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  • I thought I did the monster math on Smurfs, but someone else calculated their villages value. My estimation wasn’t far off at all!

The idea Gargamel is up in the sky and can’t find that GIANT SMURF VILLAGE WITH SMURFBERRY SILOS 5 -6ft tall? What is going on there? https://unclefishbits.com/something-wrong-in-the-smurf-universe-ie-gargamel-is-blind/

 

Vote for the Allison Inn & Spa in Oregon, The Inn Above Tide in Sausalito, and The Inn at the Presidio in San Francisco on the Traveler Annual Awards, so I have more work to do in celebrating.

Conversely, just vote for what you love and people you can support. Our industry is bonkers rough right now. We can take all the help we can get, but you can use it as an aspirational travelogue and vacation nostalgia exercise! Thanks k bai.

 

NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT…. HORIZONTAL LINES!

 

SPACE

 

 

Solar eclipse from space! See satellite view of moon casting its shadow on Earth (this photo) https://www.space.com/ring-of-fire-solar-eclipse-2021-satellite-photo

 

 

  • BEAR WITH ME BUT OH MY GOD WHAT DOES THIS MEAN???

The NY Times published this article on Tuesday:

 

But I buried the lede: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/watermelons-mars-new-york-times_n_60bfeedce4b059c73bd2f7bf

The New York Times accidentally published and then deleted Thursday a mock report that watermelons had been discovered on Mars, prompting hilarity on social media. “Fields of Watermelons Found on Mars, Police Say,” was the headline of the article, written by “Joe Schmoe,” the website Futurism first reported. “Authorities say rise of fruit aliens is to blame for glut of outer space watermelons,” the report continued, as seen in an archived version. “The FBI declined to comment on reports of watermelons raining down, but confirmed that kiwis have been intercepted. This story is terribly boring.” It added: “watermelon taste good, police say.” The article was promptly deleted and now links to a statement that it was published in error.

Original link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/admin/this-article-was-published-in-error.html

 

 

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AND YOUR BRAIN IS WEIRD

 

  • This is truly mystifying. “That is embarrassing”… oh man.

 

 

  • Holy cow. It’s wild how messed up everything is, taking our eye off the ball THAT WE’RE IN THE FREAKING FUTURE:

 

 

  • Graphene drives store 10x as much data, but really I just want to paste the study headline here:

“Graphene overcoats for ultra-high storage density magnetic media” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22687-y

 

 

  • They’re not little grey or green dudes, and they’re definitely *here*, and apparently not American, I am excited to see more declassified footage. Again… just advanced tech, and not the “helicopter man” or “jet pack man” variety. Report to Congress 25th June, most will be made public: https://www.space.com/ufos-not-alien-spacecraft-pentagon-report

 

VIDEO GAMES AND VIRTUAL REALITY

 

 

 

MUSIC

 

  • The breakbeats on this 1993 score for Body Melt are something else. Good synthwave / vaporwave stuff. The thing is total chaos for it’s time. It’s like it was informed by Perrey & Kingsley 50s, Italian library music of the 60s, And 80s video game and sci-fi music. Pretty well done, and again… bonkers.

 

MOVIES, COMEDY, & POP CULTURE

Australian film “The Dry” is a great bleeding edge slow-burn climate change detective story in the Outback, and it’s phemomenal. Eric Bana is perfect. Streamers are giving big screen films 2 week runs within networks, and I believe the Dry is on Amazon.

If you’re into Stephen King in any form, the Hulu show “Castle Rock” has so many Easter Eggs from all his novels, and he exec produced it. It’s turning out to be a fantastic, wild show.

BUT…

  • THIS ENTIRE NEWSLETTER IS NOW A STAN BLOG FOR I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE. Season 2… airing on Netflix in early July. I am going to watch it 100x, per usual. A fun skit! I think it’s the best sketch comedy in history after Kids in the Hall and Monty Python.

