43 Favorites: #13


Lake Street Dive is my current jam and latest favorite thing. I’ve had their whole discography on repeat in anticipation of today’s release of their new album, Bad Self-Portraits.

Cover to Lake Street Dive album 'Bad Self-Portraits' — members posing stiffly in a drawing room in front of wall adorned with photos of them making goofy faces

The band, whose members met at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, consists of Rachael Price (lead vocals), Mike “McDuck” Olson (guitar, trumpet, backing vocals), Bridget Kearney (acoustic bass, backing vocals), and Mike Calabrese (drums, backing vocals).

Yesterday and Today


High crane shot of The Beatles on set of 'The Ed Sullivan Show' with full stage and cameras in view
The Ed Sullivan Show 17.19 photo © 1964 SOFA Entertainment.

I’m a little surprised at how emotional I got watching the Beatles tribute earlier tonight.

A Spoonful of Sucralose


Splenda has been challenged in court for saying that its artificial sweetener is — to quote the ad line — “made from sugar so it tastes like sugar”. At issue is the fact that key molecules have been changed in deriving sucralose from sucrose, with no actual sugar in the result, and that the majority of Splenda is filler supplementing the sucralose.

Tom Hanks as waving, smiling Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as stolid, unimpressed P.L. Travers at Disneyland
Photo: François Duhamel for Walt Disney Pictures © 2013.

Or something. You can go look it up if you want. My point is that Saving Mr.
Banks
, Walt Disney Pictures’ current release about the difficult adaptation of P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins books into the eventual classic Disney movie, has roughly the same relationship to the truth as Splenda does to sugar.

His Story


Of all the striking details in March Book One — and there are more than a few —
what I keep coming back to is this: At the age of five, John Lewis began preaching to
his family’s chickens.

Title; protesters with signs; John Lewis and others at a lunch counter

Lewis, an organizer of the March on Washington in 1963 and since 1987 the U.S. Representative for Georgia’s Fifth District, is a great storyteller. March is a great story. I’ve just left those sentences alone after too much time spent considering adjectives other than “great” due to how easy and vague the word is, but it’s apt.

Which Doctor?


Peter Capaldi as new Doctor in blue jacket with red lining turned out, vest underneath, dark slacks, and black Doc Martens, gesturing at camera with serious look
Photo: Steve Brown / BBC © 2014.

The BBC released a promo shot of Peter Capaldi in the outfit he’ll be wearing as the
12th Doctor on Doctor Who last week, and… he reminds me of Doctor Strange.