My brain is spent. The online conference I presented at was this week, my Friday was a full day of overlapping meetings, it was Spirit Week at our kiddo's daycare, both sets of grandparents are in town, and general work/life just continues. It was a lot and I felt like I was grasping at straws to keep track of it all.
So, instead of an incoherent introduction, let's jump straight to the Wrap.
Happy Halloween! 🎃
I should finish up reading Hue 1968 some time this week. It’s a good book but, man, reading over 500 pages on the Vietnam War is intense. Gonna need something much lighter for my next read.
If you're buying books for the holidays, choose backlist titles to avoid supply chain issues. [Popular Science]
Stunning landscapes made from clay. [kottke.org]
A materials list syllabus for drafting and design. [Syllabus Project]
The Dead Sea is disappearing. [ABC News]
House plants that are hard to kill. [WaPo - gift link]
Poaching is causing rapid evolution in African elephants. [Telegraph]
TV shows are too damn dark to see. [The Audacity]
The higher education lobby may have killed free community college. [New Republic]
Millennial nostalgia alert - What's the story, Wishbone? [Book Riot]
Green buildings can increase urban biodiversity and happiness. [Bloomberg CityLab]
Language is always moving. [Hidden Brain]
Do not sign me up for early dentistry. [Every Little Thing]
Sea level rise is coming. Can we engineer our way out of disaster? [Hidden Brain]
The long border between Canada and the US has led to some pretty interesting stories. [99% Invisible]
The history and tastiness of Halloween. [Gastropod]
You might still have time to whip up these adorable pumpkin rolls. [nm_meiyee]
I am going to have to try my hand at making this french toast omelette sandwich. [The Cooking Foodie]
My parents were in town this week and my mom made ropa vieja one night. She served it over rice with a side of black beans. It was delicious. Anything that includes olives is a winner in my book. [Food 52]
I tried a new rosemary garlic rub for our salmon. I aced the garlic but I added too much rosemary. It came across as piney. We served the salmon with rice pilaf and roasted carrots, so at least our taste buds got a break from the rosemary. [Sitka Salmon Shares]
Emojipedia is basically a dictionary for emojis. You can search by word and category. You can also look at the most popular. From there, you can cut and paste all manner of emojis for whatever you need. (It’s how I got the jack-o-lantern at the top of the Wrap.) Emojipedia shows you how each emoji appears on various IOS and other tech platforms. If you’re interested, you can also see the history of how the emoji came to be through unicode.
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I just need this week to be nice and slow so that I can recover from last week. It’s unlikely to happen, but I can wish.