on appropriate hummus substrates

August 26, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that just ate a slice of apple pie out of the fridge that was about 9 days old because it's time to live life on the edge 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway120 - Time-to-Eyeballs Factor"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Ben Ward (@benward) unveil an assortment of choice ideas around food, stories, baby products, civil engineering, and at least one (1) heist."Ben: "What did mayo do to you, Jon?"(crosstalk) Jon: "It's gross and I hate it." / Besha: "It's a long story."[pause]Jon: "Well, it's only six words."📣📣 HONK HONK 📣📣We're now at 19 5-star ratings in Apple Podcasts or iTunes or whatever you want to call it, which is LOVELY and I thank you -- this means we're just 6 away from that magic number of 25! Can you push us over the top? Yes, you!Instant Band Night 12: The Dozenth🎶😎 IT'S GONNA BE GREAT 😎🎶✨🎸 YOU SHOULD BE THERE 🎸✨❤🎹 INVITE YA FRIENDS 🎹❤Further details and a handy link for sending to every fun person you know: http://bit.ly/instantbandnight12If you don't live in the Bay Area, send it to 'em anyway because maybe they know someone fun here who wouldn't! want! to miss it!! 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Can I get a show of hands from anyone out there who's read Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear and agrees with me that 

  • It's great

  • There's no way to turn it into a movie no matter how bad I want someone to try

Right? It's a fuckin' barn-burner of a story, but intensely unfilmable despite being a space-based action revenge story on a literal planetary scale. Actually, a space-based action revenge story on a literal planetary scale featuring a cast made up entirely of Hot Teens, which seems like total blockbuster material a la Hunger Games .......... In Space!!!!!! But there's also a lot of weird physics and character dynamics and technology that'd be too difficult to explain, and no way to cram the baseline story into even a three-hour runtime. Would ..... would it be doable as a season of TV, though? Shit. You'd have to blow the entire budget on just the aliens, probably. Damn, now I want to see it.If you haven't read the book, please read it and then write me so we can yell about it together. Thank you in advance. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.For a while now, hummus has had a place at the table whenever Quentin eats; at first he seemed to just like it on toast, but over time its use as a condiment has expanded to several other foods, including but not limited to 

  • Sweet potato

  • Carrots

  • Actual potato

  • Turkey meatball chunks

  • Cauliflower

  • Broccoli

These all seem like reasonable choices of food to put hummus on, right? A few weeks ago, he started to want hummus on almost everything, to the point where we were just giving him spoonfuls of it to just eat straight up, which he did happily.* About a week ago, he started asking for hummus on the chunks of fruit I like to give him for a mid-morning snack, and something inside me decided the line would be drawn here. Surely there must be limits, right? Several friends pointed out to me that this was a dumb, bad idea and I should let Quentin decide whether it's gross without imposing my own views on him. This sounded more or less reasonable to me, so the next time he asked for hummus on his nectarines, he got it. Somewhat predictably, he liked it. So from now on, he gets hummus on his fruit if he wants it. I don't like doing it, but I'm gonna do it.Having said that, I'm not sure Quentin is going to know what mayo tastes like unless someone feeds it to him at a cookout or a McDonald's or something, given that neither Mavis nor I like it and we therefore have none in the house. Somewhat paradoxically given my new stance on hummus-smeared nectarines, I don't feel bad about this! Parenting: It's Chaos!™* This is somewhat unsurprising, given that for months now Quentin has been addicted to Grillo's Hot Italian Dill Spears, of which he eats at least one per day. This is how we taught him to say "please" for things he wants that aren't currently on the table. I need to emphasize that we never intended for this to happen: this was near the start of his currently-ongoing "whatever's on Mom's plate looks interesting" phase, and when he pointed to her pickle, she cut him a piece with the full expectation that he'd hate it and quit asking. Instead, he loved it and now he says "Pickle please" at almost every meal. We have gone through enough Grillo's Hot Italian Dill Spears that I actually bought a glass jar from Ikea to put them in, because I very quickly grew sick of the stupid bullshit way their asinine container lid thing closes. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • There's a raft of underwater volcano-derived pumice the size of Washington DC floating slowly toward Australia, and by the time it gets there it'll be full of life forms that may colonize the bones of the Great Barrier Reef; weirdly symmetric somehow, isn't it? (Weather Channel) 

  • As fewer and fewer people go to church, what are we doing with the buildings themselves? (NPR) 

  • If you did not heed my words last week and take a look at the YouTube channel of the botanist with the amazingly strong Chicago accent, just click this link (thank fuck YouTube resurfaced the ability to easily link to a specific timecode) and watch for a minute or so, because now I'm curious about what the shit these mushrooms are eating down there, too. (YouTube) 

  • At first glance, your impulse might be "oh, another Poor Me from rich people," but this article has something interesting to say about how meritocracy is basically the worst no matter where you are on the socioeconomic ladder. (Atlantic) 

  • I link to stories like these out of self-defense, so nobody else can do it to me first: Researchers find hurricanes drive the evolution of more aggressive spiders (McMaster U via EurekAlert) 

  • Megan Greenwell's scathing goodbye to the idiots at the top of her former org is a good if somewhat depressing read. (Deadspin) 

  • Who wants some actual data on American gun control opinions? (Brookings Institute) 

  • I just want to point out that at least three of the things in this article about battling urban heat are literally right out of a study I linked us all to over a year ago and that you should still read (PDF), because it's great. (Guardian) 

  • Here's a paper that proposes bringing back hydrogen airships for cargo-carrying purposes that use the jet stream to circumnavigate the world without generating a lot of pollution. (ScienceDirect) 

  • Some interesting recommendations for battling online hate groups. (Nature) 

  • I said I didn't want any more Trump thinkpieces if they weren't being written by David Roth, but I lied; this one is good, too. (Slate) 

  • Fellow Bake Off enthusiasts: here are essays and recipes from Rahul (2018) and Yan (2017) (spoilers for last year if you didn't watch it)! (Nature) 

  • I like that innovation is still apparently possible: here's a new electric motor with 2-5x the torque of anything currently out there. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Is summer camp bad, actually? The kind of camp the author went to sure sounds like it, but I have to tell you that I went to orchestra camp three years running in high school, and I firmly believe that the friends I made my first summer there were integral to me becoming the vaguely decent person you see now before you. (Vox) 

  • More efficient and sustainable desalination filters could come from something with the ridiculous name of "nanowood." (Anthropocene) 

  • It took a month, but DoorDash apparently isn't all talk when it comes to promising to pay workers fairly. (The Verge) 

  • Here's a fascinating essay from someone who interviewed 60 biologists to get a sense of the state of life science right now. (guzey.com) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumHatecat, It's Beautiful to SOMEBODY 

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.