An Ode to Pizza Hut, Patience with the Creative Process, Drumming Complexity, etc.
In which it is actually I who pontificates on the pizza franchise.
🌎 Hi. Hope you had a lovely Earth Day yesterday.
🤘 …and Record Store Day. Missed that new Nuggets set but happy to have picked up the 20th Anniversary Edition of You Forgot It In People. If you were out, lemme know what you were able to add to your collection.
😂 Please enter the password to continue. It’s 4663.
⚾️ With pitchers on the clock, baseball has seen some immediate changes.
🪰 The brain of the fly may be able to tell us a bit about our own.
👩🌾 Author May Sarton on gardening, writing, and having patience with the creative process. “Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone.”
💭 “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.” -Steve Jobs
🎻 Photographer Charles Brooks explores the inner workings of instruments in his series Architecture in Music, “making these relatively cramped spaces seem cavernous and immense.”
📦 A new art book from London curator Tom Buchanan celebrates the idea of thinking “Out of the Box.” “The 336-page compendium draws together more than 500 assemblages, collections, dioramas, miniatures, and other works that play with and re-envision the limits of the humble container.”
⛽️ There is a museum in Milan dedicated to vintage gas stations. “The pumps are particularly pleasing, if you like buttons, dials, type and colour - which you do.” Yes. Yes I do.
🇺🇸 Where in the USA is this? “There are five photos from the same place. You have five guesses to figure out where. A new photo is revealed after each guess. The tile color is how close your guess was.”
🍔 Where’s the McCheapest? An app that tracks the price of the Big Mac at every McDonald's location in America.
💝 My engineering cousin Andrew was part of a team tasked with making the world’s largest box of chocolates. Filled with candies wearing anywhere from 11 to 38 pounds, the box clocked in at 5,616.
🥠 Shouldn’t be a surprise, but ChatGPT is now writing your fortunes.
🍕 Growing up, Pizza Hut may have been my favorite restaurant. No meal better than pizza, breadsticks and red-pebbled tumblers of soda pop. But there was also Book It, Nina Turtles cassette tapes, NCAA basketballs, Land Before Time puppets and a legendary cross promotion with The X-Men.
📀 The end of an era. Netflix ships its last DVD September 29th. Most won’t care, but outside of the library, this was the best resource for finding far more movies than you can imagine. I had a watchlist on Letterboxd with over 400 titles, just under 150 were available to stream, including rentals.
🎼 How much do songwriters get paid? Complicated, but interesting.
🎶 Fake bands, real music: Rolling Stone’s list of the fifty best songs by made-up musicians, from The Archies to Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem to Stillwater to The Wonders. See also: the fictional brand archive.
🥁 Jason Kottke turned me into a Larnell Lewis fan. Watch his thirteen levels of drumming complexity, then check this improv, about five minutes in if you’re impatient.
🎹 In honor of the passing of Ahmad Jamal, an impressive set from 1971.
✌️ That’s all, folks. Until next week. Remember to keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke