Just enjoying Jo Brown’s illustrations today. Using a Moleskine notebook, she sketches plants and wildlife near her home in Devon, England. A replica of that nature journal called Secrets of a Devon Wood has been recently published in the UK (US edition is out soon — Amazon is the only place I could find it). You can check out more of her artwork on Instagram. (via colossal)
Arlo Parks -- a young pop-leaning London singer-songwriter of Nigerian/Chadian/French lineage -- has won herself a lot of famous fans. Their number includes Phoebe Bridgers, who recently duetted with Parks on a cover of Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees," and Billie Eilish, whose "my future" was another recent Parks cover selection. And … More »
we need more weirdos. i love how he talks about ideas and creativity. i know lynch isn't for everyone, but his memoir, room to dream, really resonated with my creative brain. also a bunch of his works.
The title of this video is “David Lynch being a madman for a relentless 8 minutes and 30 seconds” is perfect and requires no further information or contextualization. (thx, david (no relation))
Our findings here suggest that Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and at times reinforce his disinformation campaign by using three core standard practices of professional journalism. These three are: elite institutional focus (if the President says it, it’s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and balance, neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side.
For those times when you’re constantly singing a line of a song but just can’t remember what song those lyrics came from, Spotify can now help you with that. You can now search for songs by their lyrics on iOS and Android (via 9to5Mac).
The feature looks to be pretty straightforward — type in some lyrics into Spotify’s search bar and the app will surface songs that match. Songs that could be what you’re looking for will have a “Lyrics match” tag, as you can see in this tweet from Spotify designer Lin Wang:
My team just shipped something on iOS and Android -
you want this fever dream. you need it. you're already in it. you've always been living it. starts in earnest at 3 min in. see you on the other side ((SCREAMS))
Neil Cicierega is the guy responsible for early-2000s Flash animation gold like Potter Puppet Pals and "Ultimate Showdown Of Ultimate Destiny." He also makes music as Lemon Demon, and since 2014, he's been releasing a series of jokey mashup albums inspired by Smash Mouth under his own name. So far, we've … More »
i know we all read kottke, but this hit me. after reading this, i'm horrified to re-visit what i read in college, let along high school or any of the festering, indoctrinating patriotism bullshit i read as an impressionable youth. let alone what i've written and the words i've used. we've all been conditioned
Likewise, scholar Edward Baptist (Cornell) has provided new terms with which to speak about slavery. In his 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books), he rejects “plantations” (a term pregnant with false memory and romantic myths) in favor of “labor camps”; instead of “slave-owners” (which seems to legitimate and rationalize the ownership of human beings), he uses “enslavers.” Small changes with big implications. These far more accurate and appropriate terms serve his argument well, as he re-examines the role of unfree labor in the rise of the United States as an economic powerhouse and its place in the global economy. In order to tear down old myths, he eschews the old language.
@absurdistwords had a great thread on this recently, urging us to “stop obscuring the horror with detached, antiquated, euphemistic terms”.
“Was an active and willing participant in a vast conspiracy to kidnap children from their families in order to force them into industrial and sexual servitude”
It becomes harder to write slave owning off as just a blot on one’s record.
For instance:
George Washington was our first President and was an active and willing participant in a vast conspiracy to kidnap children from their families in order to force them into industrial and sexual servitude
They continue:
America treats slavery like an oopsie rather than a centuries-long campaign of nightmarish, brutal terrorism.
America sees the systemic and sadistic destruction of Black families as an etiquette violation.
Which is why it will excuse slave owners so readily.
this is a cool series from streogum where they tell the story of every. number. one. song. ever. this one is for "total eclipse of the heart," an all time great.
somehow i've never seen the literal video for "total eclipse of the heart." you really need to watch it now: https://youtu.be/fsgWUq0fdKk
In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. More »
this slipped by me earlier this summer, but IT'S FANTASTIC and you should give it a watch
Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas was an HBO documentary series created and hosted by writer and comedian Wyatt Cenac. The entire run of the show is available for free on YouTube (and on the HBO website) for the next month, but of particular interest is the first season, which was dedicated to the problem of policing in America. The first episode of season one, embedded above, explores police training (specifically “warrior training”) and how it contributed to the death of Philando Castile in Minneapolis. The season’s other episodes cover community policing, police abolition, use of force, and abuse of power.
