Yamandu Costa plays
“Silent Night.”
Orange Crate Art
SUITS PRESSED
A dry cleaner’s sign.
The Times investigates Hallmark and Lifetime movies
Stuff like this makes me want to just ditch my subscription and read for free.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“What ‘My Girl’ is sung with.”
“Some novelty among the stars”
In the city of Andria “every street follows a planet’s orbit, and the buildings and places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars.”
Iggy Pop and Tom Waits play records
Raise your hand if you know Captain Beefheart’s “Bat Chain Puller.”
Tea, saving lives?
Boiling water.
Mystery actor
A film debut.
An “over and over”
“Pickleball infrastructure! Pickleball infrastructure! Pickleball infrastructure!”
Recently updated
Words of the year, now with a second “hallucinate” and a “vibe of the year.”
“Without fear or favor”
Yo, John Kasich, the Colorado judges did think about the implications.
Mystery actor
Another one.
“A sole Trude”
All cities, the same city.
The Unmarked Graveyard
New York City’s Hart Island is what’s typically called a potter’s field. Seven of the eight podcast episodes tell the stories of people buried there. One episode tells the story of an artist dedicated to documenting the island’s dead.
Ineligible
News from Colorado.
CleanMyMac X on sale
My only connection to CleanMyMac X is that of a happy user (since 2019).
“Scratches, indentations, scrolls”
From Invisible Cities.
The British Library was hacked
“How ironic that the most quaintly analog form of research possible, using physical books in a physical library, has been devastated by the hijacking of a digital system”: Carolyn Dever tells the story of the Halloween ransomware attack of the British Library.
Jeffrey Foskett (1956–2023)
A man for all seasons, and a key figure among the musicians who brought Brian Wilson back from, well, the wasteland.
Tár pencils: Blackwings
Quite a stash.
A Tár pencil: Caran d’Ache
A Pablo colored pencil from Caran d’Ache.
Some Automats
There are thirty-eight Horn and Hardart Automats in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory. This has been some of them.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“It’s about as old as the club.”
Current events
I am thinking of every post right now as a flight from current events. Those events are always on my mind. But I have no special insight into them.
Waiting for Bob Dylan
Dylan was playing an astonishingly good accompaniment, with all sorts of complex substitute chords. I was, as I said to myself, “agape and aghast” and began recording on my phone.
Exceedingly strange
A strange toy.
11 More Shopping Days
[From I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes, a perfect B-noir.
Orange crate racer
A 1949 project.
iA Writer is not AI
A college prof bans iA Writer. But iA Writer is not an app for AI-generated prose.
“Triptych! Trilogy! Troika!”
Today’s Zippy is all about some rocks.