Friday, May 9, 2025

Welcome back to Wolmania. Today's issue features some tonal shifts but I encourage you to stick with it.

Item 1: a link

The San Francisco Standard directs our attention to a newly-surfaced historical resource shedding light on a pretty eventful period for the bay area:

In the early 1980s, a rubbish-picker sifting through an abandoned storage locker in the Bay Area stumbled upon something incredible: a plastic garbage bag filled with 2,042 processed 35mm color slides and 102 rolls of carefully labeled black-and-white film. The images — all 8,417 of them — captured a seminal moment in San Francisco counterculture, from 1966 through the 1967 Summer of Love to 1970. 

The photographer remains unknown, and most of the photos have gone unseen — until now.

It seems like we may never know the mystery photographer's identity, but I'll be following along as they work on developing the remaining 75 rolls of film and build a crowdsourced database of information about the whole collection's contents.

Item 2: a list

Chicago-Style Hot Dog Components, Ranked:

1. All-beef frankfurter
2. Poppy seed bun
3. Celery salt
4. Yellow mustard
5. Bright green relish
6. Chopped onions
7. Pickle spear
8. Sport peppers
9. Tomato wedges

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Consilience

We may search for solutions to life's difficulty in different ways – me, through the scientific method; you, by finding ways to rationalize the answers you want to be true – but I'm confident that we can find a satisfactory consilience to our approaches by feeding all of humanity's copyrighted works into an unknowable black box that has an accuracy rate barely better than a coin toss and letting it make all of our decisions for us. And no, we shouldn't compensate anyone who created the training corpus.

Item 5: a photograph

See ya!

Thanks for reading. See you next week.