WELCOME TO DAYBREAK DIVERSIONS, UPPER VALLEY!
The Tibetan Buddhists of the domino world? You know the tradition of creating and then destroying beautiful sand mandalas? Well, there's a school of domino artistry developing in France, with magnificent, complex structures built using Kapla—little pine planks. Here's one, a project by Domino Plank, using 35,000 planks and 10,000 dominoes that took six builders three days to construct...and less than three minutes to knock down, with very un-Buddhist-like mayhem at the end but to the absolute delight of watching schoolkids.Conquer the heebie-jeebies with these slow-motion insects taking wing. What is it about bugs that sends some of us into fits? It seems less about what they happen to be doing when we encounter them, and more about what they might do—leap or fly toward us at blinding speed. If that sounds like you (or even if it doesn’t), try watching AntLab's very fine video of insects achieving liftoff at 200 times slower than real life. The sheer mechanics of a weevil dividing its armor, unfurling and beating its spectacular wings—it’s almost cool enough to forgive the thing for being a terrible pest to fruit crops.“An oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport.” It's not nice to laugh at other people's misfortune. But when the "people" is a self-important Michelin-starred restaurant and the misfortune is an entertaining wallop of a review, it's so hard not to. In The Everywhereist, Geraldine DeRuiter described with unabashed glee and the sharpest of boning knives a four-and-a-half-hour, 27-course dining... experience... at Bros, a restaurant in Lecce, Italy. “'These are made with rancid ricotta,' the server said. 'I’m… I’m sorry, did you say rancid? You mean… fermented? Aged?' 'No. Rancid.'" And so much more.The Wednesday Vordle. With a word from the news.And for today's music... In 1971, the camera crew for Gunsmoke decided to take a road trip to the U of Oregon in Eugene, because they'd heard that a barnstorming blues revue with Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, Big Joe Turner, and George "Harmonica" Smith was appearing there. The result was this 84-minute video. I know.... You don't have time for the whole thing. So you could just check out the first few minutes, with Big Mama tearing up the house with "Early One Morning." If you're totally impatient, forward to the 2:45 mark, where she starts in earnest, but I wouldn't recommend it.See you tomorrow.
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