Spring 2024 Tiny Letter
Dear Friends,
Greetings from spring. Everything is blooming, and spirits are just a bit more lifted. Not much personal news to report here, but lots of good articles and bits.
Corgi mastery
Portland is full of dogs. And some folks treat ‘em like their children. Legend has it, according to Samantha, there is a trainer who only works with Corgis. He taught it to sit outside the grocery store with a treat resting on its nose.
No leash! (I hope I have the story right.) What powerful advertising. (AI image generator could not put the treat on the nose, nor size it correctly.)
Polari, gay slang from the past
In Photos: The secret gay language still in use today | Huck
A hot soup of influences and cultures, Polari offered queer people protection and freedom to communicate Professor Paul Baker tells us alongside a photo…
Polari was a secret language created by queer communities in years past, and some words from Polari are still in use today. I love the endlessly versatile concept of dialects -- they can be Black Vernacular, a.k.a., ebonics or AAVE, Spanish-adjacent (Valenciano) or one of the many Chinese dialects (like Taiwanese). There's also jive, which was cleverly slipped in to the slapstick classic Airplane. If you're language curious, you must check out Lexicon Valley, John McWhorter's amazing podcast.
Clip from Airplane
Do people swear more now? Curse words are currently in the middle of a big shift. - Vox
Curse words shift a lot over time. They’re in the middle of a big shift right now.
Also, speaking of language. I love the last sentence in this excerpt.
It’s hard to prove, says Michael Adams, author of In Praise of Profanity, that people actually are swearing more than they used to. “That’s for a number of methodological reasons,” he explains. For one thing, while people swear a lot on social media, it’s hard to show that social media users are a representative sample of the population. For another, we don’t have a real sense of how much people swore 50 years ago, as they unforesightfully failed to keep detailed records.
Now with 36% fewer police chases
Police Are Using GPS Tracking Darts to Avoid Dangerous Pursuits
Police departments across the country are increasingly tagging fleeing cars with GPS tracking darts, instead of engaging in dangerous chases.
I've long wondered if this tech existed, and it does! And I love it. Now I wish I had something like this for my bike, but instead of firing GPS darts it would fling a bao (Chinese dumpling), shelf stable crème brûlée disc, or other very sticky projectile. Inside would be a fortune cookie-type message advising the driver they did something shitty, or perhaps a QR code.
On a more serious note, police chases often endanger non-participants, i.e., everyone else. Avoiding high speed chases and just catching the suspects later when they park, can avoid alot of risk.
^ Not the best band name - maybe an acronym instead, IDFPO?
What sound does a magpie make? That depends on what's within swooping range - ABC News
When we think of birds mimicking sounds, we typically think of some kind of parrot, lyrebird or maybe even a cockatoo. However, magpies are among the best of the sound-sampling songbirds out there.
Magpies and other birds of mimicry are nothing short of amazing. The crying baby emulation is so good it sounds faked.
When those lottery winnings come in, why not train a bunch of the birds to hum famous riffs and guitar solos? Is it an affront to animal welfare to make a magpie listen to Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" endlessly until the bird can sing the hook?
Lost Tapes From Major Musicians Are Out There. These Guys Find Them.
For decades, recordings left at studios have languished in storage rooms and basements. Master Tape Rescue, a company of two industry vets, is coming to save them.
Thrilling tales of pricing and margin
At a layover in the Minneapolis airport, I stopped at a vendor and grumbled to myself at the $5(!) cost of a Kind bar. I said to the cashier, “Man, I wish I could charge this kind of margin on my work.” She replied, “Just take one.” “Really?” “Yeah, just take one.”
What a nice gesture, helping me hate airports just a little less. What I want to know is, where did my freebie go on the balance sheet — theft? breakage?
Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1,000 appetite suppressant can be made for just $5 | Fortune Europe
A joint study between Yale University, King’s College Hospital in London and Doctors Without Borders found a single shot could be made for just 89 cents.
Great example of the need to hold two conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time:
Big Pharma is greedy and ethically compromised.
mRNA vaccines, produced by Big Pharma, saved our asses.
They're Looting The Internet
Last week, Meta revealed (in a motion trying to dismiss an FTC anti-monopoly lawsuit) that Instagram made an astonishing $32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube made $28.8 billion in the same period. Bloomberg reports that the
Key quote:
This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for "catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of "content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are "good for you."
This reminds me of why I started this newsletter - the enshittification of social media. The linked article is not uplifting, but it is important reading. It’s amazing the amount of enshittification we’ve gotten used to.
Pro tip: FB Purity is very effective at getting rid of almost all Facebook’s ads! You can even get it to hide non-ad content that annoys you. Yes, their website looks like last century, but don’t be discouraged.
Watching: Franklin
I love it. The French are portrayed as endlessly status- and fashion-obsessed. Men wear makeup and powdered wigs. People are constantly bowing to each other. Lots of sneaky diplomacy and trickery.
I don’t know how accurate it is. Filmmakers tend to take liberties with this kind of story to make it more entertaining.
Folks grumbling about gender expression (men in skirts! oh my!) ought to consider the norms that existed around the time of the revolutionary war.
File under Captain Obvious
You Don’t Need More Resilience. You Need Friends. And Money.
Business books that emphasize cultivating mental toughness to deal with adversity overlook what really matters.
Amen to that. While I still find self help and entrepreneurship advice interesting, there’s a glut of it that proves the point of this article.
- Bloomberg News article (archive link)
https://archive.is/Bhh2IClosing quotes
"If the wounded mind can be tyrannical, it is a tyrant secretly longing to be deposed."
- Gabor Mate
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Capoeira (definition): The most stylish way to lose a fight.
- Dennard Dayle