Occasional Weeknote #7

Weeknote #7, seven-eleven, seven-eleven, seven even back do' Lil' Joe.

Some Links Worth Sharing

• These Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books
• Open Season (NYT gift link): Here’s to not feeling guilty about however you spend your summer.
• Yes, I Texted the Number on the Sign
• The Holocaust Happened: “I say “The Holocaust happened” as a reminder that human beings are quite capable of the worst. Not during any particular era, but at all times. Not a particular group of humans, but all of them. For no ethnic group is cut out to be the villains or the victims. Inflicting horror is a fully human affair. Any person can become a monster if pushed far enough, and many don’t need all that much pushing. Every society is ready to be awful. If flattered sufficiently, any large group of people will tacitly approve the horrors that others inflict on their behalf and in their name.”
• Miniature Calendar: Sleeping Buddha
• Snapshots of Kids Bike Jumping in the 1970s
• Library of Congress' dataset for music analysis: Built on the Free Music Archive.

Media Notes

• Reading

  • Finished Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, a surprising novelization of Tati’s movie of the same name. Loved Pierre Étaix’s sketches.
  • Started and finished What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama.
  • Started Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. This guy doesn’t mess around and makes his opinion clear (starting with “all laws from before 1965 are unconstitutional”).

• Music

  • From a recent Norman Sann short: “I see them post a video and get excited over numbers, / But remember a digit ain’t human and can’t love you. / One day you’ll be doing your thing and hear them cheering your name, / ‘Til they get tired and move on to another…”
  • Another great live Sarah Hanahan set from Small’s.

• Movies

  • Watched Cronenberg’s latest, The Shrouds. Interesting, but some of the performances were really distracting to me.
  • Better, for me, was the bonkers Thrilling Bloody Sword.

• Some good videos

  • John Green: At Least There Are Trees
  • One thing I miss about where I grew up is hearing Whip-poor-wills at night.

Site(s) Notes

• Touched up the Media Consumption page to make it a little less chaotic-feeling.
• Added a ko-fi link in the least conspicuous place possible.
• New music review: J. Smooth’s Soul, a 1998 drum-n-bass mixtape that still rocks the spot.

Life Notes

Last weekend marked 115 years from when my grandmother was born. That sentence was a weird one to write. I can’t really say “It would have been my Grandmother’s 115th” because that implies “if she were still alive” which is pretty unlikely. And saying “Happy 115th birthday to my Grandmother!” doesn’t work because a.) birthdays being celebrated generally suggest an aliveness of the subject and b.) it just sounds really odd to say.

Unfortunately, she died in 1960, 15 years before I was born. My dad was only 14 and she was 49. I realized yesterday that I am now two months older than she was. I have outlived one of my grandparents, and that feels noteworthy, in some way. (My other three grandparents lived between 70 and 86 years, so it’ll be a while before I outlive another.)