The greatest line in movie history.. Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone.”
What goes around comes around: Revolving restaurants are making a comeback
This article, by Diana Budds at the NYTimes, features the restaurant on top of the Marriott Marquis on Times Square. The restaurant recently reopened after closing in 2020.
I ate there a few times in the early 90s; it was nice. The rotation is so slow as to be imperceptible, though (as the article notes) if you went to the bathroom, which was in the non-rotating hub of the restaurant, it was easy to get confused to find your way back to your table. Especially if you had a few drinks.
There were a pair of concentric pony-walls on the perimeter of the dining areas, the inside one rotating, the outside one not rotating. Tables butted up against the inside pony-wall, and it was very easy to mistakenly put your cigarettes, lighter and drink down on the outside pony-wall and wonder a few minutes where the hell they’d gone to and you’d have to wait a half-hour for them to come around again on the turntable, by which time your cigarette had burned down the ice in the drinks had melted.
The Marriott Marquis also had a rotating lounge inside the lobby. A waitress told me the sections of the lounge were color-coded so they could find customer tables.
Even in the 90s, the design of the place seemed old-fashioned — so much orange! — but of course I loved that.
Scientists discovered a plaid frog in the Suriname rain forest. (Moss and Fog) — “I thought it was a scrap of flannel,” said Dr. Elise van Drohm, lead researcher on the expedition. “Then it blinked and leapt like a tiny, toxic fashion statement.” Follow the link for gorgeous frog photos.
RIP Val Kilmer. He played many roles, but I’ve long known and loved him as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone.”
Two wins for democracy today. Cory Booker in the Senate and Susan Crawford in Wisconsin.
I’m fighting a solo war to preserve the use of “invitation” as a noun.
Ian Welsh: Trump is "speed-running" America's "imperial decline"
Trump’s Negotiating Is Failing.
Welsh says Trump is “picking too many fights all once, his tariff threats are incoherent and unplanned, he’s defunding research and forcing brilliant scientists and engineers and scholars out of the US, has no industrial policy worth speaking of and is destroying America’s governing capacity with capricious cuts to the federal bureaucracy.”
Perhaps most damaging of all, Trump is giving every other nation of the world “reason to route around America like it’s damage: to stop using the US dollar, to move to using local currencies for trade and to stop buying American goods and services, and yes, to stop selling to the US.”
Soon, Welsh says, other nations will stop enforcing American intellectual property law, which will sabotage the US tech sector. (Cory Doctorow advocates for this.)
My $0.02: But what about companies like Nvidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.! Companies like that are powerful engines of growth and will keep America strong!
Oh, yeah? Why would they want to stay in the US?
Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself (Nikita Mazurov, Matt Sledge / The Intercept)
What Is It Like Living With Long COVID? (Nicole Pajer / AARP) — Thanks, Julie!