This Bud's For You

How Weed Strains Get Their (Amusing, Provocative, Downright Wacky) Names

I grew up smoking cannabis—or “pot,” as I called it until about 20 minutes ago—crouching in a fetid little nook between a dumpster and a stack of tires at the neighborhood Texaco station, a place that already smelled like shit and where a few puffs of smoke and a little coughing wouldn’t catch anyone’s attention.

If, like me, you came of age before legalization, you will recall one thing about procuring weed back in the day: You didn’t have a lot of choices. In fact, you had one: nickel bag or a dime bag. You couldn’t specify indica or sativa, flower or edible, tincture or rosin or vape. You couldn’t select your THC content. You couldn’t choose between OG Kush or Bombay Crush, between Cheese Dog and Chem Dawg, between Grape Ape and Gorilla Glue. No. You got whatever Danny’s older brother sold you. And you were stoked.

But that was then and this is now, and the cannabis space has entered a fascinating, fast-flowing moment where legalization—which begat commercialization, which begat corporatization, which begat commodification—has created today’s modern dispensary where the choices for consumers can be dizzying. As it turns out, there may be no better gauge of the changes rippling through cannabis culture than the humble menu at your local dispensary. Weed names have always added to the fun and intrigue (as a teen, even the relatively straightforward Thai Stick sounded entrancingly exotic), but today, as the power dynamic shifts from seller to buyer, and as growers and retailers find themselves strategizing to make their products stand out on increasingly crowded shelves, the names are taking on even more importance.

The names. Dear lord, the names. Strawberry Cough. Kosher Kush. Blueberry Mojito. Glueberry Slurm. Pineapple Trainwreck. Donkey Butter. Animal Face. Pink Panties. Purple Haze. Sour Joker. Sweet Jesus. Moby Dick. Fugu. Fatso.Tongue Kiss. Cat Piss.

Cat Piss?

Who comes up with this stuff … and how? Stoners trying to out-clever each other with inside stoner jokes about oblique stoner references? Advertising creatives at boutique firms working long hours in Stance socks? Gen Z focus groups run by blue-chip marketing firms with execs staring through one-way mirrors, scribbling notes?

The question of who names my weed has actually been banging around in my head since sometime late in 1978, when I was on the far side of 13 and my bar mitzvah money was burning a hole in my OP shorts. I’d managed to score a small bag of Maui Waui, and as a friend and I passed an anorexic doobie back and forth behind the Texaco tires, we ended up repeating the words Maui Waui Maui Waui—a name full of rhyme and promise—again and again until they became nothing more than strange sounds in our mouths. I never wondered about who grew my weed or even how it made its way to Danny’s older brother. I wondered who named it. Truth is, I still wonder about this every time I walk into a dispensary. And every time I walk out, small glass jar cupped in my hand.

I decided to find out. And what I learned from talking to folks up and down the weed chain—rock-star breeders and farmers, boutique retailers and publically traded cannabis corporations, a marketing exec who moved from Coca-Cola to cannabis—is not only who concocts these catchy names and how that concoction happens, but that legalization is quickly changing much about how naming will look in the future. “It’s a really complex time for naming,” one longtime farmer told me. That’s because as more people stream into the legalized market, the customer base is shape-shifting: We’re no longer talking about old hippies or young hip-hoppers but, well, everyone, from connoisseurs who focus on trichomes, terpenes, and terroir to juice-cleansed “I’ll have the tincture, please” wellness types to, well, my mom. There are no stats on hippie consumers, or on my mom, but in just the last four years, the percentage of women-buyers bumped from 38 to 49 percent. And with the average dispensary customer now dropping $52 a month, retailers are feverishly looking to fill their cases with more SKUs, which means more—and more eye-catching—names. As amusingly goofy as cannabis names often are, a lot of thought can go into selecting a name. (...)

