April linkstack
New slang, a new color, Musk mockery, AI-nal logos, and more.
Welcome back to the monthly linkstack! Special greetings and thanks to all the new subscribers and followers* who have brought the total Fritinancy readership to more than 3,500! If you want to catch up, you’ll find the March linkstack here, and within it a path to earlier installments.
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Reading now
I am thoroughly enjoying Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops, by British film critic Tim Robey, who also narrates the audiobook. The book covers some of filmdom’s most flagrant fiascos, including three films I’m stubbornly fond of: The Hudsucker Proxy; Babe: Pig in the City; and Synecdoche, New York.
An excerpt from The Guardian’s November 2024 review:
Few things are such a gift to write about as big, gobbling turkeys, yet Robey doesn’t let his selection of 26 juicy flops (one per chapter) baste themselves. He avoids obvious choices such as John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth, “an infamous bid to get Scientology out to the masses through the medium of a panto-shonky space opera”. Instead, he hunts out lesser-known clunkers such as A Sound of Thunder (2005), a barely seen, “below-the-radar bellyflop” featuring rampaging baboon-lizard hybrids that was bankrolled by Battlefield Earth’s producer, Elie Samaha, a former bouncer at Studio 54 turned “schmoozer extraordinaire” – one of the many larger than life characters that populate this alternative history of the industry.
I have some personal experience with Hollywood’s dark side: I contributed to the companion book for Gods and Generals (2003), a notorious flop1 omitted from Robey’s survey.2 Beyond that, I’m interested in all types of failures and fuckups: See my blog post about Silicon Valley “failure,” my account of a visit to the Museum of Failure, and my investigation into “fuckup” for the Strong Language blog. I’ve even read Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. (Recommended!) Naturally, I feel like Box Office Poison was written expressly for me. Thanks, Tim Robey!
Viewing
And speaking of movies that probably (unfortunately) won’t reach a huge audience, I caught the new documentary Secret Mall Apartment on Easter Sunday, aka 4/20, at San Francisco’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema3 — a perfect conjunction of date and setting for the wild, true tale of a bunch of RISD students (and one teacher, the mastermind) who in 2003 created a functional and aesthetic living space in a newly constructed (and detested) mall in Providence, Rhode Island — and then proceeded to inhabit it for four years. This movie made me so giddily happy I almost wept. Read Alissa Wilkinson’s New York Times review (gift link).
What to call the dictatorship?
“Technically speaking, it’s only the Fourth Reich if it comes from the Reich region of Germany. Otherwise it’s just sparkling fascism.” (Andrew Patrick Clark for McSweeney’s)
And speaking of sparkling . . .
The “It’s only X if it comes from the X region” meme got a deadpan and thorough academic treatment in a 2021 paper by two Syracuse University knowledge-organization researchers: “It’s Only a Meme If It’s from the Knowledge Organization Region of Information Science. Otherwise It’s Just a Tweet.”
Naming a new color
Scientists at UC Berkeley have created — or maybe discovered — a new color, which one of them described as “a beautiful, ultra-intense teal.” Computer science PhD student James Fong named the color olo, “a play on 0 1 0, which corresponds to the types of cone cells—the 1 is for M’s—that were stimulated to generate it.” A British artist is taking orders for this “newly discovered colouriest new color,” which he calls YOLO and for which he’s charging $10,000. (The Atlantic gift link)
Giving beetles a bad name
“Anophthalmus hitleri, or ‘Hitler’s Beetle,’ is at the center of a heated debate currently raging in the typically cordial worlds of botany and zoology. The controversy hinges on a fundamental question: Should we rename species that were named after objectionable human beings?” (99 Percent Invisible)
AI-holes
Why do so many AI companies’ logos have an anal aesthetic? (Velvet Shark; ht
)
Mocking Musk
Why anti–Elon Musk satire is flourishing in Britain and the rest of Europe. (New York Times gift link)
Revolutionary
On April 18, the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride (“The Redcoats are coming!”), a Boston art collective projected stark messages (“Two hundred fifty years later, tyranny has returned”) in old-timey fonts onto Boston’s Old North Church. The collective calls itself Silence Dogood, a tribute to one of Benjamin Franklin’s pseudonyms. (
)Take a walk!
Earlier this month. crosswalk buttons in Silicon Valley were hacked to include audio of voices imitating Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. “It’s normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every facet of your conscious experience,” said “Zuck.” “I just want to assure you, you don’t need to worry because there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.” (TechCrunch)
And speaking of Musk:
The burden of a name
“If one’s name is a brand, then mine is tarnished”: writer Elon Green on sharing a name with that rich guy. (New York Times gift link)
Bluesky’s “Blue Sky”
“‘Jay’ is [Bluesky CEO Jay Graber’s] adopted moniker. Bluesky was named before Graber became involved, but by coincidence her given name is Lantian—Mandarin for ‘blue sky.’ Graber likes to say that her mother, an émigré from China, chose it to lend her daughter ‘boundless freedom’.” (New Yorker) (Archive)
Fall in
Interesting analysis of the visual politics of presidential military moments by filmmaker and writer Azza Cohen — she was Vice President Kamala Harris’s official videographer — for
:But what’s most revealing is what isn’t shown. Think about the visual absence of Trump with wounded veterans or at military funerals. This visual avoidance aligns disturbingly well with reports that Trump “did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn't look good for me’ and his description of fallen service members as ‘losers’.”
Slinging slang
Podsnappery! Fax, no printer! Four plus four! And more old and new slang from
in conversation with Mignon Fogarty on the Grammar Girl podcast. Also check out the latest edition of Heddwen’s newsletter, English in Progress.Crosswordese
There’s a Wikipedia entry about words and names that crop up repeatedly in crosswords — ENOS, AIOLI, SEGO, IBEX — and I was shocked that AGORA wasn’t included, because it makes regular appearances.
Three stories about payphones
Just because I love them:
“Find a pay phone, dial a toll free number and say goodbye to someone. That’s the premise of the Goodbye Line, an art project that utilizes pay phones across L.A.” - Los Angeles Times (archive)
“About a decade ago, there were 27,000 payphones in California, with 2,100 in L.A. County. Now, according to the California Public Utilities Commission, there are just 2,525 working public payphones left in the state.” - Los Angeles Times (archive)
“The Masters may be the last place in the U.S. that has ‘pay’ phones.” - Country Living
Not so fast, Country Living! San Francisco’s Dolphin Swimming and Boating Club, where I’m a member, has one of California’s 2,525 working public payphones.
And while we’re in the wayback . . .
Finally, for you film buffs — and my Oakland folks — here’s
on “How to make Oakland look like 1987,” the story of how location scout Alex Pearcy brought Freaky Tales back to the future. I remember strolling past the Grand Lake Theater — it’s in my neighborhood — a couple of years ago and wondering about Ishtar on the marquee. Aha!Budget: $56 million. Box office: $12.8 million.
I adored the project, for which I researched and wrote about Civil War weaponry and interviewed a number of people involved in the movie — the dialect coach, the facial-hair specialist, the actress Mia Dillon. I also met the film’s director, Ronald Maxwell, who was a total mensch.
My first time at ADC, and I can’t believe it took me this long. If there’s an ADC in your neighborhood, please give it your support and love.
If I ever get anywhere near a screening of Secret Mall Apartment, I'm there. I mean, *four years*?
I just heard a story on NPR about the Goodbye Line. Wonderful.
Also, the UC Berkeley campus has a rule that all major buildings must have a payphone. It's because each one there includes a teletype device for the deaf.