Props to Joss Stone for realizing that "Fell in Love with a Girl" would work excellently as a funk song; demerits to Joss Stone for homophobically changing "girl" to "boy" and messing up the tight rhyme scheme #xpncountdown

Does "Also Sprach Zarathustra" get the 1890s on the board—is this the earliest-written "song" covered so far? #xpncountdown

ohh, I missed hearing it on-air, but I am so happy Patti Smith's amazing, apocalyptic-bluegrass cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" made the #xpncountdown. Might have been my #1 if I'd voted!

Always here for covers of Neil Young #xpncountdown (because I am one of those people who respects his talent & activism but just can't stand his voice)

Good news, today's the earliest sunset of the year, all further loss of daylight is going to come off the mornings instead

I feel it may be time to resurrect and remaster my mildly Twitter-famous typology of Christmas music

I fucking love memes you can understand through the language barrier, holy shit

Getting to know this legend has been one of the greatest joys of my life and I'm so pleased to introduce you to her with this gorgeous feature from the Inquirer, where she speaks for the first time in over 30 years on her incredible journey share.inquirer.com/XdfXr9

OLIVIA Ay me, detested!

It feels now like this season's Oscars are, more than anything, an Irish wake for the Warner Bros. that put out "Sinners" and "One Battle After Another"—big, bold, awards-worthy movies that audiences loved seeing in theaters—and then got gobbled up by Netflix.

a friend sent me a YouTube video of easy-listening French pop music and I clocked it as AI within about a minute 💅 (then checked, & the creator admits to it on their page) one tell was that the lyrics were 100% nebulous cliches in simple AABB quatrains

new measure of how well you know a second language is not "Do you dream in that language?" but "Can you identify AI slop in that language?"

New post at On a Pacific Aisle, with thoughts on Tom Stoppard and Stephen Sondheim. pacificaisle.substack.com/p/paragons-o...

Stoppard's advice to Belarus Free Theatre, whom he advised for many years - if you want to influence politics, you must write great plays & stage them well, 'because people only listen to those who know what they're doing.'

This composition had eluded me for nearly a decade, but yesterday I was finally able to capture it. A train rolled through just as the Duquesne Incline was crossing over the tracks in #Pittsburgh, creating a picture perfect winter scene. It was worth the hours and hours I've waited over the years.

My annual Christmas trivia: Frank Capra was a Caltech graduate and lifelong science guy who told a biographer that had he not gone into film, he might have wanted to be an astronomer. When Capra was Academy president in 1937, he invited Edwin and Grace Hubble to be special guests at the Oscars.

Claude the albino alligator is dead My story with @aidinvaziri.bsky.social Lots of cool facts from biologists I've interviewed. Claude knew his name & briefly had a pit-mate named "Bonnie." Most common question from guests: "Is he real?" RIP to an SF icon 🐊 😢 www.sfchronicle.com/entertainmen...

“Have Yourself A Merriam Little Christmas” Merriam, a career-oriented lexicographer from the city, returns to her small town for the holidays and meets Webster, a ruggedly handsome librarian, who shows her the true DEFINITION of Christmas.

All opera plot summaries are like "Kunfre, driven to madness by the treachery of Zarnfig, flees her wedding to Bogaro and resolves to throw herself into the sea, before being stopped by an unnamed and irrelevant countertenor" and all ballet plot summaries are like "somewhere, a princess exists"

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Day 1 - Madeleine can hear the guffawing of supremely confident men from the other side of the door. She can detect the brittle tones of her mother and the giggle of her sisters. She takes a deep, restorative and bracing breath, steeling herself for what is inevitably to follow 1/2

AD-ROCK: Yo Ebenezer you gotta show re- BEASTIES: MORSE AD-ROCK: Redemption is not a mere matter of Beasties: COURSE MIKE D: We’ll show you Bob Cratchit’s not a lazy BEASTIES: MOOCHER MCA: We’re Christmas Past MIKE D: Christmas Present BEASTIES: AND CHRISTMAS FUTURE

I named my fists Chekhov and Gun because you know they're coming but you don't know when

Wait, so the American Pope held a whole summit on cinema earlier this month and didn’t invite a single person involved with “Wake Up Dead Man”?!

