music appreciation for the 1.75yo in your life

August 19, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's going to enjoy a brief reprieve of true San Francisco Bay area summer (aka temps in the low 70s with a nice breeze) before it heats up again, seemingly just to spite me and my efforts to stay cool. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway119 - The Marie Kondo of Mail"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Scott Kramer (@scottskramer) unearth a wealth of ideas virtually guaranteed to improve society on nearly every level."It turns out Pumpkin Spice Life Cereal is a thing that existed, but for some reason I didn't see any of it last year. It's possible it might've been a Walmart exclusive?? It still seems like pumpkin spice anything should be more readily available year-round, dammit.✨🎃 ALSO: We're at 17 ratings in the Apple Podcasts department, and apparently 25 is a magic number to hit, so if you could just pop on over and give us a nice 5-star, it really truly would help! 🎃✨Instant Band Night 12: The DozenthI think it's been a minute since I've actually explained this: Instant Band Night is a party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot.1. The stage has a drum kit, guitar, bass, keyboard, and mics.2. We draw names out of hats to make instant bands that get 7 minutes in the green room to plan a 5-minute set.3. A hat-drawn artist will also take the stage alongside each band to draw their gig poster on a meeting room easel pad.BEING A MUSICIAN IS NOT A REQUIREMENT FOR ATTENDANCE: you can just come watch the show. In fact, I strongly encourage you to just come watch the show -- I guarantee you've never seen anything like it.Sept 12East Bay Community Space8p$5 doorBYOBFurther details and a handy link for inviting your friends: http://bit.ly/instantbandnight12 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I both do and don't wish I was plugged into whatever rumor mill exists around the LA podcast scene, if there could be said to be one,* for the sole reason that I want to know in advance what's going to happen to Punch Up The Jam when Demi leaves, because I love it a lot and wish for it to continue basically indefinitely. My dream wish, which I will now type aloud to the universe in the hope that it manifests, is that Eliza Skinner takes over for him, based solely on the strength of Cool Playlist, which I also enjoy a lot. Please see to it. Thank you for your time.* Do ......... do you think Headgum and Earwolf and Max Fun and the rest of 'em have a softball league in which they all play each other? I also want there to be one team made up entirely of non-aligned podcast hosts. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin has a favorite song, and it's "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," or as he calls it, "Diamond." Close second is "Itsy Pyduh," otherwise known as "The Itsy Bitsy Spider," whose hand gestures amuse him greatly. He hasn't yet figured out the word "sing," though, so for now he'll just request "Itsy Pyduh" and correct us if we start singing the wrong song.A few days ago, we realized it'd been a while since we'd put any music on in the car with Quentin, and decided to see if he still likes Carly Rae.* We're pretty sure the answer is yes: he waved his arms and shouted random words with a look of glee on his face -- it was almost unbelievably adorable.I don't have anything else, really -- it's just good to know he likes music as much as he does.* I still maintain that the frequency range of her singing voice and his little toddler chirp must be similar, though to what degree that plays into his enjoyment is anyone's guess. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • I for one am looking forward to a world where all our appliances play hopeful little microtunes instead of just beeping at us. (Atlantic) 

  • Well, shit: kids don't get enough free play time, and it's ruining their childhoods: "for many Americans, the nuclear family has become a lonely institution — and childhood, one long unpaid internship meant to secure a spot in a dwindling middle class." I forget where I saw this, but there's a tweet somewhere in response to this asking that we establish Free Range Fridays for kids going forward, and you know what? Sounds good to me. (NYT) 

  • Archaeologists have unearthed what they think is a box of supplies kept by a lady "sorceror" in Pompeii. (artnet) 

  • Here's a good story about a high school cheating scam, for at least two values of "good." (Vice) 

  • Solar roads: there are some problems. (Popular Mechanics) 

  • The rise of high-paying tech jobs hasn't spurred the growth of lower-wage ones, which I have to assume is yet another in the densely nail-studded coffin of trickle-down economics. (CityLab) 

  • Trying to plan school bus routes in Boston sounds like a nightmare; the baseline work can now be done by an algorithm, which results in surprising savings. (Route Fifty) 

  • Why do brands keep emailing us? (Vox) 

  • Holy motherfuck: Amazon used to just trash products in its warehouses that weren't selling. Now that they've been caught, they're going to start donating them instead. (The Verge) 

  • Sometimes Twitter is good for something, like pointing me to this YouTube channel that belongs to a botanist or ecologist with an extremely thick Chicago accent who likes to make educational videos and does not shy away from technical terminology, which in the aforementioned accent is really a thing to behold. (YouTube) 

  • It's sort of embarrassing how well this works: for disaster relief, why not just give the affected people money? (Vox) 

  • WeWork's IPO filing is a doozy based solely on the wild shit it reveals about the company's structure and the guy running the show. (The Verge) 

  • This story about an underwater transforming robot proves once again (to me, at least) that trying to engineer things for deep water is approximately 80,000x harder than for space; fight me. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Trump's racism incites more racism as well as actual racist violence, shocking no one. The second story in particular is worth a look. (Brookings Institute) (ABC News) 

  • Speaking of which, this story about a guy who lost his wife to the El Paso shooting and who's turning up to the funeral is both a bummer and kind of a cheer-up. Kind of. (NPR) 

  • Ranchers in Africa might benefit from letting wild animals mingle with their livestock. (Science) 

  • We like to romanticize getting away from it all and just living that #vanlife, but what's it like to actually try it? Not great, it turns out, although that probably depends on the quality of the van you start out with. (Outside) 

  • Geological time is almost incomprehensibly deep, to the point where calling our current moment something as grand as the "Anthropocene epoch" seems laughable. The pull quote from this is very good: "If, in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries before forgetting to carry the one on an orbital calculation, thereby sending that famous valedictory six-mile space rock hurtling senselessly toward the Earth themselves—it would be virtually impossible to tell. All we do know is that an asteroid did hit, and that the fossils in the millions of years afterward look very different than in the millions of years prior." (Atlantic) 

  • At least one white supremacist kid figured out it was bullshit and got out; how replicable is his experience? (NBC News) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some new and exciting words I put together out of the letters on the fridgeJUNTWHIRKOMEDRINGUS 

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.