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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 the audio work that is now my 100% focus. And I think that's the right way to approach it. If you have ideas, let me know.

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 pretty amazing things about what flora and fauna are engaged in and how they do it, about how humans change their course sometimes, about the dramatic cycle of creation, destruction, and re-birth anew, and about ourselves.

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 “tbt@bananas.extraface.com” to your whitelist/address book/etc. to make sure the potassium continues to flow freely. Things should work mostly the same.

This Quanta story by Veronique Greenwood is about research advancing the hypothesis that organisms had the sleep function before they had brains. Recent research on the brainless Hydra (hail the beastie that has no brain and yet can still sleep, what a dream of a lifestyle) and accompanying reasoning suggests that sleep does some important direct-to-organism things that don’t involve the nervous system and the old bean. The article also does the impossible. It shares some adorable illustrations of cockroaches - engaged in something like sleep.

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 tweet, watch this clip, then hit reply (it’ll go only to me) and tell me if this added to our reduced your pile of nightmare material.

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 critters and their superpowers ripened recently. These are stories and imagery that took me away from the pettiness of our current national human nightmares.

You’ll probably never meet a comb jelly, but they are super cool. This crossed my timeline via who said that if they were a sea animal they would want to be one of these.

The next bunch needs some more time to ripen. See you next week!

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 get a grasp of the breadth of activity that each platform represents. Right now the three and typically only three kinds of behaviors that cross in to mainstream view as far as “what ARE these platforms anyway” (thinking of TikTok specifically) tend to be: 1. activity related to politics and the political tribes (OMG the K-Pop stans), 2. things that seem like moral panic triggers (OMG China is stealing kids data/OMG kids are misusing their cameraphones to make prurient videos), and 3. stuff having to do with brands (OMG Ocean Spray bought that guy a truck). Those looking for a simple answer to wrap their head around as far as “what is TikTok” or “what is Twitter” end up landing on those kinds of things.

But it ain’t like that, and arguably, it’s never been like that. As one colleague once put it, social media is and always has been a collection of niches. And one of the distinguishing features of even very large social platforms is that with a few exceptions, the tacit rules and behaviors of one group don’t look anything like those of another. That’s why it’s always so fun on Twitter, once every few years or so, when something unexpected happens that crosses all those boundaries and makes it feel like the mass participation platform it so rarely does. Most recently, there was a night when all verified users were accidentally locked out of posting on Twitter (except for retweets, which made for kind of a speaking ghosts effect) and all of us non-verifieds had the platform to ourselves. It was glorious. Most of the time, we’re all in our own circles doing our own things. You can get way the wrong idea by looking at trends and hashtags.

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 timeline recently via Cory Doctorow’s prolific curation from Tumblr.

“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 colleague and I have been working towards with our approach to contracts for creative work. We care very much about creating a working relationship with partners where they stick with us because they want to and have what they need to thrive, not because onerous terms keep them there. We’re determined to make that a business reality as we move forward, and as I heard this I was inspired by Karl Hammer and his chickens, who are “more enabled to express their full chickenhood than lots of people on this sad planet.”

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 Flair’s history offered out of context, recently shared a famous promo from just after when Ric Flair stunningly lost NWA Wrestling’s Championship in 1987.

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 century-long tradition of tightrope walking excellence and a topography that either gave rise to it or just fits the myth-making perfectly that way. It’s said that every able-bodied person there can successfully walk a tightrope. Lawrence notes that it’s called Tsovkra-1, to distinguish it from another village in Dagestan that’s called Tsovkra. All Google Maps finds for Tsovkra is a liquor store, but it does find . Maybe the sans-1 village is so small Google doesn’t know about it.

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 I might turn it in to a sort of multi-segment variety show where I interview the person closest to the banana. I have no idea if or how it would work, but to move one step closer, I’m offering questions at the end of each banana - the questions I’d want to ask after I had the person summarize the thing in question for you.

And this week, one banana grew far longer and riper than the others, so I’m going to place that last and offer you two smaller (though not necessarily lighter) ones up top.

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 of Toots and the Maytals’ performing their song Pressure Drop, this is, uncannily, about as good of an introduction as any. (You may have to click in to the tweet to be able to play the YouTube video.)

“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 people of Georgia and South Carolina to tribes in Sierra Leone, West Africa. This thread from the Gullah Museum of South Carolina traces the highlights of an incredible bit of sleuthing and legwork memorialized in the documentary “The Language You Cry In.”

