Commitment to the bit, and a conker-scandal update.

21st October 2024

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Hello!

Over on Lateral this week, it's the return of the No Such Thing as a Fish team! They're face questions about technical translations, missing movies and gesture guesstimates, and it was a lovely episode for us to record.

The Technical Difficulties' new series continues! Thanks for all the lovely comments on the episodes so far: this week, Gary, Chris, Matt and I have real commitment to the bit.

And I've turned up on another podcast! Over on Guestimators, a show about working out the public's opinion on silly questions, I'm talking about bagpipes, buddies, and beef dinners.

Here's what I've found from the world of video this week:

"How I made the Top Gear theme" is a brilliant bit of production. Not only does media composer Christian Henson tell the story of how he put together one of the most widely-known bits of television music in the world — but he also recreates it, walking the audience through the process. Despite knowing very little about music production, I found this fascinating all the way through.
Congratulations to Geography Now: ten years ago, in his apartment, he started a project to make a video about every UN country in alphabetical order. This week, he uploaded the final video in the series, with an actual trip to Zimbabwe!
Over on TikTok: you'd better not be turning your Antarctic fieldwork into a Wes Anderson film. (Alternate link if that doesn't work.)

And around the rest of the web:

The flu shot is different this year, thanks to COVID. An entire lineage of flu virus appears to have died out thanks to masking and social distancing, which means that the main North American flu vaccine can be trivalent instead of quadrivalent!
Cheating alleged after men’s world conker champion found with steel chestnut. That story did the rounds this week, but the update didn't go quite so far: ‘King Conker’ cleared of cheating at World Conker Championships. Incredible title, incredibly British story. I expect at least a dozen YouTubers to turn up to next year's championships, the same way they do at the cheese rolling. (Side note: what is the game of conkers?)
I remembered about Halfbakery this week, and was astonished to find it still going! The site started in 1999 as a database of "half-baked ideas", product ideas and suggestions that people can't be bothered to make but want to put out into the world. (Start my browsing the hierarchy of categories at the bottom of the page.) It appears mostly unchanged in the quarter-century since it started, other than the news page becoming the internet equivalent of an ice core.

And finally: all I want for Christmas is a negative leap second.

All the best,

— Tom

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