Queue Up: 20 Essential Music Documentaries | Pitchfork.

Classic or seldom-seen music films available to stream for free online.

Yesssss!

(Source: sawedoff, via tinaratedtinaapproved)

A knot is the basal portion of a branch whose structure becomes surrounded by the enlarging stem. Since branches begin with lateral buds, knots can always be traced back to the pith of the main stem.

Ah, this makes so much sense now. Excerpt from Understanding Wood at Cool Tools.

Why are we not much, much, much better at parenting? | Practical Ethics →

Economics!

Humans are quite bad at estimating the results of different interventions, if the feedback only comes years later. One needs only to see the plethora of different parenting guides and opposed schools of upbringing thought. Such variety couldn’t maintain itself if it were easy for parents to see which methods worked and which didn’t. Thus parents are poor at knowing what they need, and hence make ineffective consumers from the economic perspective.

Also, “a lot of parenting techniques are procedural, rather than declarative.”

The Rembrandt of Basketball.

Bret Dunlap Discovered Running and It Changed His Life | Runner's World →

Keep your tissues handy.

Nuptial Matters by Ruth Graham →

How did reading poetry become an essential part of so many American wedding ceremonies—and why is it still so hard to choose a wedding poem of one’s own? […] It was around the early 1960s that some Protestant denominations began loosening the strictures of approved readings and music, according to Paula Treckel, a historian at Allegheny College who has written about the history of American weddings. The usual suspects were first to acquiesce: Unitarians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, responding to counterculture couples who wanted to make their wedding ceremonies their own. Suddenly, weddings were taking place in parks, and couples were writing their own vows. As the journalist Rebecca Mead writes in her 2007 book about contemporary weddings, One True Day, the modern idea is that “a wedding ceremony, like a wedding reception, ought to be an expression of the character of the couple who are getting married, rather than an expression of the character of the institution marrying them.”

Fascinating.

Despite our best attempts at uniqueness, we have generated a canon (as people do). And so what if the canon shifts over time (as canons do)? If, in 30 or 40 years, Cummings brands an early-21st-century wedding as indelibly as Gibran brands a 1970s wedding, well, so be it. Marriage means stepping into an ancient institution marked by hundreds of temporal particulars—everything from the cut of the bride’s dress to who is legally allowed to marry. We hope the marriage lasts forever, but we have to expect the wedding itself will age. Maybe we’ll all look back on our wedding poetry the same way we’ll look back on our wedding photos: with a fondness for those young, goofy people who had no idea how their tastes would change, or what was to happen to them.

A Scientific Search for the Most Remote Places in the United States - The Atlantic Cities →

Pretty cool. Cf. the Arctic 1000 traverse from a few years back, which crossed through the most remote part of Alaska. Also reminds me of some of the issues and ironies that William Cronon brings up in The Trouble with Wilderness.

natgeofound:

Buckets of iron ore are transported to a major steelworks in Hunedoara, Romania, November 1975.
Photograph by Winfield Parks, National Geographic

The mood here made me think of Tarkovky’s Polaroids. Winfield Parks also took that great photo of the Turkish steambath.

The Thoreau Poison: Shane Carruth's 'Upstream Color' : The New Yorker →

This movie has prompted some really good writing.

"It is not the young man who is most happy, but the old man who has lived beautifully; for despite being at his very peak the young man stumbles around as if he were of many minds, whereas the old man has settled into old age as if in a harbor, secure in his gratitude for the good things he was once unsure of."

Epicurus. So yeah, I accidentally started a retirement tag today.

Iron Man 3. I liked it more than Iron Man 2, maybe not as much as the original Iron Man, though I don’t remember it well at this point. This was definitely funnier than the first sequel, with some Kiss Kiss Bang Bang-ish genre awareness and biting humor. The villains, though, were a letdown, and the silly action spectaculars were kind of a mess. And yeah, it is kind of a feature-length damnation of wearable computing.

Girl Rising. Got suckered into seeing this two-hour commercial. Some vignettes are better than others (depending on the spunk of the girls and the writers’ adaptation), but some seemed a dangerous mix of exploitative and/or pandering. And the didactic interludes just grate after a while. Like, say, a Michael Moore film, I’m not sure that anyone who agrees really needs to see it, no one who disagrees (and who might that be?) will be persuaded.

sarahlcomics:

Save on.

Retired man enjoys easy life at home | Mississippi’s Best Community Newspaper. Not The Onion. Something to shoot for! (via)