Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that helped with some yard work at a friend's house with all the zeal of a man who hasn't done this sort of thing in so long he's forgotten his physical limits and is now paying the appropriate price in soreness

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.

Instant Band Night 32: BEACH PARTY

I made custom guitar picks. In case you wanted to know how it's gonna be from here on out!!!

Also, this will be the last Instant Band Night until November, so make sure you come to what might be the highlight of summer in your best vacation outfit and get ready to either create or witness something amazing onstage every 5-10 minutes!! There is, of course, no pressure to perform — you can just be a part of the best live music crowd on the entire West Coast. Yeah I said it

Tell your friends! Pass the invite around! Mark your calendars!

✨🪩✨
July 10 2025
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 55th St 94609

(Eventbrite) (Partiful) (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 YOU

If you've been looking for a weird little guy to put in your garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then I have the perfect place to start your search. If you know someone else who needs a weird little guy for their garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then you're also in luck!!!!

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after three+ years of inactivity, but I'm putting a link to its evergreen 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 podcast

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.

Several years ago I had a hard drive crash that wiped out a lot of my music collection, which wasn't as devastating a blow as I thought it might be because, well, I spend most of my listening time with podcasts these days. But! As the kids are getting older and developing some musical taste of their own (more on that below), I've realized I need to be more considered about what I'm exposing them to aside from "whatever was on my Spotify Discover Weekly that I happened to click Like on and then shuffle-playing my Liked Songs list." So I've been going through what remains of my music collection and I'm running into a problem, which is:

• I don't remember why I own some of this stuff — is Anathallo good? I guess they must've been good to me at some point? What's all this Wye Oak doing here?

• I don't have the time to listen to entire albums anymore anyway

• My memory is bad enough that I don't know where the holes in my collection are

I strongly suspect that there are lots of bands from roughly 2002-2012 that just dropped out of my collection entirely, bands that I would probably miss if I could remember what they were (did I have a Bloc Party album?). I do not have the time to find and re-read the entire archive of Pitchfork or Stereogum or whatnot from that decade, and the current best(?) idea I have is to look up the Coachella lineups from those years and see if anything sparks a memory (I think I did have at least one Bloc Party album). But I strongly suspect that you, my wonderful readership, may be the best way to do this. I don't want you to think about this too strongly: if you'd like, just hit Reply and blast the first 3-10 bands that come to your mind from the first two decades of the millennium. Thank you in advance!!

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.

Let's start by acknowledging that the end goal here is for my kids to be their own people with their own tastes and worldviews and whatnot. At the same time, I do think it would be grand for them to have the same musical preferences as me. Simultaneously, I haven't had the time or energy to really attempt any kind of full-force musical indoctrination. At present what I'm doing is just trying to sneak things into the Liked Songs playlist on Spotify, or bump tunes from my own collection that I've pulled onto my phone.*

Results thus far have been instructive, in that I really truly cannot predict what they'll like. Attempts to get my kids into Dave Matthews Band have thus far met with indifference, at least to the extent that nobody ever asks for one of those songs to be repeated. "Super Bon Bon" by Soul Coughing, by contrast, is requested almost every other car ride, and when the Spotify shuffle puts it on it's greeted with yells of delight. I'm gradually introducing more Soul Coughing, and it's funny what they latch onto: the one bit in "Moon Sammy" where everything stops for the words "strum it" is, as far as I can tell, the whole song for them. The kids have also liked lots of Beatles songs. Mavis can't stand Thom Yorke's singing voice so I haven't really attempted Radiohead to any degree.

Classics of ancient hip hop have also been received well; the kids shout the title of "Don't Sweat the Technique" when they hear it come on. They also love Tribe's "Can I Kick It?" which has resulted in my favorite moment of musical interpretation of the year: when I asked them what they thought the song was about, both of them started talking, and what I gathered is that they believe the song is from the POV of a guy who's got a soccer ball and is looking at a tremendous hole in the ground: he's wondering if he can kick the ball hard enough to get it across the hole without it falling in. Perfection. Absolutely no notes.

