Well, it’s Friday morning once again, and here I am, writing my weekly newsletter!

We finished our first official week with students and I have to say that it was a bit disheartening to be doing it online again. When I saw all my students on the screen, what I saw was a group of kids who were pretty much aching for human contact. And they weren’t getting it (again). It’s terrible what this virus has done to the world, and try as we might to put on a happy face and hope for the best, it’s still pretty depressing to have to sit in your house the whole time. My goal is to give these kids all kinds of projects over the next few months that offer them the opportunity to do something creative.

And that leads me to my next question…what is it that has gotten you through all of this (relative) misery? It’s been art. You’ve been watching movies. You’ve been reading books. You’ve been playing video games. All of these things are art. You haven’t been doing math equations in your spare time (and if you HAVE been, you’re weird). You’ve been engaged with art, because art is what makes the world go round.

But I sometimes wonder what happens when you run out of art. What happens when you don’t have anything else to watch on Netflix? Do you simply binge something you never wanted to watch in the first place? Do you watch the same things over and over again? What do you do?

My challenge to you is to create something NEW. Go paint a painting. Go write a story. Go draw a comic book. Get some friends together and go make a short film and put it online for the world to see. Go build something new with legos, or make a sculpture out of paper mache. Go learn a language. Grab a pencil and make abstract art. Go build a coffee table for your living room.

The bottom line is that you should go CREATE something so that you can feel like your day-to-day is worthwhile. My ultimate goal has always been to bring something into the world that didn’t exist before I woke up, and to do that every day. Perhaps it’s time for you to do something similar.

MEDIA DIET

My daughter and I discovered the new AppleTV series, “Ted Lasso” about a week ago and we watched every episode over the course of two days. It was that good (of course, there were only five episodes, so it’s not like we went crazy). Ted Lasso is an American football coach who gets hired to coach a Premier League team in London because the owner wants to destroy the team as she seeks revenge against her ex-husband.

It’s a pretty standard premise, but what makes the show wonderful are the quirky characters, the main one being Ted Lasso, himself. There is something about that character, as it’s written and played by Jason Sudeikis (sp?) that is just utterly appealing to me, and I think it boils down to his relentless positivity. Nothing gets Ted down. You can insult him, make fun of him, threaten him…his attitude never changes, and I think that’s pretty refreshing. I wish I had that kind of relentless positivity. I may very well try to adopt it.

On top of all that is the simple equation that none of the characters are cardboard cutouts. In the beginning, you think you have a feel for who they are, but they all have subtle nuances that make them real people that you want to know more about. And that’s the magic of the show. AppleTV offers a free trial, so I’d recommend giving it a go, simply for this show.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK

So, there are a TON of newsletters out there nowadays and I have subscribed to one-too-many. But some of them are just filled with interesting bits of information that I find absolutely fascinating. For instance, Mark Frauenfelder (of the website BoingBoing, amongst others) has a newsletter called “The Magnet”, which has an interesting write up about marvel Comics Mini-Books from the 60s. It’s just a fascinating bit of esoteric memorabilia that

TO BE SORTED

You know how I love radio stations (I don’t really…). Well, here’s an app that lets you listen to over 30,000 radio stations around the world. A great way to sample a wide variety of music, with built in tools that enable you to find out a song if you don’t know it!

OPEN TABS

Great article on Hollywood memorabilia thievery! It’s like reading about mafia bosses who only deal in things like Star Trek and Super-hero memorabilia.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an all-time classic and I teach it in my IB Film class. It’s the 10 year anniversary of the film at the moment, so there are all kinds of articles out there. Here’s one.