Flying balls! twitching curtains! and 2000s trance.
29th April 2024
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Hello!
This week, I made a thing: I rebuilt my web site! Lower your expectations: it contains absolutely nothing new for the reader and looks almost identical to how it did before. But it does load slightly faster, and no longer has the layers and layers of old spaghetti-code CSS cruft that built up over time. I'll be honest, it feels a bit like the virtual equivalent of grouting the bathroom tiles.
This week, I made a thing: I rebuilt my web site! Lower your expectations: it contains absolutely nothing new for the reader and looks almost identical to how it did before. But it does load slightly faster, and no longer has the layers and layers of old spaghetti-code CSS cruft that built up over time. I'll be honest, it feels a bit like the virtual equivalent of grouting the bathroom tiles.
Over on Lateral this week! Simon Clark, Alec Steele and Rowan Ellis face questions about creative calibration, Canadian cities and crafty cataloguing. (Producer David's done
well to make all of those alliterate this week.)
Plus, an update on a previous Lateral question! When the San Francisco Giants play baseball in their waterfront stadium, home run balls can end up sailing into in the ocean for a "splash hit", where people in boats will race to scoop them out. Well, this week, for the very first time,
a home run landed directly in a kayak and CBC News has the footage, along with an interview with one of the less lucky ball-hunters who were there that day.
Aside from that, what
good stuff have I found on YouTube? It's a mix of very very different emotions this week:
- Ruth Aisling investigates why Olympic curling stones cost so much. Quite a few places have covered this
story before — but as far as I know, no-one has actually traveled with the granite harvesters to the one single remote Scottish island where it comes from, on their first trip there since 2013! Over weeks, Ruth gets to see the preparation, the harvest, the big slicing and cutting, the shaping, and finally some stones actually in use. There's a huge amount of effort gone into this, and Ruth tells a great story. (Thanks to John for sending this over.)
- My little piece of privacy is a maker project from 2010, and I'm linking to it for two reasons. First, because it's a really fun project and I smiled watching it! And second, because it shows just how much YouTube maker-culture, has changed in those
years. In 2024, this would be a half-hour piece with a build montage, details of the components used, shots of failures along the way, and constant narration. Maybe there'd be some cutaway jokes. And I get why that's the style now! But this is from 2010, so it has three minutes of entertainment and a link to a project write-up. I'm not saying either option is objectively better, but I do appreciate this much more efficient style.
- Anthony Vella's paramotor crash almost ended his life. (Extremely justified strong language.) This is not clickbait, and the content warnings at the start are no joke. I found this distressing to watch. The video length is also not padding: the desperate waits for the 911 call to be
answered and transferred, and for first responders to arrive, cause more emotional affect than any dramatisation could.
Other interesting links I've found this week, around the rest of the web:
- US pizza chain Domino's used to
have a guarantee: they'd deliver your pizza in 30 minutes, or it was free. The resulting car crashes and lawsuits meant the guarantee didn't last long.
- There's a particular font that
anyone in Britain older than 30 will know: it's used on mid-20th-century municipal buildings and in old BBC broadcasts, and is a shorthand for 'the seventies'. It's called "Festive", and this is a dive into its history.
- A photographer, with an enormous amount of effort, managed to take a picture of a bird flying in front of the solar eclipse.
And
finally: when Queen Margarethe II abdicated at the start of the year, Danish national broadcaster DR1 threw her a big 'thank you' party. I'd like to think she enjoyed Safri Duo performing their 2000 trance hit Played-A-Live (The Bongo Song) with the Danish military drum corps.
All the best,
— Tom
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