5 Intriguing Things
Thanks to all who sent in screenshots yesterday. We've identified that the formatting problem occurs with the Gmail and Mailbox apps for the iPhone. It's not a totally simple problem, so it won't be solved immediately, but TinyLetter is on it.
In the meantime, let me direct your attention to two other sources of intriguing things: One, subscriber Jay H. created an always-updated archive of all the intriguing things, you may recall. Two, there is a Facebook page, to which I post most of the things that go into the newsletter. If you're still super-duper annoyed about the mobile UX—which I totally understand—before you unsubscribe, drop your email address here, and I'll let you know when it gets fixed.
1. Where the (fake) planes of the movies are.
"While it's rare for us average Joes to see airplane cross-sections, there's at least one company that looks at them all the time. In fact, they create them. Air Hollywood, started by a movie producer who found shooting films in actual airports too logistically constraining, bills themselves as 'the world's premiere aviation-themed studio.' Whenever a movie, television show or commercial needs to be shot inside an aircraft, without the pesky security regulations of an actual airport, Air Hollywood is the only game in town."
2. Whatever happened to Starter jackets?
"It's been 15 years since Starter Corp. went bankrupt. Since then, the brand's ugly-beautiful jackets, spliced into jarring colors like Mondrian paintings, have accrued mythical status. Rare editions sell for hundreds of dollars online. Some are impossible to find. Their inventor is not. David Beckerman, 71, is a semiretired real estate investor in New Haven, Connecticut. When I emailed him recently, he responded immediately."
"Originally designed for fruit, Whooshh turned its technology into a tool to help safely send fish over dams blocking the course on the Columbia river in Washington state. Under tests right now with the Department of Energy and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Whooshh tubes could be shooting more fish over dams in the near future. A test this past summer showed that fish will voluntarily enter the tube. When they swim into the entrance, the vacuum sucks them in and gives them initial boost; after that, elevated pressure behind the fish keeps them moving at about 15 to 22 miles per hour till they go flying out the other end."
4. A gloriously Geocities-like gallery of fake automata like FUBAR, the entertainment robot.
"Fubar looks like a cross between Groucho Marx and a futuristic vacuum cleaner, which isn't really surprising because he claims his father was a 14-speed blender and his mother a well-known washing machine. Who is Fubar? Fubar D. Robot is a Futuristic Uranium Bio Atomic Robot with a sense of humor, sprinkled with puns, and a glib tongue … uh, transistor."
5. That's a lot of exclamation points for a darknet advertisement.
"We are a team of libertarian cocaine dealers. We never buy coke from cartels! We never buy coke from police! We help farmers from Peru, Bolivia and some chemistry students in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. We do fair trade!"
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
chill(y). The form chill (as adj.) is only a LITERARY WORD, chilly being that in general use.
Between Groucho Marx and a Futuristic Vacuum