I’m speaking with the man who gave the name “Outback” to Subaru, the name “Pentium” to Intel’s processor, the man who named the Swiffer, the Blackberry, the Impossible Burger, not to mention Dasani, Sonos, and Febreze. His name is David Placek, and David Placek and I are talking about weed. Specifically, we’re talking about the names given to cannabis strains and whether Placek, whose Sausalito-based Lexicon Branding has notched some 3,600 consumer product names, thinks the most popular strain names have a winning ring to them. If corporate America ever comes hard for cannabis names, Placek’s insights would likely filter onto dispensary labels.

by Bill Shapiro, Esquire |  Read more:

Image: Humboldt Seed Company’s Nutter Budder strain, sold by Burr’s Place/Kandid Kush

Tulsa Time

Something interesting is happening in Tulsa

This past weekend, I went on what was essentially a Birthright Trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma. My plane flight, accommodations, and food were all paid for with the explicit intention of convincing me, as a Jewish person, to move to Tulsa. This was an odd, fascinating experience, and I’m breaking my usual convention of not writing about my personal life because I think it’s interesting to share.

When I signed up for this trip, I had zero background for it. I saw a Facebook ad advertising free trips to Tulsa for young Jews and signed up because that seemed like an interesting thing to do. Even when I got to Tulsa, I still had very little context as to why I was there. I had to piece it together over the course of the weekend. To save you from the same detective work, I’ll just present it here.

Tulsa is in a weird spot. It’s a little over 100 years old, and has always been a frontier town. Its fortunes have waxed and waned with the oil and gas industry, which alternately produces millionaires, billionaires, and bankruptcies. The town itself was basically stolen from the Indians a bit over a hundred years ago, laid out on a grid, and then developed in fits and spurts as city tax revenues swelled and declined with its main industry. This means that Tulsa has some beautiful art deco buildings, a strange layout including massive parking lots in the middle of downtown and full on suburbs 5 minutes from the city center, and a still unsettled sense of place.

 

In the 80s and 90s, Tulsa experienced a decline. It got gross and dangerous. Starting in the late 90s, George Kaiser, a local billionaire (oil and gas, naturally, and then banking), decided to do something about it. He established the George Kaiser Family Foundation and then the Tulsa Community Foundation to house the assets of it. The Tulsa Community Foundation, with GKKF’s assets, rapidly grew into the second largest community foundation in the nation, behind only the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. It has over $4 billion in assets, and is almost completely unaccountable to anyone except the people who donate to it (namely, Tulsan billionaires). Because of its structure, it doesn’t even have the normal nonprofit requirements of donating 5% of its assets every year.

So, the single largest force in Tulsan civic life is an opaque, unaccountable community foundation funded mostly by George Kaiser and partially by Lynn Schusterman, who are two elderly Jewish billionaires. And what’s really weird is that this is happening in an otherwise normal, Bible Belt city of 1 million people (and a Jewish population of roughly 2000) with a median household income of $60k. Compare this to Silicon Valley, which has a median household income of $140k and no shortage of billionaires, and you’ll understand the Tulsa Community Foundation’s outsized impact.

By all reports, this has been a very positive relationship. The Tulsa Community Foundation (or, more specifically, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and, to a lesser extent, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, as TCF is just a house for these family foundations) have spent enormous amounts of money trying to make Tulsa a better place to live. They’ve built multiple beautiful parks (including one incredible one called the Gathering Place), a children’s museum, revitalized downtown, launched scores of programs to improve the lives of Tulsa’s underprivileged children, created Tulsa Remote (which offers $10k and relocation assistance for any remote worker to move to Tulsa for one year), and funded a bunch of different business assistance programs. And all of this is just off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t know about.

The tide that George Kaiser is beating back is, of course, Tulsa’s natural decay as a midwest, Bible Belt city. Throughout the 90s and 2000s, every young person who could afford to leave Tulsa did so. This included Tulsa’s Jewish population, which declined from about 5000 in the 90s to less than half that number today.