The show’s not perfect. You can see when my eyes are reading a teleprompter because HBO’s legal team needed me to say something very specifically so they didn’t get sued. But the show wasn’t about being perfect or even about being right. It was about trying to have a dialogue.
When the smoke clears, we’re still going to need to find a way forward. And we’re going to have to find a way to do it together because this country is a dingy apartment and we’re all just a bunch of Craigslist roommates that have to find a way not to eat each other’s cheese.
Growing up Latinx, I was raised with a couple of things that, upon going to school and learning how my white friends lived, weren’t as common as I thought. Sometimes it just didn’t come up. I, for example, never talked about the caped, androgynous man who appeared on Spanish-language news and delivered daily horoscopes with great theatricality. That was my normal, and I never really registered how less... dramatic the news was on English-language networks. This caped astrologist of my youth, Walter Mercado, was an icon and a fixture of Latin American life. But I, caught between cultures, had no idea how large he loomed.
Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado is a Netflix documentary that explores the life of a Puerto Rican...
this is a great song and YOU should give it a listen
Every song on Jamila Woods' last album, last year's great LEGACY! LEGACY!, was inspired by a different iconic artist of color: "Zora," "Eartha," "Baldwin." Today, the soulful Chicago R&B singer and poet is back with her first new song since then, "SULA (Paperback)," named after Toni Morrison's 1973 novel … More »
what about this as TOR-HQ? we could have ship puns, a plank, and make homemade pop tarts in the ~*~* galley *~*~
This "house boat" for sale on Mercer Island, Washington was once the USS Manzanita, built for the US Coast Guard in 1908 and later part of the US Navy. It's now for sale for $2 million. From Realtor.com:
n 1949, the boat was going to be scrapped, when a local librarian and her father bought the stern portion of the vessel.
"So, they bought this boat for a thousand dollars, and they barged it over to Mercer Island. They cut down some trees, sort of winched it up onto the property, and put it on a foundation," [listing agent Lori] Holden Scott explains.
What was once one-fifth of a boat was then converted into a residence, permanently affixed to dry land. The converted boat is now a 1,390-square-foot home, with three bedrooms, one full bathroom, and two half-bathrooms.
is there a word for this? see third link: [insert gif of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown again...]. i really like this and it always makes me imagine funny things like [insert slightly inappropriate floating text gif from steve].
This is a pretty cool — and historically important — project from the Boston Public Library!
The Boston Public Library's Anti-Slavery collection—one of the largest and most important collections of abolitionist material in the United States—contains roughly 40,000 pieces of correspondence, broadsides, newspapers, pamphlets, books, and memorabilia from the 1830s through the 1870s.
[…]
We need your help to turn our collection of handwritten correspondence between anti-slavery activists in the 19th century into texts that can be more easily read and researched by students, teachers, historians, and big data applications.
It's not paid work, but if you're historically curious, they welcome volunteers to comb through their online archives to help digitize everything line-by-line. It looks like a pretty straight-forward process, although it doesn't work on mobile devices or tablets.
Corey Gray is an astrophysicist, and the lead operator at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) at the California Institute of Technology in Washington State. He's also a member of the Blackfoot nation through his mother, Sharon Yellowfly. Yellowfly grew up in Alberta, Canada, where she lived through brutal state-run boarding schools designed to assimilate indigenous peoples and beat their native languages out of them.
As a result, Gray himself did not grow up speaking Siksika (the language of the Blackfoot people). But in 2015, when he realized that his field was on the verge of a breakthrough in proving the existence of the Einstein-theorized gravitational waves, he saw an opportunity. As NPR explained at the time:
People from around the world were involved in the discovery. So before it was publicly announced, colleagues started translating the press release into about 20 major languages, such as Russian, French and Spanish.
"I thought, 'Whoa, wouldn't it be just really cool if we could get this translated into an indigenous language?' " Gray recalls.
Gray recruited his mother to help in the translation — which you can see above — but it wasn't entirely easy:
She had to create new words for weighty scientific terms such as Einstein's general theory of relativity. That one she translated into a word, "bisaatsinsiimaan," that means Einstein's "beautiful plantings."
