibility” in response to “the intolerable conditions of glass life,” a state of unending uncertainty about when we’re being watched.
Indeed, Default Filename is not the only attempt to celebrate the web’s less profitable content. No Likes Yet dug up Instagram posts with, yep, zero likes. YouHole.tv shows videos with fewer than 500 views, and othersites have highlighted videos with unchanged filenames.
Pipkin’s framing is my favorite. Zero-view videos are to be pitied, like the kid with no friends at recess. Tweaking the API call to target videos that were added to YouTube with their original filenames intact shifts the subject/object relationship. The uploaders presumably didn’t publish their videos with the goal of going viral. You can watch if you want, but this isn’t TikTok. The people in these videos are not performing for you.
It’s not clear how much longer sites like Default Filename will exist. YouTube’s original slogan was “Your Digital Video Repository,” a pricey commitment for a free website whose users now upload more than 80 years’ worth of content every day. Considering that an estimated 85 percent of the platform’s traffic goes to 3 percent of channels, I can imagine a day when YouTube executives decide that it doesn’t make sense to save all those videos that have washed up on the long tail. Or they could tweak the API that allows Pipkin to retrieve videos and Default Filename may just stop working.
In the meantime, I’ll cherish the site, passive and voyeuristic as it is. I’ve seen videos that frighten me, like the clip of a toddler who’s pointing the butt of a gun at the family bunny and pulling the trigger. Then the next video loads, and I’m watching a group of women wearing lavender cowboy hats spin children in wheelchairs around a stage as the audience claps along to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” Such is the promise of plunging a hand again and again into the welter of human memory.
this show is *really* incredible. by many accounts it stays true to the facts, which are wild enough to begin with. WATCH IT. it's only five episodes and will make your skin crawl.
Chernobyl, the five-part HBO/Sky dramatization of the 1986 nuclear disaster, is filled with more dread, tension and horror than any Hollywood movie I've seen in years. The most unsettling part of it is knowing that it adheres closely to the truth, right down to the details. Yet I'm still startled to see just how exacting the production design is, as demonstrated by this footage from one of the plant roofs where "liquidators" struggled to remove irradiated debris by hurling it back into the open core of the reactor. Jump to about 7:45 for the roof work.
Compare to the "roof" scene from the show, which integrates the true footage so cleverly you wouldn't know it if you hadn't seen it for yourself:
If you still need convincing that you should check out this amazing show, here's the scene from Ep. 1 where three young plant workers inspect the reactor hall after the explosion. They know what they're afraid of finding, but they don't know that it's going to be... well, you watch it and see for yourself.
Embedded below, a hapless engineer is ordered onto the roof so that managers can debunk claims that the reactor is exposed to the open air. He knows he's dead as soon as he sees the satanic cloud of smoke billowing from the ruin. He knows the guard escorting him up there is dead, too—and that guy doesn't even have to go up to the edge and look down into it. The guard doesn't have to go back to the managers and get yelled at again, either.
Back in spring 2011, I visited New Orleans and came back with a handful of records. Amongst them was a single by Floyd Anckle and the Majestic Brass Band, performing what I expected to be a cover of The Meters’ mid-70s hit, “Hey Pocky-Way.” However, the one thing I noticed right away is that it opened with a big tuba riff that wasn’t like anything in The Meters’ song at all.
That song stayed with me for a long time but it was hard to find much on Anckle or the Majestic and at the time, I didn’t pursue much more background research on it. Then, a year and a half ago, I was back in NOLA, giving a talk at Tulane and one of my hosts literally wrote the book on New Orleans brass bands: Matt Sakakeeny. On a whim, I played the track for him. He didn’t recognize the single but he instantly recognized the tuba riff. “That’s Tuba Fats!” He said. “Huh?” I replied.
In the latest Fall 2018 issue of 64 Parishes, published by the Louisana Endowment for the Humanities, Matt and I have an essay all about Tuba Fats. The name, as I soon learned in 2017, refers both to a person – Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen, a legendary tuba player in New Orleans’ second line brass bands – and the riff itself, one of the most famous in the city. I’ll spare you all the details since you can just read about it yourself:
This post isn’t meant to duplicate what’s already in that article. Rather, it’s a companion post, with all the necessary songs you might want to hear, related to the essay. Read it first, the come back here.
