you know I'm right about the songs

September 25, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that helped put together a couch from Ikea and then wondered why its body was achey the next day 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI know I say this every week, but the possibility that we may return to podcasting cannot be mathematically excluded! In the meantime, you can find the show's 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 podcastInstant Band Night 23: YOUThe last Instant Band Night of the year is in two months and you should be there! We'll create bands on the spot from people who've just met and they will astonish you — come play or just come watch! Every band needs an audience, and this one is maybe the best in the entire Bay. I don't know how it happened; it just did, and I'm not about to mess with it. Come see for yourself!Nov 9 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (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 YOUI've decided to experiment a little with the pricing in the shop, so if you haven't stopped by, or if you know someone with excellent taste who needs something that literally can't be bought anywhere else, maybe take a look right now and consider some clever ceramics! Brilliant little statues for your garden or home! A place to put your fruit! A little buddy to hold your garlic! I'm working (slowly) on even more delightful little weirdos and I hope to show you soon. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Okay. This article (Vox) says that if you take the entire world's population and focus on the richest 1% of them, that includes a huge number of people — anyone without kids who takes home $60k after taxes, for instance. Further, if you imagine that this global 1% gave away 10% of their income for a year, it would create a giant pool of money that could do incredible things. It's fun to imagine!But something about this rankles. Obviously it's just a thought experiment, but it feels like some plastic straw bullshit. Doesn't it? Why should this be on us?What I want to know is how many people are there on the planet who are truly fucking ultrawealthy — like say a net worth of over $100M? What would happen if you could put some kind of metaphorical gun to their head and take away almost everything they had, leaving them with maybe $10M apiece? What kind of pile would that create? It certainly won't be $3.5T, but I'm betting it's pretty far from nothing. What could we do with that? I'm just asking questions. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We survived five days of Solo Dad mostly due to the invaluable backup provided by my in-laws and our excellent friend Avery, who's been Auntie Avery to the kids for so long that Felix's toddler malapropism for her is "ATV." I hope they all feel sufficiently thanked, but I wanted to do it again in what amounts to public right here.My Mickey Mouse Funhouse problem solved itself handily, in that an episode with a minotaur freaked Quentin out so badly he's decided he doesn't want to watch that show ever again; somewhat mystifyingly, he said the reason he didn't like it was because it seemed to him like all the characters were about to battle. Meanwhile, one of his other favorite shows is nothing but battles. Sort of. Nobody's hitting each other in Spidey and His Amazing Friends,* but they're definitely throwing stuff at each other and slinging webs around willy-nilly. Did you know there's six new episodes on Disney+ now? We sure found out this weekend. Whatever keeps him away from Paw Patrol!My current parent "how much can you stand of this" ranking of all my kids' shows is thus: 

  • Bluey

  • Magic School Bus Rides Again / Ada Twist, Scientist (tie) (Ada Twist maybe gets a slight demerit because the songs are real earworms)

  • Octonauts

  • [imagine there's a gap here]

  • Spidey and His Amazing Friends

  • Daniel Tiger (only placed so relatively low because it's very clearly aimed at tiny children; the show is fine for what it is, which is an honestly invaluable resource for new parents)

  • [imagine a yawning chasm here]

  • Mickey Mouse Funhouse

I would give you a similar rating for the kids' movies, but there'd be no point, because there's only one item on the list, and it's My Neighbor Totoro. My Neighbor Totoro is the only movie that exists. To be clear, I'm absolutely fine with this. It's a fucking masterpiece. If you want to witness it, odds are good we'll be watching it for the 9th or 10th time Friday evening; just give me a call!* It still baffles me that there's no DC equivalent to this show. You can't gin up a Batman version of this thing, fellas? 

