How This One Painting Sparked the Impressionist Movement My Modern Met Naturally, it’s a Monet. But it may not be what you’re thinking… The author credits the artist’s 1872 exhibition of “Impression Sunrise” as the tipping point for the nascent movement which would shortly thereafter become known as Impressionism. Some of the criticism mentioned in the article is fantastic: “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more labored than this seascape!”
The Convicted Felon Who Became the King of Roadside BBQ Men’s Journal I love BBQ. This last weekend’s smoked brisket turned out magnificent and already has me wanting to replicate it. Or maybe try ribs again… Warning: this article will make you hungry. And, more importantly, it will make you smile.
New Coke Didn’t Fail. It Was Murdered. Mother Jones Need a Coke with that BBQ? Okay, full disclosure: I haven’t seen the third season of Stranger Things yet. YET. But I’m aware that New Coke makes a cameo. And I do remember New Coke. I agree with the article… it wasn’t bad. I recall it tasted eerily similar to Pepsi with that super forward sweetness. I wasn’t sorry when they brought back Coke Classic, though I still kinda wish they kept New Coke around. But I’m the guy who kinda wishes they kept Crystal Pepsi around, so who am I to judge?
Janelle Monáe’s Ready to Burn Sh*t Down InStyle Janelle Monáe is amazing. I saw her last year and it was revelatory – easily one of the best shows I’ve ever been to; if you ever have a chance to see her, run, don’t walk. There are better bio articles about her, but I love the breeziness of this one plus the amazing fashion photos.
Badass of the week: This is a new section in FTTW celebrating someone who displayed particular badassery this week.
Previous winners (yeah, I wrote these down but neglected to publish them): Last week’s BAotW went to the 54-year old Canadian outdoorsman in the forests of British Columbia who KILLED A BEAR WITH A HATCHET.
So, yeah, it’s been a minute… Though it’s been quite an eventful minute! Hopefully I’ll get to that soon in a Selfie post. For now I’m just dipping my toe back in with a FTTW:
“The Big Error Was That She Was Caught”: The Untold Story Behind the Mysterious Disappearance of Fan Bingbing, the World’s Biggest Movie Star Vanity Fair The story uses the frame of Fan Bingbing’s disappearance (and, spoiler, reappearance) to detail the sweeping changes engulfing the Chinese film industry as the government reasserts its primacy. This is of particular importance because of how intertwined Chinese film companies and investors have become with Hollywood – rare is the American blockbuster that doesn’t have at least some Chinese underwriting. It’s a testament to the amount of money needed to make a modern popcorn movie, but also to how Hollywood actively tries to appeal to a larger, global market, and with almost one and a half billion people, China can be just as important – or more – than domestic audiences. How this crackdown will ripple across the ocean still has yet to be seen, but it’s likely something to watch develop over the next few years.
The Dreams Of A Man Asleep For Three Weeks Kotaku True story: a couple weeks ago I was having a dream where I was returning to a campsite in the woods when a pair of wolves came out of the bush snarling at me. They rushed me and in the dream I made a decision that if they were going to attack me I was going to attack right back. So I roared a battle cry and as the lead wolf leapt at me I bit his face. That’s when Fern woke me, “Are you okay?! You were just yelling in your sleep!” Mike Fahey, one of the editors at gaming site Kotaku, was rushed to the hospital for a life-threatening heart condition and then had to remain sedated (though, he points out, not exactly in a coma) for three weeks. And he dreamt… FYI, Dream Wolves, if I had slept longer I would have bit your damn faces OFF! You’re forewarned!!
Bodies of Long-Lost Divers Discovered At Bottom of Belize Great Blue Hole: ‘They Are At Peace’ Newsweek I hate this headline. Like, so much. Okay, sure, they found a few bodies down there, but the more important thing is the expedition and the mapping they did. If you’re not familiar with the Great Blue Hole, it is, well… okay, I’m not going to do that to you. It’s an enormous marine sinkhole off the coast of Belize that was made popular in the popular imagination by an old Jacques Cousteau expedition. What’s fascinating – and we’ve know this for some time – is that below a certain depth oxygen is replaced with dissolved hydrogen sulfide, so any marine life that ventures into those depths dies quickly. Here’s more info from Wikipedia and Belize’s own site or this cool site about “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About The Blue Hole of Belize” (spoiler, I’ve already told you a couple. The Newsweek article has a snippet from this video put together by the sub company, but here’s their longer (~8 minutes) version and if you have any interest in the Blue Hole or in underwater exploration, you should take a look (another spoiler: the sub company doesn’t even mention the dead bodies).
A brief history of the ball pit Vox I haven’t been in a ball pit for decades. I haven’t even been near enough to a ball pit to actually contemplate jumping in. Back in the 90’s I almost worked at a tech company that had a ball pit (and a big slide!) but that’s about as close as I’ve come. But there’s still that lure… The article talks about the rise of the ball pit out of a concern for “safe play,” which dovetails nicely into a lot of things I’ve been seeing and reading lately (*cough*CoddingOfTheAmericanMind*cough*).
Foxconn Is Confusing The Hell Out Of Wisconsin The Verge Last December the podcast Reply All did a great episode about the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut Foxconn coming to Wisconsin and the secrecy and politics behind it. The podcast took a human look behind the glitzy promises and political bullet points and is well worth listening to. This article follows on that by actually visiting the places where Foxconn promised fast-track building and thousands of jobs. Real people were displaced, lots and lots of real money was spent by relatively small municipalities who were promised enormous economic gains. What’d they get so far? A whole lot of nothing.