We may as well start where I started, with the Floyd Anckle song.
Floyd Anckle and the Majestic Brass Band: Hey Pocky-Way (C&E, 197?)
As Matt and I note, we aren’t certain Tuba Fats himself actually played on this but the single is either the first or second time the riff ever was committed to record. Here’s the other time, and this one, we know Lacen played on:
Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band: Tuba Fats edit (from Serenaders, 197?)
The full track begins with “Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” one of the Olympia Brass Band’s classics, but midway through, they turn things over to Tuba Fats to do his thing and you can instantly hear that riff come in to mark the transition.
As Matt notes in our article, “Tuba Fats” wasn’t so much a record that circulated in the city; it was the riff that everyone knew, so much so that the fact that it was never a hit record was besides the point. As our piece opens with, “Tuba Fats” was so popular in the city that a generation later, Mannie Fresh and Gregory “D” open their “Buck Jump Time” single with the riff and tell the listeners “you know the bassline!” Notably, they say this on the local, NOLA release of the single but when it was picked up for national distribution, they kept the track intact but no longer reference the riff/bassline as an obvious nod since, presumably, outside of the Crescent City, no one would have known what they were referring to.
And then there’s this, which I found in the process of researching the story, a live performance of “Tuba Fats” as done by Connecticut’s Coventry High School Band, led by the late Ned Smith.
At some point, I’d love to develop this story into a proper podcast episode (*fingers crossed*) but until then, please enjoy Matt and my article and all the accompanying music.
Since January, Google has been pushing for a change to its extensions handling in Chrome; one casualty of that change is ability to block unwanted content before its loads, something that would effectively kill privacy tools and ad-blockers.
After a public outcry, Google has tweaked the change, but only for enterprise customers, who will have access to an API that will allow this kind of blocking. That means that corporations will be able to develop internal-use plugins that do the kind of screening that adblockers do for the rest of us today.
Google has warned investors that "New and existing technologies could affect our ability to customize ads and/or could block ads online, which would harm our business," and ad blocker developers like Raymond Hill of Ublock Origin have speculated that "Google’s primary business is incompatible with unimpeded content blocking. Now that Google Chrome product has achieve high market share, the content blocking concerns as stated in its 10K filing are being tackled."
Google denies this, and says "We’re actively working with the developer community to get feedback and iterate on the design of a privacy-preserving content filtering system that limits the amount of sensitive browser data shared with third parties."
Chrome is the dominant browser on the web today, and even though it is nominally open source, Google has used a suite of tricks to ensure that it gets to decide who can adapt it and what features those adaptations can have.
Firefox is available for virtually every OS -- mobile and desktop -- and supports full ad-blocking.
Chrome is deprecating the blocking capabilities of the webRequest API in Manifest V3, not the entire webRequest API (though blocking will still be available to enterprise deployments).
Google is essentially saying that Chrome will still have the capability to block unwanted content, but this will be restricted to only paid, enterprise users of Chrome. This is likely to allow enterprise customers to develop in-house Chrome extensions, not for ad blocking usage.
For the rest of us, Google hasn’t budged on their changes to content blockers, meaning that ad blockers will need to switch to a less effective, rules-based system, called “declarativeNetRequest.”
Singer-songwriter Leon Redbone, who specialized in old-school vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley-style music, died earlier today, his family confirmed. He was 69 — although, in characteristically whimsical fashion, the official statement announcing his death gave his age as 127.
Redbone had officially retired in 2015, with a representative then citing unspecified health concerns as the reason for his being unable to continue performing or recording.
A post on Redbone’s website confirming his death contained enough deadpan humor and whimsical fiction that it was almost certainly prepared in advance by the singer himself. “It is with heavy hearts we announce that early this morning, May 30th, 2019, Leon Redbone crossed the delta for that beautiful shore at the age of 127,” it read. “He departed our world with his guitar, his trusty companion Rover, and a simple tip of his hat. He’s interested to see what Blind Blake, Emmett, and Jelly Roll have been up to in his absence, and has plans for a rousing sing along number with Sári Barabás. An eternity of pouring through texts in the Library of Ashurbanipal will be a welcome repose, perhaps followed by a shot or two of whiskey with Lee Morse, and some long overdue discussions with his favorite Uncle, Suppiluliuma I of the Hittites. To his fans, friends, and loving family who have already been missing him so in this realm he says, ‘Oh behave yourselves. Thank you…. and good evening everybody.'”
