(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:
And just as Smith’s friend says, this descent to righteousness is a habit—one of those habits of the heart, as Alexis de Tocqueville called them, that are essential to “the maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States.” In a nation founded on the suspicion of authority, in which the state church is no church at all, in which everyone may well be equally right (or just as disastrously wrong), ideologies inevitably wrestle each other to a standstill. But there is no arguing with the person suffering through no fault of his own; he’s been wronged, so he is right. The 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.
Abacus Noir 
