Five Bullets 7.5.24
Aphelion, The Bikeriders, Van Halen & more
Good Morning & Happy Friday!
It’s a hot and humid morning here in New York City. I hope you’re all enjoying the long holiday weekend.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
On this year’s Independence Day I was thinking about Benjamin Franklin (having finished Walter Isaacson’s biography last month). Franklin was the the only person to sign all three documents which forged the new United States: the Declaration of Independence, The Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution.
Remarking on the end of war with Great Britain, Franklin wrote:
“Thus the great and hazardous enterprise we have been engaged in, is, God be praised, happily completed; an event I hardly expected I should live to see. A few years of peace, well improved, will restore and increase our strength; but our future safety will depend on our union and our virtue.”
Bullets this week:
Comedy: The hilarious Bill Hader impersonating an Eddie and Alex Van Halen interview. [This is the kind of music-related comedy that is part of my daily lexicon.]
Essay: Can You Read a Book in a Quarter of an Hour. Do you read books on your smartphone? Do you use an app for book summaries? Anthony Lane’s witty essay on Blinkist - a ‘high-tech alchemy’ of A.I. meets self-help guru designed to give you a book’s ‘gist’ - focuses on what’s lost when we don’t actually read books.
Movies: The Bikeriders stars Tom Hardy and Austin Butler as rough-riding bikers based on Danny Lyon’s photos and interviews with the Chicago Outlaws. It’s a wild ride depicting the ‘golden age of motorcycles’, part The Wild One and Easy Rider sprinkled with some Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels.
Music: The apprehension engine is a unique musical instrument designed for the raw, creepy screeches, moans and groans of horror movies. Musician Mark Korven commissioned the instrument for his work on films including The Witch and The Lighthouse. Here’s the story behind the making of this instrument.
Science: The earth has reached aphelion, it’s greatest distance from the sun at 94.5 million miles away. In January, we’ll be at perihelion, our closest point to the sun at 91.5 million miles. Factors including a few million miles distance from the sun or the gravitational pull of Jupiter on Earth’s orbit or the tilt of Earth’s axis may not seem like a big deal but they effect us in ‘small’ ways.
That’s all for this week! I sure love getting this weekly list together. It gives me something to work on, to indulge my interests, learn more and share it with you.
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