Posts with Recent Comments
Silence of the Lambs of the Sea
The first great white shark carcass washed ashore in February 2017, in Gansbaai, a town about 35 miles southeast of False Bay. Over the next several months, four more were found, all with tears to their underbelly near their pectoral fins and none with livers.
i need a deep dive into 2-hit wonders
If one hit is a miracle, then two hits is a near impossibility. Two-hit artists sit in a weird space ... pop stars a remembered because they are very famous. One-hit wonders are remembered for the opposite. Their un-memorableness makes them great answers to bar trivia questions. Two-hit wonders are stuck in the middle. Some might be able to parlay those two hits into careers, but others are lost in a musical no man’s land, too many hits for trivia, not enough to be legends. Still, there’s got to be a greatest two-hit wonder. from The Greatest Two-Hit Wonders [Can't Get Much Higher]
inefficient, not to say absurd
The Last Drops of Mexico City One of the world’s largest and most populated cities may run out of drinking water in the near future. As Mexico’s capital struggles to quench its thirst, scenes from the parched megalopolis show how water scarcity could one day impact cities around the globe.
Your taste in music sucks
How Bad Is Your Streaming Music? Our sophisticated A.I. judges your awful taste in music, brought to you by the good people at The Pudding [more inside]
If you want peace, prepare for DOGE
The United States Institute of Peace—a private, non-profit NGO created by the Reagan Administration dedicated to non-violent conflict resolution and prevention, and which receives funding from various US government and outside sources—has become the latest victim of Musk's chainsaw. [more inside]
It's as Canadian as hockey, the maple leaf and Canada geese
IF THIS IS IT
"I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks."
it's not just war zones
Pilot Akseli Meskanen's cockpit is warning him that his Airbus A330 passenger plane is about to crash into the ground... But he's 33,000ft in the air. So what's happening? Why could his aircraft be telling him things that aren't true? from "Pull up! Pull up!" [Sky News]
“How do we know they’re doing the right thing? The answer is: We don’t.”
"For many on California’s North Coast, Lear Asset Management’s heavy-handed tactics in Idaho were no shock. For decades, CEO Paul Trouette has straddled the line between private security and hired gun, hired by logging companies to police forest protesters." The mercenaries who took on Northern California's hippies resurface by Matt LaFever in SFGate.
SomaFM
"SomaFM is an independent Internet-only streaming multi-channel radio station, supported entirely with donations from listeners. SomaFM originally started broadcasting out of founder Rusty Hodge's basement garage in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, as a micropower radio station broadcast at the Burning Man festival in 1999. The response to the project was sufficiently positive that Rusty Hodge launched it as a full-time internet radio station in February 2000."* [more inside]
You're ok with the boss talking about erections at work, right?
How Bryan Johnson, Who Wants to Live Forever, Sought Control via Confidentiality Agreements Another day, another skeevy CEO. This one combines sexual creepiness, drugs, wishing he had Elon's popularity, and oh yeah, he started his own religion. And he's not going to die! [more inside]
Goblin Camp Returns
ALA Statements on the Elimination of IMLS Library funding
ALA FAQ about Executive Order From MeTa: "Perhaps someone else would make a MeFi post because.. I think it's something that Mefites might want to discuss? ALA = American Libraries Association" [more inside]
Storm the wedge-tailed eagle returns to skies after feather transplant
Storm the wedge-tailed eagle returns to skies after feather transplant.
Aptly named, Storm the wedge-tailed eagle has been released back into the wild more than a year after being injured in wild weather in Victoria.
"We're just listening for his call"
Andy Kaufman's: 'Mighty Mouse'. "This performance raises a host of questions concerning performance and identity. What exactly are we seeing? Is it Andy Kaufman simply being (or presenting) himself executing an action?"
'Missed Connections: Performance, Art, and Popular Culture' [more inside]
'Missed Connections: Performance, Art, and Popular Culture' [more inside]
The 24-hour diner contains multitudes
Depending on the time of day, it can be: a hub where decades-long regulars grab their morning coffee; a comfy spot for families to gather over an affordable, hearty meal; and a post-closing-time oasis where the young and buzzed find post-bar grub. In her short documentary Regulars, the US filmmaker Emma Kopkowski spends an entire 24-hour day at Jake’s Diner in Greensboro, North Carolina. There, she encounters a fascinating cast of employees and patrons, each of them with stories to tell and full lives viewers only ever catch a glimpse of. from The passage of time is a peculiar thing in a 24-hour diner [Aeon]
Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen, AKA, Wasted and Wounded
75 yo Tom Waits performs "Tom Traubert's Blues" for Italian television, as part of the documentary Ultima Fermata, broadcast in February 2025.
Here he plays it 48 years earlier. [more inside]
The General Strike
The Bibliotheca Bible
"The unexpected popularity of the Bibliotheca project on Kickstarter brought a whole genre of Bibles — the multi-volume, reader-friendly kind — out of the archive of past ideas. Before, the conventional wisdom had been that nobody wanted a beautifully designed and produced edition of Scripture separated into volumes so as to do away with the necessity for super-thin pages and super-small print. (Or at least, nobody wanted to pay for it.) When Bibliotheca raised nearly $1.5 million for exactly such an edition, the conventional wisdom was quickly revised." [more inside]