The Museum tweeted:

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 each task you completed, were like the rules of a Frequent Flyer Club. You have to do certain things in certain very specific ways in order to unlock paying work, and those bits of work only “count” for credit based on a set of fairly complex rules that can be changed regularly. And the rules are all clearly set up to limit how much money you can make at one time and how much work you can get, and to maximize what the frequent flyer program gets out of you and everyone in the program.

It’s only natural that a program with such manipulated guard rails and incentives would yield participants that do everything they can to get the most out of it. After all, that’s the same thing the program does to them, except it holds all of the cards. In the history of labor, this is an ever-present thing. There has always been reason for workers to find ways to work around the rules employers use to control them. But it’s all the more apparent now, in an economy when so many workers have contract jobs laden with these types of labyrinthine control mechanisms often driven by technology and software.

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

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 Useless Jobs. That’s the blunt title of a December 2018 academic article, which found that approximately 8 percent of 100,000 workers in 47 countries strongly disagreed with the statement, “My job is useful to society.” Another 17 percent were on the fence, which probably means they prefer not to think about it.

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.

Perceptions of musical octaves are learned, not hard-wired. “Neuroscience has offered few concrete ideas about how octave equivalence might operate in the brain, but the physical basis for octaves made it seem credible to many researchers that our perception of them might be hard-wired into the auditory cortex. Results from the Tsimané, however, indicate that this system may develop differently based on cultural experience, suggesting that the brain’s auditory processing system is more malleable than expected.”

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 up and decided to drink the nectar and dew collected in a Lily.

And it worked out. She didn’t die, and apparently it tasted heavenly.

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 until this tweet from Iyad el-Baghdadi crossed my timeline:

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 crossed my stream, and effectively bumped another banana out of place for this week.

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 of new information is hard and valuable work. There are few tools as important in making good sense of the world right now as this one: trying to recognize and account for the lenses through which you take in new information, and striving to make sure that new information comes in and is evaluated on its merits without the help of what you already assume to be the case.

Last tape recorded by pops. Archivist Ricky Ricciardi authored this breathtaking tale of discovering the contents of the very last tape Louis Armstrong made. Prior to a couple of years ago, I would have had no idea what that means - Louis Armstrong’s last tape. Like his last performances? I was lucky enough to find a museum exhibit on these same tapes when I was in New Orleans in August of 2018. It turns out Satchmo made personal reel-to-reel recordings of all kinds throughout much of his life, of interviews, playlists, performances, bits of dialogue. As or shortly after he recorded each one, he took to decorating the tape box as an incredibly artful found object and photo collage.

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 through. This is disappointing and alarming. Nothing we’re facing, not Covid-19, not the sober recognition of systemic, historical racism and economic inequality, not the economic chaos that the global pandemic has brought - we’ve handled none of it, and we’re on the other side of nothing.

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 my head for months now, and that has popped up all over the place since I started thinking about it. The idea is that just envisioning, proposing, or supporting an idea increases its likelihood as a possible future. Imagining something that doesn’t exist and may even seem outlandish in the status quo in some sense brings it a little closer to reality, sometimes a lot closer to reality.

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 in-the-flesh figures painted to look like the old 2D shading of the cartoon. The background is also painted to match that look. I just…wow. It’s pretty amazing, both to have the idea to do and the execution here. There are lots more photos of work like this in .

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 probably always going to be fashionable to dismiss sincerity with snark. In the current cultural moment, it feels almost subversive to hold up as important things like warmth and childlike play. Ian Bogost crafted a tender, thoughtful, insightful , and I’ve been sitting on the link for some reason. I’ve had it in my bookmarks for a couple of days now and just finally read it tonight.

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 really well told story about a pretty grave fact of life right now. Insect-based protein is as a curiosity and even a luxury wellness item here, but in war-ravaged Yemen, a plague-level infestation of locusts that feasted on anything left have quickly become the most viable staple food source. This short doc shows you what that really means for individuals, families, and merchants. Who catches locusts? How are they shared and sold? At what scale is this happening? How perishable are they - can they be converted into other forms of currency? And (bonus reading)? If they don’t, what if you have no other choices for sustenance?

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 to me.

Ring ring ring ring, lithophone. There’s a captivating video that made the rounds on Twitter, of a guy playing stones as if they were a melodic xylophone. The tones deliver far beyond what I expected.