And that’s where my weekend comes in. I visited Tulsa through Tulsa Tomorrow, a program that flies out young Jews to Tulsa for a weekend to try to get them to live there. So far, from their own numbers, they’ve flown out about 150 Jews over the last 6 years and about 70-80 have moved.

Tulsa Tomorrow is partially funded by George Kaiser, but it’s mostly funded by the rest of Tulsa’s Jewish community, with the majority coming from a local family who made their fortune as a fabric distributor. The scion of that family, Dave, was, not coincidentally, one of our main hosts for the weekend.

The pitch that Dave and his fellow Tulsan Jews made to us was simple. In Tulsa, your dreams can come true.

Of course, they didn’t pitch it quite like that. Instead, they put it something like this: Tulsa itself has a few natural advantages. It has cheap housing (e.g. $350k for a 4 bed, 2 bathroom house 5 minutes from downtown), mostly warm weather in the winters, and zero traffic. Also, recently, Tulsa itself has become a cute, fun city, thanks in large part to the largesse of George Kaiser. Over the course of our visit, we were shown museums, a Tiki bar, a hip brunch place, and a dueling piano bar. We were also told that we had just missed a Journey concert, and that Lizzo was coming to Tulsa shortly on her tour.

But that’s why to come to Tulsa more generally. More importantly, they wanted to pitch us on why to come to Tulsa as a Jew. Their argument here was basically that the Tulsan Jewish community is insanely well-resourced and organized. If you move here, they can pretty much guarantee you a nice job at a Jewish nonprofit and a social event every week at least. That’s not to mention all the social clubs and volunteer opportunities that are available through those nonprofits.

Meanwhile, if your ambitions stretch farther than that, that can also be accommodated. Over the course of the weekend, I heard from a bunch of people who had taken advantage of just that.

by Trevor Klee, Trevor Klee's Newsletter |  Read more:

Image: Playground section of the Gathering Place/uncredited

[ed. I hear stories about political relocations (eg. conservatives moving to northern Idaho and eastern Oregon; liberals to blue states/cities) and wonder if this type of targeting might increase, beyond the traditional approach of focusing on specific business sectors - tech, manufacturing, retail, etc.? Or one-off deal?]

Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a decision theorist from the U.S. and leads research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He's been working on aligning Artificial General Intelligence since 2001 and is widely regarded as a founder of the field.

An open letter published today calls for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

This 6-month moratorium would be better than no moratorium. I have respect for everyone who stepped up and signed it. It’s an improvement on the margin.

I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.

The key issue is not “human-competitive” intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence. Key thresholds there may not be obvious, we definitely can’t calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing.

Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die (ed. emphasis added). Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.” It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.

Without that precision and preparation, the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.

Absent that caring, we get “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.” (...)

To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.

If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.

by Eliezer Yudowsky, Time |  Read more:

Image: Lon Tweeten
[ed. AI Alignment goes mainstream. See also: Artificial intelligence 'godfather' on AI possibly wiping out humanity: ‘It's not inconceivable’ (Fox):]
"Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI. And now I think it may be 20 years or less," Hinton predicted. Asked specifically the chances of AI "wiping out humanity," Hinton said, "I think it's not inconceivable. That's all I'll say."

Also this: 

I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible. I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to. Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business? Follow along. (Jackson Greathouse Fall, Twitter thread).

Pear Ring

The social experiment that wants to end dating apps

News outlets are beating the drums about the Pear Ring, dubbed the world's biggest social experiment. Millions of people have reportedly joined this experiment that wants to end the culture of dating apps. But what is the Pear Ring, who should get one, and what are the likely outcomes of wearing it? Here are some answers.

According to its website, The Pear Ring is the opposite of engagement rings. Wearing one signals to others that an individual is single and looking to strike up a relationship. The website also claims that this is a real-life social experiment live in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Canada, and Australia and will be launched in other countries soon.

Why does one need a Pear Ring?

Dating apps have been the more accessible option for many individuals who find it hard to strike up conversations as the algorithms have been doing the hard work of matching people up. However, the chances of finding the right person have been low, even with the technology. Instead, the apps have further increased the likelihood of experiencing social anxiety and compounded the risks of having eating disorders among users, studies have shown.

