Running Commentary 7/15/2024

Hello,

Just a heads up: I'll be taking the 29th off from this newsletter. That's Monday after next.

Anyway...

Watching...

The Acolyte

• This is the key episode in this show. We’ll have the finale tomorrow and that will hopefully wrap things up but this episode is the one that things turn on, that’s been hinted at throughout the show. We finally find out what happened on Brendock. Kind of. We were given the Jedi’s perspective, along with Mae’s for a bit. We weren’t told every possible detail, and it’s unclear exactly what the Ascension ceremony was supposed to be, but the Jedi’s motivations at least are clear now.
• I was correct that the Jedi wound up killing the coven all at once after the coven pooled their power. I was wrong in supposing that the Jedi were there to investigate an illegal Force cult; turns out they were there coincidentally, and engaged with the coven in defiance of the Council’s wishes. Early press about this show hinted that it would be more critical of the Jedi than other Star Wars stories, but unless something big is revealed in the finale, I don’t see that being the case. Sol goes rogue to save some children he thinks are being abused (and who kind of are, from how we see Koril treat Mae). A lot of people’s instinct is to act rashly if they think kids are in trouble. the scarce information we’re given about the coven’s intentions with the girls actually works well in characterizing Sol’s actions here. The audience is put in his place: not fully knowing what’s going on but suspecting something serious, and having to decide what’s justified.
• Once again, the action in this show is excellently choreographed.
• A lot of fans were saying that the way Mae’s notebook fire managed to burn through a structure carved from rock would somehow be explained once we saw more of what happened, but no, that appears to just be a mistake.

Bird of the Week

This week's bird has long been a favorite of mine, even back when I was a little kid, before I was into birding or anything. I liked their shiny blue heads, mostly, and their bright eyes. That's all there is to most birds to most people. People who pay a bit closer attention to birds might also appreciate them for some charming behavior, but not, I'm afraid, the Common Grackle.

Grackles are large songbirds of the New World blackbird family, known for glossy black plumage and long tails. These tails they hold folded down the center, almost looking like the point a paper airplane has become lodged uncomfortably somewhere; viewed from the side, these tails are often described as "keel-shaped", referencing a boat component with a similar reverse-taper shape. There are 11 species, amongst which the common grackle is the most northerly, living throughout the eastern United States in the summer, retreating down out of Michigan and other northern states in the winter; the presence of grackles is my personal metric of whether it's spring yet or not.

Grackles are songbirds, but barely sending out a harsh, shrieking graaek that sounds like a rusty gate being opened. At feeders they're known to bully smaller birds and monopolize the supply of seeds, so much so that people seek to deter them from eating there, such as by only putting out sunflower seeds.¹ (I put out sunflower seeds, and the grackles still come; I don't mind, since they don't stay all day the way house sparrows do.) They're also hated as pests; in Austin, Texas, where huge flocks of common and great-tailed grackles live in town over the winter, recordings of birds of prey or gunfire, and sometimes the birds and guns themselves, are used to deter the birds from roosting on businesses.²

Linnaeus gave the common grackle the name Gracula quiscula. The genus name comes from an old name for some bird, likely the jackdaw, that went "cra cra", as the grackle does. This amusingly vampiric name still lives on in the mynas (a kind of starling, which the icterid blackbirds were once thought to be) but sadly not in grackles, which have been re-assigned to the genus Quisculus. This and Linnaeus's genus name comes from the Carib name for the island of Hispaniola³, today the site of the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Oddly, this island is not home to common grackles in any significant numbers.

Curation Links

The American Dream is Cursed | Megan Boilard, Off-Topic

The title promises some sort of jeremiad, but, in this case, “The American Dream” is the name of a massive shopping mall/amusement complex in New Jersey. Languishing in construction limbo for decades under the name Xanadu, the mall finally opened in October of 2020 and so far has failed to live up to its promises or attract many visitors, for reasons beyond the usual 21st-century shopping mall woes.

Chirality is Just Turtles All the Way Down | George Zaidan, Reactions

[VIDEO] "L-DOPA is the best drug we have for Parkinson’s disease. If you take L-DOPA and reflect it in a mirror, you get a different molecule: D-DOPA, which does absolutely nothing for Parkinson’s and causes potentially deadly side effects. Making just L-DOPA without D-DOPA is surprisingly hard – so hard that the person who finally figured out how to do it won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry." (12 minutes)

Mineral Water Gets the Silent Treatment | Jordan Michelman, Taste

An interesting, if somewhat pretentious, complaint that high-end restaurants all serve the same two brands of mineral water, opting for cheap, commodified product in a way at odds to the ethos that guides the rest of their menus.

The Girl with Flies Coming Out of Her Eyes | Sally Wen Mao, Joyland

[FICTION] "Imagine you are a young woman. Imagine you want to cry, but you can’t, because of a sickness where your eyes make flies instead of tears. You’ve had this illness since the day you first turned into an adult, but you don’t remember that day because you don’t remember a day in your life when it was okay for you to cry."

See the full archive of curations on Notion