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Buying Costco peaches mainly to get the box for your cat

As far as our cat is concerned, the only thing in our house that rivals the L.L. Bean Wicked Plush Throw blanket is this peaches box (preferably placed in a sunspot for her).

Watching Mythbusters with your kids

Mythbusters was one of my favorite shows back when it was first on, and it’s been super-fun rewatching it with my kids. I particularly like that it shows so many of the initial failures, missteps, bad ideas, disagreements, and things that just plain don’t work the way you hoped they would—it seems good for them to see that even people who are really, really good at what they do often have to flounder around for a while to figure something out!

"The Balloon" by Donald Barthelme (1966)

@Lyla Trilling's rec of "Sticks" by George Saunders brought Donald Barthelme to my mind, and with it this short-short story (not as short as "Sticks," but still only about 1,800 words)—a surreal and beautifully written bit of metafiction in which the narrator inflates a giant balloon over Manhattan. And the man knows how to stick a landing. (I might have linked to the New Yorker, where it originally ran, instead of this bootleg Sixty Stories PDF, but it's hard to overstate how much it infuriates me that they stuck an auto-playing video window directly before the final paragraph.)

Replacing IMDb with Callsheet

IMDb was always essential for me, but I hated both their app and their website, which seemed to just keep getting uglier and more loaded up with janky ads and auto-playing nonsense. If you have an iPhone (or an iPad, or a Mac), this is the answer—a clean, well-designed replacement that isn’t trying to distract you or sell you anything else. It also has a ton of thoughtful little touches and features. Want to know how old the actors were when they were in a particular show or movie versus how old they are now? It shows you that. Trying to recall the name of a movie where all you remember is two actors who were in it? You can search to find every movie that those two actors were in. Want to hide potential spoilers in cast lists (when, say, the name of the character someone played is actually an important reveal in the movie or show)? It’ll do that. I’ve never hit “subscribe” on anything faster, or deleted an app faster than I deleted IMDb. $9/year, 100% worth it.

Buying Costco peaches mainly to get the box for your cat

As far as our cat is concerned, the only thing in our house that rivals the L.L. Bean Wicked Plush Throw blanket is this peaches box (preferably placed in a sunspot for her).

Watching Mythbusters with your kids

Mythbusters was one of my favorite shows back when it was first on, and it’s been super-fun rewatching it with my kids. I particularly like that it shows so many of the initial failures, missteps, bad ideas, disagreements, and things that just plain don’t work the way you hoped they would—it seems good for them to see that even people who are really, really good at what they do often have to flounder around for a while to figure something out!

"The Balloon" by Donald Barthelme (1966)

@Lyla Trilling's rec of "Sticks" by George Saunders brought Donald Barthelme to my mind, and with it this short-short story (not as short as "Sticks," but still only about 1,800 words)—a surreal and beautifully written bit of metafiction in which the narrator inflates a giant balloon over Manhattan. And the man knows how to stick a landing. (I might have linked to the New Yorker, where it originally ran, instead of this bootleg Sixty Stories PDF, but it's hard to overstate how much it infuriates me that they stuck an auto-playing video window directly before the final paragraph.)

Replacing IMDb with Callsheet

IMDb was always essential for me, but I hated both their app and their website, which seemed to just keep getting uglier and more loaded up with janky ads and auto-playing nonsense. If you have an iPhone (or an iPad, or a Mac), this is the answer—a clean, well-designed replacement that isn’t trying to distract you or sell you anything else. It also has a ton of thoughtful little touches and features. Want to know how old the actors were when they were in a particular show or movie versus how old they are now? It shows you that. Trying to recall the name of a movie where all you remember is two actors who were in it? You can search to find every movie that those two actors were in. Want to hide potential spoilers in cast lists (when, say, the name of the character someone played is actually an important reveal in the movie or show)? It’ll do that. I’ve never hit “subscribe” on anything faster, or deleted an app faster than I deleted IMDb. $9/year, 100% worth it.