I first happened on these a long time ago, then forgot about them until recently when I saw an ad or mention somewhere.
I love dark, overbaked things: Extra Toasty Cheez-Its are alway in stock here.
I took a flutter on these pretzels and they're just as good as I remember.
Six 11-oz. [a little over 4 lbs.] bags cost $26.99.
Up top in the headline, the two labels used by Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Peacock et al to group movies and shows I want to watch.
These lists have gotten way out of control: last night I counted over 75 titles between all of them.
Whenever I want to find something to watch I end up clicking through all of them, trying to find one that fits my head space at the moment.
Not to mention how annoying all the sites are to use: when you click on a title to see what it's about and then want to continue scrolling instead of returning you to where you were, instead the site returns you to the very beginning over and over again so you have to go through all the titles up to where you were again and again and again.
It's tedious, and my thumb gets tired scrolling around sideways and up and down and back and forth with Apple TV's crummy remote.
Time for a new approach.
Long story short: From now on I'm gonna watch the first 5-10 minutes of each title in my lists: if it's good, I'm set and I'll get my popcorn and settle in with my kitty for the duration.
If it's not I'll delete it and move on to the next one.
On average, about 1 in 5-10 movies in my lists turns out to be good; about one in 20 that I've never heard of — usually foreign — knocks my socks off.
With this tactic I expect to winnow my on tap titles down to single digits in the next couple weeks.
Every article is a building whose height is determined by how many people have read it.
FunFact: The all-time most read article on Wikipedia is "List of deaths by year" (below), according to Perplexity Pro.
Fair warning: there goes the rest of your life.
[via Dense Discovery]
From Open Culture:
It’s a good bet that your first box of crayons or watercolors was a simple affair of six or so colors… just like the palette belonging to Amenemopet, vizier to Pharaoh Amenhotep III (c.1391 — c.1354 BC), a pleasure-loving patron of the arts whose rule coincided with a period of great prosperity.
Amenemopet’s well-used artist’s palette, above, resides in the Egyptian wing of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Over 3000 years old and carved from a single piece of ivory, the palette is marked “beloved of Re,” a royal reference to the sun god dear to both Amenhotep III and Akhenaton, his son and successor, whose worship of Re resembled monotheism.
As curator Catharine H. Roehrig notes in the Metropolitan’s publication, Life along the Nile: Three Egyptians of Ancient Thebes, the palette “contains the six basic colors of the Egyptian palette, plus two extras: reddish brown, a mixture of red ocher and carbon; and orange, a mixture of orpiment (yellow) and red ocher. The painter could also vary his colors by applying a thicker or thinner layer of paint or by adding white or black to achieve a lighter or darker shade.”
(Careful when mixing that orpiment into your red ocher, kids. It’s a form of arsenic.)
Other minerals that would have been ground and combined with a natural binding agent include gypsum, carbon, iron oxides, blue and green azurite and malachite.
The colors themselves would have had strong symbolism for Amenhotep and his people, and the artist would have made very deliberate—regulated, even—choices as to which pigment to load onto his palm fiber brush when decorating tombs, temples, public buildings, and pottery.
As Jenny Hill writes in Ancient Egypt Online, iwn—color—can also be translated as “disposition,” “character,” “complexion,” or “nature.” She delves into the specifics of each of the six basic colors:
Wadj (green) also means “to flourish” or “to be healthy.” The hieroglyph represented the papyrus plant as well as the green stone malachite (wadj). The color green represented vegetation, new life and fertility. In an interesting parallel with modern terminology, actions which preserved the fertility of the land or promoted life were described as “green.”
Dshr (red) was a powerful color because of its association with blood, in particular the protective power of the blood of Isis…red could also represent anger, chaos and fire and was closely associated with Set, the unpredictable god of storms. Set had red hair, and people with red hair were thought to be connected to him. As a result, the Egyptians described a person in a fit of rage as having a “red heart” or as being “red upon” the thing that made them angry. A person was described as having “red eyes” if they were angry or violent. “To redden” was to die and “making red” was a euphemism for killing.
Irtyu (blue) was the color of the heavens and hence represented the universe. Many temples, sarcophagi and burial vaults have a deep blue roof speckled with tiny yellow stars. Blue is also the color of the Nile and the primeval waters of chaos (known as Nun).
Khenet (yellow) represented that which was eternal and indestructible, and was closely associated with gold (nebu or nebw) and the sun. Gold was thought to be the substance which formed the skin of the gods.
Hdj (white) represented purity and omnipotence. Many sacred animals (hippo, oxen and cows) were white. White clothing was worn during religious rituals and to “wear white sandals” was to be a priest…White was also seen as the opposite of red, because of the latter’s association with rage and chaos, and so the two were often paired to represent completeness.
Kem (black) represented death and the afterlife to the ancient Egyptians. Osiris was given the epithet “the black one” because he was the king of the netherworld, and both he and Anubis (the god of embalming) were portrayed with black faces. The Egyptians also associated black with fertility and resurrection because much of their agriculture was dependent on the rich dark silt deposited on the river banks by the Nile during the inundation. When used to represent resurrection, black and green were interchangeable.
