Welcome to the weekend; the holiday season can officially begin, from Halloween to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve!
Bigmouth Strikes Again:
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Happy Halloween Holiday!
Stranger Things
Spiders or Snakes
Spiders or snakes are questions about why people are scared of one or the other. Do people on team spider spend time with snakes? Do snake people enjoy creepy crawly things? If you are afraid of both, you are right; if you think you aren’t scared of spiders, read on.
We read an article in The Atlantic about a male widow spider sacrificing itself while having sex with a female widow. More than knowing she will kill you when you are done, the male turns on its back and almost puts its tiny body into her mouth. The male is a spec compared to the female; the male weighs between 1 and 2 percent of the female. The article goes on to speculate all sorts of reasons a male widow spider would do this, which made us think about a few other things.
How long do you have to study creepy, crawly spiders to develop the hypothesis in the first place? That’s a lot of spider sex to determine that man spider sacrifices himself, rather than a woman spider eating him when she’s done. Second, why would you study spiders’ mating habits in such detail? Are we running out of tiny male widow spiders? Female widow spiders are some of the most deadly on the planet; we think we could use fewer widows!
Breaking [the] News
Sahil Bloom writes a fabulous newsletter called The Curiosity Chronicle. In a recent installment, he listed 50 Life Hacks; here are three of our favorites.
If you want to get better at anything, do it for 30 minutes per day for 30 straight days. It's easy to over-engineer progress—a bit of dedicated effort each day is all you need. Nine hundred minutes of accumulated effort is enough to make dramatic improvements at literally anything.
As a rule of thumb, don’t consume the news unless you're confident it will matter one month from now. Consuming more news has become a reliable way to understand less about the world. Focus on smaller doses of high signal content vs. a constant drip of the "BREAKING NEWS" that has become the industry standard.
When someone goes through hell, just saying “I’m with you” is the most powerful thing you can do. Advice, perspectives, or offers to help are minimally impactful. The notion that someone is with you is 10x more powerful. Be the “darkest hour friend” to those you love.
One of our writers related to the third hack; he was going through a tough time and ended up in an outdoor open space at a monastery. One of the monks who was also walking the grounds could tell he was having a hard time and approached him and said, “It looks like you are having a hard time. Can I walk with you and your pain?”
So many of us A-types want to fix things, and someday we will learn that walking with someone in pain is the best thing we can do.
Boo!
Empire of the Dead
In this fascinating look at Catacombs, we wondered, whose job was it to stack skulls?
[Music Notes]
Are you starting to see a theme today? In other news, Hell Raiser Jerry Lee Lewis died on Friday at 87. Vulture had a good write-up on the Great Balls of Fire singer. Lewis left an impact on music. Unfortunately, the life he led took all the sweetness out of the song.
Don’t Tell A Soul
Secret Links to Cool Stuff:
Words | Music | Art | Unknown
Jukebox Shuffle
Thoughts on Music
Three Strange Days!
Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.
Words from Gen X
Thank you for spending a few minutes with us!
With A Shout Team