A few McDonald’s restaurants in Sweden started putting beehives on their rooftops to help save dwindling bee populations and it turned into a national sustainability effort.
More franchisees around the country are joining the cause and have also started replacing the grass around their restaurants with flowers and plants that are important for the wellbeing of wild bees.
To promote the idea, McDonald’s constructed what might be their smallest restaurant, actually a fully functioning beehive just for the bees:
whoa. i never thought about this regarding impressions.
Watching this video is the closest thing to shrooms I've yet experienced online. Not so much in the content, but rather the way hallucinatory changes to reality outpace your conscious awareness of them by uncanny moments.
(It's a Bill Hader impression of Arnie where they deepfake him to look like Arnie in precise proportion to the waxing and waning effort put into the impression)
Mueller throws the newspaper off his face and lurches upward. He’s back in the gym. Staring back at him he sees Sam Waterston from the NBC hit Law and Order. He rubs his eyes. No, just John Kerry again wearing those damn American Flag workout shorts that say ‘04 on the rear. “Say Bob, you seem stressed. Why not come to our improv show tonight? I guarantee it’s the funniest show this side of the Potomac.”
“That’s not a thing people say, John,” Mueller spits, gathering the papers he threw on the floor. He could use a good laugh he admits to himself. Kerry thrusts a neon flyer that he made in Mueller’s direction. It depicts stick figures laughing at a crudely-drawn performer on stage. “Err, thanks, John. I’ll see if I can come. It’s pretty busy on my end,” he says, squeezing out his best smile.
“Sure Bob, no problem. Maybe you can ask Tammy what she meant. She has such a foul mouth in these shows. She is very - and I mean very - funny.” Kerry checks himself out in the mirror. Mueller takes his papers and stands up. “Candied pecan?” Kerry offers, “You look famished. I love these things - never leave home without a bag or two.” Did Kerry just wink at me, Mueller thinks to himself.
“Sure, sure, thanks John,” Mueller demurs, helping himself to a few. He scans the papers, walking away quickly, hoping that he’s lost Kerry. He’s on the fence about whether he should go to the show this evening. Following up with Baldwin would be smart. And nobody enjoys a good laugh more than Bob Mueller…but John Kerry? Seven dollars at the door?
“You know Bob,” Kerry says far down the hall, “it’s always time for nuts!”
Mueller’s mind starts racing. Nuts, time, shawarma, Law and Order, the ‘04 election…what does it all mean? How does it fit together? Mueller leans against a shuttering tree outside the gym. The rain has started up again. He removes the tie from his waist and uses it to wipe rain and sweat from his forehead. A lightning bolt splits the sky. Mueller feels a primal urge to take shelter.
He enters a shop with a strange device over the door, a sort of masonic mermaid - “Starbucks,” reads the sign under the device. Mueller’s head clears as he enters, the acrid smell of coffee fills his nostrils. He closes his eyes and sighs. And then he notices something, all the people in this little shop are holding the paper coffee cups! This must be where you get one! Finally, a piece of the puzzle becomes clear.
Mueller goes up to the counter and says to the barista, “I want a cup of coffee, in one of the paper cups.” The barista sighs inwardly, she can tell this is a man who has never ordered a Starbucks coffee before.
“What size?” she asks, gesturing to a display of various sized paper cups. Mueller is struck by the variety of sizes, and by the names for the sizes which seem to correspond to nothing. This is a metaphor for his life, he realizes.
Several people order while Mueller contemplates the cups as well as the idea that words are meaningless until we add meaning to them. Finally he gestures to one of the middle cups and says, “that one.”
“Okay, great,” says the barista, “is a dark roast okay?”
Mueller rocks back and forth on his heels, feeling almost revived, “Yes, yes, anything!”
She gets the coffee and punched a few buttons on the cash register, “That will be…”
Mueller is already digging in his pocket for his wallet, “Anything, I don’t care how much it is!” He pulls out a crisp $100 bill. “Keep the change!”
The barista’s face goes from mild annoyance to happy surprise in an instant, but Mueller only has eyes for his paper cup of coffee. He cradles it as though it were a newborn Panda at the National Zoo, a symbol of international cooperation, joy, and new grant money.
