Welcome to this week’s edition of our Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting and entertaining links. Brew a fresh cup of coffee, find a comfortable place, and relax.
🎸🎧: I would honestly be remiss if I didn’t start this week’s linkage by pointing you to this incredible full-live-album performance by Parcels, a band I only recently discovered but which immediately intrigued me on a number of levels.
For one thing, each of them looks like they were ripped straight out of different eras — the guitarist a late-’60s Beatle, the bassist a fairy tale prince who somehow found a career as an ’80s fashion model, one keyboardist a ’90s boy band member and the other a carbon copy of Neville Longbottom if he’d grown up a musician, and the drummer…well, he just looks like a regular guy. On top of that, the music they play is unmistakably ’70s disco-pop-funk, sometimes blended with more modern electronic/synth stuff.
And yet, this five-piece of twenty-something misfits has some of the slickest and most compelling musicianship I’ve ever heard in a group so young. They play as though they’ve been together for decades, and even on an individual level they’re each very skilled at what they do. You’ll wanna listen with good headphones to catch all those sweet musical details in the mix.
Did you notice how I never mentioned a frontman/vocalist above? That’s because there isn’t one, not really (although some articles identify the Beatles-looking guitarist as “lead singer”) — they all contribute vocals and take turns sharing the spotlight.
On their site, here’s what the band says about the performance:
The performance isn’t edited in any way, just mixed, mistakes and all, so we’re concentrating hard in the video on making it sound nice. There’s a lot of nervous eye communication, a little bit of polite dancing and occasionally moments of just enjoying being right in the zone together. We’re stoked with how it turned out.
You can watch the whole thing on YouTube, or stream the album version on Apple Music, Spotify, etc.
🧊☕️: I’ve been getting back into the whole AeroPress thing lately, after focusing purely on espresso for a while.
As such, I’m very curious to try this Redditor’s method for doing an “ice brew” in the AeroPress:
The recipe:
- The ice brew will be done with a 1:10 coffee to ice ratio by weight. In my case this usually means 20 grams coffee to 200 grams ice for a single serving, but you can scale up this recipe a bit as long as you can still fit ice into the brew chamber.
- Grind your coffee a little on the fine side; something a little finer than you’d use for a standard pour-over.
- Set up your aeropress with two rinsed filter papers and place over a glass. Add your ground coffee and give it a shake to make sure it’s level.
- Add your ice directly on top of the grounds. You can use the Aeropress’s included funnel to hold any overflow.
- Leave at room temperature and allow the ice to melt. The melting ice will slowly drip through the grounds and yield a fairly strong cold brew concentrate.
I usually hear of methods involving brewing directly over ice, or setting up drip reservoirs atop the AeroPress, or something like that, but just…putting the ice directly on top of the grounds? That’s a new one on me.
Sounds like they’re not the only ones to do this either, based on this thread and this one. You’d definitely have to grind pretty fine to restrict water flow and prevent channeling, I’d say. Looking forward to experimenting with this!
🎃☕️🍂: On the topic of coffee, resident YouTube expert James Hoffmann shows you how to make the ultimate pumpkin spice latte:
Grab the full recipe from the video’s description, or from his website.
✈️💸: Here’s an interesting thing I just found out: Airlines don’t make money from selling flights; if anything they lose money on that. Their real profit comes from loyalty programs.
For example, Delta Air Lines is worth $19 billion — unless you take away their loyalty program, which would drop them to -$7 billion.
Negative. Seven. Billion. 😯
+ It’s worth noting that if airlines start going under because of this whole coronavirus thing, it would undoubtedly be a good thing, as far as the planet and climate are concerned. The cruise ship industry too, as much as I enjoy going on a cruise.
💡: In a piece about the ideas that changed his life, Morgan Housel offered some great food for thought:
Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. […] Start with the assumption that everyone is innocently out of touch and you’ll be more likely to explore what’s going on through multiple points of view, instead of cramming what’s going on into the framework of your own experiences.
It’s easy to look at people around you (or in the world at large) and imagine that most of them have life all figured out, or that because someone is an expert/best-selling author/authority figure/etc then they’re infallible or even noob-like in other ways. You’ve gotta remember that every one of us, old or young, is figuring this stuff out all the time, making it up as we go.
There’s a Steve Jobs quote I think about all the time:
“Everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people who were no smarter than you.”
🧑🍳: If you didn’t already know, the folks at Serious Eats have been doing a “Food Lab Junior” series with recipes designed so kids can get involved in the kitchen. There’s only four posts in the lineup so far, but I’m hopeful they’ll be doing lots of these:
🚚😱: As an RVer, the bridge documented on this YouTube channel is my nightmare:
The 11foot8 bridge is a railroad trestle over Gregson St in Durham, North Carolina and it has earned a reputation for for its rigorous enforcement of the laws of physics. No truck taller than 11 feet and 8 inches will pass under this stubborn piece of infrastructure. Period. On this channel we document the various attempts of hapless drivers trying to get past this bridge. Some try to be sneaky, some try to be quick, some try to argue, but the bridge always wins. There is a reason why the locals call it “The Can Opener”!
We’ve come across some low bridges in our time, and luckily we’ve always found a way to get around these things — or in one specific case we dealt with this past summer, underneath still, because years of other RVers coming and going had created an unofficial lower path off the side of the road 😆
If I’m ever going through Durham, South Carolina, though, I’m going to be very wary of encountering this bridge.
💻: If you’ve ever been curious about learning CSS code to modify the look or behavior of your website, this guide is a great primer for understanding the anatomy of CSS queries and what you can do with them.
🥁🎼: Back in August, CNN featured the story of a blind percussionist who created a new type of orchestra conductor baton that lets him feel a conductor’s movements rather than see them. I love this idea, along with anything that can make people’s passions more accessible.
Neat Stuff We’ve Published Recently
- Although the special launch pricing window has closed, it’s never too late to sign up for our sister site’s new “Calm Inbox” course. 😉
- Don’t mess with a classic: Bialetti’s Moka Express can make some darn good coffee; there’s a reason it’s been around for nearly a century.
- “Lord of Maps” is a small studio producing perfectly Middle Earth renditions of places you can actually visit.
- Longtime author Antony Johnson knows how to be a productive writer, which is why his book, The Organised Writer, is worth your time.
- The Ooni “Koda” gas-powered outdoor pizza oven cranks out jaw-dropping pizzas in 60 seconds flat. No assembly, no mess, no fuss.
- Stop grabbing those plastic produce bags at the store in shame and bring your own organic cotton mesh produce bags instead.
- NEFF’s Daily Beanie is nice and stretchy without fitting too loose. The perfect beanie for falltime.
Got any suggestions for articles, videos, stories, photographs, and any other links you think we should be posting in our weekly Quality Linkage? Please do let us know on Twitter.