Friday Cocktail: Good sentences, short workweeks and Joni Mitchell going strong

Sip: on an Obituary – a martini with dangerous levels of absinthe

Weekend browsing:

• The four-day week really seems to work

• Romania has a new, non-human government adviser

• The beauty of a good sentence

• Daily Diaries of Note

Listen: to the great Joni Mitchell singing Summertime as she receives the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song

“One of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing

Yes you'll spread your wings and you'll take to the sky…”

Have a great weekend.

Friday Cocktail: Electro-hymns, interstellar mystery and godly science

Sip: on a Ce Soir tonight

Weekend Browsing:

• “there has come to be an assumption that the artist who isn’t offering a response to our social, economic, and political circumstances is somehow failing to act as an artist“ – one critic looks deeper than ideological purity

• New AI analysis gives theologians more credit for the emergence of science

• How to power America by tapping a supervolcano

• Okay, the balloons weren’t aliens, but this meteor might be

Listen: to Lisel’s new album Patterns For Auto-tuned Voices And Delay – Renaissance polyphony meets cyborg electro-hymns.

Have a great weekend.

Friday cocktail: Big ideas, grieving elephants and a heartfelt memory

Sip: on a McKinley’s Delight

Weekend browsing:

• Why the world’s biggest ideas are still waiting to be discovered

• A grandmother’s love: this charming Korean animation turns a pregnant daughter’s craving for Chamoe melon into something deeper

• Are constant IT updates crippling the economy?

• Asia’s sad giants: video evidence reveals how India’s elephants mourn their dead

Listen: to Morgan Wallen singing Don’t Think Jesus, a modern country ballad about the shock of grace in our stone-throwing culture.

“‘Find someone else to give Heaven to.’ I'm telling you

I'd shame me, I’d blame me

I'd make me pay for my mistakes.

But I don't think Jesus does it that way.”

Have a great weekend.

Friday Cocktail: virtual pots, mechanical watches and stupid rules. Plus gin.

Sip: on a Gin Sonic (soda + tonic)

Weekend browsing:

• How does a mechanical watch work? – amazing interactive animations! The author has a whole series of fascinating explanatory essays

• In Afghanistan, the Taliban forces women back into burqas

• How GDPR rules crush online innovation

• Idle hands: Google’s virtual pottery studio

Listen: to Detectorists performed by Johnny Flynn (in honour of the new feature-length special due later this year)

“I knew the call of all the song birds

They sang all the wrong words

I'm waiting for you…”

Have a great weekend.

Friday Cocktail: Reset your brain with cognac, chess and a holy hand grenade

Sip: on a long, refreshing Roffignac

Weekend browsing:

• A ‘brain reset’ to fix anxiety

• Behind the scenes with Zelensky

• Peter Thiel and Gary Kasparov talk chess, tech and politics

• The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch Jerusalem?

Listen: to Where Did Our Love Go? sung by The Supremes on the streets of Paris: despite the lyrics, one of the happiest videos I know.

“Baby, baby don't leave me

Please don't leave me

All by myself.”

Have a great weekend.

Friday Cocktail: Styrofoam, hobbits and… do you know when the world’s going to end?

Sip: on a Full Monte No.2

Weekend browsing:

• Hobbits: still alive and living in Flores?

• Philip Tetlock is looking for superforecasters… to help predict the end of world

• Diverse democracy is hard. A new book looks for the answer

• It came from another world: amazing snaps of our space debris on Mars

Listen: to Ashley McBryde sing Styrofoam

“Thousands of usages, all kinds of stuff

And that includes forty-four ounce cups”

Friday Cocktail: British space power, a royal birthday and Elon Musk’s toilet

Sip: on a Queen Elizabeth Cocktail. Happy 96th birthday, Ma’am (although this drink is named after the wife of a Philadelphia bartender).

