internet explorers club | twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom

I just found out the story of Inky (!) the Octopus escaping from his aquarium and it’s amazing:

After busting through an enclosure, the nimble contortionist appears to have quietly crossed the floor, slithered through a narrow drain hole about six inches in diameter and jumped into the sea. Then he disappeared.

Amazing! Bonus:

Also apparently it’s possible to spin the saliva of clams, called byssus. There’s only one woman left in the world who still dives every day and gathers the saliva herself, then processes it and weaves it into cloth that's light as a feather and shines gold in the sun.

Delightful images of Art Deco remnants in the New Yorker hotel (recently renovated & reopened). Two blocks away, the Hotel Pennsylvania’s phone number (you know, PEnnsylvania 6-5000!) is the longest-running still-working phone number in New York City.

Game of Thrones’s production design is top-notch, so I love reading about the real-life inspirations for different sites. Also: of COURSE the Ennis House was the inspiration for Meereen! How did I not see it?!

Two long reads for today, both of which I’m including read times on because they’re a bit longer than my usual recommendations! The first, on the widow of the inventor of Sea-Monkeys (and X-Ray Spex!), who lives in a dilapidated estate in rural Maryland, attempting to win a tense legal battle with a rival toy company. (18 minutes)

Secondly, a piece all the way back from 1993, but this New Yorker profile of Ricky Jay, one of the world’s greatest magicians, is an all-time great profile. It’s engrossing to hear Jay go on about methods of magic, of his avoidance of other magicians, of his practice methods—and this isn’t even getting into his obsession over a particular library of early magic ephemera. (60 minutes)

Bloomberg interviewed the designers of the Hamilton poster,
and they walk through all their previous designs. I love them all.

I am 100% always here for insider articles on the Unicode Consortium (the folks that govern emoji), and this Buzzfeed piece on “the fight over the future” of Unicode does not disappoint. It’s interesting to see the factions splitting between the goal of the Unicode (creating symbols for existing languages) and where they’ve found themselves now (managing a massive emoji keyboard that is far more popular than they ever thought).

As anyone who has texted someone on another device knows, emoji on one phone do not often match, much to our collective dismay. (I am a passionate defender over the Google “Neutral Face” over any variants & will wax poetic given any amount of time) Hannah Miller did a study about it, focusing on the “Grinning Face with Smiling Eyes” emoji (which, btw, the Microsoft one is TERRIFYING)

Etcetera: Literally my reason for existing tbh: The U.S. Has a Giant Cheese Surplus, and It’s Our Patriotic Duty to Help Eat It. Captain Cook's Endeavour is finally found 230 years after it disappeared! Pushing back in favor of Boaty McBoatface. The Fascinating Origin Story of Prince’s Iconic Symbol.

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emilyhummel.com | @hummeline