blessings of the indictments season upon us all

June 12, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that probably doesn't need to remind you at this point, but the next time the Wildfire Doom Sky approaches, get yourself the materials for a Corsi-Rosenthal box and breathe easier 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I'll recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life sometime in 2023. In the meantime, you can find the show's Apple Podcasts presence here, which includes a back catalog over 150 episodes long chock-full of excellent ridiculousness, including an experimental tabletop RPG and a couple of Star Trek fantasy drafts that could almost be their own show if I had the time to make yet another podcastInstant Band Night 21: MIXERIt's just about a month out! Get ready to rock out onstage with friendly strangers for a wildly receptive audience, or just be part of said audience and bear witness to creative genius several times in a row!! Mark your calendar now just to be sure you don't miss it!July 13 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  T E L L   Y O U R   F R I E N D S  + ++ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + +Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOUNew stuff alert: there's a bunch in the Etsy shop right now and you're the first to know!! 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I read this interview with a couple of experts on national security law about what would be happening to Trump right now if he was just some jabroni off the street, and it's simultaneously a beautiful glimpse into a purer alternate universe and just the most maddening thing in the world to contemplate.The thing that still gets me about Trump — the thing that will never, ever stop getting me, to tell the truth — is that even though he's a complete fucking idiot, just the stupidest man to ever be President of the United States by a lightyear, a dumb, easily-led animal who could never, ever keep his stupid flapping fuck mouth shut about whatever fuckwit bullshit nonsense he happened to have fixated on for a second or two, we still couldn't stop him from being elected, and for four goddamn years we couldn't pry him out of that office, even though we! could! all! see! that he was doing massively corrupt bullshit in there! We could all see it!! He wasn't taking the time or energy to hide any of it, because he was so fucking dumb he thought being President made him The Untouchable King of America! Can you imagine how colossally goddamn stupid you have to be to believe something like that?? And yet he did — he so clearly did — and we still couldn't get rid of his dumbfuck ass??? The rage I felt during the Trump years, I tell you!!!So this is why the indictments will always make me happy; I just wish I knew if they'd be effective. To see Trump die in jail would deliver such concentrated joy into my bloodstream that I might spontaneously transform at the molecular level into a person-shaped pile of animated neon glitter. Which will be difficult to explain at parent/teacher conferences, but what are you gonna do. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Hark ye now and hear the word of the Unbreakable Bedtime Board Book Trilogy as laid down by Felix!✨ First up is Goodnight Constellations, which lists a number of constellations and their sleepy avatars. Sometimes we name the big star in each one, sometimes not.🌞 Next, somewhat incongruously, we have Hey! Wake Up!, a chronicle of some big and little animals getting their morning started, playing, and lowkey shaming the diet choices of a rabbit who just wants some broccoli stew.🐑 Finally, an ode to road safety if ever there was one, there's Sheep In A Jeep, which tells the story of what can befall you if you and your goof-off pals get too rowdy in the car and nobody's paying attention to the damn road.These books must be read at bedtime if there is to be order in the universe. It's a small price to pay, frankly, and we remain thankful the list has not expanded wildly.  

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye. 

  • If you'd like to feel a faint warm glow in the core of your being for just a moment, here's a rundown of all the legal shit currently swirling around Trump's big stupid head, not just the stuff he's been indicted for. (Business Insider) 

  • As always, David Roth has us on the essential core of the Trump documents thing that we should not ever lose sight of. (Defector) 

  • The Scientists warn that we're fucking up badly right now on CO2 emissions (U of Leeds) (Paper), and fully 90% of the net-zero pledges out there have been ranked, quote, "low confidence in their full implementation." (Imperial College London) 

  • Four Indigenous Colombian kids survived over a month in the jungle after a plane crash; I laughed out loud when it got to the part about the dog. Where'd the dog wander off to?? Anyway: what a story. (AP) 

  • At this point, you don't need to read the very long Atlantic article about how bad Chris Licht was at his job of running CNN, because he's not at it anymore. This much shorter piece, also from the Atlantic, makes a pretty good guess why. (~$Atlantic) 

  • The Scientists think they've found a new class of antibiotics, which would be great because we haven't had any of those in about 50 years. (U of Zurich) (Paper) 

  • Dupont and 3M have known about the deleterious effects of PFAS forever chemicals for decades. (Science Alert) (Report) 