Weekend browsing:

• Post-Brexit liftoff: Britain prepares for its first space launches since the Seventies

• France’s doomed love affair with state power

• Ignore his tweets from the toilet: Elon Musk is giving the world a brighter future

• As China heads for decline, both demographic and economic, dangers mount

Listen to: Sarah McLachlan singing Rainbow Connection

“Some day we'll find it

The rainbow connection

The lovers, the dreamers, and me.“

Friday Cocktail: UFOs and other invisible friends

Sip: on an Enigma

Weekend browsing:

• How to stop the next pandemic now

• Anniversary letters between Argentina and the Falklands

• Company in solitude: Roger Scruton on the life of the mind

• The truth is out there: US Navy warship chased by two car-sized balls of light (for context: Obama’s CIA head on UFOs)

Listen: to Jesus Met The Woman At The Well, sung by Mahalia Jackson

“…She went running, crying, God help me

She said whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you must be the prophet

Because you told me everything that I've done“

Friday Cocktail: How to keep your diary at the end of the world

Sip: on a Snowfall

Weekend browsing:

• We thought we knew who would win the next war – not any more

• Take this down – Dominic Hilton on his lifelong obsession with notetaking, a bittersweet joy

• Civilisation is dying in San Francisco – and elsewhere, soon

• Doubled energy bills are brutal. The plunging price of light has been a staggering achievement

Listen: to The Peace of Wild Things, read by Wendell Berry

“…I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.“

Friday Cocktail: Dickens, fusion, megafloods and Jodie Nicholson

Sip:

On a Rome with a View, a dream of summer afternoons in a glass

Weekend Browsing:

• Cracking the Dickens code

• Big milestone in fusion research (see my earlier post)

• How to resist climate doomscrolling (via @tomchivers)

• A waterfall 1.5km high in the middle of the Med

Listen:

To the brilliant Jodie Nicholson singing Midnight (via @tedgioia)

Here we are again/ I don’t remember you.

I’m on holiday until the end of the month, so posts will resume in March. Have a great weekend.

Friday Cocktail: Division Bells, the book that didn’t burn and energy from the air

Sip: after a long week of political squabbles, on a Division Bell

Weekend browsing:

• Is the future of clean energy making hydrocarbons out of thin air? (via @patrickc)

• One book that proved uncancellable: Ulysses turns 100

• The rise of America’s New Industrialists cuts across party lines. But where’s the UK equivalent? (See my earlier post on the need for an abundance agenda)

• The UK does, however, have a new and surprisingly ambitious £1.4bn space defence strategy

• Could one simple rule of thumb have saved Boris Johnson’s government from implosion?

Listen: to John Cale, singing Perfect

“I'm not perfect

But you're perfect for me…”

Have a great weekend.

Friday Cocktail: flying cars, dying words and God’s big comeback tour

Sip: on a Last Laugh – a Last Word that tickles the nose

Weekend browsing:

• It’s always sunny in Philadelphia pretty much everywhere in the US, compared to Europe

• “A world that’s not supposed to exist”: the awkward persistence of God

• Pearls before swine: 50 very English phrases that are off to the knacker’s yard

• Flying cars, now officially airworthy (in Slovakia)

Listen: to Smile, sung by Uncle Kracker

“You make me smile like the sun

Fall outta bed

Sing like a bird

Dizzy in my head

Spin like a record

Crazy on a Sunday night”

Have a great weekend.

Friday Cocktail: Blasphemy, Tom Baker, spaceplanes & more

Sip: on a Cosmonaut

Weekend browsing:

• The real Lord of the Flies is a lot less depressing

• A new spaceplane aims to launch before 2030

• A life in the day of Doctor Who (a memorable read)

• How many coma patients are conscious?

Listen: to Blasphemy, Coldxman

I feel with my heart, but think with my head,

Mix up the parts and we’ll all end up dead…

Have a great weekend.

Friday Cocktail: Egg Nog

Sip: on some seasonal Egg Nog, with this simple, shaker-based recipe

Weekend browsing:

• Chessboxing I: a new documentary, By Rook or Left Hook, now available to stream

• Chessboxing II: the first post-pandemic live event in London, Season’s Beatings 2021, this Saturday night. Tickets here, or watch free on livestream

• Engage warp drive: has a new discovery shown a physics-friendly path to faster-than-light travel?

• A fan-funded film about the birth of Christ has topped the US box office and taken $10m in its first week. There’s a livestream on Monday night at 1am GMT for night owls

Listen: John Prine, Christmas in Prison

“She reminds me of a chess game

With someone I admire

Or a picnic in the rain

After a prairie fire…“