Gravitational waves became "they stick together waves," or "Abuduuxbiisii o?bigimskAAsts."
Other words, such as "black hole" could be directly translated using the Blackfoot, or Siksika, words for "black" and "hole," or "sigooxgiya."
Both NPR and Atlas Obscura have some cool details about the translation process, and what it means within the larger struggle for language rights across the world.
When the NBA regular season resumes later this month, the entertainment product will look markedly different. In its restart will be a rich irony: A sport that long ago went all-in on in-game entertainment will begin operations in a climate that requires none.
Gone will be the pregame pyrotechnics, midquarter dance breaks and four-barreled T-shirt cannons meant to entertain boisterous crowds — since, of course, there won’t be any boisterous crowds within the Walt Disney World bubble.18 But perhaps the most conspicuous absence will be that of the fuzzy creatures that usually roam the arena.19
If you’ve attended an NBA game in the past few decades, you’ve probably noticed the anthropomorphic creatures that regularly steal the show and sometimes your significant other. They are intentionally difficult to miss, interwoven in the fabric of game presentation and the contemporary fan experience. All but four teams20 feature a mascot, and of the current crop, only a handful have been around for less than a decade. A few — Benny the Bull, Bango the Buck and Sir CC — predate the 3-point field goal.21
Of course, mascots aren’t exclusive to the NBA nor to athletics. And seldom, it seems, do they share much connective tissue with the names of the teams or logos that they represent. This isn’t a recent development,22 but it looks like one that’s growing.
The divergence is often more humorous: Why are the Minnesota Twins represented by a bear or the Phoenix Suns by a gorilla? Why are the New York Islanders represented by a dragon or the Tennessee Titans by a raccoon? In some cases, these are tactical decisions, the result of hours of market research and focus groups and refinement. And sometimes they’re the result of a viral singing telegram or a college student showing up to a baseball game dressed like a chicken.
Occasionally, designers are granted the creative latitude to create mascots from the ground up, in any shape or taxonomy.
“When people start with us, we always tell them that we’re building a program from scratch,” said David Raymond, who served as the Phillie Phanatic for more than 15 years beginning in the late 1970s and now owns and operates a mascot company. “They go, ‘Well, what should it look like? What should it be?’ And I tell them, ‘I don’t care.’ That’s like fourth on our list. First we have to figure out its story. And then eventually it might be mostly rubber. It might have a tongue. Or it might be the logo. Each project is a uniquely creative one.”
Consensus can be difficult to come by in the world of fabric and foam. But most agree that there likely isn’t a professional sports league that invests more in mascots or shines a brighter spotlight on their work than the NBA.
“The NBA does a lot of great things,” said Trey Mock, who performs as Blue, the mascot of the Indianapolis Colts. “That league puts a lot into entertainment. I’m not trying to compare one league to another, but they have been plugging millions and millions of dollars into the entertainment side of the operation for a long time.”
Case in point: The Colts hired Mock in 2006 to be the team’s primary performer and to build a mascot from scratch. He drew Blue on his parents’ dining room table.
“The NFL has way more money,” said Rob Wicall, who served as the San Antonio Spurs Coyote for nearly two decades. “But it’s the NBA that invests and has them center stage. They have mascots commanding the crowd.”
What once was a part-time afterthought has evolved into a full-time focal point. The former auxiliaries are now fully fleshed-out character brands and the marketing cornerstones of billion-dollar franchises.
“They understand the mascot’s value and they care,” Raymond said of the NBA. “They support it both from a financial and a marketing perspective. They recognize its power and how to leverage it.”
Not only do mascots cultivate the next generation of fans, they also generate millions of dollars in revenue for their teams. When Gritty, the mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers, exploded onto the scene in 2018, online publicity of the googly-eyed orange creature was valued at $151.3 million in just its first 30 days. And then there’s Benny, the mascot of the Chicago Bulls. “Benny’s popularity at games is proven in his merchandise sales, which are among the top 10 items sold in the team store,” said Michelle Harris, Chicago Bulls senior director of entertainment and events, in 2016.