When all of this is over we are going to have to collect all of the gold in the world and launch it until the sun Same with the letters X, Q, and the word Trump

'Tis (almost) the season for the Met Opera's Saturday radio broadcasts and I just added the 2025-26 selections to the public calendar I made for this. Link below to add this to your own Google calendar #OperaSky calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0...

As Stoppard wrote, and as I contemplate often: “I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.”

Let’s not let this get overlooked: Stoppard basically invented 2 very popular theater subgenres. There’s a direct line of funny riffs on canonical classics descended from “Ros & Guil,” & a direct line of dual-timeline science plays descended from “Arcadia.” So much other work wouldn’t exist w/o him!

The other eerie thing: this piece mentions the Riemann Hypothesis, b/c I wanted something abstruse/nerdy that, to my knowledge, Stoppard *hadn’t* ever mentioned. Then 4 years later “Leopoldstadt” opened & the Riemann Hypothesis comes up several times in Scene 1. Could I have…? Now I’ll never know.

whoa, this is a little eerie... it is almost exactly 10 years to the day since The Toast published my "How To Tell If You're In a Tom Stoppard Play" web.archive.org/web/20160323...

What is it with my favorite 20th-century theater writers dying on Thanksgiving weekend? (Sorry, I don’t have anything else clever to say, I’m going to go to the coffee shop and read his last play, “Leopoldstadt.”)

Et, in Arcadia: We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it...

RIP great genius and legend playwright Sir Tom Stoppard has passed away, aged 88 - will never be forgotten: a huge loss x

across all the variations: the Baum novel, the original film, the Wiz, Wicked (the book), Wicked (the musical), the Great and Terrible, Wicked (the film), Tin Man, the common theme that unites them all is “Americans are especially susceptible to propaganda from conmen and shysters”

It's Sad Shakespeare In Love, why is everybody on either side of the love it/hate it divide so excited

big leftover salad time

I’ve talked before about how AI represents the inevitable outcome of techbros’ lack of distress tolerance for the messy business of relating to and interacting with other human beings but I think the logical outcome of having that skill issue humored is becoming unable to relate to yourself, either

Patti Warashina, Airstream Turkey, 1969. Earthenware with low-fire glaze and low-fire luster, 9 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. x 19 3/4 in (Seattle Art Museum)

An increasing number of bookstores in Japan are leasing out their shelves to book lovers to allow them to sell the works they want to recommend, fostering communities of such “shelf owners.”

I feel like there's a joke in a publication called Telos taking so meandering a path to get to its conclusion

I’m going to France over the holidays and I just purchased the last available ticket for “Le Misanthrope” at the Comédie-Française on my last night in Paris and for this, I paid the princely, top-tier sum of 48€

My parents have complained several times that “younger people aren’t showing up to the weekly Saturday protest” in their wealthy blue-state suburb they don’t quite realize that housing there is so expensive that there are 1.5x as many residents in their 60s/70s as in their 20s/30s

Please enjoy this list of ways that the NY Times crossword puzzle has clued the word SEXT, it's my sexy gift to you.

I'm just a great composer And not a violent man But I lost my composure And I shot Ferdinand Crying "it's well and kosher to say you don't understand but this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland" His last words were We don't know anything His fading words were We don't know anything

my greatest post-pandemic achievement may well be moving to a rent-controlled SF 1BR in February 2024 💅

too bad “Hamilton” doesn’t have a song about how ordinary citizens felt when they read the Reynolds Pamphlet

too bad “Hamilton” doesn’t have a song about how ordinary citizens felt when they read the Reynolds Pamphlet

They line up perfectly.

they said my Shahada was the best they'd ever seen, they were so impressed. they couldn't believe it. the means of production, we're going to be looking into it, looking into very strongly.