“Milk and sugar are over there!” the barista calls. Robert Mueller is not a man who needs milk and sugar in his coffee. He takes a seat in a stoll looking out the window. He takes a sip of the coffee - too hot, acrid, perfect.
With a snap, he straightens like a predator who has smelt a trace of blood. He stares out the window. There, just across the street, is his Mr. Tumnus, his white whale, his…he can’t think of another literary comparison. The man with the pink umbrella turns to look across the street into the Starbucks. His eyes meet Mueller’s. In this mild-looking man’s eyes, Mueller sees reflected the void he himself has stared into for many months. For a moment, they are one.
Bob Mueller quickly sips from the white paper cup. A caustic, burning taste fills his mouth. He winces and it is the best feeling he’s felt in months. He bursts out of the doors onto the sidewalk where it is pouring. The man with the pink umbrella stays put across the street, as if beckoning. The world grows quiet as busy citizens zoom by in their automobiles. Mueller straightens his back, cups his hands over his mouth and shouts “I’ve seen you before.” The man with the pink umbrella stares, face partially obscured by his prop. “I…I think I know you,” Mueller stammers. He feels an energy seething within as if long-sought after answers stand across the street from him. Could this be when everything changes?
The man replies in a slow, calm tone, “I know you too, Bob. It’s good to see you. There’s much to discuss.” He glances up and down the street, “But this is not the place.” Sound suddenly returns to Bob Mueller’s world: trucks wheeze down the road, shoes scrape against the pavement, rain cascades down, phone conversations stick like pins into his ears. “I need to go,” the man announces.
“Wait, just wait, please,” Mueller begs, waving his arms, spilling coffee everywhere. “Are you real? Do you know what’s going on? Who…who are you.” Questions flood his brain and his shoes suddenly feel too small for his feet. Everything is wet.
The man smiles, establishing a comforting truth. “I’m flesh and blood, Bob. Just like you. I’m as real as those ties you are wearing. We share the same passions. The answers you seek are out there. We’re on the same side of this story. I know it’s not easy, but I need you to be patient.” Where Mueller would normally feel frustration, he feels a deep connection with this stranger - an understanding, a sense of justice.
“Soon, then?” Mueller squints and shouts over the din of the storm.
“Yes, soon,” the man says, nodding, as a bus suddenly appears, obscuring him. Mueller tries to track him, bolting down the street to catch another glimpse, but he is already gone. In his place is Chief Justice John Roberts holding a red umbrella and some bowling pins. Mueller instantly realizes that Roberts has just finished another one of his circus classes.
“Bob Mueller, that you? Dang! Did you know I just learned how to juggle? Well, sorta.”
“Inopportune,” Mueller swears to himself under his breath. He feels the weight of his foul mouth and quickly conjures up a way to avail himself “John, you are here! I have to go fix my sink!” Brilliant, he thinks and teeters away down the jagged, labyrinthine streets. He can hear Roberts shouting something about an improv show going on later as he speeds away.
Mueller feels overwhelmed by his interaction with the man with the pink umbrella. He seems so familiar. He must connect the dots. How can he find out who that man is? Sky plane note? No. Microfiche? Probably. Fortune-teller? Expensive. Old newspaper clippings? Likely, but which ones? Who shares the same passions that he does? How soon is too soon to obtain another paper cup? He feels a familiar feeling and looks up. Wind. Simple wind. It is the wind blowing on his face. He looks toward its source.
The storm has subsided and the sun is setting. Bob Mueller stares at the golden rays stretching across the old greystones. He realizes he has been walking away from John Roberts for longer than he thought. There’s a soft sound of…music? He looks up to see that he’s standing outside of an old jazz club, holding a half-eaten tuna melt in his hand. He throws the sandwich away and walks toward the hazy light coming out of the jazz club’s doorway. Like the first chirps of birds in a well-earned spring, the most beautiful sounds coax him in.
i'm going to continue to post mueller fan-fic until we get to the bottom of this.
Mueller steps back out into the drizzling street. In the distance, a furtive figure catches his eye. A man carrying a brightly colored umbrella, its pattern indiscernible at this distance, is leaning over a garbage can. The man straightens, seeming to feel Mueller’s eyes on him. He scurries off, his gait both unusual and familiar. Mueller follows, no longer noticing the rain. As he trails the mysterious man, he is reminded of Mr. Tumnus, the faun in The Chronicles of Narnia, who helped the Pevensie children. Or did he sell them out to the White Witch? Mueller isn’t sure. He breaks his stride to consider the story, in that instant, the man with the umbrella disappears.