 

 

 

  • This is really bonkers to say, but I’ve not been in a professional kitchen or front of house since 2002 when I went lateral to rooms. Pranking in the restaurant industry used to be pretty standard, but Michelin upped the game and you’ll see some stuff, but definitely quiet working brigades nowadays.

My wheel used to mess around a lot, and one time during a brutal brunch (I *think* it was like 500 covers in 4 hours at approx 100 seats) he was moving my tickets around, but I was losing my mind about coffee and toast and mucked something up expediting. It wasn’t that bad, but he felt SO BAD and was like “you owe me one, or you get a freebie”… so the next day I put his keys and pants in a 5 gallon bucket and froze them at the bottom in a walk-in during our shift. When I walked out at the end of work that day, he was chipping at the ice. LOL He was in that “Man I wanna be mad, I can’t be mad, I’m going to get him good” and we went back and forth a lot after that. It was a fine dining space with an open kitchen and man we were not the silent, fluid organized brigade, I’ll tell you that. Good times. Then Kitchen Confidential did some toxic romanticizing of the biz, and everyone wanted to be a tv show chef and the industry changed forever. I can’t *believe* I sound like the old timer now. LOL

 

 

 

  • IDIOCRACY! –> Damnit this has everything. Tom Rothman being a joke of a failure (he’s the producer who submarined Idiocracy *&* tried to stop Deadpool about 5 times). Mike Judge going from physics to bass at the Shamu band at Seaworld, then cartooning to Beavis and Butthead. To think the studio had zero faith in Office Space, then had zero faith in Idiocracy… it’s astonishing. I get the sponsors got caught off guard but wow.

 

 

 

  • This S1E6 Better Call Saul soliloquy / conversation Jonathan Banks makes in talking about Mike’s son… well it is just some of the best damned acting:

 

 

  • I’ve not even started the show, and I’ve seen so much of it…

 

 

 

 

  • Looney Tunes Logic it’s got to be comedy: Drug Dealers in Brazil stopped a police vehicle from raiding them (for now) by pouring vegetable oil all over the street.

 

 

WAIT, DID HE REALLY BURY THE ACTUAL MEANING OF LIFE UNDER POP CULTURE?

 

  • What is the meaning of life? Viktor Frankl is a pretty big influence on me, and I ran across this in his book. Another quote that I work on is my reactivity, and this almost works as a meditation for me: “Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”.

But onto figuring out what we’re doing here! –>

According to Frankl, “the meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.” The meaning of life always changes, but it never ceases to be. It can be discovered in three ways according to logotherapy: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. In sum, meaning is everywhere, all the time. https://medium.com/@DrewGMurphy/viktor-e-frankl-on-the-meaning-of-life-ab400401d688

 

 

  • A worthy second entry on the meaning of life that I’ve carried with me since I was 13 years old in 1989. This is from “It was on Fire When I Lay Down On It”:

A story is told by Robert Fulghum, a Unitarian minister, about a seminar he once attended in Greece. On the last day of the conference, the discussion leader walked over to the bright light of an open window and looked out. Then he asked if there were any questions. Fulghum laughingly asked him what was the meaning of life. Everyone in attendance laughed and stirred to leave. However, the leader held up his hand to ask for silence and then responded

“I will answer your question.”

He took his wallet out of his pocket and removed a small round mirror about the size of a quarter. Then he explained:

“When I was a small child during World War II, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place. I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone, I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun could never shine. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places that I could find. I kept the little mirror, and as I grew up, I would take it out at idle moments and continue the challenge of the game.

As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child’s game, but a metaphor of what I could do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of the light. But light – be it truth or understanding or knowledge – is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it. I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have, I can reflect light into the dark places of this world – into the dark places of human hearts – and change some things in some people. Perhaps others seeing it happen will do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life.”

