The long-lost source for a sample in Craig Mack’s Flava In Ya Ear has been found. “Back then, rap producers took care in disguising the samples that they chopped up, making them difficult to trace — not just for legal reasons, but as part of the art.”
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Literary Hub is trying to determine the best literary TV adaptation of all time. I have soft spots for Station Eleven, Mindhunter, Shogun, The Expanse, Normal People, and, especially, My Brilliant Friend. (Where is Fleishman Is in Trouble??)
Sicily and the Family Tree of Citrus
On his site Notes From the Road, Erik Gauger has a wonderful eight-part series on The Citrus Kingdom, a collection of illustrated stories about citrus fruit and Sicily.
The key to the citron’s future—a future that links nearly every aspect of Sicily’s cultural, political and culinary history—lies just outside of urban Palermo. It’s a flat plain that was well watered by three rivers. The Arabs turned it into a fantasyland of fertile agriculture. They dug reservoirs and sank new wells and ran canals out across the valley. They began to see it as paradise—the literal version they knew from Persia. They called it the Conca d’Oro. The Golden Shell.
Today, mention of Sicily’s Conca d’Oro symbolizes endless citrus groves. But before miles of orange and lemon trees, it was the citron that proved an Asian mountain fruit could survive a Sicilian August. The answer? Yes, as long as the water keeps moving.
Somewhere in one of those shaded Palermo courtyards, a gardener planted a skinny sapling from a land Sicilians would never see. He was just keeping a tree alive. He had no way of knowing he was starting a kingdom.
The image of the hand-drawn illustration above is available as a print.
You may remember Gauger from his Hand-Drawn Visual Guide to Chili Peppers.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listThe 100 Best Indie Rock Albums of All Time. Includes albums by Death Cab for Cutie, Neko Case, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bon Iver, TV on the Radio, Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Liz Phair, and Sonic Youth.
Jono is a video game with 1,000,000 levels. Only one person can play at a time, for 60 seconds, while everyone else watches on a livestream.” As of this writing, the game is up to level 179,579, and Jono has died 250,687 times.
Richard Scarry Illustrations Paired With Karl Marx Quotes
Writer and comedian Zach Mander took quotes from Karl Marx and paired them with illustrations from books by Richard Scarry like What Do People Do All Day? and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.
See also Mamdani’s Richard Scarry socialism.
Riding the Rails With America’s Last Train-Hoppers. “There are still people today who risk injury and arrest to climb aboard freight trains, still moving through the country in cars designed to carry things rather than people.”
The corkscrew car jump from the Bond film The Man With The Golden Gun was extensively modelled on a computer in 1974. “McHenry took all the measurements and simulated the stunt using the equations of the 18th-century mathematician Leonhard Euler.”
“Today’s rich people are richer than ever, and that seems to have made them worse than ever. More shameless. More out of touch. Less empathetic. Thinner-skinned. And…angrier. They’re people who consider equality for others oppression for themselves.”
Map of New England Places Everybody Pronounces Wrong
As part of the 30 Day Map Challenge, Maxwell Howe created a map of New England places that many out-of-towners mispronounce (Instagram). As you would expect when you start talking about local pronunciations and accents, he’s getting some blowback:
You’re mixing accent with correct pronunciation. It’s only WUH-stah if you have a non-rhotic accent. If a non-native dropped that instead of “WUH-ster” in conversation they’d sound like an asshat. Same with Lem-in-ster et al. You do this correctly when you write Concord as CON-kerd, where the local accent would have it sound like “CON-kid”…. We expect the accent on the first syllable, but not for the R to drop. Source: native new englander with a rhotic accent.
Growing up in the Midwest, we had plenty of our own place names like this: Madrid (MAD-rid) and What Cheer (WATCH-ear) in Iowa were two of my favorites.
As a baseball card collector in my teens, I was familiar with the Rhode Island city of Pawtucket from the minor league stats listings on the backs of the cards of Red Sox players (Pawtucket is the Sox’s AAA team). My friends and I pronounced it like it looked. It was only when I went to a Red Sox game like 15 years ago that I overheard a guy talking about some prospect coming up from Puh-TUCK-it (he made it sound like a single syllable somehow) that my eyes went wide and my brain exploded. That’s how you pronounce it?
Starting today at 7pm in NYC, 400 volunteers will read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in 10-minute increments for 4 days. They’re gonna livestream it on YouTube.
Nope, this is not at all metaphorical: “In its glory days, the S.S. United States was fast, luxurious and all but indestructible.” RIP, the United States.
Robyn’s Tiny Desk Concert
NPR recently welcomed Swedish pop star Robyn to their office for a Tiny Desk Concert. She sings four songs, including one of her first hits, Show Me Love.
Every choice here is a tender one, down to the teardrop glued to her cheek. Every move is confident, yet comes from a place of vulnerability. Most of these arrangements play up the quiet desperation in her outsized songs, though on “Ever Again,” Robyn pulls off a magic trick by inviting us into the conversation, opening a broken heart to defiant resilience. “Light Up,” in particular, sounds revelatory, a glitchy synth banger reborn as a piano ballad. “I was looking at you like a mirror,” she sings with a catch in her throat, like an old memory surfacing for a split second, as she builds to a moment of emotional release.
