November 28, 2020
See Canada Now!
Directed by Gerald Potterton - better known, perhaps, for the 1981 film Heavy Metal, whose soundtrack included Don Felder and Sammy Hagar, and Yellow Submarine, whose soundtrack included... well, you've heard of them - Buster Keaton stars in one of the last films of his long career, crossing Canada on a railway track speeder in a short film called "The Railrodder". [more inside]
Potatoes, Potatoes, the Magical...Vegetable
However it's spelled, it's a famously versatile ingredient - or even a dish on its own! [more inside]
The Outsiders Guide to Life
“Well this is rather snazzy! Casually making into into the ‘Best books of 2020: Science’ in the Financial Times reading list,” said biochemist and neurodiversity advocate, Dr Camilla Pang who, at 28, is the youngest ever winner of the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Prize for Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love and Relationships, the book she needed and began writing as a child through the perspective of her autism and her love of science.
To keep up, one must upgrade to the status of a "SuperLearner"
Speed Reading Sucks (LA Review of Books): Seen in tandem with other popular companies like Blinkist, Joosr, and Shortform, which offer bullet-pointed, summarized versions of books so customers don’t have to spend time actually reading the books themselves, speed reading is part of the emergent market of “cram reading” and represents the latest heights to which our skill-obsessed, workaholic society aspires. I have little doubt that following lines of text with a pencil or scheduling specific times to focus on the task of reading (both “techniques” advised by Kwik) could aid in the reading process. But a more pressing matter is why such odd, over-achiever exploits are so alluring in the first place. Just why, exactly, is everyone suddenly so behind on reading, so gripped by the need to read more and faster than ever before? ¶ For the answer we need only survey the structure of our techno-capitalist civilization, with its grinding, hyper-competitive dynamism...
Regular Americans
55 Ways White People Say ‘White People’ Without Actually Saying ‘White People’ (Very Smart Brothas/The Root)
Circus Girl, The Hunter, and Mirror Boy
I wasn't planning to leave this life that I'd built purely on some intangible warning from a boy who was half a dream. I liked what I had now: the mindless, fuss-free job; a roommate who was reasonably clean and had no drunk boyfriends to bring over; the little pockets of weird I'd found in the neighborhood, places where I didn't feel quite out of place. For the first time in my life I could see myself continuing down this path towards the future, gray in my hair, a box flat to call a home, a collection of books, half a dozen cats. A tidy and quiet picture that brought me little jolts of pleasure when I thought of it. [more inside]
"Scented candles: An unexpected victim of the COVID-19 pandemic"
On Twitter, Terri Nelson noted the proliferation of complaints on Yankee Candle's website about the lack of scent in their scented candles. Kate Petrova responded (Threadreader version) with a tweet thread analyzing Amazon reviews for scented candles before and during the pandemic, and the results are interesting (and very easy to understand). [more inside]
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