The enviable digs of harvest mice: This seems good for everyone involved, especially the photograph peruser.

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. Here, Andy Richter uses a photo of a block of The Bowery to make a Trump joke.

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 over the world? How good a job do they do, consistently, translating the idiom of jokes, moods, and references, so that they hit the same way in other places? And what about accents? Tone? Are we, like, even watching the same show at that point? And unless I gain full native (and sort of residential/cultural) fluency in another language, how will I ever know what the differences feel like?

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

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 whole lot about and experienced a lot of the culture there, but I was growing and evolving at the time too, and, well, some things seem to have painfully just passed me by completely. I hadn’t thought about the crazy entertainment complex at the Trocadero in Picadilly Circus for a long time, and then I came across this thread that gives a history of some very unique offerings that hit their peak during my time there. “Alien War” was a wild live adventure experience that was there for just a short time. From the thread:

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 for its own sake, and not a whole lot of user/reader value. Not so with this Kickstarter, which makes such amazing sense once you see it and read a bit about it.

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 drummer accompanies a scene from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and in so doing illustrates the rhythms that are hiding all the time in our everyday speech.

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

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 at Red Truck Gallery in New Orleans. They have a whole collection of originals there.

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 of Press Your Luck referenced by banana enjoyer Melissa P.

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 digital airwaves over the years. This stuff (brand extensions and the like) is notoriously hard to keep track of through company transitions. Something like this is probably not a huge contract to begin with. Then it’s often executed by a third party service that may report in to a non-technical group within the company that may or may not have contract management responsibilities. It probably has only surface-level ties in to the client company’s core IT services. If the service provider doesn’t turn the service off at the end of a contract, during a liquidation, or when a contact person on the client side disappears, it can keep echoing on long after the company has folded up.

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 TV series. If you had any doubts about the cold, commercial cynicism behind Saturday morning cartoons, this should cement that impression for you.

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 account has been a fountain of music journalism and fandom, photos, reminiscences, snippets, pointers, and branching forays into other pursuits.

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 on our lives today. The April 16th edition is on the 3,000 year old practice of milking snails and other mollusks to make a brilliant purple dye, still practiced today by expert Mixtecs in Oaxaca, Mexico. Szerlip centers part of the story around Habacuc Avedano, a present-day Mixtec who just recently turned 78:

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 play button. Consider this a preview edition. I expect it to grow and change quite a bit.

The Beach Offering, and other rituals. This first audio banana, which you can find up there is about this blog post by Tara K. Shepersky: . I found it via a Twitter user who shares lots of good stuff of her own and from others, . I promised some links in the notes to some of the thinkers in Ritual Studies who I read and enjoyed in college. They’re loosely in chronological order based on the family tree of Comparative Religion:

Man can’t see snake, woman can’t see boulder. Maybe you’ve seen this illustration and accompanying story going around.

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 removing specialists. They make all of their medicines and instruments by hand, including a “blade-like tool to chisel out the skin around the corn and a thick tweezer to pluck out the corn. A long, thin rod is used to apply the medicinal black liquid that burns the part of the skin where the corn existed.” And they treat people on the roadsides in Mumbai from all walks of life, sometimes as an alternative to foot surgery.

The passion part is to propel you past the inevitable obstacles. Baseball writer translated Ichiro Suzuki’s retirement press conference (, ) as a labor of love. Reading things in translation you’re bound to lose things, but there are two passages in particular that are real keepers even if they may be slightly butchered from the original phrasing and nuance. First, on “advice for the kids” which is really universal advice:

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 least three pieces I enjoyed. continues in my ongoing fascination with niche creative fields and what they’re like from the inside. It sheds light on how music videos are highly creatively satisfying for early-career directors, highly important for music sales in their own way still, and (also) deeply problematic in how they treat directors in general. It’s a fascinating example where the quality of ideas and creativity is highly valued, but it is highly valued within a construct that tries to be super super efficient cost-wise. This works great for the music artist, but feels exploitative for the director.

Sometimes it’s good just to stare in wonder, jaws agape, at things that are strange and beautiful. I have two of those and a third banana that peels back the layers on a fascinating job relating to making beautiful things.

“They tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.” I spotted this powerful turn of phrase on a beautiful pin and immediately had to have it. I think it was in PDX airport. At the time, I remember reading that it had been used in relation to LGBTQ activism but didn’t know much about its origins or history. I keep the pin affixed to my work bag and think about it from time to time.