📺 TV nudity, abandoned ham, and divinely inspired software
I started a newsletter. At least it's not a podcast.
Does the world need another newsletter? No. Absolutely not. Objectively, no. But here we are.
Welcome to Wishful Linking! Here are some of the most interesting things that found me this week.
GOD FROM THE MACHINE: This is a beautiful story about a piece of software designed to help people learn to sing the Torah, as well as the man who created it and the community left behind when he was no longer able to push updates.
It was a voice unlike any I’d ever heard: not human but made by humans, generated by a piece of computer code dating to the 1980s, singing words of a text from the Bronze Age in a cadence handed down, from one singer to another, over thousands of years.
TropeTrainer was software that had been taught to sing the words of God.
Then it went silent.
A MEATY MYSTERY: A ham-related puzzler out of New Zealand …
Rafael Fonseca was walking his dog at lunchtime when he discovered the leg of the deceased. The toes had blackened, the withered shin was peeking crudely out of a black bag. It appeared that someone, or something, had attempted to hide it in a patch of flax in Hobsonville Point.
Ashen-faced, Fonseca dialed 111.
The voice on the phone asked him if he required fire, ambulance or police. He said police. It was only when another person answered and asked “what’s the nature of your emergency” that he realised he hadn’t in fact called 105, the community police number, as he intended.
“This isn’t quite an emergency,” he said, “but I found a leg of ham.”
In other New Zealand curiosity news, here’s a comprehensive accounting of Dug the giant potato, who turned out this week not to be a potato after all.
OF SOUND MIND: I enjoyed this interview with the author of a new book about animal sounds — the evolutionary past and the potential “sensory extinction” of the present and future.
It was shocking to me, in researching this book, how long the time period was that Earth lacked any communicative sound — the sound that evolved for the purpose of carrying a signal from one creature to another, usually one animal to another. It took hundreds of millions of years after even complex animals evolved for those first communicative sounds to evolve, as far as we know.
DON’T BE PRESSED: It turns out that maybe you don’t need to press your tofu?! I tried the salt-it-and-let-it-sit method this week and it was perfectly fine. I’ve been lied to. Duped. Played for an absolute fool.
HOW THE SAUSAGE IS MADE: This is a delightful story about penises on television.
Asking an actress to go topless may seem like a milder demand than asking an actor to go bottomless. But while nearly all of those breasts are real — if artificially enhanced, in some cases — those penises are not. Most of the ones that appear in mainstream TV or film are silicone prosthetics, and they are often oddly large.
“It’s very rare to just see a normal penis,” Horeck said.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks so much for being here. I’ve recently spent a long time off social media, but I’m trying to find a way to exist on the Internet without, you know, having a total breakdown. (I’m taking it as a positive sign from the universe that Lil Nas X also chose this week to get back online.)
Please let me know if you have any feedback on the newsletter (or if you see a cool link you think I might like!) and feel free to share with your friends and loved ones.
Until next week, here’s Arthur.
