November 19, 2021
I’m Gonna Fly
I have no way of knowing, but I’ve been told that was the last recording Townes ever did. He died a few months later, leaving me with the memory of a timeless moment where, when filtered through the guy that was Townes Van Zandt, I sat there fully understanding how a “heart can only make one sound / like a whippoorwill in the midnight.” Kimmie Rhodes gives us the lowdown on a beautiful song, and what it was like to sing it with a beautiful person.
Chuck Sams unanimously confirmed as new Park Service Director
New National Park Service Director Makes History as First Native American to Hold Position (People). "The Senate unanimously confirmed Sams' nomination for NPS director on Thursday, making him the first Senate-confirmed director since the Obama administration." [more inside]
Flash Friday: Gamesnacks.com
Gamesnacks.com has over 140 simple games you can play in browser with no ads or crap. I've played most of them. [more inside]
Subtle scenery please, easy on post-processing
Natural Landscape Photography Awards 2021 — The competition was focused on awarding images based on composition, lighting, and originality as opposed to post-processing techniques or outlandish compositing: Why?, Winners, Galleries, Rules, Judging.
Mansaf is both a dish and an idea
For Many Members of the Arab American Diaspora, Mansaf Offers a Taste of Home. [slNYT] We were Arab at home, mostly, and American in public. On weekends, Arabic music and the scents of cumin and sumac spilled through the windows in our otherwise sedate neighborhood in Syracuse, N.Y. Dad’s dinner parties were outsize, like his cooking, everything studded with garlic and bedded in great piles of rice: mujadara, maqluba, stuffed grape leaves and the most important Jordanian dish, mansaf, named for the big platter upon which it’s served. Ours covered the center of the dining room table. My youngest sister could have gone sledding with it. The bigger the mansaf, the more generous the host. [more inside]
“When It Rains, It Pours”: The History of the Morton Salt Girl
Sometimes you just need to look at some photos of animals
NPR has announced their annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards
Do we anthropomorphize, or are animals just as human as we are? Or are we just as animal as other animals?
The titles of the photos are just as entertaining as the photos themselves.
Do we anthropomorphize, or are animals just as human as we are? Or are we just as animal as other animals?
The titles of the photos are just as entertaining as the photos themselves.
the American city has largely been a no-go zone.
Where Did All the Public Bathrooms Go? Writing for Bloomberg CityLab (limited free articles - archive link), Elizabeth Yuko examines the history, social, political, and economic factors that have influenced the waxing and waning of public toilet spaces in the United States and their current rarity today - a lack thrown into sharp relief during a worldwide pandemic. [more inside]
"she is lonely, and skeptical of my ability to ease her loneliness"
"Unit Two Does Her Makeup" by Laura Duerr (published this year): "She is smiling, but I see and catalog and evaluate thousands of smiles every day. Hers is tentative." "Maslow's Howitzer" by Miriam Oudin (previously): "I shipped from the factory with several hundred variations of the offer I was about to make." Two fun scifi stories about robots figuring out how to fulfill their needs -- in caring for themselves and for others.
When foreclosing on farmers meant a merit bonus in pay
I think of the desperation that drove farmers to death by suicide and even, in some extreme cases, murder. I think of the empty eyes of the store windows. I think of the historical society in LeMars, where the second floor is a graveyard of pianos from all the small churches closed up, because the farms failed and families moved. It’s easy to see the Middle of America as an empty expanse, instead of what it is: intentionally disemboweled. Lyz Lenz writes about farming, disaster, and a memoir by Sarah Vogel called The Farmer’s Lawyer.
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