Six Things, Volume 62

Albums | One-minute Park | Place Names | Catch & Throw | Typewriters | Games

Thing 1 – Albums

Another excellent info thingy from the people at Pudding, this time exploring Rolling Stone’s ‘Greatest Albums of All Time’ across two decades.

It all depends on who you ask and when you ask them.

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Thing 2 – One-minute park

This is for anyone who combines a thirst for seeing the world with an overwhelming desire for peace and quiet. You get one minute of footage from a random park. Then another minute from another one. And so on.

You can also upload your own minute. Click on the little question mark in the bottom left corner of the screen for instructions.

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Thing 3 – Place names

A fun map of Britain by Robin Wilson which allows you to search for any combination of letters. Many people, acting on a basic human instinct, will immediately search for rude words. Others will wonder if their own name is represented. Yet others, perhaps of a more historical bent, will search for things like ‘burgh’, ‘hampton’ and ‘bach’.

I opted for a ham and cheese sandwich.

And, inevitably, I had fun looking for bird names.

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Thing 4 – Catch and throw

The tray-catch scene in Spider-man famously took 156 takes to get right – proof that excellence is the result of painstaking attention to detail and hard work.

But if you want perfection, sometimes you just have to wing it.

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Thing 5 – Typewriters

The Boston Typewriter Orchestra (originally featured in Volume 25 of Six Things) have at last embraced modernisation. Their submission for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts series includes, for the first time (gasp – shock – horror) an electric typewriter. If you listen really carefully you can hear someone shouting ‘Judas!’ In the background.

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Thing 6 – Game

Here, have a game. It’s a pleasing one, I think. (It comes, as do quite a few of my things, courtesy of Web Curios)

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Thing 7 – Paperback

Wait, what? SEVEN things?

Well, sometimes I feel the need to give you a little bit extra. Unfortunately, this little bit extra is entirely self-serving.

The paperback of Taking Flight will be published in (at the time of writing) 3,357,589 seconds. Or, for the more conventionally-minded, on 16th May.

As the day approaches I shall of course be wasting no opportunity, including this one, to tell everyone about it, in the hope that everyone will buy it.

Taking Flight is the evolutionary story of flight in the animal kingdom – or, as the new subtitle has it, ‘how animals learned to fly and transformed life on Earth’. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

I’m never entirely sure how much difference endorsements from other authors make, but here they are anyway.

Thanks to Parikian, you'll never look at a bird, a bat, or a beetle the same way again. Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry

This book soars… Parikian is a nature writer at the top of his game. Steve Brusatte, author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

Had P. G. Wodehouse ghost-written Attenborough’s Life on Earth, we might have had Taking Flight forty years ago. This is a charming book, which – like its author – fizzes with erudition, wordplay and humour. Nick Acheson, author of The Meaning of Geese