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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.

Musical genres by the most popular words in its titles. It’s pure poetry. Blues is “worried mojo howlin' luck reconsider goin' highway messin' mean motherless lowdown prison gambling leavin' walkin' lonesome boogie howling hurts juke”. Death Metal, on the other hand, is (shoutout to )

Obvious insights are super valuable. It seems intuitive that to keep people’s attention and deliver something powerful, you have to have those TED nuggets in your presentation. You have to have counter-factual, unexpected data points and distillations that shatter people’s assumptions. Adam Grant writes in MIT Sloan Management Review that if you want to elicit action in an organization, it’s much more powerful to roll in with a strong data point that overwhelmingly reinforces what people already think: Hat tip to for this one.

Swingin on the Flippity-Flop. A great story shared by video game writer @MitchDyer:

I’ve come across a ton of music-related bananas recently. Here are the ripest of the bunch.

The composers as biscuits. Head on over to where she matches up major historical composers with the cookie (biscuit) that best describes them. It was hard to choose a representative sample, but she was clearly on her game with Liszt, below. Oddly, she pairs Wagner with Oreos, “divisive, and not everyone’s taste” which just shows how poorly Oreos translate from over there to here.

Without further ado, the quincunx. This tweet from Aitor García Rey sent me off in a spiral of feverish discovery: “Today I learned the layout used to represent 5 in a dice (⁙) has a name: quincunx. In fact, the pattern appears in many disciplines ranging from horticulture, architecture and tattooing to vexillology, heraldry and even graphics processing (antialiasing). Quincunxes everywhere!”

That led me to this chain which goes from here:

Hi! #Tbt is now on a new provider, Substack rather than Tinyletter. It was surprisingly easy. Not much should have changed. I’m going to try using horizontal rules to separate bananas now.

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