“Mascots were somewhat of a precursor to selling your branded logos in all kinds of different colors, all kinds of hues that you never would’ve seen otherwise,” Raymond said, pointing to the rise of St. Patrick’s Day-themed retail specific to mascots. “It’s been a revolution in sports marketing.”
Mascot salaries are beginning to reflect that return on investment.
One current NBA mascot performer — who, like other working mascots, talked to us on the condition of anonymity — said he first learned of the pay disparity among leagues at a summer camp. “Hockey, baseball and football do a decent job of compensating mascots in the $30,000-to-$50,000 range,” the mascot said. “But the NBA is this whole other world.”
The NBA can offer a lucrative career, current and former mascots told FiveThirtyEight. They estimate that roughly one-third of leading performers earn six figures annually, making it the gold standard among professional leagues.
“You make more money in the NBA,” Raymond agreed. “But you probably need to be more physically skilled and talented to get a job.”
No longer is a gymnastics background and an energetic disposition sufficient. The modern-day mascot must be proficient in choreography, comedy and skit ideation, among many other skills. Critically, a performer must embody the character and its brand, which means bottling the culture of a city and exhibiting it as an oft-dopey avatar in a poorly ventilated suit.
“It’s extremely difficult,” Raymond said with a laugh. “Unfortunately, even at the highest levels in certain sports, there are people that think, ‘You go over there and work with the kids while we take care of serious business over here.’”
More than one mascot said they had been asked to serve as a pallbearer.
A single home game might involve waving a flag at center court as the starting lineups are introduced, weaving through multiple outfit changes25 and numerous rehearsed skits, discharging silly string into the face of an unsuspecting fan and gyrating in concert with the dance team. In rare instances, anejection might be part of the evening’s festivities.
More than a handful of current NBA mascots have trainers and dieticians working to keep them on the court and off the training table. Performances have resulted in torn Achilles tendons and broken backs. Some injuries have ultimately forced performers into early retirement.
“I’m screwed for the rest of my life,” Wicall said, half-joking. “My body is broken.”
Current NBA performers told FiveThirtyEight that while teams play only 41 regular-season home games per year, mascots log hundreds of additional events — community outreach opportunities, internal holiday parties, hospital visits, fundraisers, weddings and funerals. “Funerals are about as weird as you’d expect,” one mascot told FiveThirtyEight. More than one said they had been asked to serve as a pallbearer.
No public database is available for industry demographics, but current and former mascots gave us a picture of the people underneath the outfits — young, white and male.
Typically, NBA performers are between the ages of 25 and 50, although there are a few performers north of 50, one mascot told FiveThirtyEight. “There’s actually probably less physicality now,” Wicall said. “There used to be more tumblers and that kind of thing in the early 2000s.” The average career is roughly 15 to 20 years.
Roughly six teams feature a Black leading performer, and only one leading mascot is portrayed by a woman. That performer, now in her fourth season, is the only female mascot at the NBA level that one longtime mascot could recall. “She does a phenomenal job,” the mascot noted.
Mock agreed that the mascot industry is dominated by males. “I absolutely don’t want it to be a boys club,” Mock said. “I think a lot of us who are mascots never necessarily fit into any club. It takes a very unique personality to become one of us and that has nothing to do with gender or race. I’m doing everything I can to make sure we get the best performer in the suit.”
The lack of diversity among pro mascots is glaring and has been an issue for a while, according to Wicall, though he said the college ranks are currently populated by extremely talented female leads. “There are plenty of women who are much stronger and in better shape than me,” he said. “But even the design of the costumes are masculine. I’ve never even seen a female at an audition.” Lightning, the pegasus mascot of the WNBA’s Dallas Wings, is one of the few female-specific mascots in sports.
Like other industries, the mascot profession can be a family affair. There’s currently an NBA Western Conference mascot in what’s believed to be his final season after nearly 30 years beneath the suit. His son is a lead mascot in the Eastern Conference. His other son is expected to assume his role when he retires.
The humans inside the costumes come in different forms, but what about the mascots themselves? Is any one type more frequent in each professional league?