Robyn was 16 years old when “Show Me Love” appeared on her debut album, Robyn Is Here. “For me, this is where it all started, in a way,” she tells the audience, understating the foundational impact the hit would have on late-’90s pop. Behind the Desk, its lite new jack swing slows to something more spacious and reflective, if no less flirtatious. She lets the music age with her.
A recent documentary called Capturing Bigfoot offers proof that the famous clip of Bigfoot was a hoax in the form of “a lost 16mm film shot in 1966, the year before the famous Bigfoot footage, and what it shows is a kind of rehearsal for it.”
Techno Marching Band!
When someone says “German techno group”, you probably have a pretty good picture in your mind. MEUTE, on the other hand, is an 11-piece techno marching band that plays electronic music with acoustic instruments: tubas, trombones, drums kits, etc. Reset (above) is a single from their new album, KOSMOS. I love this.
Staying Cool at the Airport
A comment by Adam Keys about showing grace in airports over on Craig Mod’s site reminded me of this story from the introduction of Genny Rumancik’s book The Wisdom of Feeling: Finding Clarity, Courage, and Connection Through Emotional Intelligence:
I was in the last boarding group, and when they finally called our zone, there was a bottleneck of people trying to get in line to board. As I stood waiting and shuffling around, I watched as a man took a step forward to get in line and saw him step right in front of a woman who was on her last nerve.
She threw her hands up in the air and spoke angrily but passively to the man’s back, “What an ass. Oh, well, I guess you must be sooo important—you should just go right ahead! Don’t worry about the rest of us.”
She rolled her eyes and heaved heavy sighs, throwing a little tantrum.
The man didn’t realize he’d done anything wrong, and it took him a moment to realize the kerfuffle happening behind him was related to his actions. As he turned around and saw how flustered she was, he reacted with genuine wide-eyed surprise and apology, “Oh, I’m sorry! Please, go ahead.”
The woman doubled down.
Hands up, avoiding eye contact, exaggerating sighs, and waving him forward. “No, no, no, go ahead, Mr. Big Shot.”
The man paused and turned like he was going to walk forward but then stopped.
He took a breath, turned all the way around to face the woman, and gently said, “This feels important to you. Please, I would like for you to go ahead of me.”
He stepped to the side and calmly gestured for her to go forward. There was no passive aggression, no sarcasm, no hidden agenda. Those of us watching could feel that he meant it.
At this, the woman deflated. Her aggressive energy melted.
She began apologizing, “No, I’m sorry, I’ve had such a hard day. That damn delay just put me right over the edge…”
“I completely understand,” he responded, smiling and nodding back at her.
By then the line was moving forward. I took my place behind them and listened to their amicable conversation about holiday plans as we boarded the plane.
This was a small moment in time—an interaction that took maybe ninety seconds in total—that impacted me deeply. I was so impressed by how this man was able to be present to this woman’s aggressive behavior in a tense, public setting without taking it on or responding defensively.
He remained calm, present, and genuinely kind, and in doing so helped her regain her own composure, which then resulted in a warm connection between the two of them.
His maturity neutralized the tension in the space, making it safer for everyone else in the vicinity, too.
There’s so much aggression in airports…it brings out the worst in people. Ever since reading this passage, I have been trying to be more mindful and chill in crowded public spaces.1 Part of that effort, as it relates to airports in particular, involves this advice: “Arrive early and move through the airport like the Dalai Lama.”
This advice works for crowded online spaces too. I feel like the KDO community guidelines are geared towards creating this type of atmosphere in the comments section here. ↩
Scientists have identified a new species of penguin, the first in 100 years. “Genetic evidence shows that what scientists once treated as a single, widely distributed gentoo penguin species is actually made up of four separate species.”
What Will Starting a Creative Career Look Like in the Next Few Years? “We can’t keep asking where all the good designers are if we’re unwilling to help anyone become one.”
Why Does Japan Have Such Good Railways? “Successful public policies can be emulated by one good government. Much about Japan’s railway system could be replicable around the world.”
“I Made a Film in Excel, and I Don’t Know Why”
Animation director Maria Tomazou made a short animated film entirely in Microsoft Excel.
There’s no reason for this film to exist. Yet, I made it and it took ages to put together. To keep going and keep creating something that is pointless is actually very painful. I wish my love for making films was enough of a why to keep going, but sometimes it’s not. I’m glad I made this film. I don’t need to know the why for everything.
Three cheers for creating pointless things.
Watch the morning fog flow like ocean waves into the town of Triesenberg, Liechtenstein. (Also on Instagram.)
Advice for the incoming Democratic Congress: 8 Bold Ideas to Fix America. Bold? I dunno…it seems like a lot of this stuff is closer to the floor than the ceiling of what they should be considering.
Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996? “It (almost certainly) wouldn’t have even been close.”
A short history of Lego instructions from 1955 to the present. “Prior to [1955] the only ‘guidance’ for products containing plastic bricks were drawings on the packaging to serve as inspiration for consumers.”
Satellite images of sand dunes migrating in Egypt. They move about 13 meters a year.
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