twenty twenty two hoo hoo hooOoOooooOO

January 03, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's been getting a lot of extremely silly ideas for good little garden sculptures 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI actually started the edit on the last episode we recorded, which was (ahem) back in uh March of 2021. It's not done yet. But I did start it!!I heard from trusted sources that giving us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and/or leaving a nice review is one of the only guaranteed ways to start out 2022 karmically refreshed. This is just some information I'm passing on to you.Instant Band Night 15: TIME WARPAssuming there's a vaccine for kids under 5 by then, which let's face it is probably a stretch but we are choosing to live in optimism, Instant Band Night 15 will! take! place! on the 24th of March!! (Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  r e t u r n i n g   i n   2 0 2 2  + ++ +  h a n g   i n   t h e r e  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Last week we had a night of extremely enthusiastic winds that snapped a large branch off a tree near the sidewalk, which in turn had the temerity to tear the fiber line a little ways off the side of our house. This had the unfortunate effect of dangling it across the street at a height/angle combination that PG&E was not comfortable with, evidenced by the fact that a truck came and snipped it off at the pole. Which honestly: understandable. However, this meant that we were without internet for many days until AT&T could send someone to reconnect and splice back into the line going into our house. It was mostly harrowing, unsurprisingly, but also maybe just a tiny bit freeing? I did get a little reading done, by which I mean I skimmed books 2-4 of the Dark Tower and settled in to re-read 5. Am I going to give the last ones another shot? I 'unno. There's probably something else I could be reading (or re-reading). I don't know where I'm going with this. Oh, right! Resolutions!I don't have any. Quite frankly I feel like anyone who tries to make one for 2022 is either tempting fate or flirting with a kind of delirious optimism that I would love to learn how to recapture. Did you make one? What was it, and also how dare you.** Kidding!**** Mostly. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Adjusting Felix's sleep schedule is an ongoing process. It's mostly working, in that there's something like a 50:50 chance we can lay him down for a nap and he'll fall asleep with minimal crying (which I'm calling "any bout of crying that lasts less than 5-10m"). Today, for instance, he took two naps with basically no prelude. But his 4p catnap was greeted with what I'm going to call outrage crying that made it seem like he'd been personally and mortally insulted by the concept of being laid down in a dark room with a white noise machine going.We do, at least, have our evenings back, in a way: we lay him down at 7p and he goes to sleep with varying levels of fuss (but he does go to sleep). Which is great, except he then wakes back up again every 3h ready to nurse. Sometimes he skips the 10p session, but that's still a relative rarity. Small steps, folks, small steps. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "How omicron broke Covid-19 testing" (Recode) 

  • All the Trumpite idiots are starting to battle each other for influence and grifting territory, and it's beautiful. The takeaway quote as far as I'm concerned is "QAnon is 'the easiest money that you could possibly make if you don’t have a conscience, but there’s only a certain number of people you can fleece. It’s not a renewable resource,' said [a researcher]." ($WaPo) 

  • I don't know why rogue planets unnerve me so much, let alone a group of 70 (or as many as 170) floating in a group out there. (ESO) 

  • The Scientists can learn a surprising amount about what lives at the bottom of the sea by dumping dead animals down there and seeing who shows up to eat 'em. (Hakai) 

  • A Cretaceous-era dinosaur embryo fossilized perfectly within its egg has been discovered. (U of Birmingham) 

  • Either all your hangover home remedies are bullshit, or nobody knows how to put together a hangover cure study. (Gizmodo) 

  • The James Webb telescope has successfully unfurled its sunshield, yet another example of NASA engineers proving their ability to execute insanely complex mechanical operations fully remotely without a hitch, which when you think about their track record (which includes two -- two!! -- landings on another planet involving a fucking rocket-powered hovering SKY CRANE) is pretty goddamn impressive. (Space dot com) 

  • For the first time, The Scientists have managed to successfully breed a captive population of eensy-weensy octopuses for research purposes. (MBL) 

  • Runoff from salting the roads during winter's not great for the environment, but it turns out cutting the brine with beet juice makes it work better while getting the salt concentration down. (Topeka Capital-Journal) 

  • Drones vs. wasps! Drones vs. wasps!! Drones vs. wasps!!!! (The Mainichi) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumSEXTERIOR, It's Solution Time(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because now I'm curious) 

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.