Fascination Corner

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

  • American Climate Corps. Okay!! (NPR) 

  • Hot damn, the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission was successful. NASA, you maniacs!! (The Verge) 

  • California's suing Big Oil for lying to us about climate change for decades. Fucking get their ass. (AP) No, really, it's been literal decades. (Greenpeace) 

  • The Scientists have come up with a sort of disease-detector-on-a-microchip technology that sounds incredibly promising. (Rutgers U) (Paper) 

  • The American public as a whole has a surprisingly accurate (bleak) view of our political system. (Pew Research) 

  • We've been hacking entire branches off the tree of life, The Scientists warn, and we need to quit it immediately. Just the title of the paper is an eye-opener of sorts: "Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera" (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • Ohhh shiiiiiiiiit: the Jimmy Dubs has spotted CO2 on the surface of Europa, which means it probably came from inside!(!!!!!!) (NASA) 

  • The Scientists have invented a method for turning mixed plastic waste into a variety of useful industrial chemicals. Let's gooooooooooo (Oak Ridge Natl Lab) (Paper) 

  • Molly White reminds us that flashy article headlines aside, 95% of NFTs have always been worthless. (Molly White on Substack) 

  • The Scientists are weighing an increasing body of evidence that suggests cephalopods used in research should have the same protections that mice and monkeys do. (Nature) 

  • Urban heat is a real thing we've known about for a while, but The Scientists are getting really insistent that we plant trees in city spaces ASAP to mitigate heat waves. Yeah!! (U of Surrey) (Paper) 

  • Relatedly: inspired by chameleons, The Scientists have demonstrated a color-changing coating that could be applied to buildings to save on heating and cooling costs. (ACS) 

  • Human dog bed? Human dog bed. Sounds nice, actually. (Daily Beast) 

  • The Scientists have assembled a chemical cookbook cataloging combinations of compounds that could theoretically give rise to life. (U of Wisconsin-Madison) (Paper) 

  • Gen Z falls for online scams way more than boomers, but that may just be down to volume of usage (not to mention poor app design). (Vox) 

  • We could get a lot of carbon sequestration done by planting specific plants in deserts, The Scientists say; the only catch is the right combination of plants, dirt, and soil microbes doesn't exist there and would need to be engineered. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • Just FYI: whole milk yogurt turns out to be really good at eliminating garlic odor. (Ohio State) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have recovered RNA from an extinct species for the first time, in this case the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger. (Stockholm U) (Paper) 

  • Count all the cells in the human body and then group them by type. Then forget about that and just group them by size. Weirdly, the groups kinda line up?? Fascinating! (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • At what age are we our happiest? Sure isn't between 9-16, according to this meta-analysis. (Ruhr University Bochum) 

  • The Scientists have invented a new compound that appears to prevent bone loss in space, at least in mice. (UCLA) (Paper) 

  • Where in the body do we feel different types of love? Results of a self-reported study probably won't be surprising. (Aalto U) (Paper) 

  • What in the motherfuck: tiny box jellyfish the size of a fingernail without a central brain to speak of still seem to be capable of learning. (Nature) 

  • Dark photons???? (U of Adelaide) (Paper) 

  • Bake Off is back at the end of the month and this bingo card is pretty good. (Bon Appetit) 

  • Where does our agency come from? The Scientists designed an experiment decades ago involving a baby and a mobile that turns out to answer this question handily. (Florida Atlantic U) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have figured out how to mess around with the genes of different individual cells in a living organism, which will be a huge game changer for lab experiments. (ETH Zurich) (Paper) 

  • If you think that's somethin', The Scientists are also working on creating synthetic organisms whose DNA codes for amino acids that ours doesn't. Yeah, I know. (proto.life) 

  • Hospitals are always worried about patients catching C.diff infections, but a recent study seems to show that the C.diff might actually be coming from inside the house, where "the house" is "the patient's own body." (U of Michigan) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have managed to genetically modify silkworms (in a hugely labor-intensive-sounding process) to spin spider silk. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper) 

A Fictional Thing

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

Photo by Alex Shuper on Unsplash(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:

Photo by Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa on UnsplashNo reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think was an experimental folk album in the sense that its sound was soothing but the lyrics were the absolute most brutal words ever put together by the hand of a human. 

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.