 

 

“In Hinduism, people traverse life through “stages.” You begin as a student, become a householder, during which time you get married, have children, work, and build your foundation; then when you are around retirement age, you begin the forest-dweller stage. At this point, your children have families of their own, you are beginning to detach yourself from the material world, and you do this, essentially, by living part of your time in the forest. For me, I saw Fern as someone hovering between the forest dweller and sannyasin stages. What is a sannyasin? Well, it’s a person who has completely unmoored themselves from materialism. No job, no possessions, no attachment … just getting ready for death.”

Sort of relevant, I wrote about this a bit: You’re not going to see me talking about the intersection of Buddhism, suffering, the human condition, meaning and purpose, and the notion of a broader concept of leisure. NO SIR NOT AT ALL. https://unclefishbits.com/youre-not-going-to-see-me-talking-about-the-intersection-of-buddhism-suffering-the-human-condition-meaning-and-purpose-and-the-notion-of-a-broader-concept-of-leisure-no-sir-not-at-all/

 

 

  • I’m getting old, and I may have slipped this into a past newsletter… but Shatner’s 90, so there’s that. This interview is playful and interesting, but it’s helped with the title alone. The guy’s had 4 wives, tragedy, wild times, and it’s nice to hear someone say “take it easy, nothing matters in the end”. It’s really nice.

‘Take it easy, nothing matters in the end’: William Shatner at 90, on love, loss and Leonard Nimoy https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/may/20/william-shatner-interview-love-loss-and-leonard-nimoy

 

SOCIETY & CULTURE & MORE PHILOSOPHY

 

Hide the Pain Harold is the meme of the decade (according to Imgur)

 

 

  • Bob Odenkirk has had a wildly disparate and varied ride in his career, and to think he’s an action hero star now, and no one balked… I guess comedians can become pretty good actors. =) He also has a grounded perspective, and the interview has humility and charm. Thought his perspective wouldn’t hurt, and Better Call Saul final season is coming! You gonna rewatch Breaking Bad?

Bob Odenkirk: ‘Soon people won’t remember Breaking Bad’ He charmed as slimeball lawyer Saul in the drugs drama and its spinoff – but now Bob Odenkirk has gone badass in action thriller Nobody. Has he left his comedy days behind? https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jun/07/bob-odenkirk-soon-people-wont-remember-breaking-bad-saul-nobody-action-thriller

 

 

  • THIS IS AWESOME… HELLO MEN! You too can experience the lingering and unwelcome eyes of objectification without consent!

The Lemon Cake Male Objectification Experiment

https://jezebel.com/the-lemon-cake-male-objectification-experiment-1677579069

 

 

  • In the “STOP CIVILIZATION I WANT TO GET OFF RIGHT NOW PLEASE”

THESE PEOPLE:

 

ELECT THESE PEOPLE:

 

 

We knew this was coming. In October of 2015, the Atlantic ran this piece:

The Millennial Urban Lifestyle Is About to Get More Expensive As WeWork crashes and Uber bleeds cash, the consumer-tech gold rush may be coming to an end. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/say-goodbye-millennial-urban-lifestyle/599839/

“If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you’ve interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year. If you use Lime scooters to bop around the city, download Wag to walk your dog, and sign up for Blue Apron to make a meal, that’s three more brands that have never recorded a dime in earnings, or have seen their valuations fall by more than 50 percent.”

It’s too bad… the whole model was to dial us into all the ecosystems, addict us with the first taste of the candy, make it essential, and break us. Who says tech isn’t a drug?

 

 

 

  • This is a fantastic notion that you don’t have to grind everything you love to dust. A pursuit of leisure is noble, and consistently disappearing from our lives:

The Modern Trap of Turning Hobbies Into Hustles https://repeller.com/trap-of-turning-hobbies-into-hustles/

 

THIS IS THE END, BTW…

 

Northern California gets its first Legoland in the form of Legoland Discovery Center, which will open in Milpitas' Great Mall in the middle of June.

Legoland Discovery Center Bay Area's Castro Theater recreation curiously features a nuclear family in front of it holding hands.

By Uncle FishbitsCategories: Newsletter