A few yards ahead Mueller sees former White House photographer Pete Souza coming out of a laundromat.
“Hey there!” Mueller calls. “Did you see a man with a pink umbrella go by a minute ago?”
Souza is startled and almost drops his sack of laundry. “No, I didn’t see anyone.”
Mueller continues, “it was one of those really big umbrellas.”
Souza replies, “I think I would have noticed that, Mr. Mueller, it’s not even raining.” Mueller stares at him. Souza goes on, attempting to be conversational, “It hasn’t rained here in weeks, we could really use it.”
Mueller continues to stare, he is sure it was drizzling only a few minutes ago. Then he thinks to himself, you can’t trust a photographer anyway. He is about the push past Souza to try to find the umbrella-wielding stranger when Souza pipes up again. Souza, alarmed at the lack of focus in Mueller’s eyes and the fact that he is wearing two ties, asks, “Are you okay, Mr. Mueller?”
Mueller snaps to attention and begins to correct Souza on the pronunciation of his name. “It’s Mueller, like mule. No, I mean it’s like dull, but with an ‘M,’ I mean…what were we talking about? I can’t say anything about the indictments.” Mueller presses his knuckles into his temples. Souza, meanwhile, has begun to back away.
“Can I call anyone for you, Mr. Mue…” Souza pauses, now unsure how to pronounce the name, “Can I get call an Uber for you?”
Mueller is looking frazzled now, “Who have you been talking to?! NO CALLS!” Mueller steps toward Souza and stares down at him, and the full force of the jowly features ripple over the photographer’s face. Could it be a mask? Souza is torn now, he wants to get away from Mueller, but he also feels that the man needs help.
Just then Senator Baldwin comes back around from the Chipotle across from the shawarma shop. “Just spit it out, Bob,” she yawps, smacking Mueller in the middle of his back. The force of the blow throws Mueller to his knees. She continues to march down the street without looking back.
Souza takes the moment of confusion to slip across the street.
Mueller stands up, dusting off his knees. Better get back to it; lunch is over he thinks to himself but really says out loud to a gaggle of tourists from Revere, Massachusetts. “Go get ‘em, Bowbby!” they say in response. He walks toward a federal building at a gait that anyone would label as “teetering” or “goofy,” but he thinks of as “power walking” or “a heel-forward clip.”
Teetering by several pristine government offices, Bob Mueller opens a black door, which reveals a hallway that has not been renovated in decades. It smells musty. Homey. Honest. He unlocks his office door and blurts out “what’have’we’got,gang?” It is a hive of productivity. In the back there are several cork boards with yarn radiating out from many axes, connecting disparate pieces of evidence. Trusted agents click-clack away at laptop keyboards, while others dig through crates of documents. Phones ring. An old stereo sounds a restrained jazzy beat. There are murmurs of “Hey, boss.” “Nothing yet.” “Too much to process.” “Hiya.”
Special Agent Sandra Willard slams her phone down. “Boss, it’s another flurry today.”
“Don’t I know it,” Mueller says, shaking his head, loosening one of his ties.
“Aiming for another write up in the New Yorker?” Sandra or Sandy if you prefer, asks, looking at the ties.
“Let’s just say it’s all part of the plan,” Mueller responds, winking at a blank wall as if someone were there. Two agents see this and exchange knowing looks. “Sandy, I ran into Tammy Baldwin at lunch today and she said that I shouldn’t worry about the time, but that I should keep my eye on it too. What the hell’s that mean?”
Sharpie in hand, Sandy writes this down on an index card and posts it on a cork board. “Cryptic. It’s something. We’re getting more used to this confusion every day,” she says shrugging. Index cards cover the boards with various phrases like “All is still in the moonlessness,” “It’s Mueller time,” “Four in one isn’t quite three of nine,” “Botched nose job,” etc.
“All will reveal itself,” Mueller declares, tapping his lip for ten minutes. “I also saw Souza today. He was telling me it wasn’t raining out.”
“Sure wasn’t. Wish it was. We really could use it,” Sandy adds. “But, then again, you can never trust a photographer, even when they’re right.”
