Friday, November 25, 2022

Good morning. I hope those of you that celebrate Thanksgiving had a good one. And I hope those of you that don't celebrate Thanksgiving also had a good one. Here's some stuff for you:

Item 1: a link

The New York Times's Caity Weaver had a problem: a story she had been working on for weeks was scheduled to publish soon, but it looked like her main promotional outlet might be down for repairs, or irreparably #canceled by the woke mob, before the story went up. Fortunately, Caity is smart and came up with a plan - she would solicit emails from her Twitter followers and then when the story went up she would just email them back with the link, on their assurance that they would share the link with at least three people. Foolproof.

Unrelatedly, Caity Weaver has a story in the New York Times today about going insane in an anechoic chamber:

Much of the lore about the chamber’s propensity for mind-annihilation centers on the concept of blood sounds. It is an oft-reported experience, in anechoic chambers, for visitors to become aware of the sound of blood pumping in their heads, or sloshing through veins. Hearing the movement of blood through the body is supposedly something like an absolute taboo, akin to witnessing the fabrication of Chicken McNuggets — an ordeal after which placid existence is irreparably shattered.

Owing either to blood-sound insanity or cost, the record duration in the Orfield chamber was, until very recently, just two hours. I wanted to set a new world record for something, even if it was a world record that, for legal reasons, I could not describe as being in any way affiliated with or sanctioned by the famous Guinness inventory of world records — on which, more later. Even more than that, I wanted to hear the forbidden blood song. I emailed Orfield Labs to book a three-hour attempt and, a few days later, boarded a plane to Minnesota.

Item 2: a list

World Cup soccer teams, ranked:

1. USA
2. Denmark
3. South Korea
4. Croatia
5. Japan
6. Spain
7. The Netherlands
8. Costa Rica
9. Morocco
10. France
11. Uruguay
12. Ghana
13. Canada
14. Australia
15. Serbia
16. Germany
17. Cameroon
18. Ecuador
19. Iran
20. Wales
21. England
22. Senegal
23. Portugal
24. Mexico
25. Belgium
26. Argentina
27. Poland
28. Switzerland
29. Tunisia
30. Brazil
31. Qatar
32. Saudi Arabia

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Chary

Item 5: a photograph

See ya!

Thanks for reading. See you in December.