FiveThirtyEight analyzed each primary mascot in five North American. sports leagues — the NBA, WNBA, NFL, NHL and MLB — to get a sense of what type of creatures populate the sideline. For this exercise, we considered only the leading, most public-facing mascot for each team, and if a team has multiple signature mascots, we used the one with the earliest origin year. It also had to have a human inside the suit, so unfortunately Al the Octopus didn’t qualify.
We classified each mascot according to where it could be found: on land, in the sea, in the sky or in the world of make believe.
The NBA is smitten with mascots native to land, the most popular classification across the board. Seventeen of the league’s 26 primary mascots can be found on land — the highest number of mascots in that category across the five leagues. Half of the WNBA’s 12 mascots26 come from the world of make believe, the highest share of that category among the five leagues. MLB shares that preference for the world of fantasy, with the most make-believe creatures to its credit (10), while the NHL has the greatest affinity for sky-bound mascots (six). The NFL features a wide assortment but also includes the most teams without mascots (five).
“What’s great about each league is that they’re different,” one mascot told FiveThirtyEight. “But we know one league is paving the way.”
Like the league in which they operate, NBA mascots have embraced digital media with open, fuzzy arms.
In an effort to turn the sport into a global game, professional basketball has long catered itself to a younger demographic. And no league has embraced social media more than the NBA. With 49 million followers on Instagram, the NBA has a digital audience nearly double that of the NFL, NHL and MLB combined. The English Premier League is no doubt the most popular league of the world’s most popular sport, but it has roughly 10 million fewer followers on Instagram and 8 million fewer followers on Twitter than the NBA.
That passion for social media extends to the whiskered world.
All but two of the NBA franchises with a mascot have an active, dedicated Twitter account for it.27 The Cleveland Cavaliers have two, for Sir CC and Moon Dog. Most NBA mascots have Instagram and Facebook accounts, and more than one-third are now on TikTok.28 NBA mascots have embraced social media in ways no other league has — and they have larger followings to show for it.
More NBA mascots are on social media
Social media followings in five North American professional sports leagues, with number of accounts per platform and total followers
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
League
Accounts
Followers
Accounts
Followers
Accounts
Followers
NBA
14
382,624
24
283,002
20
771,849
NHL
15
188,908
25
697,167
18
612,936
MLB
8
87,423
21
502,221
16
453,619
NFL
7
180,359
14
270,721
12
245,756
WNBA
1
827
4
2,670
3
1,663
Follower counts as of July 2, 2020.
Gritty, of the Philadelphia Flyers, accounts for nearly half of the NHL’s followers on Twitter and Instagram.
Sources: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
Once an afterthought, social media has rapidly become an essential responsibility for most performers. “Everything we are doing is content,” said one NBA mascot who estimated that he was churning out five video projects per week during quarantine. Another mentioned that he had converted the entryway of his home into a TV studio. It’s not uncommon for mascots to expense thousands of dollars per month on materials for skits featured both during games and across social media. “Amazon Prime has been a lifesaver,” one NBA mascot said, noting that the closure of Toys R Us was devastating to the community.
“I think the sport sells itself to the entertainment side,” one NBA mascot said. “Our entertainment team really looks at what we are doing and what we can be doing differently. How can we innovate? What’s trending? There’s a big emphasis on staying current across the league, and that goes all the way up to [Commissioner] Adam Silver.”
“Amazon Prime has been a lifesaver,” one NBA mascot said, noting that the closure of Toys R Us was devastating to the community.
In terms of reverence and popularity, everyone is chasing the bull. From being a featured guest on Jerry Springer to producing a soundless podcast titled “Between Two Horns,” Benny the Bull has pushed the envelope for the industry, both on the court and online. “His full body of work has enabled him to become one of the most iconic mascots in sports,” Harris said. Benny was born a few years after Jerry Colangelo — then in marketing — had someone drive a flatbed truck down Michigan Avenue with a literal bull in a vehicle in an attempt to sell season tickets. Named after Ben Bentley, the team’s first public relations man and public address announcer, Benny has grown into perhaps the most well-known sports mascot of all time — and certainly the most-followed.
Benny, who celebrated his 50th birthday last year, leads the league in followers on Twitter (39,300), Instagram (299,000) and TikTok (2.4 million).29 Chicago’s loveable bull isn’t just successful by mascot standards: Benny has the most-followed North American professional sports TikTok account and the second-most followed sports account on the planet.
