Thom's Link Emporium - 0012 - 11 April 2022
I’m trying a bit of an experiment this week to move when this is delivered to a Monday. I’m still writing it at about the same time, but delaying its delivery. This is primarily because I find I’m more inclined to read newsletters on weekdays and also because it means it can arrive at roughly the same time each week regardless of when I finish it, but I’m more than happy to move it back if people find that Saturday or Sundays are better.
Links
Mike Snowden’s Everything is Amazing newsletter on Doggerland. Sixteen thousand years ago, Britain was joined to Norway by land, an area now called Doggerland after the fishing area it sits under. The thing I got from this article was an idea of the speed at which Doggerland returned to being underwater and how scary and traumatic that must have been for those who lived off that low-lying, fertile land.
An older article, from 2007, in which a man discovers his wife is world-standard at GameBoy Tetris. Billy Baker writes "We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She's weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem." It turned out the world record is 327 lines
This looks like fun. How much water can you put in a cup before it overflows? Sometimes the simplest games are the best.
Don’t Cross Me Because I Will Get My Revenge By Being Marginally Less Pleasant The Next Time We Meet. I feel seen. “I’m a hot-tempered, dagger-eyed, razor-tongued wild woman. I’m a loose cannon. At any moment, I’m likely to say something like, “So sorry!” or “Thanks! Have a great day!” in a tone almost indistinguishable from my regular voice—yet faintly too cheerful to be sincere.”
The first trailer for Danny Boyle's TV series about the Sex Pistols (which John Lydon tried to stop)
David Baddiel, like myself, loves cats: “Tiger, Ron’s brother, will grab your attention by tapping you gently on the arm with his paw, which is not unusual in and of itself, but he often becomes uncertain about the tap on the way to the tapping moment and so just stays with his paw poised in the air staring at you in hope and confusion, which is so cute it makes me want to die.” My cat Billie does this as well. I can confirm it’s one of the cutest things you’ll see.
I'm not asking comedians to stop telling trans jokes. I'm asking them to stop telling the same trans jokes over and over. “The “I identify as…” jokes are lazy. True lowest common denominator stuff. Boring. Played out.” Yup. Also contains one of the more generous interpretations of Dave Chappelle’s work.
This comedian's piece on New York works pretty well for London too. “Is it noisy? Sure it is but it’s also unwelcoming.”
A strangely touching, if weird, story in which a man fulfils his dream to have sex with a woman dressed as a clown (unsurprisingly not safe for work) leading to this wonderful quote: “After hours of lovemaking we sat there holding eachother and kissing while I occasionally honked her nose and tried to hold back my tears of pure bliss.”
It's interesting not just to see how conspiracy theories form, but also how they collapse. This article looks specifically at the belief that (and if you haven't heard this before, prepare yourself!) that Donald Trump is actually JFK in disguise and he's soon to reveal himself. But, and this might be issue, he was supposed to have revealed himself on a few occasions before and it’s just possible that Donald Trump isn’t JFK in disguise after all. To be fair, I reckon you could fit most of a JFK inside a Trump - it might explain Trump’s, shall we say, roominess? “Protzman’s group has been dismissed by the wider QAnon community because its predictions have been too wild even for a group that believes a cabal of pedophiles is trafficking children around the world to drink their blood.”
Ian Leslie at The Ruffian on Taxi Driver. The main take-away I had from this is the way that Scorsese keeps the audience on the side of Bickle (or as close as possible to being on his side) almost to the end of the film.
The ultimate wedding planning checklist. Wonderful throughout.
4 months out
Choose your cake
Sort poppyseeds from dirt in Baba Yaga’s garden
Buy wedding bands
If unable to afford gold wedding bands, seek them in belly of a talking trout
Listening
Ted Gioia on the "fake" music found (and extraordinarily popular) on Spotify and other music streaming platforms. I was loosely aware of this on Apple Music, particular types of playlist are full of music from artists that seem strange. This piece suggests they might be made by a tiny number of composers, for reduced rates, for stocking those playlists. Primarily it seems to be for the sort of background music, but speaks to the fact that people increasingly see music much more as a commodity that just sort of plays in the background like Muzak, which is deeply depressing.
In cheerier news, I’ve been enjoying the album Topical Dancer (Spotify, Music) by Belgian duo Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul. It’s electronica, but with some humorous touches that manage not to wear thin. An example is the closing, deeply sarcastic track Thank You (Spotify, Music, YouTube) which is a response to being a creative person meeting fans / critics, one would imagine primarily on social media “Couldn’t have done this without you / And your opinion / Enlighten me with your vision”
Reading
I think I might have mentioned here before that I’m gradually reading my way through all of Agatha Christie’s books. In her long life she wrote 66 detective novels and 15 short-story collections, but the ones that I find most interesting are the six novels she wrote under the alias Mary Westmacott. They’re sometimes described as “romantic” but considering one is about a woman considering suicide and another is about a woman trapped in the middle east gradually realising that her husband is cheating on her. They’re as beautifully written as the detective novels, but are laced with a depth of emotion not found in your average Poirot. I’m particularly enjoying Absent in the Spring at the moment.
Watching
I got around to watching Encanto this week, and it’s typically well-made Disney fare, with some great songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’m not too sure about Disney demoting their animated movies to going straight to streaming, but the quality of the output certainly hasn’t dropped.
Quote
This is their world, starless and sacred.
They think it impervious. Impenetrable and eternal.
Yet all things change in time.
Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
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