  • The jobs will be different, and might not pay quite as much, but decarbonizing the US economy could triple the number of energy jobs in the country in 27 years. (Anthropocene) 

  • Should we maybe be making fuel out of ......... ammonia?? (~$MIT Technology Review) 

  • Fungi are doing a huge amount of carbon capture and storage and we just found out. (U of Sheffield) (Paper) 

  • "The Binge Purge: TV’s streaming model is broken. It’s also not going away. For Hollywood, figuring that out will be a horror show." (~$Vulture) (Did you know that if you're out of clicks, you can still read paywalled Vulture articles by just putting a period — literally a "." — after the .com in the address bar? It works on Chrome; haven't tried it on Firefox. Just sayin') 

  • Just in case you weren't already mad at them just for being crypto dicks, the Three Arrows Capital guys are doing just fine traveling the world after their whole shit collapsed last year. ($NYT) 

  • What did all the animals do during what The Scientists are now calling the "anthropause" induced by the 2020 pandemic lockdowns? Moved around a lot more, mostly, which is interesting inasmuch as it reveals human presence to be an inhibitor on what they might consider normal activity. (NPR) (Paper) 

  • Oh fucking hell: there is a real concrete technical reason why all the new shit we're watching is so GODDAMN BADLY MIXED. It appears about 2/3 of the way into this article — look for the paragraph that starts with "The good news" so you can skip the author's pearl-clutching bit about the people who turn the subtitles on. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Why do societies differ from each other? The Scientists have done some thinking and it looks like about 1/5 of the cultural differences between civilizations boil down to ecological factors. (The Conversation) 

  • The diversity of microbial life in coral reefs is way, way beyond what anyone thought. (Nature) 

  • I like this read on why wealthy and powerful people still seem to want our admiration, and why it's important that we never give it to them. (How Things Work) 

  • A UC Berkeley experiment proves robot gardeners could do just as well as humans at tending plants. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • What happened when a Brooklyn neighborhood policed itself for most of a week. ($NYT) 

  • Some Engineers have successfully tested the whole "beam power from space with microwaves" concept. (Universe Today) 

  • The corporate metaverse is still completely fucking stupid from top to bottom, but Second Life is still going! (Guardian) 

  • Evidence for one of the first steps in the evolution of life on Earth as we know it has finally been uncovered. (Motherboard) 

  • Time for an interesting meditation on "SETI in the Age of UAP" (Supercluster) 

  • Some Engineers at my old school built a robot specifically for eradicating spotted lanternfly egg clusters. (CMU) 

  • Forget food deserts for a second; let's talk about food swamps. (Science Alert) 

  • Some Engineers took suggestions on robot design from ChatGPT and it seems like it actually worked out okay. (Delft U of Tech) 

  • There's at least twice as many cocaine hippos in Colombia as previously estimated, and nobody knows what to do about 'em. (Nature) 

  • Air quality monitors suck in air all day and they're goddamn everywhere, which means they're also a goldmine for eDNA that can be sequenced to see how local biodiversity is doing! (Anthropocene) (Paper) 

  • "Women, Technology, Glitter Pancakes and Existential Unease at the Malibu Barbie Cafe: What Barbie means in 2023 seems as unclear to the designers of the Barbie Malibu Cafe as to anyone else—but they do make a great garlic aioli." (Motherboard) 

  • The JWST has detected organic molecules in a galaxy 12 billion light years away, a new record. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) 

  • Everybody can relax, The Scientists have identified the genes responsible for how thick your eyebrows are. (Elsevier) 

  • Why does everybody always think their society's morality is crumbling around them? (Nature) (Paper) 

  • Rolling out the malaria vaccine is now the next hurdle, and it's a big one. (Vox) 

  • "OK, WTF Is Going on With the 'Intact Craft of Non-Human Origin' Allegedly Recovered by the U.S. Government? There are currently no public details on what evidence or documentation, if any, the whistleblower may have." (Motherboard) 

  • Philly residents, do y'all really call your accent "hoagiemouth" or is that just a wonderful invention of this particular blog? (Billy Penn) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

Photo by Marco Giesuppe Timelli on Unsplash(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

No reader interpretations for this one either, which leaves me free to say I think Worry Suit was a heavy-sounding indie rock band whose frontman's incomprehensibility was their downfall; turns out the average music listener's tolerance for English-adjacent gibberish tops out at The Wrens. 

Thanks

If you've read this far, I thank you. Feel free to forward this to someone you like, or inflict upon someone you don't.