While Benny undoubtedly has benefited from performing in the third-largest media market in the country, other mascots have found success with smaller backdrops. Relative to market size, there is perhaps no mascot in the NBA that has amassed a larger social following than Coyote of the San Antonio Spurs. The 7-foot, bat-catching, pants-losing dork ranks among the league leaders in followers on all platforms while performing in an average-to-small media market.
“I couldn’t be prouder of Coyote,” Wicall said. “And what it has become.”
After Mock posted on Blue’s social media platforms in support of Black Lives Matter, he said that other mascots reached out to him and asked if the posts had been cleared by the Colts organization. Some asked why he published the posts.
“I’ve heard mascots say, ‘That’s not a place for mascots.’ But I very much disagree,” Mock said. “I always tell students that everyone has a story that needs to be heard and a platform and to use that platform for good and to help others.”
Blue is among the most-followed mascots in the NFL, with more than 65,000 followers across its social media channels.
“If it’s going to be just trick shots and slapstick comedy, but not something that’s inspirational and can be impactful to change lives, I think that’s a misuse of the platform,” Mock said. “I think mascots go a lot deeper than just what people see on game days. They run much deeper than just making someone laugh. I think mascots can be a part of all emotions, and hopefully emotions that stand for love and change.”
Some NBA mascots admit they are stuck in a bind.
“I would say most of the time mascots avoid any type of ‘real’ issues, but I think [racial injustice] is near and dear to a lot of the organizations and the NBA,” one mascot said about the mascot community’s response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. “I have a lot of political opinions, but personally I think statements should come from the team account.
“However, I will say that once in the past 37 years our mascot has said something serious, and it was last week. I think that actually means a lot.”
Nearly three decades after his tenure as the Phillie Phanatic, Raymond helped open the Mascot Hall of Fame in Whiting, Indiana. It was a dream of his, born from the moments he spent bringing joy to countless others. “I take such pride in seeing the current generation perform,” he said, drawing a line from the San Diego Chicken to Gritty.
That generation includes Blue, who was a member of this year’s Hall of Fame class. “In college, really for the first time, I saw a mascot who was super athletic and hilarious and doing things that most people get arrested for,” Mock recalled. “And I was like, what is this? I’m doing it.”
Blue joined Boomer of the Indiana Pacers, The Oriole Bird of the Baltimore Orioles and Youppi! of the Montreal Canadiens in this year’s class, inducted last month. For those behind the mask, the virtual ceremony was the culmination of a life’s work of double-knit screens and spotters, cardboard and padding, weekends at Chuck E. Cheese and endless wash-and-dry cycles.
For the NBA, this year’s class was yet another reminder that the league’s mascot community remains strong. Boomer is the seventh NBA mascot to be enshrined. No other professional league can say the same.30
“I knew from an early age that I wanted to be an NBA mascot,” one current performer told FiveThirtyEight. “That’s the pinnacle of this career. Basketball is kind of where everyone wants to end up. It sets the stage. It creates stars.”
Wicall finds himself reflecting more these days. He misses the energy of the crowd; he said that this is the first time since he was 4 years old that he isn’t performing something.
His career includes five championship rings and a whole lot of memories. But the smaller moments — the ones that extended well beyond the field of play — are the ones that left a mark.
Over his tenure, Wicall took Coyote on hundreds of trips to the children’s hospital in San Antonio. He’d carefully make the rounds, maneuvering around ventilators and webs of wires and hoses, doing anything he could in the minutes he had to lighten the load, if only briefly, for suffering families.
Maybe he’d crack a joke or give out a hug. Maybe he’d conduct a magic trick or comically walk into a sliding glass door. Wicall remembers that he always liked to place the Coyote’s paw on the cheek of a sick child. Always the side with the softest fur.
“Bye-bye,” whispered a 3-year-old girl one day as Coyote left her room. Moments later, Wicall looked down and was surprised to see two arms clasped around Coyote’s waist. It was the child’s grandmother, in tears, thanking him and explaining that the girl hadn’t spoken in two weeks.
“It just blows you away, the power of a mascot,” Wicall said. “It’s those things right there that were truly monumental.”
a reminder that if you put enough weird things together it gets good.
