The Weekender, December 27, 2019
Hi!
It’s a very, very slow week for newsletters, as I’ve mentioned before, so I basically took the week off. To those who read anyway, thanks! To those who didn’t, you’re probably not reading this either. :-)
Similarly, I don’t have much to say here. Thanks to everyone who donated to my birthday fundraiser on behalf of charity: water; together, we smashed my goal of $4,200 by more than $1,000! If you still want to participate, you still can, so please do.
The Now I Know Week in Review
Monday: Not Even Baby Yoda Knows How to Drive. This one was a fun one to write. By the way, I actually really liked The Rise of Skywalker.
Tuesday: Raise and Shine: The unlikely hero of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.
Wednesday: Nothing! Hope you had a very Merry Christmas.
Thursday: The Day That Never Happened: December 30, 2011 didn’t happen everywhere. One country decided to just skip it.
And some other things you should check out:
Some long reads for the weekend.
1) “The Movie Set That Ate Itself” (GQ, 18 minutes, October 2011). The subhead: “Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home.”
2) “Meet the Shaggs” (The New Yorker, 20 minutes, September 1999). I couldn’t find this on their website but I found it on another site. Anyway, the Shaggs are, perhaps, the worst rock band ever created. Four sisters with no musical talent were cajoled into forming a band by their father; it kind of, sort of, worked. Wikipedia’s brief summary is fun: “The band is primarily notable today for their perceived ineptitude at playing conventional rock music; the band was described in one Rolling Stone article as ‘sounding like lobotomized Trapp Family singers.'”
3) “The Lying Disease” (The Stranger, 34 minutes, November 2012). A glimpse into Munchausen syndrome coming alive via the Internet.
Have a great weekend!
Dan