This is the first episode I’ve heard of Seth Roger’s Storytime podcast, but it’s a beautifully made podcast, and this episode is gripping and the story is so good! • The Ballad of Mount Doogie Dowler, Storytime with Seth Rogen
Productivity inversely affects creativity, and vice-versa. So, welcome to the lowest productivity week of the year. May your creativity flourish.
A letter to a newborn child, requested of Desmond Tutu by the girl’s father, July 2016:
Dear Juliet
Hello, little sister.
You don’t know me. I am a very old grandfather from South Africa nearing the end of my journey on earth while your journey—on another continent many miles away—is just beginning. We may never meet on earth, so I thought to send you a secret. Well, it’s not really a secret because we should all know it. So I don’t mind if you tell everyone else.
Did you know that all people belong to one family, the human family? That although we may look nothing like each other, live in separate homes, practise our own cultures, subscribe to different religions—and some of us have more money than others—we are all sisters and brothers of God’s family?
You and I, and everyone else, were born with the same purpose. For love, for goodness and for one another.
God Bless You.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu
Cape Town, South Africa
Whenever I hear Carol Of The Bells I have this tribal urge to run home to protect it because I think it’s about to get robbed.
Disney+ thinks that Iron Man 3 is a Christmas movie. Is everything a Christmas movie now?
Bob Lefsetz, self-proclaimed boomer, on boomers:
“Going to see McCartney, the Stones and the Eagles has become a ritual. Because their music reminds us of when we were our best selves, when what we had to say was important, when we were against the man before we became the man, when we wanted the new instead of the old and familiar, when we wanted change instead of stasis.”
“A tribe without enemies is, almost by definition, not a tribe. As a consequence, tribal dispute and warfare is part of what defines humanity.”
…
“Things have changed a lot since. The biggest enemy we have to fight against right now is our tribal past. What served us so well for thousands of years is now an obsolete concept. It’s no more about the survival of this tribe or that one, but about Homo sapiens as a species. … For the first time in our collective history, we must think of ourselves as a single tribe on a single planet. … We are a single tribe, the tribe of humans. And, as such, not a tribe at all.”
— Marcelo Gleiser in “The Trouble with Tribalism” via Tim Ferriss’s email.
I met a Betty once and told her that when she calls me she can call me Al.
She just nodded in reply.
I think about this a lot.
If you got your professionally shot wedding, couple, or family photos printed at Officeworks, Harvey Norman, Big W this Christmas, know that you broke your photographer’s heart.
“In the not too distant future, learning video editing will be the new learning cursive.”
When I’m elected your President I will legislate that bakeries are allowed to make and serve real rum rum balls. None of this bullshit chocolate ball stuff.
A lot of people whinge about Jesus being taken out of Christmas, my issue is much more important. My two local grocery stores have zero Christmas food. Who took the rum balls out of Christmas?
There’s a very late model MacBook Pro on my kitchen table and aside from all the power in that chip, I’m getting serious PowerBook Titanium G4 vibes from the body shape.
I’m that old that I’m having nostalgia for old computers.
Sophie Zhang and a Honduran disinformation researcher on Facebook’s election problem:
“We don’t expect Philip Morris to solve tobacco addiction”
The British Medical Journal fact checks Facebook’s false fact checking of the BMJ’s “news blog”.
I can’t help but feel that the skill of knowledge, the skill of knowing something, will be a superhuman skill in the future. Because we can’t leave it up to algorithms.
PSA: next year isn’t actually 2022, it’s 2020 Two. It’s the sequel.
2020 II: 2020 and the Chamber of Secrets.
How grunge started
From today’s edition of Josh Spector’s For the Interested email:
“At the start of the 1990s, no one cared about the Seattle music scene.
That was a problem for the founders of indie record label Sub Pop, who couldn’t get any LA or New York music journalists to pay attention to their bands (including Nirvana).
So they got creative.
They flew out a British music journalist for a few days, set up a bunch of shows and introduced him to the Seattle scene.
He found it cool and wrote a big story about it.
That piece caught the attention of US journalists who suddenly thought they were missing something in their own backyard, and that launched the Grunge era.”
I really want to help this guy find this photo of Leonardo DiCaprio at the University of Sydney student bar, but the websites he mentions - 2Day FM and others - have all been re-made os many times there’s be no archives.