Fredkin's paradox: The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them — no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less. Thus, a decision-making agent might spend the most time on the least important decisions.
It was proposed by American physicist Edward Fredkin.
The paradox arises from the negative correlation between the difference between two options and the difficulty of deciding between them.
"The online Museum of the Human Web features over 90 artefacts spanning more than 50 years of internet history, honoring an era when networks, sites, and memes were still built by human hands rather than algorithms."
[via Dense Discovery]
Pretty much right on.
Bonus: here's 99% of a dermatology residency, as related by a senior dermatology resident back when I was rotating through derm in med school:
"Wet on the dry, dry on the wet, if that doesn't work, steroids."
I suspect it's still effective 95% of the time.
It was introduced in April of 2006 at the "Open Your Mind" exhibition in Milan but after twenty years the designer has yet to find a manufacturer.
Wrote Pezzini (pictured above and below with his creation): "It invites only one to sit yet suggests others are welcome, though there is no practical place provided. Sunny Day Bench is a metaphor for contradictions in the human condition: we may dislike the company of others, but we need it. We may hate to be alone, but ultimately we are. We flee crowds, but we are also attracted to them; and, more often than not, we demand a degree of individuality and independence."
Fellow southpaws know what a pain in the butt it is to use a conventional spiral notebook, having to contort your writing hand so as to minimize the pain of the spiral pressing into the underside of your wrist.
Here's an assortment of six (6) double spiral notebooks in six (6) colors, each with 50 8"x 5" sheets.
Smaller than a bread box — wait a sec, joe, your wires are crossed.
Again.
The Egyptian tortoise is smaller than a raspberry at birth; fully grown, it will measure between 3 and 5 inches long.
Critically endangered in the wild, its only hope for survival from extinction is continued successful breeding of the species in zoos.
Its native habitat is the Mediterranean coastal deserts of Egypt, Eastern Libya, and the western Negev Desert in Israel.
Its numbers have rapidly declined since the 1960s because of the exotic pet trade and destruction of its habitat through development.
From Open Culture:
.....................................
Albert Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he'd had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence for the work of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin was the only person Einstein wanted to meet in California during his second (1930–31) visit to the U.S., when he was at the height of his fame, with newspapers tracking his every move and academics clamoring for explanations of his theories.
The admiration was mutual. Their first meetings happened outside press scrutiny at Universal Studios, where the pair took a tour and had lunch together. They hit it off straight away, sharing quick wits and curious minds. In his autobiography, Chaplin writes that Einstein's wife Elsa finagled an invitation to dinner at Chaplin's house. He was only too happy to oblige, arranging an intimate dinner at which Elsa regaled him with the story of when Einstein came up with his world-changing theory around 1915.
The two continued to correspond, and the big public unveiling of their friendship came when Chaplin invited Einstein to the premiere of City Lights in 1931 (see photo up top) where the mega-celebrities from very different worlds were greeted by reporters, photographers, and adoring crowds.
It's clear Einstein saw something in Charlie Chaplin worth emulating. Chaplin left his mark on Existentialist philosophy, lending the name of his film Modern Times to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's influential journal, Les Temps Modernes. He also left a legacy on Beat poetry, lending the name City Lights to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's infamous San Francisco bookstore and publisher.
This 2004 piece by the Belgian designer employs an ordinary chair covered with a "new skin" of paper strips from a shredder.
"Every dot on this globe is a real person's voice — a short story about a place, a memory, a feeling. Tap one and hear someone from the other side of the planet."
If you like, you can record your own voice for others to hear.
Back story here.
It's a new feature making its debut today.
Aren't you excited?
Oh.
That's OK, never mind.
This inaugural installment is entitled:
Have you ever noticed how most people, when given a compliment, say things like, "It's about time you noticed," or "It's nothing," or "No, not really?"
That's rude.
Because what they're doing is telling the person giving the compliment, in effect, that they're wrong.
How much nicer, more appropriate and gracious to simply say "Thank you."
And yet not one person in a hundred does.
Try it — I promise it will improve the quality of your — and others' — lives.
And isn't that the only reason to use up oxygen, really?
To make life a little better and sweeter for others?
If you don't agree, please don't ask for a jump seat when the mother ship comes to take me back to my home planet.
When the first time you knew you had an AdSense for YouTube account is when you're notified (above and below) this morning that it's defunct.
No worries — as long as they don't suspend my YouTube channel, where over 10,000 happy subscribers tune in daily to see what my beloved calico cat Vanta has gotten up to.
The Economist offers up its annual assessment of paradise and hellholes.
There must be peeps reading this who live in some of these places: what say you?
This bookshelf appears to suspend a stack of books in mid-air against a wall, without any support.
Mounts to almost any wall with included hardware in minutes.
Metal powder-coated with silver finish.
Set of 3 —Small: $25.49; Large: $45.
Both here.