Sha Na Na was a strangely popular TV variety show that aired in the 1970s. Featuring a 1950s tribute band of the same name, the program featured comedy skits and and performance from contemporary musical acts. Every episode ended with "Bowzer" Bauman's sign-off "Good night and grease for peace!" Notably, Sha Na Na had previously played Woodstock (at Jimi Hendrix's urging) and later appeared in the film Grease as the National Dance-Off band.
This odd TV simulacra of 1950s cartoon rock-and-roll culture was at its weirdest when The Ramones—who themselves were inspired by 50s and 60s bubblegum pop—appeared on Sha Na Na in 1979.
Maybe climate chaos, a rising chorus of alarm signals from around the world, will simply become our new normal. Hell, maybe income inequality, political dysfunction, and successive waves of a deadly virus will become our new normal. Maybe we’ll just get used to [waves hands] all this.
Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got.
The concept of shifting baselines was introduced in a 1995 paper by Daniel Pauly. Roberts explains:
So what are shifting baselines? Consider a species of fish that is fished to extinction in a region over, say, 100 years. A given generation of fishers becomes conscious of the fish at a particular level of abundance. When those fishers retire, the level is lower. To the generation that enters after them, that diminished level is the new normal, the new baseline. They rarely know the baseline used by the previous generation; it holds little emotional salience relative to their personal experience.
And so it goes, each new generation shifting the baseline downward. By the end, the fishers are operating in a radically degraded ecosystem, but it does not seem that way to them, because their baselines were set at an already low level.
Over time, the fish goes extinct — an enormous, tragic loss — but no fisher experiences the full transition from abundance to desolation. No generation experiences the totality of the loss. It is doled out in portions, over time, no portion quite large enough to spur preventative action. By the time the fish go extinct, the fishers barely notice, because they no longer valued the fish anyway.
And it’s not just groups of people that do this over generations:
It turns out that, over the course of their lives, individuals do just what generations do — periodically reset and readjust to new baselines.
“There is a tremendous amount of research showing that we tend to adapt to circumstances if they are constant over time, even if they are gradually worsening,” says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon. He cites the London Blitz (during World War II, when bombs were falling on London for months on end) and the intifada (the Palestinian terror campaign in Israel), during which people slowly adjusted to unthinkable circumstances.
“Fear tends to diminish over time when a risk remains constant,” he says, “You can only respond for so long. After a while, it recedes to the background, seemingly no matter how bad it is.”
Ok, I’ll let you just read the rest of it, but it’s not difficult to see how shifting baselines apply to all sorts of challenges facing the world today. I mean the lines “You can only respond for so long. After a while, it recedes to the background, seemingly no matter how bad it is.” seem like they were written specifically about the pandemic.
movie scores are really underrated. morricone looms large over the rest and is definitely worth a deep dive. so many memorable themes, sounds, and melodies. i recommend queuing up some best of and strolling around the city or nature. it'll be hard not to be moved.
if you want to dive into movie music even more, there is a WHOLE RADIO SHOW about it named after him: https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/PE
An absolute favorite piece of music to cranku-up while driving around in my Volkswagen Vanagon... for some unknown reason. Not nearly as good in other, less dopey and pokey cars.
i saw this during normal times in a movie theater and it was fantastic. speaks to the importance of archives and access and all that good stuff i geek out about.
For 35 years, activist and archivist Marion Stokes recorded television news coverage on VHS tapes, amassing a collection of hundreds of thousands of hours of footage. Matt Wolf has produced a documentary about Stokes called Recorder: The Marian Stokes Project.
For over 30 years, Marion Stokes obsessively and privately recorded American television news twenty-four hours a day. A civil rights-era radical who became fabulously wealthy and reclusive later in life, her obsession started with the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979 — at the dawn of the twenty-four hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 as the Sandy Hook massacre played on television while Marion passed away. In between, Marion filled 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows and commercials that show us how television shaped the world of today and in the process tell us who we were.
A mystery in the form of a time capsule, Recorder delves into the strange life of a woman for whom home taping was a form of activism to protect the truth (the public didn’t know it, but the networks had been disposing their archives for decades into the trashcan of history) and though her visionary and maddening project nearly tore her family apart, her extraordinary legacy is as priceless as her story is remarkable.
