Jason Kottke’s weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
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It usually takes weeks to climb Mt Everest due to altitude acclimation. A group of British climbers did it in less than a week by inhaling xenon gas, which allegedly helps acclimatize people to high altitudes more quickly.
“Fascism sets in EXACTLY like this. Days go by. Nothing improves. The people wait with bated breath for SOMETHING or SOMEONE to help…”
It’s Friday and so we’ll end the week with a pair of poems. Good Bones by Maggie Smith:
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Those are just excerpts…click through to read the whole poems. I’ll see you next week.
Tags: Maggie Smith · parenting · Philip Larkin · poetry
A new offering from Swiss hotels: Bees & Friends. “We’re welcoming bees, butterflies, insects and hedgehogs with their own charming little homes, nestled right next to our hotels.”
Now on public display for the first time, at MoMA: a collection of watercolor drawings of flowers by Hilma af Klint.
Apple TV+ and filmmaker Rebecca Miller are doing a five-part documentary about director Martin Scorsese.
“Today, faced with a president who seemingly has no concern for constitutional limitations, the carefully crafted restrictions of the Constitution appear to be unenforceable; the courts are ineffective, and Congress doesn’t seem to care.”
Old school food blogger Adam Roberts has a new novel out this week called Food Person in which “a young and socially awkward writer takes a job ghostwriting the cookbook for a famous (and famously chaotic) Hollywood starlet”.
The Quilters (trailer) is a short documentary about a group of men in a Missouri prison who spend 40 hours a week making birthday quilts for foster kids and kids with disabilities.
The Quilters follows the daily lives of several quilters inside the sewing room at South Central Correctional Center, a Level 5 maximum-security prison in a small town two hours south of St. Louis, MO. From design to completion, the men reveal their struggles, triumphs, and sense of pride in creating something beautiful in this windowless, sacred space deep within the prison walls.
The Quilters is now available to watch on Netflix.
Tags: prison · The Quilters · trailers · video
PBS executives forced the makers of an Art Spiegelman documentary to cut derogatory mentions of Donald Trump from the film before it could air. “If PBS isn’t going to stand up for free speech, who is?”
“[This website] is a repurposed smartphone running on solar power. It’s a web server pieced together from scraps, humming in the attic of an apartment building.”