Floppys still in service, Sputnik intercepts, and Good To Go

February 2, 2023

Chuck E. Cheese shows still run on diskette (You can click the image or the link up top to bring up the tiktok video) All you really need to know you get...

Fresh Bananas! Perspective Shifts

January 26, 2023

Three stories (plus bonii) relating to shifting your perceptions.

Three Banana Thursday Special Dispatch

February 16, 2022

Hi, I've almost started this thing back up a couple of times now. But right now I'm thinking through what I can do with it, that will better connect up to...

Ecology, twerk rigs, and mystery

June 17, 2021

Pulling back to a broader context. One of the books I read earlier this year was Rust Belt Arcana, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. You’ll learn...

TBT returns: Sleep before brains, that explains

June 10, 2021

Welcome back to Three Banana Thursday! We’re off Substack now and on Buttondown.email, and coming to you from a new “from” email address. Please add...

The Freddy litmus test, bathroom waters, and more corvid exchanges

November 19, 2020

Nightmare fuel, or an antidote to nightmare fuel? I can’t decide if wacky Freddy Krueger and friends is the former or the latter. Please click in to this...

Comb jellies, glowing monotremes, and ocean acoustics

November 12, 2020

This last couple of weeks, I’ve been soothed by what’s going on with our biodiverse neighbors on Earth. As it happened lots of bananas relating to wonderous...

Green means 'whoa slow down'

November 5, 2020

The next bunch needs some more time to ripen. See you next week! (These wonderful illustrations were made for us by Kyle Brooks) With a stop light, green...

Workshop TikTok, Soundhouse, and Can

October 29, 2020

One internet, many TikToks. If you’re not-very-online, when you see stories in the news about the various social platforms it can be extremely difficult to...

Floating Odessa, 28 otters, and design fiction

October 22, 2020

The short tale of the floating potato sorter. This ethereal, Studio Ghibli-esque photo of what purports to be an abandoned Ukrainian potato sorter crossed my...

High chicken aspirations, Aristotle, Twitter radar

October 15, 2020

“Welcome to stay where she wants to be is a high chicken aspiration.” With this quote, manure and compost farmer Karl Hammer captures a sentiment that a...

Ric Flair's epistle, the crocupine, and telemelt

October 8, 2020

All the honors that you’ve won in the past can’t buy you a drink at any bar in this country. @NoContextFlair, the twitter home for clips from wrestler Ric...

Wire work, city pop, and thermal prints

October 1, 2020

The whole town walks on wires. Kevin Lawrence writes in Splice Today about a place called Tsovkra-1 in Dagestan, which is particularly remarkable for its...

Olive Garden ads, prison cheesecake, and the surprising merits of the thick human skull

September 24, 2020

I’m adding something new this week. In my ongoing effort to evolve this newsletter into a podcast organically and deliberately, I’ve been thinking about how...

Joyful song, future grief, and chicken care

September 17, 2020

Phone book or the bible, it doesn’t matter. If you’re not familiar with the late, great Toots Hibbert, and you don’t have access to just about any recording...

Melodies, habits, and a watermelon

September 10, 2020

“It’s the oldest song we know.” A recording from 1931 that captures a woman singing a short folk song becomes a thread that connects the Gullah Geechee...

Muppet promos, cellphone trees and UFO's

September 3, 2020

Imagine if your job was more like being in a contest or loyalty club. Imagine if the rules of the way you received each task in your work, and got paid for...

Nurdles, shrink-wrap, and mysteries

August 27, 2020

The world is always changing: the origins of shrink-wrapping records. I saw a tweet about nurdles a bit ago. Tristan Baurick @tristanbaurickLittle nurdle...

Ghost apples, library foxes, and useless jobs

August 20, 2020

Our banana harvester, Dave, is under the weather this week, so he passed me a basket of unripe bananas and let me pick three to share with you all. Socially...

Neuromusicology, Lego UI, and Cissy Strut tips

August 13, 2020

I’ve been at half strength or less this week, but I didn’t want to leave you all empty handed. Here are three raw, unprocessed bananas to hold you over....

Lily sippin' and the web assay.

August 6, 2020

Marguerite sips a lily. My friend Marguerite, who I’ve known since the second grade, made a startling discovery recently that crossed my instagram path. She...

Robotic vines and robots in the office.

July 30, 2020

That time Pepsi owned a twenty-ship military fleet. I guess I was 14 when this happened, in 1989, so I have no recollection of it nor had I heard about it...

Melisma and The Long View

July 23, 2020

Figure him in your budget. Shortly before I sat down to finish this newsletter up, this newly discovered trove of FBI motivational posters from World War 2...

Examining Priors and Cathedrals

July 16, 2020

Just because it looks like a leaf to us doesn’t mean it looks like a leaf to them. Preventing your prior assumptions from distorting your critical analysis...

Satchmo's last tape and some rules

July 9, 2020

Last tape recorded by pops. Archivist Ricky Ricciardi authored this breathtaking tale of discovering the contents of the very last tape Louis Armstrong made....

