I get bodyslammed, and I read bad handwriting.

8th August 2022

Heads up! This newsletter is more than four years old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.

Hello!

It's been a busy week of editing and travel for me: with the Technical Difficulties starting to film a new season that'll hopefully come out towards the end of the year, and the new project that I alluded to a while back steadily starting to take shape.

But the videos go ahead as usual! This week, the old channel moves from Idaho to Utah, as I get to find out how the US Postal Service reads terrible handwriting (and try it out myself).

And over on Plus, I got bodyslammed by professional wrestlers. Seriously, that's the best title I've had in a long time, and it's 100% true.

Elsewhere on YouTube:

I know almost nothing about ballet, but even I can appreciate the genius of The Mistake Waltz. (That's an article with links to several versions.) It's a series of Blue Man Group-style 'one person didn't get it right' gags, filtered through the medium of ballet. But I do wonder: the piece's choreographer Jerome Robbins, thought this work should be performed "sparingly" to avoid the jokes getting stale. That's not compatible with the modern world, when videos like this are more popular than most clips of actual ballets.
Mary Spender's The Dangers of Dating a Songwriter is a well-told story about breakup songs, and whether you should ask permission before writing a song about your ex.
And Evan Hadfield's Rare Earth is back! Talking about the Most Beautiful Toilet in Guatemala. (Occasional moderate profanity.)

A load of other links I've found while reading and researching this week:

The long-established booking system for the hajj was changed this year on about one month's notice. It hasn't gone well. (Side note: Mecca has a metro line that only operates for seven days a year.)
Off the back of the "Chemical Hunger" article I linked to a while back, and with the caveat that I do not endorse this, just find it interesting: citizen-science experimental results of an all-potato diet. As before, this desperately needs an executive summary, it's basically a novella, but the results hidden in there are interesting.
There's a new version of Winamp!
I didn't realise that "how anesthetics work" is still a mystery, nor that we might be getting close to solving it.
The mysterious disappearance of the world's longest shrubbery sounds like a quirky little article, but turns out to be a deep-dive into a "monstrous system" of the colonial past.

These newsletters are getting longer and longer, aren't they? This was meant to be a quick place to put some links, but I'm starting to add more context and thoughts. I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not! But either way, I'm going to make sure to the "and finally" section. That's a good tradition. So:

And finally, the silliest name of the year nominees.

All the best,

— Tom

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