Frankenstein Tomarken and TOS Fails
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
Bananas to marvel at
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...
The seed and the sword
“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...
Big challenges and making art babies
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...
Forgetting, the obvious, forgetting the obvious
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...
Food lies, music lies, and literary realism
Swingin on the Flippity-Flop. A great story shared by video game writer @MitchDyer: (Click to this tweet if the visual doesn’t come up well in the email...
Bananas about music
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 this thread by Oxford...
Try the quincunx, it's delicious
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...
Take your brand to work day, revisions, and stockpiling
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...
Coming soon
Substack is a platform for email newsletters. The author of this publication will no doubt be publishing their first edition soon. In the meantime, you can...