The Pear Ring experiment attempts to move people away from the apps and help them make real-life connections. By wearing the green-colored ring, an individual makes known their availability for dating in the real world, increasing their chances of being hit up at the gym, bar, train, restaurant, wedding, or almost anywhere where more humans are around. (...)

With millions of rings already sold, one could argue that the ring is simply the insertion of consumerism in an activity that would have happened anyway. Moreover, wearing the ring gives others more authority to approach the person than empowering the wearer themselves.

by Ameya Paleja, Interesting Engineering |  Read more:

Image: Pear Ring

[ed. Pear-ring= pairing. Low tech.]

Jimmy Giuffrè

How Saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre Taught Me Organizational Theory (Honest Broker)

[ed. Wow. Next level.]

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Sinclair Broadcast Group

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[ed. Sinclair  Broadcast Group (Wikipedia), what an operation. Extremely dangerous to our democracy. Read the Wikipedia entry to get a full sense of how broad and deeply embeded this media corporation's tentacles are. See also: Sinclair Broadcast Group: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO).]

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2008-2018: Seattle’s Transformative Decade

Between 2008 and 2017, Seattle added more than 100,000 people. For a Sun Belt metropolis, this is an average pace. For Seattle, with fewer than 84 square miles, the growth was staggering.

Comparisons can be found only in the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century. In the former, Seattle almost doubled in population. Between 1900 and 1910, it grew from about 80,600, to more than 237,000.

The past decade also saw Seattle and the Puget Sound region solidify its place as one of the most economically potent spots in North America, with headquarters of two of the five Big Tech giants and a varied set of other assets. A diverse world city facing Asia for the Asian Century.

To be sure, not everyone is happy about it. This transformative period also saw housing grow more expensive, and traffic increase. The number of people panhandling on city streets or living in makeshift camps also increased. Collegial “Seattle nice” politics was replaced by a hard-left City Council where crowds of “activists” sometimes shout down other-thinking people who try to speak. A scandal forced out the mayor.

Longtime resident Connie De Roy says, “I have lived in Seattle for 63 years and have renounced this city as the home of my heart, even though I still live here. It’s a different place. I loved the Seattle I grew up in. It was a fun and special place back then.”

By most measures, it still is — this is one reason people keep moving here. But it’s much changed from 10 years ago. (...)

For such a fortunate place, the city overflows with new crises: the housing affordability crisis, inequality crisis, drug-abuse crisis, police-brutality crisis and homeless crisis.

All these are concerns, but the overuse of “crisis” makes it difficult to evaluate the severity of each, the national context, its particular effect in Seattle and constructive measures available. Or even to get our bearings.

The overheated environment is a direct result of a revolution in city politics. We’ve come a long way from stolid Mayor Greg Nickels, a center-liberal council and the famously slow “Seattle process.”

The decade saw a hard-left swing on City Council, backed by protests and large contingents of activists attending municipal meetings. A Socialist Alternative candidate, Kshama Sawant, was elected in 2013. Outrage became a dominant theme.

How this came about should intrigue historians and political scientists for decades. (...)

Decades of arbitrary measurements. Yet the 10 years from 2008 to 2018 transformed Seattle and the nation. One question is how much they set a trajectory for the future, too. (...)

Even if Democrats gain the gerrymandered Congress this year and Trump loses the White House in 2020, precious time has been lost in combating human-caused climate change. Seattle weather is already turned screwy. Valuable fisheries are at risk. Climate refugees from the Southwest could make the population growth of the past decade look like a trickle.

Do the changes seen over this past turbulent decade give us a preview of what’s to come?

Some are undoubtedly turning points here to stay — a larger, denser city; the primacy of the knowledge economy; and more conflict in politics, among them.

by Jon Talton, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: David Miller/The Seattle Times
[ed. The traffic and parking headaches, oy...]

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself.

Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.

Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra—A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.

Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.

For Frank Sinatra was now involved with many things involving many people—his own film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five—which are only a portion of the power he is and has come to represent. He seemed now to be also the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has money, the energy, and no apparent guilt. In an age when the very young seem to be taking over, protesting and picketing and demanding change, Frank Sinatra survives as a national phenomenon, one of the few prewar products to withstand the test of time. He is the champ who made the big comeback, the man who had everything, lost it, then got it back, letting nothing stand in his way, doing what few men can do: he uprooted his life, left his family, broke with everything that was familiar, learning in the process that one way to hold a woman is not to hold her. Now he has the affection of Nancy and Ava and Mia, the fine female produce of three generations, and still has the adoration of his children, the freedom of a bachelor, he does not feel old, he makes old men feel young, makes them think that if Frank Sinatra can do it, it can be done; not that they could do it, but it is still nice for other men to know, at fifty, that it can be done. (...)

The two blondes, who seemed to be in their middle thirties, were preened and polished, their matured bodies softly molded within tight dark suits. They sat, legs crossed, perched on the high bar stools. They listened to the music. Then one of them pulled out a Kent and Sinatra quickly placed his gold lighter under it and she held his hand, looked at his fingers: they were nubby and raw, and the pinkies protruded, being so stiff from arthritis that he could barely bend them. He was, as usual, immaculately dressed. He wore an oxford-grey suit with a vest, a suit conservatively cut on the outside but trimmed with flamboyant silk within; his shoes, British, seemed to be shined even on the bottom of the soles. He also wore, as everybody seemed to know, a remarkably convincing black hairpiece, one of sixty that he owns, most of them under the care of an inconspicuous little grey-haired lady who, holding his hair in a tiny satchel, follows him around whenever he performs. She earns $400 a week. The most distinguishing thing about Sinatra's face are his eyes, clear blue and alert, eyes that within seconds can go cold with anger, or glow with affection, or, as now, reflect a vague detachment that keeps his friends silent and distant. (...)

Now Sinatra said a few words to the blondes. Then he turned from the bar and began to walk toward the poolroom. One of Sinatra's other men friends moved in to keep the girls company. Brad Dexter, who had been standing in the corner talking to some other people, now followed Sinatra.

The room cracked with the clack of billiard balls. There were about a dozen spectators in the room, most of them young men who were watching Leo Durocher shoot against two other aspiring hustlers who were not very good. This private drinking club has among its membership many actors, directors, writers, models, nearly all of them a good deal younger than Sinatra or Durocher and much more casual in the way they dress for the evening. Many of the young women, their long hair flowing loosely below their shoulders, wore tight, fanny-fitting Jax pants and very expensive sweaters; and a few of the young men wore blue or green velour shirts with high collars and narrow tight pants, and Italian loafers.

It was obvious from the way Sinatra looked at these people in the poolroom that they were not his style, but he leaned back against a high stool that was against the wall, holding his drink in his right hand, and said nothing, just watched Durocher slam the billiard balls back and forth. The younger men in the room, accustomed to seeing Sinatra at this club, treated him without deference, although they said nothing offensive. They were a cool young group, very California-cool and casual, and one of the coolest seemed to be a little guy, very quick of movement, who had a sharp profile, pale blue eyes, blondish hair, and squared eyeglasses. He wore a pair of brown corduroy slacks, a green shaggy-dog Shetland sweater, a tan suede jacket, and Game Warden boots, for which he had recently paid $60.

Frank Sinatra, leaning against the stool, sniffling a bit from his cold, could not take his eyes off the Game Warden boots. Once, after gazing at them for a few moments, he turned away; but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in them watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, The Oscar.

Finally Sinatra could not contain himself.

"Hey," he yelled in his slightly harsh voice that still had a soft, sharp edge. "Those Italian boots?"

"No," Ellison said.

"Spanish?"

"No."

"Are they English boots?"

"Look, I donno, man," Ellison shot back, frowning at Sinatra, then turning away again.