Who among us hasn't used a pair of parentheses to draw a butt?
Swedish graphic designer Viktor Hertz has taken this idea one step further with Butt Types, a visual exploration of typographical butt art using 50 different fonts, including:
Adobe Garamond Pro, American Typewriter, Arial, Big Caslon, Bodoni, Calibri, Century Gothic, Comic Sans, Chopin Script, Copperplate, Didot, DIN, Eurostile, Futura, Geneva, Georgia, Helvetica, ITC Benguiat, Joane, Klavika Bold, Lato, Mrs Eaves, Optima, Papyrus, Playfair Display, Steelfish, Times New Roman, Trajan Pro, VAG Rundschrift D and Zapfino.
Butt Types began a year ago as a series of somewhat-viral (or perhaps diarrheal?) Facebook posts; in October of 2019, he tried to launch Kickstart a limited edition Butt Types poster print…but sadly, only got about a third of the way to his funding goal.
"The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move...It will just be something you see and you’ll think, "Oh I’m on the wrong page."
"In lieu of flowers, please pay someone's open bar tab." That's the request to those mourning the loss of one Randall Jacobs of Phoenix, Arizona, who died at age 65. According to his obituary, RJ, aka Uncle Bunky, "told his last joke, which cannot be printed here, on May 4th, 2020." He sounds like a real character and will be greatly missed by those who knew him. From Legacy.com:
When the end drew near, he left us with a final Bunkyism: "I'm ready for the dirt nap, but you can't leave the party if you can't find the door."
He found the door, but the party will never be the same without him.
In lieu of flowers, please pay someone's open bar tab, smoke a bowl, and fearlessly carve out some fresh lines through the trees on the gnarliest side of the mountain.
which brings me to my next point: can we start a "do the right thing fund," where when people get offered to do say or do horrible things, this fund offers them a better deal? or somehow people get paid to do the right thing? then fewer horrible things happen?
(vanishes into haze of shaggy hair and sweatpants)
Norma McCorvey was famous as the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, the case that led the Supreme Court of the United States of America to rule abortion a constitutional right. In later life, McCorvey became an anti-abortion campaigner. Shortly before her death, she admitted it was a paid performance: “It was all an act. I did it well too. I am a good actress.”
When Norma McCorvey, the anonymous plaintiff in the landmark Roe vs. Wade case, came out against abortion in 1995, it stunned the world and represented a huge symbolic victory for abortion opponents: “Jane Roe” had gone to the other side. For the remainder of her life, McCorvey worked to overturn the law that bore her name.
But it was all a lie, McCorvey says in a documentary filmed in the months before her death in 2017, claiming she only did it because she was paid by antiabortion groups including Operation Rescue.
"Pro-life" was never an honest political stance, but the coronavirus pandemic has blasted away whatever remains of it as a position or ethic. This doesn't mean the anti-abortion movement will wither, or that the right to an abortion will prevail. On the contrary, it just means that the rhetoric will blister and peel to reveal raw misogyny, bigotry and religious fundamentalism. The best you'll get from them is a more honest picture of how precarious your life is in their world.
In this video, Luke Palmer makes a surprisingly compelling case that Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer is actually a sequel to the beloved 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. (Spoilers for both films to follow.) The main idea is that Charlie Bucket inherits the Wonka fortune and grows up to be Wilford, who builds the train to save humanity.
They’re both two movies about groups of people that work their way through a large fantastic structure. One-by-one, a person from the group is removed in each room until one person makes it to the very end, who then found out that the entire thing was a test because a wealthy industrialist needed to find a new successor.
I love this, but I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s a sequel. A reboot maybe or an homage. (via @mulegirl)
Arlo Parks -- a young pop-leaning London singer-songwriter of Nigerian/Chadian/French lineage -- has won herself a lot of famous fans. Their number includes Phoebe Bridgers, who recently 
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Neil Cicierega is the guy responsible for early-2000s Flash animation gold like 
In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. 
Every song on Jamila Woods' last album, last year's great LEGACY! LEGACY!, was inspired by a different iconic artist of color: "