“Agreed,” Mueller nods, pinning Souza’s name on the board for good measure. Unwrapping a Charleston Chew, he takes a generous bite. He gnaws, sizing up the board. He stares, shakes his head, rubs his eyes, still chewing. He unbuttons his blazer and places his hands in his pockets. “This is going nowhere,” he sputters between chews. Swallowing, he turns to everyone and says “You are all doing the work this country deserves. I can’t thank you enough and this citizenry owes you all a debt of gratitude. I’m a little stuck right now and need to work through some of this,” he explains, gesturing at a cluster of cards and strings, letting the day’s events wash over him. “I’m going to the gym.” High-fiving everyone he can on the way out, he grabs a copy of The Hilltop, Howard University’s best newspaper, by his estimation, to check for leads.
He teeters down the hallway and stumbles out into the bright sunlight. “Gosh darn it, Souza,” he mumbles, using one of his stronger oaths. He takes a hesitating step out onto the sidewalk. He can tell there is something off about how he is walking. He tries a few steps on his tip toes, then a few hops, then settles into stomping with his left foot and dragging his right foot to meet it.
Halfway to the gym is when his best frenemy and doppleganger, John Kerry, bursts out of a boarded up Border’s. “Typical,” Mueller thinks, “Just what I need.”
“Heya, Three Sticks,” Kerry calls out, “How’s the weather up there.” Kerry runs up and hip checks Mueller. “What’s with the two-step?”
Mueller doesn’t understand the reference. “John, have you spoken to Senator Baldwin lately?”
“Sure, she’s in my improv group.”
“She told me something kind of cryptic today, off the record, ya know. Something about how time was short.”
“Well, sure, Bob. Time is like a hand slowly circling a clock face. But you’d have to talk to someone on the Budget Committee to really understand it.”
Mueller finds this statement to be completely unhelpful. He tries to lose Kerry in a gaggle of 7th graders, but it doesn’t work because they’re both much taller than the kids. “Listen John, I need to get to the gym to do some reading.” He stomps off before Kerry can react.
At the gym, the twenty-something at the desk says, “Good Morning, Mr. Mueller, enjoy your workout.”
“It’s Mueller,” Mueller snaps, “Like bugler, with an ‘M,’ I mean it’s like bowler, like that hat.”
In the locker room, Mueller removes his remaining tie. It has a golf theme, with tees, and ball, and putters printed all over it. “Where the heck did I get this thing? Have I ever even played golf?” He promptly ties it around his waist.
He goes out into the gym to use his usual bench press. There is a new motivational sign on the wall next to him. “There’s only one today until tomorrow!” it reads. Mueller is struck by this sentiment. Surely it was placed here for him to see. Is it a threat or a clue? Mueller can’t tell. He leans back on the bench, places The Hilltop over his head and falls asleep.
A field, green with wildgrass. The sky is a golden yellow. The sun is strong. Bob Mueller can feel his jaw sharpening. He is far away from the district. He rolls over in the grass which feels like swimming. His hands stretch farther than normal and his feet feel light. He floats toward a tree and looks down at his watch. The numbers blink rhythmically. He clicks his heels together and notices a blue ribbon in a tree. He maneuvers up toward it. The air smells sweet. He reaches for the ribbon, grazing it with his hand. A gentle breeze lifts him toward it. He can touch it. He feels a sense of being late and something else. He should call home. And something else. He looks at the ribbon. There’s a message. “Oh great, just what I need, another message,” he says, only his voice pours out of his mouth like a thick, juicy marmalade. He raises the ribbon to read, but the words remain out of focus. He pulls it closer. Still blurry. He begins to wrap his head in it, starting from his neck up to his nose. He is about to cover the last bit of his face, his eyes, with the ribbon when the last part of the message abruptly comes into focus: “It’s time.”
The Swiss know a thing or two about cheese, and here's their latest conclusion: It tastes better under the influence of rap music. Specifically, longterm exposure to A Tribe Called Quest results in improved flavor, which sounds about right. More »
Kaija Straumanis took a series of portraits of herself being hit in the face with all sorts of different objects, from a dodgeball to a book to an old boot.
The Swiss know a thing or two about cheese, and here's their latest conclusion: It tastes better under the influence of rap music. Specifically, longterm exposure to A Tribe Called Quest results in improved flavor, which sounds about right. 