Now the poolroom was suddenly silent. Leo Durocher who had been poised behind his cue stick and was bent low just froze in that position for a second. Nobody moved. Then Sinatra moved away from the stool and walked with that slow, arrogant swagger of his toward Ellison, the hard tap of Sinatra's shoes the only sound in the room. Then, looking down at Ellison with a slightly raised eyebrow and a tricky little smile, Sinatra asked: "You expecting a storm?"

Harlan Ellison moved a step to the side. "Look, is there any reason why you're talking to me?"

"I don't like the way you're dressed," Sinatra said.

"Hate to shake you up," Ellison said, "but I dress to suit myself."

Now there was some rumbling in the room, and somebody said, "Com'on, Harlan, let's get out of here," and Leo Durocher made his pool shot and said, "Yeah, com'on."

But Ellison stood his ground.

Sinatra said, "What do you do?"

"I'm a plumber," Ellison said.

"No, no, he's not," another young man quickly yelled from across the table. "He wrote The Oscar."

"Oh, yeah," Sinatra said, "well I've seen it, and it's a piece of crap."

"That's strange," Ellison said, "because they haven't even released it yet."

"Well, I've seen it," Sinatra repeated, "and it's a piece of crap."

Now Brad Dexter, very anxious, very big opposite the small figure of Ellison, said, "Com'on, kid, I don't want you in this room."

"Hey," Sinatra interrupted Dexter, "can't you see I'm talking to this guy?"

Dexter was confused. Then his whole attitude changed, and his voice went soft and he said to Ellison, almost with a plea, "Why do you persist in tormenting me?"

The whole scene was becoming ridiculous, and it seemed that Sinatra was only half-serious, perhaps just reacting out of sheer boredom or inner despair; at any rate, after a few more exchanges Harlan Ellison left the room. By this time the word had gotten out to those on the dance floor about the Sinatra-Ellison exchange, and somebody went to look for the manager of the club. But somebody else said that the manager had already heard about it—and had quickly gone out the door, hopped in his car and drove home. So the assistant manager went into the poolroom.

by Gay Talese, Esquire |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Eliot Porter, Maple and Birch Trunks and Oak Leaves, Passaconaway Road, New Hampshire, 1956.
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Sølve Sundsbø. “Hair Storm”. 2008. (Doutzen Kroes, Pop).

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[ed. Mr. Sundsbø did a great layout with my model nephew Tony in Luncheon Magazine Spring/Summer 2018.]

The 2-Ingredient Espresso Tonic is the Drink of Spring

Here’s how to make the best one.

Espresso tonic

As Merlyn Miller wrote for Food & Wine, the espresso tonic first gained traction in Sweden in the mid-2000s, as it was allegedly created by a barista at Koppi Roasters in 2007. "It grew in popularity throughout Scandavia, and eventually made its way abroad through barista competitions, like the World Barista Championship," she wrote.

As she points out, its popularity is not incredibly widespread in the States, but the refreshing drink can be found on menus at Nashville's Barista Parlor, Brooklyn's Konditori and Chicago's F.R.O.T.H.

 

Now, I say it's refreshing because I personally love the taste of tonic water, which is a little different from club soda or sparkling water; tonic water is made with dissolved quinine and a hint of added sugar, resulting in a bitter, slightly citrusy flavor. As such, it actually enhances both some of the more bracing and floral notes in a shot of espresso.

You only really need two ingredients to make an espresso tonic so, as basic as it sounds, the key to making a great one is to choose good ingredients. While for a long time tonic water was a pretty limited category on American shelves, in recent years, a ton of craft makers have hit the market. One of my favorites is the grapefruit and lime-flavored Indian Tonic Water from Milwaukee's Top Note. The addition of the citrus flavor is really stellar. For a more classic "gin and tonic" tonic flavor, you really can't go wrong with Fentiman's Tonic Water.

