Tom Thumb Meets the Romulans

April 27, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that highly endorses this pizza recipe if you've got the ingredients, because holy shit it's basically like homemade Golden Boy (the best pizza in North Beach). 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNo new episode this time, but don't worry, there'll be one next week.We continue to hold steady at 31 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts, but I still feel like it could go up to 33 if a couple of you are strong and brave enough. Is that you?? OF COURSE IT ISInstant Band Night 15: POSTPONED📣 JULY 9TH 📣🚀 PREPARE FOR AN ALMOST UNBELIEVABLE AMOUNT OF FUN 🚀It's also still on Facebook if you're there, too* * s t a y   h o m e   / /   s t a y   h e a l t h y * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry."There’s no “invisible hand” insisting that we have precarity all the time. We choose this. We choose these rates of inequality, this racial wealth gap, we elected it. We choose to not help parents out until their kid is 5 with public education. We could’ve chosen another system, another world, like other countries have. All of these are solvable problems in terms of policy. In a lot of ways, this isn’t even hard stuff. We’ve just chosen not to do it."That's from this Vox interview about how millenials are getting hit harder. For some reason they toe the line on naming names, and I don't know why they think that's useful. Republicans. It's the fucking Republicans. Look, I don't know about you, but the general background radiation of news like this in my life + this other article from the ~$Atlantic make me feel like I should pick up a brick. Nahmean? How many of us out there are feeling this? Instead of just some half-cocked kook talk from an admittedly hyperbolic but extremely fed-up person, what if it turns out just about all of us are extremely tired of this bullshit? I'm just askin'. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin seems to experience the book Each Peach Pear Plum as the story of Tom Thumb, which it sort of is. As part of his still admittedly brief bedtime ritual, Mavis sits with him in a rocking chair and sings him a song or tells him a story; for the past several weeks, he's consistently requested "Once upon a time Tom Thumb." An indelible new wrinkle has been added, however: Quentin has also been fascinated by the concept of Romulans ever since he witnessed me attempting to recount to Mavis the entire plot up to episode 8 of Star Trek: Picard; every now and then, usually during lunch or dinner, he would request "Once upon a time with Romulans." The new normal, however, for at least the past couple of weeks, has been a bedtime story request for "Once upon a time Tom Thumb Romulans." Mavis has expertly woven him a story about Tom Thumb encountering three friendly Romulans in a peach orchard and inviting them to accompany him to a plum pie party with his friends. A bulldozer is also in attendance across the street, because Quentin. It's a very good story. Weirdly, I'm also able to render the illustrations in my head in the style of the Ahlbergs, and it never fails to raise a quiet little mental smile.In completely unrelated news, a minor Crib Crew mystery has been replaced with a deeper one: it turns out Quentin is against canines of any sort lingering in the crib once bedtime arrives. During the course of the day's activities, he might accumulate some new pals in there, but when the day ends, all canids must leave: Cozy Doggy, Pink Puppy, Pumpkin Snoopy, Regular Snoopy, and Big Goth Snoopy are summarily ejected. Why, though? We have no idea. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Just a reminder that if you're not already subscribed to Together Alone, you're missing out on a glittering daily window to worthy diversions from isolation far and wide and everything in between from a good and brilliant friend of mine. (Together Alone) 

  • If you have any dumbasses around you who think the economy needs to reopen immediately, send them this, maybe: "Opening up the economy won’t save the economy" (Vox) 

  • I'm going to allow this one thing to briefly make me feel good: a whole factory staff literally lived in the building for a month to crank out enough polypropylene to ramp up PPE production for other manufacturers in the supply chain. They got paid, and even got a raise, thank fuck. ($WaPo) 

  • The insect apocalypse isn't evenly distributed. (Science Alert) 

  • The rona should force us to rethink our place in the planetary ecology. (Nautilus) 

  • Bike lanes improve business, actually. (Portland State) 

  • Instead of launching a helicopter once it gets to the surface, what if the next Mars rover just released a swarm of -- wait for it -- nanocardboard flyer drones? (Penn Engineering on Medium) 

  • Be the mirror in this world that shows Sufjan Stevens that he is a clown. (AV Club) 

  • What if DNA isn't really the blueprint for a life form, but just a jumbled list of ingredients? (U of Maryland) 

  • Believe it or not, the rest of the world actually used to look to the US for leadership; now they're looking at us the way bystanders at a horrific but utterly avoidable car crash might. ($NYT) 

  • Zoom fatigue is real; here's why. (Axios) 

  • If these microsensors become a thing that we use to run, say, a neural lace, does that mean a person's skull gets absolutely stuffed with nanoscale blinking lights? I mean ....... right?? (Cornell) 

  • If you've been following Steak-umm on Twitter, you might wonder what the person behind it is like. Now you can know! ($WaPo) 

  • Nearly half the chatter on Twitter about the rona might be down to bots. (Vice) 

  • I both do and don't like the idea of a park designed for physical distancing. (Fast Company) 

  • We should probably rethink the practice of travel itself now that the rona has put the whole industry on pause. (NBC News) 

  • Putting some more grazing animals in the Arctic could help fight climate change. Sure! (Science Alert)

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumArea Denial Round, A Display of Unwarranted Optimism 

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.