[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Anthrodendum considers the question of what, exactly, is the genre of ethnographic film.
• Centauri Dreams features authors’ calls for a debate on METI, on sending messages to extraterrestrial intelligences.
• The Crux reports on the continuing damage caused by the continuing eruptions of Indonesia’s mud volcano, Sidoarjo.
• Imageo shares a cute time-lapse video from Hubble showing the motion of Phobos around Mars.
• Language Hat responds to a newly-translated mid-19th century Russian novella, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya‘s 1861 novella Пансионерка (The Boarding School Girl).
• Lawyers, Guns and Money has a depressing extended examination of Trump as reflecting structural crisis in the United States.
• The LRB Blog looks at the genesis and continuing success of Nicaraguan Sign Language.
• The Map Room Blog shares a satirical map of Washington D.C., defined by the names that its metro stations should have.
• Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang lists the various worlds in our Solar System possibly hosting life, and notes how you could get an Earth-like world with wildly erratic seasons as in Game of Thrones.
• Unicorn Booty notes that the German president has signed marriage equality into law. (Also, the country has good LGBT protections.)
• Window on Eurasia notes that Putin is fine with an asymmetrical bilingualism in Russia’s republics, aimed against non-Russian languages.

[ISL] Five articles from the Toronto Islands in this time of flood

• blogTO shares Aidan Ferreira’s stunning photos of the Toronto Islands flooded out. The damage, especially to the beaches, looks severe.
• CTV News shares remarkable drone footage of the Toronto Islands.
• The Toronto Sun reports on the plight of the water taxi operators, unable to earn their living this summer with trips to the Islands.
• The Toronto Star‘s Fatima Syed notes that, to stay afloat, the Centreville Amusement Park will be selling its beautiful antique carousel.
• Katharine Laidlaw’s interviews in Toronto Life with Toronto Islanders tell the story of a very hard year.

[NEWS] Four links about queer history, from the National Park Service to the Globe to New York City

• The National Park Service’s LGBTQ Heritage Theme Study is an amazingly thorough survey of sites and stories of note.
• In The Globe and Mail, Stephanie Chambers explores how the history of homophobia recorded in her newspaper’s old articles.
• Back2Stonewall shares rare archival footage of the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day parade, ancestor of Pride.
• The New Yorker’s Daniel Penny tells the story of Joseph Touchette, at 93 the oldest drag queen in Greenwich Village.

[BLOG] Some Pride Day blog links

• Joe. My. God. has reposted a famous, fantastic contemporary New York Daily News article about the Stonewall Riots.
• James Leahy’s clips of Toronto Pride parades from 1988 through 1995 are great. h/t to Leahy and to Shawn Micallef of Spacing for sharing them.
• Arnold Zwicky has collated some photos of Pride rainbows on Chicago and Dublin transit buses and on some boots.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• D-Brief considers if gas giant exoplanet Kelt-9b is actually evaporating.
• The Dragon’s Gaze links to a paper that considers where to find signs of prior indigenous civilizations in our solar system. (The Moon, Mars, and outer solar system look good.)
• Joe. My. God. reveals the Israeli nuclear option in the 1967 war.
• Language Log shares a clip of a Nova Scotia Gaelic folktale about a man named Donald.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the ongoing deportations of Hispanic undocumented migrants from the United States.
• The LRB Blog notes the brittle rhetoric of May and the Conservatives.
• The NYRB Daily mourns the Trump Administration’s plans for American education.
• Savage Minds considers the world now in the context of the reign of the dangerous nonsense of Neil Postman.
• Strange Maps shares a map documenting the spread of chess from India to Ireland in a millennium.
• Window on Eurasia argues that the Russian government needs to do more to protect minority languages.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• D-Brief shares rare video of beaked whales on the move.
• Dangerous Minds notes that someone has actually begun selling unauthorized action figures of Trump Administration figures like Bannon and Spencer.
• Language Log looks at a linguistic feature of Emma Watson’s quote, her ending it with a preposition.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen considers, originally for Bloomberg View, if Trump could be seen as a placebo for what ails America.
• The New APPS Blog takes a Marxist angle on the issue of big data, from the perspective of (among other things) primitive accumulation.
• The Search reports on the phenomenon of the Women’s History Month Wikipedia edit-a-thon, aiming to literally increase the representation of notable women on Wikipedia.
• Towleroad notes the six men who will be stars of a new Fire Island reality television show.
• The Volokh Conspiracy finds some merit in Ben Carson’s description of American slaves as immigrants. (Some.)
• Window on Eurasia argues that Belarusians are beginning to mobilize against their government and suggests they are already making headway.

[MUSIC] Grimes, “Kill V. Maim”

The Grimes song “Kill V. Maim” is one I’ve been playing a lot this week, with its video set partly in Toronto’s abandoned Lower Bay Station and a threateningly manic song with a chorus–“Are you going to the party?/Are you going to the show?”–inspired by Godfather‘s Al Pacino and by Harley Quinn.

Grimes, a.k.a. Claire Boucher, appears on the latest episode of the “Song Exploder” podcast, a must-listen for music fans who want to hear their fave artists talk about how they created their own songs. In it, Grimes breaks down her thrashing Art Angels cut “Kill V. Maim,” revealing the impetus of it was a friend who doubted her ability to be musically aggressive.

“He kept doing these cute little plucky things, and I was like ‘No, no, let’s make a hard song.’ He was like ‘No, no, you make cute music.’ I was so horrified,” Grimes recalls. “So I went home after that sort of wanting to prove that I could make something that’s going to be really aggressive that I would want to play during an action sequence in a movie.”

After that, she set out to make something that could soundtrack the trailer for a fictional crossover of The Godfather and Twilight. Add in a lot of kick drums, some cleverly buried samples of cheering crowds, and what Grimes calls a “scary, demon chorus” inspired by Harley Quinn, and you have “Kill V. Maim,” which she reveals is “probably my favorite song I’ve ever made.”