Ahead on Differential

Here are ten things.

1. Happy 35th birthday to me! Pisces power, baby!
2. It was the Academy Awards on Sunday! Everything Everywhere All at Once went 7 for 11! Michelle Yeoh has a fucking Oscar, dude! And the guy from the “Turn Down for What” video has three! That's cool as hell! That's my take: it's nice that the winners got an Oscar.
3. Maybe it's because I didn't watch the show, and maybe it's because I'm fucking sports-pilled beyond salvation, but I really liked what Daniel Joyaux wrote at the Ringer on how to fix the Oscars telecast once and for all. Basically make it two shows split by a Super Bowl Halftime Show-esque musical interlude.
4. Man, all this movie talk crowding up the list, huh? Too bad, here's more: every year, I give myself until the Oscars to officialize my list of the previous year's movies. To that end: here are my top 10 movies of 2022.
5. A brief history of the Peeing Calvin decal.
6. You know what's a fun game? Retro Bowl. Shout out to Retro Bowl. I'll take it over Madden any day of the week.
7. It's such a rare treat to discover a new favourite podcast. Thanks to a guest appearance by the Shutdown Fullcast's Ryan Nanni (who is on a yearlong quest to guest on as many podcasts as possible), I have been mainlining episodes of Remember that Guy?, a podcast about remembering athletes who are not legends or Hall of Famers, but who are fascinating and intriguing for other reasons. These guys are my people.
8. In conjunction with the release of his book Shift Happens, Marcin Wichary (or someone on their team, I can't tell) put together this nifty in-browser typewriter simulator.
9. For the last couple of months, I've been getting into lifting weights, spurred by a couple of chance encounters with the work of Casey Johnston. She writes about fitness in an approachable, lucid, down-to-earth way that I can appreciate as a complete and total novice. It's a real antidote to a lot of discourse that's in the ether about fitness and health in terms of tone and POV. If you're curious about strength training, her book Liftoff gets my official okey-dokey.
10. “The Kingfisher” by Mary Oliver:
    

    The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
    like a blue flower, in his beak
    he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
    the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind
    a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
    that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
    There are more fish than there are leaves
    on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
    wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.
    When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
    remains water—hunger is the only story
    he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
    I don’t say he’s right. Neither
    do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
    with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
    I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body
    if my life depended on it, he swings back
    over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
    (as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

#tenthings