Porcupines might make your paella cost mucho dinero
10 sundry Sunday notes
Happy Easter weekend to anyone celebrating it. And this year, it’s also a double whammy — as all major branches of Christianity celebrate it together. Here are some things I found worth sharing with all of you today.
I always thought that the method for determining the date of Easter was obscure but pretty simple. Something like “oh just add 40 days to Shrove and call it a day”. Apparently, I could not have been more wrong, and even brilliant mathematicians like Gauss worked on perfecting the computus paschalis. And for those asking, why can’t they just fix the date… the answer appears to be that the Catholic church kind of blessed (apologise for the pun) this idea in 1963 but no one has really acted on it.
I love professional jargon, as it oftentimes shows a less professional side of certain professions. For example, did you know that pushy passengers who bug airline staff by breaking boarding group protocol are called “gate lice” in the industry? Or that passengers as a whole are sometimes described as “self-loading cargo“? While this gargantuan list of aviation terms compiled by Simon Calder for the Independent explains a lot of rather serious terms (like cabotage and load factor), it oftentimes slips into silliness. Not Airplane! level, but close enough.
TIME has published a list of 15 of the Greatest Dumb Comedies Ever Made compiled by their film critic Stephanie Zacharek. If I were to compile a similar list, it would definitely feature BASEketball, a movie I’ve watched more times than I’d like to admit.
Battling a light cold, I finished Paul Theroux’s Kowloon Tong in one sitting. Never heard of the author and had no idea what to expect. Set in Hong Kong on the eve of its Handover (or how the main characters call it — Chinese takeaway), the novel follows a 40-something British national who inherited his father’s factory. The book shows a class of Brits that — while having lived in HK for decades — never learn to speak the language, despise Chinese food, are suspicious of the locals, and drop racial slurs while sipping breakfast tea prepared by their houseboy. And there's a lot of visiting sex workers, hucksters, swindlers, opportunists, an American who got a Guinea-Bissau passport for tax reasons, and much more. Maybe even some light murder. A worthy addition to your summer reading list, if you, unlike some Goodreads commentators, don’t mind reading about “a despicable man”.
Saffron has always been super expensive (€2,950 per kilo — wow), and I don’t think I ever bought the real thing (not counting the painted chalk I got at the Gran Bazaar in Istanbul). A reporter on the BBC radio was joking about porcupines becoming a problem for saffron growers. I found it funny, as most stories involving animals are lighthearted in nature. But the actual story has way more complexity: from climate change to impact on global spice trade to the livelihood of Kashmiri farmers.
Went to see Moonspell playing together with Dark Tranquility. The show was good, even if my wife compared DT’s sound to that of a broken washing machine. It got me thinking about the different genres and subgenres of metal that might sound made up to a noninitiate. Yes, Viking Metal, Funeral Doom and European Power Metal, which is different from U.S. Power Metal, are absolutely legit genres. There’s even a super-complicated graph mapping influences and an even more creative Metal Map which looks like an actual map of some fantasy land. According to the former, the evolution of metal ended in 2010 with… Kawaii Metal. Oh how far we’ve strayed.
Working on a piece for this month’s STSC Symposium — a rant on how headphone addiction is the new screen addiction. Basically, an expanded version of a post I published a few years ago. One of the things we miss being caught up in a podcast in public is the little chats with strangers. This morning, for example, a man eyeing the same loaf of ciabatta at the store called it “baked air”, and I’ll be carrying this memory for years to come.
Watching the latest legal procedural (Matlock with Kathy Bates), I couldn’t help but notice how fast some of the characters spoke. Apparently, characters on TV speaking at abnormal speeds has been the norm for many years (this article from 2006 already talks about it). This trend might be one of the reasons why more and more people watch TV with subtitles even for material in their native language.
The beauty of smaller Lithuanian towns is that usually their Little Free Libraries are stacked. Back at home, most are either empty or have the tried and tested mix of Jehovah’s Witness, ISKCON and Scientology pamphlets. I was pleasantly surprised by this view in the morning:
Note the 95% discount on The Art of Fine Cigars and the amazing art on the Jules Verne and Walter Scott books.
One of the funniest and most “authentic” (hate the word but can’t find a suitable alternative) YouTube channels I’ve recently discovered is 1234days, where a 45-year-old German guy working for an online chess company sets a goal of becoming a millionaire with a six-pack in 1234 days. It’s the antithesis of any hustle bro content you’ve ever seen, and every video is just pure fun.
Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it! Recommend Fictitious to a friend or foe, buy me a coffee, and simply share something cool you’ve recently learned with me by answering this email.
Till next time,
Oleg
Happy Easter!