Elefunk & telefong

Remember the Friday afternoon grab bag in elementary school? Presuming this wasn't specific to my childhood, I'm guessing you recall how—if you hadn't had your name written on the board a bunch of times that week for bad behavior*—you could stick your hand in a bag and, no peeking, fish out a tiny treasure to call your own? (Listen, we can have a discussion of the materialistic-behavior-reinforcement-to-crass-consumerism pipeline some other time. The 1980s were really something else.) Just close your eyes and think of the glee of wrapping your sticky six-year-old hand around a pack of gum or one of those super-bouncy rubber balls with the marbling and being like myyyyy preciousssss, you are the one.

This week's list is like that grab bag, and if you want to know what its subject heading means, well, you gotta stick your hand in and see if you can find it. Buona fortuna!

Go fish:

1. Look, we’re gonna wean ourselves all the way off of social media eventually, or at least the current, corporate-run/panopticon-modeled version of it—I just know we are—but before we do, let’s enjoy just a few morsels more, starting with this.  
2. Here's a moment of lol... 
3. And a moment of awww...
4. And a moment of ooh! to circle us back to how cool marbling effects are... even more so when we get to watch them emerge through a process as intricate and measured as this one. Uggghhh so satisfying. Ingenuity, shared skills and raw materials, baby.
5. You will never catch me jogging for fun, much less running, much less doing either of those things early in the morning on these middle-aged knees, but I salute the folks who do. If you're one of them, here's a way to be an extra good neighbor and generally decent human while chasing those endorphins. Come to think of it, this applies to walkers (including dog walkers!) too.
6. You will also probably never catch me playing Minecraft, not because I have opinions on it (I don't) but because I'm not a gamer and I have no real idea how it works. But anyway, three cheers to the network of journalists and Minecraft designers who put together a giant digital library inside the game and filled it with banned books, plus "books" stuffed with unfiltered news for people who live in places where access is limited by censors (including you and me these days... to some degree, at least). It's free for all Minecraft players, and its location inside the game keeps it accessible to anyone, no matter where they are.
7. Speaking of news, I have some: I just published my first poem in print. I have a few floating around online already, but this is the first time I've made it onto the pages of a literary magazine you can hold in your hands. It's a double haiku on page 76 of Humana Obscura's Summer 2025 issue. You can pick up a hard copy (only through Amazon, unfortunately, for $19) or read it online for free. I hope you enjoy it.

Stay cool, m'darlin's. See you next week.

*was it bad behavior, or were you just stressed or under/overstimulated and trying to let somebody know you needed something you weren't getting?

"There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

—Kurt Vonnegut

01 July 2025

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