on the list, 25 may 2021

wolves do the work all year long at their own expense

Following a raindrop down the Mississippi.

1. The Number Ones: Guns N’ Roses’ Sweet Child O’ Mine. Stereogum’s Tom Breihan has been every #1 hit in the Billboard Hot 100, chronologically. “For years, Slash claimed to hate Sweet Child O’ Mine. The song, he thought, went against the sound that the band had established for themselves. He’s right, and that’s part of what makes Sweet Child so magical.”
2. Oakland, the city that borax built. One of my favorite follows this past year has been Andrew Alden’s blog about Oakland geology. The twist in his latest post is that there actually aren’t any borax deposits in Oakland.
3. River runner. Click to drop a raindrop anywhere in the contiguous United States and watch where it ends up.” Via Kottke, of course.
4. Wolves save deer from being hit by cars. “By analyzing 22 years of data, Raynor and her colleagues found that Wisconsin’s wolves have reduced the frequency of deer-vehicle collisions by a quarter. ‘The icing on the cake is that wolves do this work all year long at their own expense,’ says Liana Zanette, an ecologist at Western University, in Canada.” Emphasis mine.
5. Diffs are cool.
6. Tyler A. Donohue on SOUR. “Whether we’re discussing the public abuse of Brittany Spears in the early 2000s or Taylor Swift being constantly dragged for her romantic life — it’s clear that we are still sorting out how to make space for female voices that threaten our conceptions of appropriate femininity.”

Speaking of which…