Jason Kottke’s weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
Jimmy Carter for The Onion: You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President. “Maybe I’m just a sucker. Apparently, all I needed to do was hand off control of the farm to my family.”
A streaming music translator: I Don’t Have Spotify. Paste a share link from Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer or SoundCloud and get links to that music on the other platforms.
I love me some Wallace & Gromit and so I was delighted to see that this guy made a real life version of Wallace & Gromit’s breakfast machine, complete with a spoonful of jam flying through the air perfectly meeting a piece of toast popping out of a toaster.
It starts with this crazy part here, where he falls out of bed into a pair of trousers, landing in a chair, and then his sleeves go on, and the vest. And then, probably the hardest part of all, is throwing jam — through the air — and hitting toast — in the air — perfectly. Some of these stunts are going to be the most challenging things I’ve ever attempted.
Cracking toast, Gromit! (via the kid should see this)
Tags: Aardman Animations · remix · video · Wallace and Gromit
The help desk at Auburn University is still answering questions from the public via telephone. “The rules are these: Be as polite as possible, end the call if the question is offensive, don’t answer anything that sounds like a homework question…”
I’d never seen this before: a thief does some stretches in the parking lot before robbing a Dunkin Donuts. Warming up is important for peak performance! https://bsky.app/profile/erikahall.bsky.social
Bess Kalb: Hooray for Pills. “I hope you shut out the simplistic, reductive, anti-science voices like RFK’s who tell us that pills are bad, and suffering is good.” Co-sign!
I saw Sinners last night (fantastic!) and loved reading Karen Attiah’s piece, ‘Sinners’ is a Black Challenge to White Christianity. Eagerly accepting recommendations for what else to watch/read/listen to about this film.
From a 1940 collection of essays called Freedom: Its Meaning, here’s Bertrand Russell on how fascism begins:
The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
This technique is as old as the hills; it was practiced in almost every Greek city, and the moderns have only enlarged its scale.
Tags: Bertrand Russell · politics
From Kyla Scanlon, a “brief comprehensive guide” about tariffs. “We call a tariff a protective measure. It does protect; it protects the consumer very well against one thing. It protects the consumer against low prices. —Milton Friedman”
“When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the gov’t because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy. By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”
Defector’s Sabrina Imbler is interviewing civil servants who have been fired/purged from their jobs at EPA, US Forest Service, USAID, NOAA, USDA, CDC, etc.
In this video, 98-year-old British WWII veteran Ken Turner demolishes a Tesla with a Sherman tank. Here’s what Turner had to say before getting down to business:
I’m old enough to have seen fascism the first time around; now it’s coming back. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is using his immense power to support the far-right in Europe, and his money comes from Tesla cars. Well, I’ve got this message for Mr Musk. We’ve crushed fascism before and we’ll crush it again.
This is a 1930 short film from avant-garde filmmaker Ralph Steiner that shows dozens of gears and other machinery at work.
(thx, matthew)
[This is a vintage post originally from Feb 2012.]
Tags: mesmerizing · Ralph Steiner · timeless posts · video
Some of the cardinals tasked with choosing a replacement for Pope Francis have watched the Hollywood movie Conclave in preparation for the real-life process. “So many of the conclave participants have little experience of Vatican politics and protocol.”