Issue 13 - Tiger
We settled into it this week — did you notice? This whole crazy, weird, scary situation is the new normal now.
We don’t know how it’s going to end, and there’s probably some real nasty stuff coming, just over the hill, but the message is clear — life is going to be like this for probably several more months, and when it’s over, life won’t be the same as it was before.
There will always be “before Covid-19” and “after Covid-19”. It’s different to anything else most of us have experienced. 9/11 was an inflection point, of course, but it was a sudden, intense blow — a single moment, played out over a few short days, in which everything changed. It wasn’t… this.
Especially weird for me, right now, is the “crossover” period we’re in, culturally speaking. By which I mean… the new things we’re consuming right now were made in a pre-Covid world; they feel like messages from a different time, just as surely as Dickensian workhouse dramas, or late-80s movies about greed, and shoulderpads, and brick-sized cellphones do.
Take the suddenly-ubiquitous Tiger King, for example, which Amy and I binge-watched in its entirety on Sunday. (Side note: it is well worth your time; the story doesn’t stop escalating in craziness until the very end).
Early-ish in the show, they briefly cover the 2011 Ohio case, where someone just let their entire private menagerie go free. And through the rest of the show, as they showed us other crazy private-zoo owners, I had to wonder… without visitor revenue, how many of these zoos are going to fail soon? How many might just decide to set a pack of tigers free? How many of them are close to our home in Florida?!
Project Updates
The sound of a long, slow, wet raspberry reverberates from this section of the newsletter, signifying disappointment.
Somewhere, on a cosmic scorecard, a weary immortal teacher scrawls “must try harder”, sighing as they do so.
A Thing of Beauty
Photo by SPUMADOR on Flickr, CC-BY-SA; via Wikimedia Commons
The tiny rocky island of Lítla Dímun, in the Danish-owned Faroe Islands, happens to be exactly the right shape to regularly cause a lenticular cloud to form on top of it, which is utterly adorable. More photos and details at the always-great Atlas Obscura.
Ephemera
Oral Histories
The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s landed on my kindle last weekend. It’s engaging and sweet and surprising; it feels like hanging out with some old friends who made a wonderful thing that one time. Highly recommended.
Also, this thoroughly did the rounds yesterday, but if you’d like to hang out with John Krasinski specifically, he released a fantastic 15-minute ZeFrank-esque show called Some Good News yesterday, which also includes an interview with Steve Carell.
And if you like oral histories but not The Office, you can pass some more indoors-time rifling through The Vulture’s archive of their oral history pieces, or occupy the remaining 9 months of 2020 with Thrillist’s insanely comprehensive roundup from all over the web.
Really stretching the topic here, but it tickles the same brain regions… 35 minutes of Astronaut Chris Hadfield reviewing space movies.
Coronaphemera
Walmart’s selling more tops than bottoms right now, because a bunch of us no longer need to wear proper pants to work. (WaPo)
Some Japanese schools are holding graduation ceremonies in Minecraft, which is exactly the sort of creative response to unprecedented difficulty which fills me with wonder and hope.
This drone footage of a locked-down San Francisco is haunting and also makes me homesick. I keep watching it for some reason.
I was curious, so I looked it up and thankfully someone out there with a journalistic platform had also been curious. Why is there still no toilet paper in stores?
That covers toilet paper specifically; The Atlantic gets deeper into all the things about modern supply chains (especially how efficiency breeds fragility) which have led to shortages of various items (as a regular non-pandemic baker, the current lack of flour here is driving me nuts).
BUT! Over on the hellpit known as twitter, a man named Dan Gardner helpfully points out that, in general, people are better and more pro-social in times of war and disaster, and our fears of wild roving gangs of looters are mostly unfounded.
Things to Make and Do
A lot of “things to do” articles seem to focus on kids, which is silly – in times like these, adults need to scribble aggressively or make an unholy mess with Elmer’s glue at least as much as their offspring do. Consider this your permission, if you needed permission.
Free coloring pages! (Colorables)
I love this Boardgame Remix Kit, which includes a bunch of ideas for using standard classic board game components to make new games. Finally, you can get out the Monopoly box without having everyone want to kill each other 5 hours later!
Not quite released yet, but a bunch of artists (including names like Anthony Gormley) are beavering away on activity packs. You can sign up to be notified of their release right about here.
And finally if you’re musical, the ever-esoteric Robin Sloan has a new project he’d like us to all participate in, playing with a fragment of a melody. Even if you’re not musical, the story of the tune he’s working with is still worth a read.
Retro-funk
Cheddar gives a quick video history of Googie Architecture, LA’s signature retro-futuristic look.
…and Boone Langston (one of the competitors on the much-better-than-it-should-be, Will Arnett-hosted US Lego Masters spends some time building human-scale 50s-sci-fi ray guns.
Endnote
Another late edition. I’m ok with it if you are. Let’s just say that this is a newsletter which aims to publish on Sunday, and pretty much always does so by Tuesday. Ok?
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