April 28, 2024

NESTED! Radioactive toothpaste, cow magnets, digital himbo, do nothing

Hi friends! I’ve had a very busy month travelling, so here’s a slightly shorter than usual summary of links I’ve read. Enjoy!

Wikipedia is the best website

• A living funeral or “pre-funeral” is a celebration held for someone who knows they will die soon, to provide closure and celebrate one’s life.
• Using sparkling water is a common hack to make a frying batter lighter. It brings me no pleasure to report that Germans have exploited this fact to create Fanta cake.
• Also from 20s Germany: the Doramad Radioactive Toothpaste most certainly fulfilled its advertised claims of destroying germs, making your teeth whiter, and charging gum cells “with a new vigorous life energy”.
• A list of non-water floods (terrifying, but occasionally funny).
• In the mid-1800s, there were multiple moral panics in London around “garrotting” (mugging with strangulation), with intense media coverage but little basis in fact.
• In indigenous Guatemala, worry dolls are given to anxious children so they can be the secret recipient and listener of their sorrows. Similar dolls are now given by child psychiatrists to create trustworthy listeners between child and adult.
• The shirime is a supernatural entity in Japanese folklore with eyes in the place of his anus. (”It does not mean to harm people. Its joy comes from scaring people.”) [via Louise]
• The Order of Brothelyngham was a mid-14th century satirical church order, a rare documented artefact of anti-clericalism in that period. [also via Louise]

🦔 🦔

Mildly interesting

• TIL: many cows are given a magnet to eat when they reach one year old, in order to prevent their stomach lining from being damaged by ingesting random metallic debris like wires or nails.
• The embroiderer Francine LeClercq creates cross-stitches of CCTV footage, the original pixel art.
• A team of researchers has spent a year trying to estimate the number of videos on YouTube, and there’s at least 14 billion.
• The Green’s Dictionary of Slang is an amazing resource for learning so many fun new words and their histories!
• The 1996 game SimCopter contained a digital himbo easter egg. Somehow I’d never heard of it, before but this is the gay activism we still need more of. [Thanks Rich!]
• Mattel is launching a new version of Scrabble that’s “less competitive”. (Have they learned nothing from Wordle?)
• I’ve posted before about seemingly absurd tech bugs like the 500 Mile Email, and here’s a new one: the Wi-Fi only works when it's raining.

Everything is depressing

• Not sure how I feel about this Alzheimer-induced polyamory situation but good for them, I guess.

  • If you’re (poly)saturated about all the recent articles and books on non-monogamy, Brandy Jensen has a brilliant review of why we keep talking about it (so badly). Big finger snaps at “It’s easy to have your scene ruined by annoying rich people (for example, San Francisco) or to make something cool sound uncool by talking about it too much (for example, weed) or to be right and yet still be embarrassing about it (for example, atheism).”

• Some trash from the International Space Station may have hit a house in Florida.
• We cannot lower carbon emissions if we keep producing steel with fossil fuels.
• In many Western films set in Africa, misrepresentations of accents has harmfully homogenised cultural nuances. [via absolument tout]

Good to look at

• Captivated by this essay on afterlife and accidentally working in a framing shop.
• And motivated by this one on how to live without your smartphone [also via absolument tout].
• Researchers looked at the origins of plants eaten today across the world, found about 70% of our current diet is not “local” — and made fascinating maps and interactive charts to see where different crops come from.
• If you want to live a life rich in meaning, first you must learn how to do nothing.
• Messed up publicly? Here’s a template to write a gold standard apology.
• The ‘space trash falling on house’ link above made me think of Donnie Darko, and I landed on an archived version of the official 2001 Flash website for the film. The effort that went into those things!

Unending vibrations,

Victor