A Journey to the Disappointment Islands BBC Spring started with a couple little storms reminding us that this long winter hasn’t quite shaken itself loose yet. Want to get away? Click on the link above and marvel in how the writer’s middle-of-the-night curiosity about a pair of mis-named islands in the 17th century resulted in him visiting one of the last untrammeled pieces of paradise on the globe. For a lot of people I’m sure the idea of traveling so far just to get to a tiny spit of land that doesn’t even have a steady source of fresh water, much less a hotel, probably sounds awful. To me, though, this article fills the sails of my heart and strains at the anchor lines holding me down. Oh, to travel…
Walled Off in San Francisco The Bold Italic I know it’s not the best way to recommend an article by pointing out its shortcomings, but I wish this were longer and talked about more walled off rooms. That said, this made me think of a small space uncovered while helping my friend tear out drywall after the latest flood. About a foot square, but floor to ceiling and drywalled on the inside yet with no way to get to this space. What was it there for? The reality is likely much more mundane than the possibilities – it’s more than likely the space just represents the re-framing the unit went through and rather than incorporate the incongruity into the newly-framed room, it was walled off for the sake of simplicity. Or maybe…
The Dodge Neon: There Should Be More Cars Like This Today Jalopnik The car blog Jalopnik does an occasional piece they call “Redemption Garage” where they look at forgotten or misunderstood cars and make a case for why they mattered. By “occasional” I mean they’ve done two. The first entry was a Dodge Caliber and… no. But The Neon… Okay, settle in or keep scrolling down because I’ve got thoughts… First, this is a nod to Fern who gave up her beloved Neon a few years ago. She loved that car, but mechanical issues made it unfeasible and she’d just gotten a newer, more reliable car… She still misses it, though. I get it for numerous reasons. First, there’s the purely emotional connection on develops with a car which I’ve written about pretty recently myself. But, I’d like to point out that there’s a lot to be said about the Neon mechanically. There’s a whole class of cars – the vast majority you pass everyday – that I refer to as “appliance cars.” That is, most people don’t give a crap about their cars other than whether they’ll take them from point A to point B. There’s more, sure – most people want their rides to at least be carry their requisite stuff, aesthetically pleasing, and safe, too, but rarely does anything truly trump reliability. Start everyday. Don’t leave me or mine stranded. Think of your Toyota Camrys and Corollas, Honda Accords and Civics, Ford Fiesta, Focus, and Fusions… you get the idea. These are the best sellers that let Ford build the Mustang, or Honda to build the NSX, or Toyota to build the Supra. And while various automakers will try to style their cars differently or add this new whiz-bang feature or that gimmick, there’s not a lot of variation. That wasn’t the case when the Neon debuted. It was different – the article goes into this in a number of ways and for that reason is worth reading – and it had to be. There’s a lot to be written about how Chrysler’s back was up against the wall and like the other two of The Big Three, they’d mostly ceded the sub-compact market to the Japanese automakers. But early-90’s Chrysler was scrappy: think of the Dodge Viper, the crazy Prowler, the redesigned Ram truck with that now-familiar big rig style front end. And they took a swing at the Japanese by offering a cheap car on an all new platform that had more power and more, well, fun. And it worked. Well, relatively speaking – to say they were fighting an uphill battle against the Corollas and Civics would be like saying if you jump high enough you can tough an airliner. But they made progress! The article talks about their “Hi!” ad campaign which I would argue foreshadowed a lot of Steve Jobs’ playbook when he came back to Apple a few years later – what the colorful iMac was to the beige PC, that’s what the Neon (it came in bright purple and green, for gods sake!) was to Corollas and Civics. Out of the box the Neon had personality! Sadly, it wasn’t enough. Chrysler had deep-rooted problems that led them to sell out to Daimler-Benz before the end of the decade – an abysmally bad deal that eventually led them into bankruptcy in early 2009. I’m happy to say that their time since being purchased by Fiat has been really good for many reasons too numerous to mention, but that’s the happy ending to their story (at least so far). PS: speaking of Chrysler, or more appropriately FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, as they’re now known), a couple weeks back Fern and I had a chance to go to the Silicon Valley Auto Show. I wanted to see one specific car: my future mid-life crisis vehicle, the forthcoming Jeep Gladiator pickup. Oh, it was glorious. It will be mine… in “Punk’n” orange. Here’s a link to Jeep’s online configurator. Blessedly, at the moment they don’t list prices, so I can trick out my Rubicon manual transmission orange monster with all the bells and whistles without utter hopelessness!
The ‘Forrest Gump’ sequel that never was, from O.J. to Oklahoma City Yahoo! Entertainment We’ve all seen “Forrest Gump” and it’s pretty safe to say we all are okay with it (I mean, you know, it grossed $677.9 million, so…). With that kind of adoration, why wasn’t there a sequel? I mean, other than it makes absolutely no sense it would have a sequel? Other than that? Well, but for September 11, it almost did. I really want to follow that up with a quip like, “And it would have been just as big a disaster!” but I won’t. I mean, yeah, I kinda just did. But I totally didn’t. But it would have been really bad. Maybe like one plane crashing into a building. Yes, I am going to hell. In fact I am driving the bus. And good seats are still available…
The Mortician and the Murderer Topic Magazine This long-read is dark. Illegal cremations? check. Trafficking in organs? check. Side helping of racketeering? You betcha. I remember when this story broke back in the day, but this is a comprehensive look at one of the most grisly scandals I can think of. Here’s a pull quote for you from one of the people who led to the whole thing being discovered: “‘Don’t tell me I don’t know what burning bodies smell like!’ the man had reportedly yelled. ‘I was at the ovens at Auschwitz!'” So, yeah, you may not want to read this one while eating. Just sayin’
