Nine Inch Nails Releases Tron: Ares Remix Album
Last week, Nine Inch Nails released an album of remixes and unreleased session music from their Tron: Ares score called Tron Ares: Divergence. I’m listening to it now; pretty good so far.
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Lumière, Le Cinema!
Lumière, Le Cinema! is a new documentary film by Thierry Frémaux about Auguste & Louis Lumière and the early days of motion pictures — and includes 100+ newly restored films. It’s playing at MoMA at the end of this month; here’s their description:
Witness the birth of cinema with Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière, Le Cinéma! (2025), about the pioneering achievements of the French entrepreneurs Auguste and Louis Lumière in the late 19th century. Journey back to the 1890s, when the Lumière Company, with their astonishing new invention, the cinematograph, made it possible for audiences to voyage around the world in moving pictures for the first time. Featuring gorgeous new restorations of more than 100 comedies, dramas, and travelogues — some famous, some forgotten, and some never before seen — and set to an evocative score of period music by Gabriel Fauré, this wondrous documentary enables contemporary viewers to imagine an entirely new language of storytelling unfolding film by glorious film.
Just watching the trailer is wild — the restored footage from short films that are 120, 130 years old is astonishing. From a review in Collider:
From riding atop trains to showing off goofy vaudevillian acts or brief moments of comical violence, each clip speaks not only to what came before, but how these short pieces behave as the DNA for every genre, every facet of what we consider filmmaking to this very day. The biggest joy of all, of course, is the ability to see these films projected large and in all their restored glory, not simply segregated to being streamed on a small screen, or to suffer through damage that makes these segments feel all that more removed from the present. It’s as if many of these clips have been rescued from an island where they have been deserted for more than a century, carefully dusted off, and allowed finally to be seen in a context that their creators could only have dreamed possible.
The Candy Factory
Ann Ballentine bought an old candy factory building in Brooklyn in 1979. She filled it with working artists and became something of a fairy godmother to them all.
It entails someone who’s not as money driven, because you’re not gouging people for huge rents, and it requires being determined to do that over a long stretch of time.
This is a lovely little short film.
Elizebeth Smith Friedman: The Codebreaker
The details of Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s remarkable career sound a bit outlandish when you list them all together:
cracked thousands of codes and ciphers during WWI
did the same in WWII, helping to foil Nazi spy rings and protect Allied supply ships
chief cryptanalyst for the US Navy and the US Coast Guard
co-developed, with her husband, many of the principles of modern cryptology
broke mobster codes used by rumrunners bringing illegal alcohol into the US during Prohibition
testified in court against Al Capone
debunked the claim that Francis Bacon had secretly written Shakespeare’s plays
J. Edgar Hoover took credit for her “uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943”, knowing that her wartime work was classified and she couldn’t correct him
From an NSA press release in 2020:
She began solving these encrypted messages and providing the Coast Guard with vital intelligence that supported their efforts to interdict smuggling. She also trained a small team in cryptanalysis to expand the crime-fighting intelligence effort. Elizebeth and her assistant solved about 12,000 coded messages between the so-called rum runners and smugglers, which resulted in 650 criminal prosecutions. In addition to criminals violating the Prohibition laws, some of the messages Ms. Friedman solved also enabled the arrest and conviction of a number of narcotics smugglers.
She had a personal role in some of the prosecutions. She testified as an expert witness in 33 cases, and frequently became the subject of newspaper and magazine articles. For a time, she was one of the most famous women in the country.
From a 2022 piece in the US Naval Institute’s Naval History magazine:
The Zimmermann Telegram, sent in code, changed the trajectory of life for the Friedmans, who possessed skills suddenly extremely valuable to the U.S. government. The military was desperate for codebreakers, and radio and wireless technology was changing the nature of war. There were possibly three or four persons in the whole of the United States who could break codes, and Elizebeth and William were two of them. Elizebeth was the first to decode military messages intercepted from the Mexican Army, working by counting the frequency of letters.
The Friedmans began operating as a team, developing strategies as they went along. For the first eight months of the war, they and their small team conducted all codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government, developing broader methodologies still in use today. Neither was particularly good at mathematics, but they operated on an intuitive level to devise techniques to discern patterns. Most importantly, their methods were scientific, which is to say the results could be replicated.3 The Friedmans worked feverishly to solve messages as they poured in. They decrypted messages from Scotland Yard revealing an intricate separatist plot by Hindu activists living in New York to ship weapons to India with German help. William was summoned to testify about how he broke the codes, but before he could take the stand, an Indian man in the gallery shot one of the defendants.
While testifying against Al Capone’s liquor smuggling ring in New Orleans, Mrs. Friedman taught a lesson on the science of codebreaking and the use of mono-alphabetic ciphers right in the courtroom. Col. Amos Woodcock, director of the Bureau of Prohibition said that without the work of the cryptanalysis unit and the expert testimony of Mrs. Friedman, the case would not have been won.
Time magazine: How America’s ‘First Female Cryptanalyst’ Cracked the Code of Nazi Spies in World War II — and Never Lived to See the Credit:
But her biggest achievement was uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943 — a feat that J. Edgar Hoover took full credit for on behalf of the FBI. Friedman, meanwhile, took her involvement to the grave.
From the National Women’s History Museum:
Smith met William Friedman, a geneticist at the estate. After spending time together, Smith brought William onto her team to help break the Shakespearean codes. They worked together to show there was no evidence that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, while growing closer professionally and romantically. The couple married in Chicago in May 1917, just after the United States entered World War I. Now using her married name, Smith Friedman worked with her husband at Riverbank to decrypt every single secret message sent to them by the Navy. Trailblazing her way through the field as an expert and teacher, Smith Friedman successfully trained the first generation of codebreakers for the military.
In 2017, Jason Fagone published a bestselling biography about Friedman, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies (AMZN). That book was the basis for an hour-long PBS/American Experience documentary called The Codebreaker, which is available for rent at Amazon or as a free bootleg on Dailymotion. Here’s the trailer:
Physics Is a Conversation
Physicist Sean Carroll leads off this video with this line:
I like to say that Einstein is, if anything, underrated as a physicist, which is hard to imagine given how highly he is rated.
And then leads us through a history of modern physics and quantum mechanics that, Einstein and Newton aside, is much more collaborative than you often hear about.
This idea that there are many people contributing and many different parts of the pieces need to put together is actually much more characteristic of how physics is usually done than the single person inventing everything all by themselves.
20 Minutes of Excellent Skateboarding Clips
What’s fun about school closing for the wicked blizzard in the Northeast today is last week was February break for Massachusetts schools, which means many kids are home for the the 6th school day in a row, and many will be home for closures tomorrow and beyond. All this to say, it reminded me a lot of the first couple weeks of school closures in March 2020, when I edutained my kids with Youtube videos about BMX, how to make biscuits, early 90s live punk hardcore shows, and skateboarding clips. And THAT reminded me it’s been a minute since I posted a skateboarding video here.
Here’s a 20 minute clip with something for everyone. There’s kick flips, front flips, backflips, flips off bikes, multiple visually impaired skaters and skaters without legs. There’s also lots of kids, stairs, pools, ramps, massive air, ballet, rollerskating on broken skateboards, incredible creativity, and no falls.
Cover of Such Great Heights by Chvrches
For a show on Hulu called Tell Me Lies, synth-pop band Chvrches covered Such Great Heights by The Postal Service. Lovely.
The Trailer for Season Five of For All Mankind
Just dropped this morning: the trailer for the final season of For All Mankind. When season four’s teaser trailer came out, I caught some flack for suggesting that “if you tilt your head and squint…you see For All Mankind as a prequel/origin story for The Expanse”. It looks like we’re heading even more in that direction in season five, which begins airing March 27.
The United States of Beauty
During her time aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara took a series of photos of the Earth from directly overhead. Seán Doran has stitched those images together into a gorgeous 4K video of a journey across North America, from San Diego to cloud-covered Quebec.
The footage is a simulation, converting an image sequence into video footage using image processing and animation. In reality this journey from California to Quebec took 11 minutes to traverse. In order to better appreciate the view this film slows that speed by a factor of 4.
Along the way, we’re treated to views of Joshua Tree National Park, the Grand Canyon, and the Rocky Mountains. Even the clouds are mesmerizing.
Butter Tea
In this lovely short film, the traditional Tibetan drink butter tea (bho jha) becomes a bridge between generations, outreach across cultures, and a reminder of the value of mindfulness.
From Clarissa Wei at Eater, more about butter tea and its place in Tibetan culture:
I stayed with Goulongzhu and her family in Tibet for four days in June, and every morning, without pause, she’d serve me a creamy bowl of yak butter tea for breakfast. In the early hours, she’d make a batch of crude black pu’erh tea — a fermented dark tea from China — brewed along with a great deal of salt. Then, a fat serving of yak butter would go into a bowl along with toasted barley powder and milk curds, and she’d pour the tea in until the liquid nearly reached the rim. I’d mix it all together with my chopsticks and sip. It was creamy and substantial — overflowing with healthy fats. The highland barley gave it a nutty finish, and in those four days, yak butter tea was something I looked forward to immensely in the mornings.
The Greek Mythology Family Tree, Explained
Do you know your Gaia from your Cronus from your Zeus? In fewer than 15 minutes, this video provides a comprehensive overview of all the important Greek & Roman gods, goddesses, nymphs, heroes, monsters, demigods, and other assorted spiritual beings, who begat who, and what all of their domains were. (via open culture)
Loop
Loop is an award-winning animated short featuring a society where people live a perfectly looping existence, all in rhythm. Then one day…
Watch How Ancient Egyptians Carved Hieroglyphs
In a video for the V&A Museum, stone carver Miriam Johnson hand-carves a pair of hieroglyphs “using both sunken relief and raised relief techniques”.
The video has minimal narration; mostly it’s just a master craftsperson quietly tapping away at the stone — and getting bits of rock all over the sleeve of her jumper. The effect is pretty relaxing, especially with the more rhythmic tapping for the second carving. (via the kid should see this)
How Finland Defeated Fascism in the 1930s
In the 1930s, a radical conservative political group almost succeeded in overthrowing Finland’s democracy:
Called the Lapua movement, it was a far-right group of Finns who sought to overthrow the republic, marginalize communists, and install an authoritarian government. They managed to disrupt Finland’s political order through threats of violence and symbolic kidnappings, in which they would capture political rivals and drive them to the Soviet border.
They earned the support of center-right and moderate politicians who believed they could harness the passion and support of this radical nationalist group. The movement also included prominent businessmen, newspaper owners, and key members of the military.
But after a few years, the country was able to right the ship:
Almost overnight, the Lapua movement collapsed. Within three years of its founding, this far-right faction was banned from Finnish politics, and democracy in Finland has been stable ever since.
You can read more about the Lapua movement and how it was defeated in this article about democracy’s “near misses”.
In November 1929, red-shirted communist youth paraded in the small Finnish village of Lapua, located in the country’s religious and conservative southern Ostrobothnian region. An angry mob of local farmers attacked the parade, stripped the participants of their shirts, and began beating the unlucky leftists. That seemingly isolated and chance incident sparked a “a series of events which proved almost fatal to parliamentary government in Finland.”
A Sense of Getting Closer
With music by Max Cooper and visuals by Conner Griffith, A Sense of Getting Closer is a music video that was inspired by a quote submitted to Cooper’s On Being project:
I have a sense of getting closer to something which my life depends on. I can sense it but I cannot tell if I should be excited or terrified about what will happen.
Mesmerizing. Like literally, given that it’s based on “a hypnotic light show we can’t look away from, yet we know is made up of low-quality content fed to us by engagement algorithms.” (via @aaroncoleman.bsky.social)
The K-Shaped Economy
I think I’d heard the term “k-shaped economy” somewhere before but didn’t really know what it meant until I watched this video:
American Airlines is changing the layout of some of their aircraft to add 31 first class and premium seats while cutting out 73 economy seats. This is the hot new trend in air travel: pulling out all the stops to cater to the wealthy.
Airlines are adding suites with more bed space, privacy doors, an extra ottoman for guests. They’re offering caviar, free PJs, luxury skin care products, and multi-course meals with wine pairings made by gourmet chefs. They’re also building more airport lounges. Meanwhile, economy is getting more cramped and low-cost carriers are going bankrupt. It’s because wealthy passengers are where the money’s at.
For years, airlines have made more money from their credit cards than from actually flying passengers around. And these days, premium seating is bringing in more revenue than the economy cabin. It’s a perfect example of the K-shaped economy.
Here’s an AP article about the K-shaped economy from late last year.
Corporate executives are paying attention and in some cases explicitly adjusting their businesses to account for it. They are seeking ways to sell more high-priced items to the wealthy while also reducing package sizes and taking other steps to target struggling consumers.
A Brief History of Japanese Art
I know I probably say this every time I post videos like this, but I wish I’d gotten into art & art history earlier than I did. Channels like Behind the Masterpiece are so good at making this stuff come alive and their Brief History of Japanese Art scratches my recent interest in Japan itch quite nicely. I was lucky to see some of the pieces from the video on my Japan trip last fall, including the Big Buddha in Kamakura, hand scrolls, sumi-e, and so many woodblock prints. (via open culture)
Building a Lego-Powered Submarine
As you know, I love me some Lego engineering builds. This one is pretty fun: using a large syringe, a Raspberry Pi, neodymium magnets, a controller scavenged from a toy submarine, and a bunch of Lego pieces, Brick Experiment Channel built a remote-controlled submarine. And it works so well! They even tested it by navigating 200 meters in a real stream.
The Track
The Track is a documentary film about a group of athletes training in post-war Bosnia to make the Olympics in luge.
The Track is a coming-of-age journey of three friends chasing their improbable Olympic dreams in post-war Bosnia. Training on a crumbling track left behind from the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, the boys are guided by their devoted coach Senad, whose fight to rebuild the neglected track mirrors his determination to create a future for his athletes in a country facing one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe.
Filmed over five transformative years, The Track captures an intimate and deeply human coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of a nation still recovering from the scars of war, political corruption, and rising nationalism. As the boys balance Olympic ambition with the pull of street life, heartbreak, and survival, their paths begin to diverge, revealing the stark realities young people face in modern Bosnia.
You can check the website for online and IRL showings; it’s on Amazon Prime in the US.
Recently Discovered: an NYC Underground Railroad Stop
The Merchant’s House Museum was NYC’s first landmarked building, but until this year, the function of a small hidden passageway in the house was unknown. When historians and preservationists examined it in detail, they found that it was built by the first owner of the house, abolitionist Joseph Brewster, as a hiding place for enslaved people escaping from the South.
But when visitors head upstairs to the bedrooms on the second floor, there’s something strategically hidden within the walls of Manhattan’s first landmarked building: a link to the Underground Railroad.
“We knew it was here, but didn’t really know what we were looking at,” Camille Czerkowicz, the curator for the Merchant’s House Museum, said.
Now they know that the Merchant’s House was also a “safe house” for enslaved Africans who escaped bondage in the South.
Architects and preservationists recently investigated the building’s hidden vertical passageway along the west wall and examined it for themselves.
“I’ve been practicing historical preservation law for 30 years, and this is a generational find. This is the most significant find in historic preservation in my career, and it’s very important that we preserve this,” Michael Hiller, a preservation attorney and professor at Pratt Institute, said.
Underneath those built-in drawers is the path to freedom.
Zoning Out Is Good For You
Sleeping cleans your brain. Research suggests that zoning out, daydreaming, and being bored can perform a similar function without the need for deep sleep. So put down that phone occasionally and let your brain chill for a bit.
Keep the Meter Running With Mouhamadou Aliy & Zohran Mamdani
In addition to his great series Subway Takes, Kareem Rahma does another series called Keep the Meter Running where he hops into NYC cabs, interviews the drivers, and asks them to take him to their favorite places.
In the run-up to the NYC mayoral election last year, Rahma jumped into a cab driven by Mouhamadou Aliy, who wanted to pick up his friend along the way to his favorite spot. That friend was now-mayor Zohran Mamdani, who tells the story of how the two of them protested & went on a hunger strike together. It’s a great conversation and video…I watched a snippet of it on Instagram (I missed it last year) and had to track down the whole thing:
I’m sorry, how can you not vote for this guy? The real deal, indeed — and voters could tell. There are so many politicians, particularly on the left, who talk a good game, push all the right buttons, and then they sputter or freeze or about-face when the rubber meets the road. It feels hollow; no wonder voters and activists find it hard to get behind the calculation of politicians who they know, deep down, are just saying certain things to get a vote. At least with Republicans, they tell you they’re going to run the country into the ground and then they go out and try to do it.
The Strangers’ Case
I don’t normally say this, but if you watch one thing on kottke.org today, this week, this month, make it this speech written by Shakespeare and performed by Sir Ian McKellen on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The segment starts at ~20:00; McKellen sets it up:
It’s all happening 400 years ago. In London, there’s a riot happening. There’s a mob out in the streets and they’re complaining about the the presence of strangers in London, by which they mean the recent immigrants who’ve arrived there. And they’re shouting the odds and complaining and saying that the immigrants should be sent back home wherever they came from. And the authorities send out this young lawyer, Thomas Moore, to put down the riot, which he does in two ways. One by saying that you can’t riot like this. It’s against the law. So, shut up, be quiet. And also, being by Shakespeare, with an appeal to their humanity.
The riot took place on May 1, 1517 and is referred to as Evil May Day:
According to the chronicler Edward Hall (c. 1498–1547), a fortnight before the riot an inflammatory xenophobic speech was made on Easter Tuesday by a preacher known as “Dr Bell” at St. Paul’s Cross at the instigation of John Lincoln, a broker. Bell accused immigrants of stealing jobs from English workers and of “eat[ing] the bread from poor fatherless children”.
The same as it ever was. The text of the play, Sir Thomas More, is available at Project Gutenberg; here are the bits that McKellan performed, after the crowd calls for the removal of the strangers (some translation help, if you need it):
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip him like a hound. Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
And of course, McKellen performs this wonderfully — he originated the role and has been performing it since the 1960s. Again…I urge you to watch it.
Michelangelo’s First Painting, Made at Age 12
The Torment of Saint Anthony is the earliest surviving work attributed to Michelangelo, painted by him in 1487 or 1488 when he was 12 or 13 years old. This is an intense painting, the kind of thing that would have resulted in Michelangelo’s parents visiting the principal’s office had the young man painted this in a contemporary 7th grade art class.
Until 2009, it was believed the painting was a copy of a documented Michelangelo original, but a restoration and x-ray & infrared scans of the work showed evidence that the painting was done by the future master.
Michelangelo’s work was based on Martin Schongauer’s engraving Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons. This video provides a great overview of the history of the painting:
(via colossal)
Claude’s Constitution
A couple of weeks ago, AI company Anthropic published the constitution that they use to train their Claude LLM (“under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Deed, meaning it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without asking for permission”). From the company’s news release:
We’re publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It’s a detailed description of Anthropic’s vision for Claude’s values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.
The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude’s outputs might not always adhere to the constitution’s ideals. But we think that the way the new constitution is written — with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them — makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training.
The full document is 80+ pages, but the news release does a decent job in summarizing what’s in it.
Claude’s constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written primarily for Claude. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.
We treat the constitution as the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave — that is, any other training or instruction given to Claude should be consistent with both its letter and its underlying spirit. This makes publishing the constitution particularly important from a transparency perspective: it lets people understand which of Claude’s behaviors are intended versus unintended, to make informed choices, and to provide useful feedback. We think transparency of this kind will become ever more important as AIs start to exert more influence in society.
Casey Newton and Kevin Roose recently interviewed the primary author of the constitution, philosopher Amanda Askell, for the Hard Fork podcast (the segment starts at ~25min).
Newton says the document reads like “a letter from a parent to a child maybe who’s leaving for college”:
And it’s like, we hope that you take with you the values that you grew up with. And we know we’re not going to be there to help you through every little thing, but we trust you. And good luck.
Both the constitution and the conversation with Askell are fascinating, no matter where you lie on the AI debate continuum. You might also be interested in this video of Askell answering questions from Claude users about her work:
Killing In The Name, The Minnesota Edition
Late last week, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello led a crowd gathered at the iconic First Avenue music venue in a spirited rendition of the band’s Killing In the Name. The band handled the music while the crowd, in the absence of Rage frontman Zack De La Rocha, sang the lyrics.
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
How many ICE/BPD/DHS officers marched in Charlottesville, assaulted Congress on Jan 6, and/or are Proud Boy/Stormfront members, I wonder? (They’re the same picture.)
Morello spoke briefly before the performance:
Brothers and sisters, thank you for welcoming us to the Battle of Minneapolis. My friends, if it looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, acts like fascism, dresses like fascism, talks like fascism, kills like fascism and lies like fascism, brothers and sisters, it’s fucking fascism. It’s here, it’s now, it’s in my city, it’s in your city and it must be resisted, protested, defended against, stood up to, exposed, ousted, overthrown and driven out. By who? By you. By me.
Minneapolis is an inspiration to the entire nation. You have heroically stood up against ICE, stood up against Trump, stood up against this terrible rising tide of state terror. You’ve stood up for your neighbors and for yourselves and for democracy and for justice. Ain’t nobody coming to save us, except us. And brothers and sisters, you are showing the way.
To that end, we would like to begin our program with an old Native American war chant. We encourage you to singalong, in this very room Prince created a revolution, now it’s our turn.
Here’s the official video for Killing In The Name:
PS. Bruce Springsteen was there as well and performed his song Streets of Minneapolis.
Seu Jorge’s Lovely Tribute to David Bowie
For his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson enlisted Brazilian musical artist Seu Jorge to perform several of David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese. Jorge released an album of the songs about a year or so later.
A few weeks ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death, Jorge released a hour-long set of him performing those songs:
Just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and the beautiful coastline of São Paulo.
Volleyball Player Does Sliding Dogeza Apology
During an exhibition, Japanese volleyball player Yuji Nishida hit a courtside judge in the back with an errant serve. He immediately sprinted across the court and dove prostrate in apology. The gesture was a sort of sliding dogeza:
Even in a country where a sincere apology can go a long way, Nishida’s mea culpa was an extreme example. The most extravagant form in Japanese culture is the dogeza, which can also be used to express deep respect.
When used as an apology, the person in the wrong prostrates themselves and bows so that their forehead touches the floor between their hands. While the dogeza is rarely seen in public, scandal-hit politicians have used equally theatrical gestures to communicate their remorse.
Nishida followed up his slide with several more bows.
David Lynch Went to the First Beatles Concert in the US (1964)
In one of his final on-camera interviews, David Lynch recounts going to the very first Beatles concert in the US in 1964.
I ended up going to this concert. I didn’t really have any idea that it was the first concert. I didn’t have any idea how big this event was. And it was in a gigantic place where they had boxing matches. The Beatles were in the boxing ring. It was so loud, you can’t believe. Girls shuddering… crying… screaming their heart out. It was phenomenal.
Lynch continued:
Music is one of the most fantastic things. Almost like fire, water, and air. It’s like a thing. It does so much.
The interview was for the documentary Beatles ‘64, which is available on Disney+. Here’s how it came about:
“David had the idea to interview not just people who like the Beatles, because we’d be still making this movie forever. But it was people who’s who had some kind of pivotal, profound reaction or moment when the Beatles first came to the U.S., or when they first heard or saw the Beatles,” Bodde explained. “We had done extensive research on people who had that level of connection and we learned that David Lynch was living in Alexandria, Virginia, with his family. His father was in the Department of Forestry and they moved around a lot, [but at that time] they lived in Alexandria. He had met JFK. Had been at the inauguration of JFK as an Eagle Scout. And then had gotten a ticket to the to the Beatles concert, the first US concert at the Washington Coliseum. We were kind of amazed that he had multiple connections to the story that was being told.”
(thx, david)
Watch Classic Episodes of Sesame Street for Free on YouTube
Sesame Street has uploaded a bunch of classic episodes to YouTube that are free to watch, including the very first episode from 1969, the one where Mister Rogers visits, and the episode where Mr. Snuffulupagus is finally revealed. The most recent one was uploaded just a couple of days ago, so it appears to be an ongoing effort. (via open culture)
P.S. From Four Things About Mr. Snuffleupagus:
Snuffy was finally introduced to the main human cast mainly due to a string of high profile and sometimes graphic stories of pedophilia and sexual abuse of children that had been aired on shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20. The writers felt that by having the adults refuse to believe Big Bird despite the fact that he was telling the truth, they were scaring children into thinking that their parents would not believe them if they had been sexually abused and that they would just be better off remaining silent.
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