Weekend Reading

Two notes on today’s post.

  1. I’m finding it harder to wade through my usual sources and avoid the T word. Especially this past week. It’s depressing stuff and shows no sign of abating.
  2. I tend to leave the order of the links in these posts unaltered. They are presented as I discovered, oldest to latest. But the news about Chris Cornell hit me really hard, largely because grunge was the ‘music moment’ I identified with growing up.
  • Chris Cornell Was a Rock Star for the Ages
    Chris Cornell, frontman for Soundgarden and Audioslave, died Wednesday night in Detroit, a few hours after a Soundgarden show. He was 52. He died by suicide, a medical examiner determined. Cornell was one of the giants of his time. You knew it from the first time you laid ears or eyes on him.

    See also: Chris Cornell: 8 Great Acoustic Covers
    A sad loss, one of THE great rock voices.

  • Pilgrim at Tinder Creek
    In 2013 I found myself simultaneously single and on the academic job market for the first time. I was thirty, several years into graduate school and at work on a dissertation about nineteenth-century poetry and pleasure. Literary studies, my dissertation argued, was blighted at its core.
    Imagine being a time traveller, coming from the distant past of 1990 and reading this.

  • A Time to Kill iTunes
    Okay, so the quote above isn’t actually a quote. Well, I said it on Twitter, but it’s not a famous quote. Nor does it technically make sense. But it is, of course, a play on a famous quote. It was and remains a great line. But times have also changed.
    WWDC in June, no rumours but I struggle to believe that this isn’t on a ‘list’ of things Apple know they need to sort out. Right?

  • How Pixar Lost Its Way
    For 15 years, the animation studio was the best on the planet. Then Disney bought it. A well-regarded Hollywood insider recently suggested that sequels can represent “a sort of creative bankruptcy.”
    Inevitable? Reversable? The early Pixar movies will remain some of my favourite movies, but Toy Story 4 just ‘feels’ wrong.

  • The Amazing Dinosaur Found (Accidentally) by Miners in Canada
    Clearly more fake news.

  • ‘Fat but fit is a big fat myth’
    The idea that people can be fat but medically fit is a myth, say experts speaking in Portugal. Their early work, as yet unpublished, involved looking at the GP records of 3.5 million people in the UK.
    Don’t worry, in August there will be an article from experts saying that bacon is better for you than lettuce.
  • Why Did a Chinese Peroxide Company Pay $1 Billion for a Talking Cat?
    Inside the strange courtship between industrial behemoths and Western video game studios. Samo and Iza Login were Slovenian high school sweethearts who studied computer science in college and then decided, in 2009, to get into the business of apps.
    One more step towards MegaCorp!

  • Dutch king reveals double life as an airline pilot for KLM
    For 21 years, King Willem-Alexander has taken to the skies twice a month to ferry passengers around on short-haul services for the Dutch airline KLM.
    Yay for the Dutch. No doubt if this had happened in the UK it’d be Prince Phillip and we all know how well THAT would go…

  • Two candy giants have spent years in court fighting over the shape of Kit Kat bars
    Two of the planet’s largest food companies have been locked in a bitter, multinational, decade-long legal saga over the shape of a chocolate bar. At stake is whether Kit Kat’s “four-finger” shape is distinctive enough to be protected by trademark. And the fight may be reaching its climax.
    I had no idea!

  • The Petticoat Rebellion of 1916
    Please warmly welcome our newest contributor, Jennifer Colton-Jones. On a December morning in 1916, the polls opened in the small town of Umatilla, Oregon, for a municipal election. As the day stretched on, the town’s men drifted in and out, casting a ballot here or there.
    Food for thought for the upcoming General Election? There must be some loophole somewhere that would let this happen, right?

  • Comic Papyrus, A Complete Font Designed as a Mashup of Papyrus and Comic Sans
    Graphic designer Ben Harman combined the two generally loathed typefaces Papyrus and Comic Sans into the font Comic Papyrus. We previously featured the same concept from Barth and Co, but Harman has made the complete font, including a special character set, available for purchase for $5.
    I feel sorry for Ben. Clearly has some weird death wish.