This is one of the most well-written obituaries of an incredible life ever published. Rick Rescorla was English by birth, fought in the Vietnam War for the U.S. Army in a pivotal early battle, and later became a writer and lawyer. He was the chief of security for Morgan Stanley at the World Trade Center on September 11, and died getting his personnel out of the building. Recommended reading: We Were Soldiers Once…And Young.
So there’s a International World Games of Lacrosse happening in 2020, and somehow the Iroquois Nation’s team, having qualified to play based on World Cup play held in 2018, were deemed ineligible to compete because they were not a sovereign nation. The Irish national team decided this was not fair and gave up their place in the tournament to allow the Iroquois to play.
Dammit. After 81 episodes and 16 years, The Venture Brothers has been cancelled by Adult Swim. I’ve spoken previously about my love for this show; Adult Swim is now saying they’re in talks to keep things going somehow.
The short version of the story is, I started writing Soul Coughing music again. I called up Soul Coughing and said, “Do you want to do this?” I got back a hot plate of crazy.
Huh. Mike Doughty has spent the last 20 years slagging Soul Coughing and is now releasing an album that was supposed to be the follow-up to Ruby Vroom, from 1994.
I know everybody thinks the music they loved when they were 18 changed the world, but it really did feel like something different was happening in those years.
I’ve mentioned many times before how much of a LEGO geek I was back in the day; this article on the UX of LEGO panels activates about seventeen different parts of my brain. I always had a collection of “special” parts that were key to any build with a minifig, and these were at the top of the list.
Interesting: most of the staff of the dearly departed Deadspin have started up their own new site, called Defector, coming in September. They’re doing a subscription plan, and for $69/yr. I’d consider it.
I wouldn’t trust the U.S. secretary of percussion to tell me how to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” if they had never sat behind a drum set, so why should any teacher trust Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to tell them how to teach, without her ever having sat at the head of a class? (Maybe she should switch to the drums.)
Dave Grohl writes in The Atlantic about how our nation’s teachers need a plan for for the fall semester, and they need it now.
I’ve never tried to link a Twitter thread here before, but let’s go: this is a bracket voting system for ranking America’s Worst Plutocratic Family. The Koch family already blew the Coors family out of the water, and right now it’s Trump vs. Walton. That’s a tough one: completely torpedoing the battered, uneven myth of America in a short 4 years or decades of eroding the social safety net, gutting small business, and selling cheap shit in search of profit. Do you take the global view or the local view?
Dries Buytaert did some sleuthing and found a way to remove YouTube tracking from embedded videos by using a simple addition to the embed URL. The result is that it’s GDPR compliant, and, as an added benefit, the page will load faster because it’s not sending a cookie off to Google. I used a WordPress plugin called Search Regex to find and replace all the YouTube links on Idiotking.org, and now they should all be cookie free.