3b) Pick Your King

 

4a) (R)eternal

4a1) 3 Hours of Ambient Sounds from Forbidden Planet's Alien Krell Machines 

3a) Daily Zensunni

3a) Edited, as found on Reddit

3a) Daily Zen

3a1) GIF of GIFs

3a2) The 88x31 GIF Collection

4a) Daily Zen

4a1) Magical Mystery Mix – 60s & 70s Soul Music Mix - "Extra Selected" - by Dirty Art Club

 

4a2) Brighter Side of Darkness - I Owe You Love

Standout track at 14:32. I hesitate to cut in because the mix is the thing, but this is so good it deserves it's own entry. Thanks to MMM and DAC for the introduction. 

6a) Parents

 

6a1a) Peanuts – April 17, 1973

6a1b) Full context: Peanuts April 1973 at Fandom

6a2) Charlie Brown's [hapless] baseball team at Fandom

6a3) All I ever needed to know about life I read in a Peanuts strip. Well, until I watched Seinfeld. Two great existentialist comedies that reveal profound truths about the absurd condition of modern humans.

I suppose it is not entirely surprising that the final panel has stuck in my head since my first reading...um, quite a while ago. If human life is absurd, what could be more absurd to a child than parents? Worse even, a group of parents. 

Maybe it's stretching fault laying a bit to say the world's ills could be laid to a group of parents getting together. But as another Mother's Day has passed, and a Father's is in the offing, an act of of compassion in the awareness that children grow to be parents, grandparents, and if they are lucky, great-grandparents. 

Just one more absurdity in this experience of irony we call human life.  

6a) Daily Zen

5a1a) Jack Kirby – Silver Surfer

5a1b) Fantastic Four #50 (1961) at Marvel

5a1c) The Greatest Silver Surfer Stories Ever Told! at CBR

5a2) 100 by Jack Kirby at Biblioklept

3a) The Future of Popular Music?

3a) Here’s a free business idea for you: Start a universal registry of NFT music owners’ names, preserved for eternity on blockchain, but updated with each change of ownership—and give free shares to record labels and star musicians who sign up as participants. The musicians and labels still retain all their intellectual property rights, but you’ve given them some sizzle to sell along with their stakes. And each of them receives partial ownership in the registry business for free, just by joining—so their participation is a no-brainer. It’s like the “name a star” registry, but with the kinds of stars that really matter.

Not only is the NFT owner recognized on this proposed blockchain, but the entire lineage, including every previous owner—traced back to original seller (or recording artist)—is preserved as well. Now Jeff Bezos can point proudly to an entire family tree tracing his ownership in Kind of Blue back to Miles Davis himself. That’s an NFT proposition to make billionaires salivate like Pavlovian poodles in a belfry. 

Ted Gioia – Would You Buy Shares in Your Favorite Musician?

3a) Savage

 

5a) Daily Zen

5a) Ned Beatty Network (1976)

1a) Paths of Survival

1a1) 1. Cases are no longer falling

The news about Covid-19 has been mostly positive in the U.S. over recent months. The vaccines continue to work well against every variant, and the number of Americans who have gotten a shot continues to rise.

But the U.S. still faces two problems. First, the pace of vaccinations has slowed, and a substantial share of Americans — close to one third — remains hesitant about getting a shot. These unvaccinated Americans will remain vulnerable to Covid outbreaks and to serious symptoms, or even death.

Second, the Delta variant — which appears to be both more contagious and more severe than earlier versions of the virus — is spreading rapidly within the U.S., after having first been identified in India. It now accounts for about 10 percent of cases, according to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former F.D.A. commissioner.

Many experts are concerned that cases will eventually start to rise as Delta becomes the dominant form of the virus. “We are vulnerable,” Dr. Kavita Patel of the Brookings Institution told Yahoo News. On Twitter yesterday, Dr. Robert Wachter of the University of California, San Francisco, wrote: “I’ll now bet we’ll see significant (incl. many hospitalizations/deaths) surges this fall in low-vaccine populations due to combo of seasonality, Delta’s nastiness, & ‘back to normal’ behavior.”

David Leondhart

1a2) From the viruses are weird column: the Delta variant is more communicable. OK. Understandable. Your hosts begin to smarten up and it's harder to spread. But why is it more virulent? Is it a byproduct of being more communicable? The best strategy would seem to be highly communicable, but mild. Like the common cold. That way, you can develop a symbiotic relationship instead of encouraging eradication. But then, with modern humans as disorganized as they are, maybe riding it out as long as you can is optimal. If you were aware you were coming to the end of your survival path, you might just start using cannon fodder to overwhelm progressing defenses. 

To be clear, I am not assigning agency to the COVID virus. More musing on how selection works to send a form of life down a path of hypothetical survival. The strategy might be, mutate and evolve and whatever strategy makes it the furthest is good enough.

Temporally, generation upon generation of the virus could survive over a short period of years, but long enough to form into a more symbiotic form of life. A compression of the life cycle to assume a form that manages to survive. Gut bacteria might have started in such a way. Kind of fascinating to think about despite the human suffering caused.

2a) Towards a Better Antilibrary

2a1) "I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it."

Sherlock Holmes A Study in Scarlet

2a2a) The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Brain Pickings – Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones

2a2b) Farnam Street – The Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are The Most Important

3a) Tee Rex

 

4a) Heavy Medal

4a1) Take Five: Heart of Thunder

An adrenaline pumping short stack of heavy medal motivation. For those who dare with hearts of thunder to go beyond, I salute you.

4a2) I but follow the masters. In this case, Hollywood Steve Huey at the Beyond Yacht Rock podcast.

There’s a fanfare of synthesizers, typically, that open the song to warm up the listener for the battle at hand. The meat? Hard-driving rhythms, a rough-and-ready guitar, and a vocalist who can hit the high registers. Lyrics are filled with metaphors: things are always on fire and people are on the edge.

 
Beyond Yacht Rock – Heavy Medal 

4a3) John Farnham "Break the Ice" from Rad (1986)