Weekend Things, S02E08
How cool are clitorises? The Guardian has a new interactive (!) series called Vagina Dispatches. There’s a quiz! Get on it.
The Great British Bake-Off is definitely my favourite tv show ever. It contains everything I love. And now greed or obliviousness or a combination thereof has led the production company responsible for it to sell the rights to Channel 4, in turn causing the hosts, Mel and Sue, to announce their departure. They are guardians of the soul of GBBO, and it’s pointless to go on without them.
Here’s another thing you might not know: When contestants do cry — out of frustration or disappointment, generally — Mel and Sue stand near them and use un-airable language so the embarrassing footage is tainted, and won’t make it into the final edit. “If we see them crying or something,” Sue told the Guardian, “Mel and I will go over there and put our coats over them, or swear a lot because we know then that the film won’t be able to be used.”
From What we Lose when we Lose Mel and Sue in Eater.
Mary Berry has also announced her departure, so Paul Hollywood is the last one standing.
Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a dumb, racist piece of propaganda earlier in the week that originated in the dumb, racist backblocks of the internet. Skittles have a particular symbolic meaning in American race politics at the moment — Trayvon Martin was carrying Skittles when he was killed by George Zimmerman — and the dumb, racist internet insists that Trayvon was going to use those Skittles in an alcoholic concoction, although the line from “teenager gets drunk with friends” to “he should be killed” is hard to walk even if you’re a completely terrible person. Skittles’ response to the whole thing was pretty tight.
You know when everybody tells you you have to watch/read/listen to something, and for some reason you just don’t, and then you do, and it’s exactly as great as everybody said it was? My Dad Wrote a Porno is in that category. 🏃🏼♀️
Zooming out to a higher level Spotify also has an entire team dedicated to keeping the UI and visual language consistent across the company. This team is called GLUE (a Global Language for a Unified Experience — the team likes their acronyms). The GLUE team actively documents Spotify’s design styles, components and patterns on a site that’s accessible to everyone in the company. Made up of both engineers and designers, the team meets with product designers weekly to share context of what they’re working on, making sure it’s aligned and helping to continuously evolve the design system.
From Ways We Work. I have never worked in an organization where this could be considered a solved problem.
Cannot wait for the Sqirl cookbook (better still is to visit LA and actually GO to Sqirl, but we can’t have everything).
I’m only halfway through this widely-shared Andrew Sullivan article, How Technology Almost Killed Me, but when my damaged attention span allows me to, I certainly intend to finish it.
I liked that the ad for Google Trips has Ashley arriving at Casa Camper in Barcelona (fave hotel ever), and I would be glad to replace TripIt, which is the app I currently use for this purpose, but when I opened Trips for the first time and found travel records from back in 2009, my skin crawled right off my body. Google!
Another execution of a black man by US police this week (two, in fact, although the police have declined to release video footage of the second).
Phoebe’s Fall is a new Fairfax investigative podcast, in the style of Serial. Phoebe died in awful and mysterious circumstances several years ago, and Fairfax is trying to shed some light on it. Phoebe also happens to have been a relative of Sophie’s, and even the very tenuous connection is making me aware of how awful it must feel for the families and friends of any crime victim to see their personal grief and drama turned into entertainment in this way. Phoebe’s immediate family has participated in the series, though, so at least they have some measure of control.
Music I’m enjoying this week: How Long Is Now by Iiro Rantala, and Nearness, with Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau. I discovered both through Apple Music’s unexpectedly good weekly New Music mix.