* There's a whole separate essay I could write here about the trials/tribulations of getting music onto my Android phone from my PC but I shan't

Fascination Corner

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

• China's greenhouse gas emissions have ........ dropped?? (Vox)

• "Infinite Contempt For Working People Is Not an Acceptable Default Position: Judge corporations more harshly." (How Things Work)

• Okay, I'm putting this here so nobody has to send it to me: The Scientists have tried CRISPR gene editing on spiders and produced a spider that can make silk that fluoresces red. And also some spiders without eyes, but that's nowhere near as fun(?). (U of Bayreuth) (Paper)

• Water voles are teetering on the brink of extinction in Wales, and they're hard to distinguish visually from rats, so The Scientists are resorting to feeding them (safe) glitter in the hopes they'll be able to track their movements through shiny poops. (BBC)

• The Scientists are reasonably sure cats recognize us by scent. (The Conversation) (Paper)

• A shopping center parking lot in Detroit is now the most cursed place on Earth, having become home to a glut of unsold Cybertrucks. (TechCrunch)

• The beige Amazon influencer lawsuit has been dropped but I bet the war isn't over. (The Verge)

• Reforestation would help more than we think, but we still need to cut emissions. (UC Riverside) (Paper) Speaking of which: we could cut shipping emissions by almost a quarter using technology that's literally already in place. (UC Santa Barbara) (Paper)

• There are no surprises in this YouGov poll of Americans on what they think they're good at, especially looking at the gender split, but that doesn't mean it's not still hilarious. (YouGov)

• What exactly is tickling? What's it for? Why can't you tickle yourself? There are extremely basic questions about tickling and how it works that we still don't have the least idea about. (Radboud U) (Paper)

• Everybody loves activated carbon for removing things from water, but The Scientists have found iron powder (which is cheaper) works way better at grabbing PFOS forever chemicals specifically; now they just have to figure out why that is. (Stevens Inst of Tech)

• Of fucking course Casey Means shouldn't be getting anywhere close to the office of Surgeon Fucking General. (The Sword and the Sandwich)

• "The secret to actually trusting each other: Americans are losing faith in their friends and neighbors. Here’s how to reverse course." (Vox)

• Human DNase1 is a super useful molecule that's incredibly expensive and difficult to produce; The Scientists have figured out how to get yeast to make it for us. (Ruhr U Bochum) (Paper)

• Some Engineers have built a robot that can transition seamlessly from Flying Mode to Driving Mode and yes there's video. (Caltech) (Paper)

• That .......... can't be good, can it: The Scientists have observed the ocean getting darker over the last couple decades. (U of Plymouth) (Paper)

• How often do Asian actors get miscast as other kinds of Asians — a Chinese guy playing a Korean character, for instance? The Pudding does a fascinating and honestly kind of reassuring deep dive. (The Pudding)

• Look at the goddamn fanciest cookies you'll ever see in your whole life!! (Colossal)

• Planting strips of flowers next to your crops can provide a home for bugs who'll devour your pests, but you can boost their numbers considerably just by picking the right combination of flower species. (U of Copenhagen) (Paper)

• The Scientists have been listening to dolphins' "signature whistles" and are wondering whether they might encode more information than just personal identity. (The Conversation)

• Is the cosmic microwave background bullshit? New data from the Jimmy Dubs suggests we might have to rethink our entire idea of how the universe formed. (U of Bonn) (Paper)

• The Scientists have always assumed megalodons mostly ate whales, but after analyzing some fossil teeth they now think the megs ate pretty much whatever they could find, which admittedly makes a lot more sense given how huge they were. (Goethe U Frankfurt) (Paper)

• Anne Helen Petersen has something interesting to talk to us about. (Culture Study)

• Pulsars blast radio waves into space hundreds of times per second and The Scientists have pretty much figured them out; long-period transients are way slower (pulses minutes or hours apart) and nobody has come up with a convincing explanation. A new one that's blasting X-rays on top of radio every 44m has just been found and it's even more confusing. I'm going to immediately jump to the craziest possible explanation and insist it's an alien battlestation. (ICRAR)

• Electric buses don't work as good in cold weather as we'd like, but at least Some Engineers have a pretty good idea why. (Cornell)

• Let's pool $10M together and buy this house in New York that comes with a stone maze that looks like it might be a legit challenge. (Robb Report)

A Fictional Thing

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

A band and their album

(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:

According to reader Gary, "Unkind Operation are at that stage of high school where the sound is more enthusiastic than good, per se. They decided that Mike Keneally's Wing Beat Fantastic and its companion, Wing Beat Elastic, were the coolest thing ever and are determined to do companion albums for all their releases. The Justice of Garbage is their first effort, and they will be recording the companion disk, The Garbage of Justice, just as soon as Dom's dad finishes work on the minivan and they can use the garage again."

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. If you received this as a forward and would like to subscribe yourself, you can do it at the bottom of this page right here (which also has the archive)!