Bardo, Fuji, and Curated Butts

July 2, 2020

Please keep your head in the Bardo. It feels like in some ways the US has emotionally moved on already from all of the upheaval we’re still very much going...

Three bananas about imagination and the future

June 25, 2020

This week I picked three bananas about the future and how it gets made. All organizing is science fiction. There’s an idea that has been bouncing around in...

Shady Transformers, David Byrne on Performance

October 31, 2019

Geniune shade. In an era of hyper-real imaging and printing, it’s easy to forget there are other badass styles. These creations by LEK Custom Toys are actual...

Sincerity, gravity, and harmony

October 10, 2019

It’s almost tomorrow, but it isn’t. As long as there’s a little bit of Thursday left, there are a few things I want to show you. Hippo Birdie 2 Ewe. It’s...

Locusts, Blackbirds and Dragons

September 26, 2019

I missed you all last week - sometimes things just get super busy. I’m excited to have three fresh bananas for you today. Locusts as staple crop. This is a...

Bananas about music, again

September 12, 2019

This is a YouTube heavy bunch of bananas. It also just so happened to all relate to music - I didn’t plan it to have a theme. They just presented themselves...

Harvest mice and quasiparticles

September 5, 2019

The enviable digs of harvest mice: This seems good for everyone involved, especially the photograph peruser. isi litke @isilitkeyou've seen those pictures of...

HHTDL's land rover and gar suction

August 22, 2019

The New York of Blondie. It’s always fun to see two famous people from completely different spheres interact with each other in sincere ways on Twitter....

The Quebec Simpsons and fore-edge painting

August 15, 2019

The Quebec Dub. I think anyone who grew up on television has wondered at one point or another this same thing: what are shows are like in translation all...

Work, magnetosense, and character

August 1, 2019

Work. A violin and cello duo at the 42nd st. station absolutely tore up the Rihanna classic “Work”. Found via @theferocity. Kay Angrum @kayangrumJust watched...

Missing Alien War, exploding books, a reverse payment model

July 18, 2019

Missed connections with Alien War. For the better part of an academic year from 1995-6, I lived as a student in Central London. I like to think I learned a...

Cootie Catchers, Hair Metal, and GPS

July 11, 2019

Lianna Fled the Cranberry Bog in a Cootie Catcher. Sometimes new, non-strictly-linear approaches to storytelling feel like they are a whole lot of innovation...

The rhythms of speech, chance encounters, and The Luminaries

June 27, 2019

The rhythms of speech. Too much setup would probably lessen your experience with it. In the below YouTube video that you should click to watch, a great...

Debbie Harry and Mr. Trash Wheel

June 20, 2019

Not all heroes have noses. This photo scrolling by on Reddit caught my eye last week. Props to original poster, u/Orphanpunchers. This distinguished and...

VHS Girl and the KFC Kimono

June 13, 2019

VHS Girl’s start in painting. We first spotted Katie Winchester aka VHS Girl’s fantastic hand painted and lovingly rendered homages to old VHS movie box art...

Frankenstein Tomarken and TOS Fails

June 6, 2019

In addition to being one of the best years for movies ever, 1984 had this. I fell down a rabbit hole looking for more information on this Halloween episode...

A Robocall from the Brand Graveyard and the Cowculator

May 30, 2019

Geoffrey from beyond the grave. The tweet below got me wondering how many pieces of semu-autonomous junk like this marketers have left strewn all over the...

Taking Toy Liberties and Remembering a Hitmaker

May 23, 2019

Sometimes you work with what you have. This is a tale told exceedingly well by those who were there, about how He-Man ended up riding a tiger in the toys and...

Booker T and a Cursor Oasis

May 16, 2019

The first of 64 quartets: Booker T and the MG’s. I think I started following music writer Chris O’Leary at @bowiesongs shortly after David Bowie’s death. The...

Snail Urine and the Kleroterion

May 9, 2019

A purple that comes from the sea. B. Alexandra Szerlip writes a column for The Believer called Vintage Tech that looks at the impacts of earlier technologies...

The Beach Offering, Whale Truths, and Malls

May 2, 2019

I’m very excited to share the first mixed media Three Banana Thursday, with two textual bananas in this email and a third embedded in audio - just press the...

Meme Sleuthing and a Book on Books

April 12, 2019

Man can’t see snake, woman can’t see boulder. Maybe you’ve seen this illustration and accompanying story going around. It’s a visual parable which most...

Tall Boys and Mumbai Corn Specialists

April 5, 2019

The Mumbai corn removers. I was captivated by this story of the Gihari people in Mumbai, who have made a living for many years as roadside pedicure and corn...

Advice from Ichiro and 30,000 feet of bs

March 28, 2019

The passion part is to propel you past the inevitable obstacles. Baseball writer Jim Allen translated Ichiro Suzuki’s retirement press conference (part 1,...

Soderbergh on Miller, and the role of music video directors

March 15, 2019

Music videos are great and bad for directors. I found The Outline’s newsletter (whole thing here) this week pretty stellar. For me that typically means at...