In terms of espresso, you don't need a machine to get a good shot at home. You just need pressure — which can come from an AeroPress, a Moka Pot or even a French press. I found the brew guides from Intelligentsia to be incredibly helpful when learning how to do this myself. You can also use a bottled espresso or espresso concentrate, from brands like High Brew and Chameleon, which have become even more popular thanks to the espresso martini renaissance.

I've found a good ratio to be four ounces of tonic to two shots of espresso — ideally served over a single, outrageously large ice cube in a stout little glass. People argue about which goes in the glass first, but I'm partial to topping the tonic with the espresso simply because it looks cooler in the glass. See below:

By the way, if you are willing to add a third ingredient, a little squeeze of orange juice would take this drink over the top (though if you want to go all in on the orange juice/coffee mash-up, check out Mary Elizabeth Williams' recipe for orange coffee soda, inspired by Nashville's Steadfast Coffee). Also, if you don't tend to take your coffee black or find straight espresso to be too bitter, consider adding a swirl of flavored simple syrup to the mix.

by Ashlie D. Stevens, Salon |  Read more:

Images: Getty Images/Dudits; and, therustycoffeeopera/Instagram

Toots Thielemans

[ed. As Quicy Jones says, a bad MF. See also: this with Stevie Wonder.]

Paul Merwart (1855-1902, Polish) ~ Refuge before a Storm, 1880

via:

Gorillaz ft. Adeleye Omotayo

[ed. Official, animated version here.]

Michael de Adder

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'Crisis' Looms as 800,000 More Nurses Plan to Leave by 2027

The critical nursing shortage in the United States is going to get worse — much worse — according to results of a comprehensive National Council of State Boards of Nursing and National Forum of State Nursing Workforce Centers study released April 13.

About 800,000 nurses say they intend to leave the workforce by 2027, according to the study. To put this number in perspective, consider that approximately 100,000 nurses left the workforce during the pandemic — a fact that has already sounded alarm bells throughout U.S. healthcare. Combined, these numbers equate to one-fifth of the 4.5 million nurses in the workforce today.

"While we anticipated there would be a loss in the number of nurses in the workforce due to the pandemic, we did not expect to see data that clearly indicates we are headed towards a national health care crisis," Maryann Alexander, PhD, RN, chief officer of nursing regulation at the NCSBN, told Becker's.

"Most disconcerting and apart from any other data collected, our study indicates that of the 800,000 nurses with an intent to leave the workforce in the next five years, 24 percent of them are new, younger nurses," she said. "This is dramatically different from past surveys that have indicated that 'nurses with an intent to leave in the next five years' were of or nearing retirement age." (...)

"The data is clear: the future of nursing and of the U.S. health care ecosystem is at an urgent crossroads," said Dr. Alexander. "The pandemic has stressed nurses to leave the workforce and has expedited an intent to leave in the near future, which will become a greater crisis and threaten patient populations if solutions are not enacted immediately."

The NCSBN pointed out that "disruptions in prelicensure nursing programs have also raised concerns about the supply and clinical preparedness of new nurse graduates."

"There is an urgent opportunity today for healthcare systems, policymakers, regulators and academic leaders to coalesce and enact solutions that will spur positive systemic evolution to address these challenges and maximize patient protection in care into the future," Dr. Alexander said.

She presented the study findings April 13 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This study examines a subset of the 2022 National Nursing Workforce Survey for analysis and provides population-based estimates. This is the largest national study that includes all levels of nursing practice (RNs, LPNs and APRNs) and includes data from over 300,000 nurses.

Key findings of the study:

Here's a breakdown of the study's main finding that one-fifth of 4.5 million nurses employed in the profession today say they intend to leave the workforce in the next four years. (Again, this statistic includes the 100,000 nurses who left the profession in the past two years.)

by Bari Faye Dean, Becker's |  Read more:

Image: via

Remembering Paul Allen

Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American business magnate, computer programmer, researcher, investor, and philanthropist. He is best known for co-founding Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which helped spark the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Microsoft went on to become the world's largest personal computer software company. Allen was ranked as the 44th-wealthiest person in the world by Forbes in 2018, with an estimated net worth of $20.3 billion at the time of his death.

