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Every few weeks, my tender heart yearns for my faceless Substack friends and I feel compelled to drop everything and spend an hour compiling earnest recommendations and half-baked epiphanies. Today is one of those days! I’m gonna be at an event at The Bell House on April 11 to promote a new book by Alexandra Petri, the Washington Post satire columnist (some recent-ish favorite columns of hers are about government fonts and Goodnight Moon). And Alexis Coe will be there! Also, I’m doing a Depths of Wikipedia show in Woodstock, NY on April 6. And then in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver (late show added), Toronto, and Montreal later in April. Tickets here. Okay, anyway

• It seems today that all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV but luckily there’s a “Discontinued Foods!” Twitter account that posts about short-lived snacks. There’s something deeply satisfying about a single-operator gimmick account administered by someone with intense passion for inconsequential trivia like the Smokey Robinson Frozen Dinners (2004-circa 2009) and McDonalds “Hula burgers,” (1963 - 1963).

• I know Amazon sucks for a variety of reasons, clearly delineated in an 18,000 word Wikipedia article dedicated specifically to criticism of the company, but I re-started Prime because I’m furnishing my new apartment (I’m in Bushwick now) and sometimes the corner store doesn’t have, like, sage green mixing bowls. Anyway, I learned from Twitter that you can append &emi=ATVPDKIKX0DER to your Amazon search URL to hide resellers and only see first-party stuff.

• I stumbled upon this New Yorker article about second mentions, a charming discussion of how far out of their way people will go to avoid lexical repetition. My favorite example: “The Guardian describing a fox who ran onto a soccer field as “the four-legged interloper.” Microplastics . . . “the ubiquitous particles”, a swan that blocked a police car was “the feathered obstacle”, Will Smith . . . “the former Fresh Prince.” I think it’s cute!

• A few months ago, I tweeted that the Oakland Library maintains a website of notes found in library books, which spurred a tiny, wholesome media cycle for librarian Sharon McKellar. Anyway, she mentioned that she was inspired by Found Magazine, a website that compiles scraps of paper that people find on the street. I think they are very charming. “If you ‘love’ me so much, then why haven’t I heard from you in forever??” is one.

• Would you look at the time, it’s dudes rock o’clock. Someone named Jurgen in Durham, North Carolina set up camera at a short bridge and posts videos on YouTube of trucks getting their roofs sliced off. The bridge, which is just eleven feet and eight inches, is nicknamed “the can opener.” For fifteen years, he has recorded and documented the collisions on a dedicated site, 11foot8.com, where he sells scrap metal (“crash art”) and also advertises an Etsy shop for (you will not expect this) bird-shaped mosaic window decals.

• Buzzfeed interviewed the guy who made a 102,040,171,200,000 pixel dick pic (it’s the largest digital image OF ALL TIME, 290 times bigger than the previous record-holder, a snap of a zebrafish embryo). It’s 250 terabytes. It’s on a website called the World’s Biggest Penis, which takes 41 days to scroll, and a Twitter bot that is set up to share a tiny portion of the picture every day for the next 134,819 years. This story is extremely dumb yet inspiring, and I like it when people perform bizarre, labor-intensive feats for no real reason.

• Tumblr went to town with a Venn diagram I put on Twitter and it makes me really happy. If I still lived in Chicago, I would probably print it onto a coaster or something

  

What else? I’m rather inspired by Muji’s inspiring design philosophy in which “good enough” is a triumph, I’m lapping up Yellowjackets season 2 like a parched puppy, and The Drift let me write a thing about Wikipedia’s bikini-clad beginnings.

If you only subscribed to this newsletter for Wikipedia stuff, might I suggest curling up on the couch and devouring unbuilt NYC subway lines, this African-American creole spoken in coastal pockets from South Carolina to Florida (it was Clarence Thomas’s first language!), Hawaiian lava sledding.

Thanks for reading! I feel like you’re my friend, whoever you are. I hope you are having a good day. Perhaps let me know in the comments.

Annie