(I think I missed the entry for January, clubbing that here too …)
So, random stuff read, heard, seen:
- This old man is clearly a role model
- Feel bad for Nancy Pelosi to be put on the spot, but this was one of those stark "There Is No Alternative" moments
- This headline says it all: “Terrorists are building drones. France is destroying them with eagles.”
- Before Mike Pence was in politics, he wrote this movie review of the Titanic
- There are lost cities in North America, big ones too (Cahokia, somewhere in the south east, is shown in the pic above)
- Came across a series of David Foster Wallace videos; this is a good one.
- At some point, the number of people with as much wealth as half the world is going to drop to two.
- I happened to watch “The Mouth of Madness” by accident, and always wondered why I never heard more about it; I feel better now that I see it as part of an explicit trilogy by John Carpenter.
- Funny and sweet and just very human: a selection of “lonely hearts” adverts from the last two centuries.
- Found this great series of insights on movies on Youtube (the one linked to, on The Prestige, was especially good)
- One of the absolutely bestexamples of synthesizing things that seem so different from each other, in this case Snow Crash and Infinite Jest
- I’m not sure if I agree with the conclusion in this piece, but I do think what’s covered in it is good stuff. Sample snippet:
ideologies inevitably wrestle each other to a standstillThe struggle for the moral high ground becomes, in remarkably short order, a race to the bottom.
- Cautiously optimistic about a possible forthcoming movie adaption of Dune
- AtlasObscura has a lot of interesting, weird stuff, like this bit about the “China girl” images that apparently used to be at the beginning of every movie reel.
- I’ll admit I never knew about the man behind the “Hugo award”; and if you care about the Hugo award at all, you should read this piece, written by James Gleick (yes, that guy); would’ve used this image for the cover if I’d got to this item first.
- Harry Houdini wasn’t just a great escape artist, he was also a great inventor. Also, secret footage(!)
- Finally, 38000 year old art.