Allen quit from day-to-day work at Microsoft in early 1983 after a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, remaining on its board as vice-chairman. He and his sister, Jody Allen, founded Vulcan Inc. in 1986, a privately held company that managed his business and philanthropic efforts. He had a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio, including technology and media companies, scientific research, real estate holdings, private space flight ventures, and stakes in other sectors. He owned the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association, and was part-owner of the Seattle Sounders FC of Major League Soccer. In 2000 he resigned from his position on Microsoft's board and assumed the post of senior strategy advisor to the company's management team.

Allen founded the Allen Institutes for Brain Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Cell Science, as well as companies like Stratolaunch Systems and Apex Learning. He gave more than $2 billion to causes such as education, wildlife and environmental conservation, the arts, healthcare, and community services. In 2004, he funded the first crewed private spaceplane with SpaceShipOne. He received numerous awards and honors, and was listed among the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2007 and 2008. (...)

Allen achieved a perfect SAT score of 1600 and went to Washington State University, where he joined the Phi Kappa Theta fraternity. He dropped out of college after two years to work as a programmer for Honeywell in Boston near Harvard University where Gates was enrolled. Allen convinced Gates to drop out of Harvard in order to found Microsoft.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image:Jordanatvulcan/Wikipedia

[ed. My son's been invited to bring his physics students to one of Paul Allen's Institutes for a visit (I can't remember which one) and last night we were talking about his (Allen's) amazing achievements. Quite an extraordinary person. See also: Paul G. Allen, Microsoft’s Co-Founder, Is Dead at 65 (NYT). Plus, there's this: In Conversation: Quincy Jones (Vulture): 

Wasn’t Hendrix supposed to play on Gula Matari?
He was supposed to play on my album and he chickened out. He was nervous to play with Toots Thielemans, Herbie Hancock, Hubert Laws, Roland Kirk — those are some scary motherfuckers. Toots was one of the greatest soloists that ever fucking lived. The cats on my records were the baddest cats in the world and Hendrix didn’t want to play with them. (...)

Were there any rock musicians you thought were good?
I used to like Clapton’s band. What were they called?

Cream.
Yeah, they could play. But you know who sings and plays just like Hendrix?

Who?
Paul Allen. The Microsoft co-founder and multibillionaire has a collection of yachts and guitars to rival the world’s finest, both of which he apparently makes good use of..

Stop it. The Microsoft guy?
Yeah, man. I went on a trip on his yacht, and he had David Crosby, Joe Walsh, Sean Lennon — all those crazy motherfuckers. Then on the last two days, Stevie Wonder came on with his band and made Paul come up and play with him — he’s good, man.

Netflix: 'All The Light We Cannot See'

Fans of Anthony Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning novel All The Light We Cannot See have something to chew on today, with the release of the first trailer for Netflix’s adaptation, directed by Deadpool and Stranger Things(?!) producer Shawn Levy. Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders, adapted the book for television.

The story follows Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a French girl blinded by cataracts at age 6, whose locksmith father taught her in childhood to understand the world through touch and memory, as she attempts to contact her father and uncle via a radio across enemy lines from a village in France, after the outbreak of World War II. Living alone in German-occupied Saint-Malo as a young woman, Marie-Laure comes into contact over the radio with Werner Pfennig, a German soldier and savant of sorts.

Levy told Vanity Fair that he went to great lengths to cast an actor in the role of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, finding Aria Mia Loberti in the haypile of audition tapes. Loberti is legally blind, and pursuing a doctorate in ancient rhetoric at Penn State. (Nell Sutton plays Marie-Laure in flashbacks.) Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and Louis Hofmann are also cast.

by Janet Manley, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Loved the book, trailer looks good. See also: 13 Adaptations Better Than the Books They’re Based On; and, 22 (More) Adaptations Better Than the Books They’re Based On (LitHub).]