Debbie Harry and Mr. Trash Wheel
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 hungry gentleman is Mr. Trash Wheel of the Baltimore Trash Wheels, and he has two siblings Professor Trash Wheel and Captain Trash Wheel. According to his bio he likes pizza boxes, pythons, and all the Star Wars movies, and dislikes single-use plastics, fatbergs (don’t ask), and ducks.
“Mr. Trash Wheel is a semi-autonomous trash interceptor that is placed at the end of a river, stream or other outfall.
Far too lazy to chase trash around the ocean, Mr. Trash Wheel stays put and waits for the waste to flow to him.
Sustainably powered and built to withstand the biggest storms, Mr. Trash Wheel uses a unique blend of solar and hydro power to pull hundreds of tons of trash out of the water each year.”
There’s a satisfying live stream where you can watch this guy do his thing all day. I am sleeping a little better knowing the Cap’n, Prof, and good sir are out there keeping Baltimore’s waterways a little cleaner on top.
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“Why do you call yourself Deborah?” Get a taste of the experience of being Debbie Harry meeting the press, throughout the twists and turns of her career and life. It’s unbelievable how shitty most of tv music journalism shows up as throughout this piece. In the sub-20 minute documentary composed of nothing but interview clips and some brief performance footage, “Deborah Harry Does Not Like Interviews,” by Meghan Friedrich, you see Harry infantilized, scrutinized for things as trivial today as changing her hair color, insulted, and objectified.
She handles it like a champ and is far more tolerant than anyone should need to be, but the above is a still frame I grabbed of well-earned shade she throws at an interviewer through shitty questions like “…the movie Hairspray: You kind of let yourself go for that. Did you put on a lot of weight for that?”
Watch the doc.
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Extending the lifespan of object sounds. This amazing project out of Germany, sent my way by banana reader @lukelucas, seeks to hold on to the sounds obsolete and disappearing objects make so that they are not gone forever. If you are of the age to have interacted with these things, I urge you to listen again to the sound of a Nintendo NES console in operation, or the buttons on a Sony Walkman. Hearing the sound of the cartridge pushed down in to its receiver immediately, viscerally, took me back to my childhood room and also Scott Bromberg’s basement, where we played Nintendo and Super Nofrendo for hours at a time.
So far my wishlist for this collection would include the sounds of the yellow waterproof Sony Sports Walkman, with its clamp and its squishy buttons, and also any number of electric alarm clocks with their odd dated drones.
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Bonus banana: A super creepy alien visitation story from North Yorkshire in 1968. This story gave me the creeps. My first thought is that the visitor knowingly or unknowingly was part of an early LSD experiment - maybe government led like MK-ULTRA in the US, or maybe something more personal and organic. Or maybe it was a visit from one of the original Men In Black, aliens who had been studying us and awkwardly tried to fit in and pass as human. The full thread is worth following as it finds its way back to Twin Peaks’ Mark Frost. Maybe all creepy things eventually do. Here’s the capper. If you follow the original thread I link to up top, you’ll find reference to a project Frost and David Lynch did some early work on about the Lemurian myth.
These are the three-ish bananas I found for you this week. You can hit “reply” to send an email and it will go only to me. You can support the ongoing harvest of these bananas in many ways, including sharing them and telling people you like about them, and dropping your harvester the occasional cup of coffee.
Thank you.