i loved that waiter—jean luc!

Enjoying a quite delightful concluding post-script to a podcast miniseries on I, CLAVDIVS recently, there was an interesting panel discussion about what artefact of culture one might be willing to impose on others to reveal either a shared-experience or a telling shibboleth that landed on the idea of swapping familiarity with television commercials. The below Pure Moods really struck a chord, as did memories of another vintage ad for Stovetop Stuffing suggested independently by another fine show and could probably merit a podcast on its own. What are some of your strongest advertising reminiscences? Re-watching have you found that you misremembered them?

a book by its cover

Appreciating the inherent, joyful weirdness that can adorn paperback novels—especially the of the science fiction and fantasy genre—the Seattle Public Library system has challenged readers to stage recreations of their favourites (see also) using items that they can find around the house. Check out the full thread and get inspired to stage your own.

maulwurf

After more than a year of inactivity due to the unexpected impacted character of the soil where it landed and deployed, NASA and DLR (previously) can report that one of the instruments included on the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) payload on the lander InSight is slowly, carefully making progress, burrowing below the surface.
Nicknamed “the mole,” the probe has the technical designation of a mobile penetrometer, a sort of self-hammering nail—will dig to a depth of up to five metres and generate (albeit miniscule, truly a mountain out of a mole hill) seismic activity that can be used to determine the composition of the core and study heat flows from the planet’s centre through the substrate and to the surface.

blursday afternoon is never ending

Through the lens of Australian English, Jason Kottke directs towards an intriguing overview of portmanteaux and slang are accelerated by the powerful drivers of novelty paired with angst and anxiety.
A few neologisms that we found especially resonant were coronials, an alternative to Generation C and predicted baby boom resulting from confinement, “Blursday” originally applied to a hangover that one couldn’t shake but repurposed to describe the untethered sense of days passing into one another, sanny for hand-sanitiser, COVIDiot and so on. There’s some gallows humour but of course new coinage is a form of commiseration and a way of coping and finding hope.

and we can dress real neat from our heads to our feet

Reaching its apex on this day in the Canadian Singles Survey (these charts give me great joy) in 1983, Men Without Hats’ hit The Safety Dance was inspired after band leader Ivan Doroschuk was tossed out of a night club by bouncers for pogoing on the dance floor during the transition from the slow death of disco to new wave in the early 1980s, despite the efforts of some to read more meaning into the song, interpreting it as an appeal to practise safe sex or protest nuclear armament though those are noble take-aways. The music video, directed by Tim Pope was filmed in the village of West Kington in Wiltshire, features several superannuated styles of dancing including mummers and maying.