Five Bullets 8.30.24
Coyotes, Trains, Robots & more
Good morning and Happy Friday!
This morning in New York City is cool and cloudy. Hopefully we get some nice weather, and not the clouds currently forecasted, for this Labor Day weekend.
Earlier this week I sifted through some papers from my old rock band and wrote about how this shed some light on my creative process.
Usually during summer I find myself reading Travels With Charley which gets my travel gears turning but an article on riding Amtrak across the northwestern United States scratched that itch. Now I’m thinking of past roadtrips across the Western states to national parks, small towns, and out-of-the-way points of interest.
Where are you travelling, exploring, or adventuring this weekend?
Five Bullets:
Article: Real Estate Shopping for the Apocalypse. Looking for the perfect bunker to ride out the end of the world? Patricia Marx brings some lighthearted comments on the curb appeal and interior design of several unique dwellings currently on the market, from caves to missile silos to Cold War-era bunkers. I coudn’t help but think of Fallout’s Vault Tec. Fun fact: Switzerland has enough bunkers to fit the nation’s entire population.
NYC: Solitary Central Park coyote finds romantic partner. A male coyote first spotted in Central Park in 2019 has now been joined by a female. Gotham Coyote Project has not reported any pups yet perhaps due to the pair’s inability to build a well-hidden den in the busy park. In other news, there are now coyote pups in Alley Pond Park near where I grew up in Queens.
Studio Tour: Inside Van Neistat’s 118 Sqft Filmmaking Studio. Van Neistat shows us around his cleverly designed studio, each piece, tool and gadget intended for a specific purpose - to make the creative process from writing to filmmaking as seamless as possible.
Travel: 4,000 miles, 6 Small Towns: A Whistle-Stop Tour of America. “There’s something about a train that’s magic”. Richard Rubin rides Amtrak’s Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle visiting towns with a few thousand people to local landmarks including a 27-foot penguin to the Grand Coulee Dam (much larger than the Hoover Dam). I love roadtrips and exploring new places across America but haven’t travelled the country by train yet.
TV: In Apple TV’s dark comedy series Sunny, Suzie (Rashida Jones) copes with, and later investigates, the dissappearance of her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and their young son with the help of the curiously emotional homebot Sunny. Set in Kyoto, Japan the series blends sci-fi and humor to look at what makes us human and how we might answer questions about ourselves and technology when robots and A.I become ubiquitous in the near future. Sunny is based on Colin O’ Sullivan’s novel The Dark Manual.