On Choosing A Leader, The Best Inventions of 2023, Micro-Acts of Joy, etc.
In which, as the sunset came to meet the evening on the hill, I told you I'd always love you, I always did, I always will.
☘️ Last week saw the passing of Shane MacGowan, lead singer of The Pogues. The Wire’s funeral song of choice Body of An American and If I Should Fall from Grace of God have gotten a lot of rotation the last few days, and this oddly poignant scene from A Very Murray Christmas means a little bit more this holiday season.
📍Do you say soda, pop or Coke? Maps of where words and phrases are most spoken in the Unites States.
🌎 Open Earth is a “soon-to-launch free footage” website dedicated to “support change-making organizations and individuals by supplying video that can be edited together into narratives to ‘inspire optimism and action in this decisive decade for our planet.’”
💡From TIME, the best inventions of 2023. LEGO braille, a robotic toothbrush and lots of apps, AI, AR and VR.
🍑 Apparently the Pantone Color of the Year is Peach Fuzz.
🥁 The Small Ensemble Director at Juilliard, Ulysses Owens, Jr., listens to Nirvan’s In Bloom for the first time, sans drums. “What is he listening for? How does he immediately craft an appropriate drum part?”
🏃♂️ Gary McKee ran a marathon every day for a year. On weekdays, he’d get up and do it before work.
☺️ How micro-acts of joy can create significantly boost your well-being. “An analysis released Tuesday from scientists behind a research initiative called the BIG JOY Project finds that people who commit daily ‘micro-acts’ of joy experience about a 25% increase in emotional well-being over the course of a week.”
🦜 Researchers taught parrots to video chat with one another. “The results suggest that video calls could help parrots approximate birds’ communication in the wild, improving their behavior—and, likely, their well-being—in their owners’ homes.”
🎞 From Far Out, their list of the 100 best movies of the ‘70s. I’m comically proud of how many I’ve seen and excited for some that I haven’t.
👯♀️ The New York City Rockettes have been a Big Apple holiday mainstay for generations. Their wooden soldier routine has amazed and baffled audiences since its debut 90 years ago. A behind the scenes peak of this beyond-impressive routine.
🍔 I’m oddly and unreasonably obsessed with ‘80s and ‘90s fast food training videos. They are almost always poorly acted, nonsensical and at least a little asinine. And then there’s Hot Drinks, an R&B banger if I’ve ever heard one.
🐝 A long but playful peak at what it’s like to be a bee, from Princeton University. “You’re all hard shell, soft core. You also have an inbuilt chemical weapon, designed as an injection needle that can kill any animal your size and be extremely painful to animals a thousand times your size—but using it may be the last thing you do, since it can kill you, too.”
📖 Really want to read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents, described as “a set of cautionary allegories, cautionary and future-protective in their keen prescription for course-correctives, about the struggle of a twenty-first-century society, Earthseed, to survive the ecological collapse, political corruption, corporate greed, and socioeconomic inequality it has inherited from the previous generations and their heedless choices.”
Butler’s thoughts on choosing a leader:
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
❤️ Have a great week, and remember to keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke
