Bloomberg does a retrospective of ten different metrics that show while Biden’s popularity is low, he’s actually done very well for the U.S. since he’s been in office.
I’ve always been a fan of the styling of the 1959 Buick Skylark Electra; It’s a rare example of how diagonally staggered headlights can actually look great. The way the headlight eyebrow is molded into the side of the car, flowing back to the side of the car below the wing, is a high point of late ’50’s design before things got square and boxy as a response. I saw an absolutely gorgeous example at Jalopyrama back in 2016 and fell in love with it in person. So this example on Curbside Classic checks all the boxes: sitting on a comfortable (but not egregious) lift, BFG All-Terrains, with a tough-looking roof rack holding a spare tire and other equipment.
Ha ha this McSweeney’s piece pretty much sums up why I’ve checked out of the craft beer thing (I bought a 12-pack of Pacifico this very afternoon, as a matter of fact) in a nutshell.
Hmm, this looks interesting. A self-described fan of The Three Body Problem novel series gives it a glowing review after seeing the screeners. It’s written and produced by the guys who fumbled the ball at the goal line with Game of Thrones, but hopefully (because the source material has all been written) this will be better. I’ll put this on the watch list, even though I rarely watch series TV these days.
Somehow I missed this when it first came around. Stereogum interviewed the band Air and went through each track on the 1998 album Moon Safari to explain their influences and background.
As someone who has a collection of tube radios, I found this article interesting for a number of reasons. The author has a huge collection of tube amplifiers, and was looking for a way to resurrect them. He bought a device called a variac, which is basically just a power transformer with adjustable input. In the article he explains how he used a variac to slowly bring the capacitors inside old tube amps back to life by slowly increasing the voltage applied; this sounds like another interesting project.
I stumbled across an article about antique refrigerators the other day and followed a link to a parts vendor I wasn’t aware of. Looking through their storefront I didn’t see mention of my fridge but figured I’d email to see if they carried the gasket I need for the IH; within a half an hour a nice lady wrote me back with a link to exactly the gasket I need. I’ve got to get out to the garage to measure how much I’ll need, but I know where I’m going when I’m ready to replace it.
I read the other day that Bluesky, the Twitter competitor started by the founders of Twitter, came out of invite-only beta this week, so I signed up to park my name. I’ll probably never post there, and will never install the app on my phone. I never signed up for Mastodon, mostly because I never saw the point of belonging to a federated version of a service I never paid attention to anyway. Why have I done this, when I avoided ever being on Twitter? Hard to say.
The GAP used to be a central hub of the mall, back when the mall was the central hub of teenage life. A former GAP employee has been collecting the centrally-curated music playlists from two decades ago and building them in Spotify for everyone to enjoy. (via, via)
Another chapter in this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things: Fruit Stripe Gum is being discontinued. I spent many, many hours in the back seat of various large American station wagons on the way to or from my grandparents’ houses, and usually Mom or Dad would hand my sister and I a fresh pack of Fruit Stripe gum for the ride. Because it was what it was, the flavor only lasted until the end of the driveway, but damn that stuff tasted good.