Open Thread: Jurassic Porg
Open Thread: Jurassic Porg
Choire's new job and a flying chicken nugget from the past
Choire Sicha is leaving the boring old NYT Styles Desk for the white-hot center of media action: newsletters. He’ll “help expand our newsletter portfolio alongside Sam Dolnick and Adam Pasick,” says the triple-bylined press release from Dean Baquet, Joe Kahn and Sam Sifton. All of this is in accordance with journalism’s famous Rule of Three: “it takes three New York Times editors to do anything.” Good luck, and hey: 📞☎️📱 know what I mean?
But it’s open thread day and we’re not here for media business news, we’re here for cute flying dinosaurs! Gizmodo’s Jake Buehler brings us a PeerJ paper about “a newly described species of pterosaur named Sinomacrops bondei, apparently evolution’s answer to the question, ’what if frog, but also bat, but also dragon?’”
Many later pterosaurs were terrifying, otherworldly, dinosaur-gobbling storks the size of giraffes, but anurognathids like Sinomacrops had the bearing and physique of a chicken nugget.
Scheduling Note: Tabs is off next week. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to take next week off as well, so you can tell your boss I said so. We can both return on Monday, April 26th, when we’re Dogecoin millionaires.
Happy Friday! What’s the best dinosaur? What should the Times newsletter strategy be? What are you doing this weekend? Subscribe if you don’t and let us all know in the 💬 zone.
What I'm doing this weekend is I have a book event tonight with Ijeoma Oluo: https://www.elliottbaybook.com/event/jess-zimmerman-ijeoma-oluo
I've had sort of a frustrating time with publicity on this book and I'm trying not to turn into my mother about it! Unfortunately I have already developed a one-sided enmity with another author whose similar book is wildly more popular and successful so odds of not turning into my mother are looking: bad.
Nothing funny happened this week at school. Here's an oldie:
I was explaining to my students that my son was having some trouble at school with fine motor skills and they didn't know what that meant so I said "Well, he's having trouble with handwriting and...(and here I blanked on a verb for "to cut with scissors")...his scissoring."
And the class exploded with laughter. These are seniors, AP Literature students, the brightest among their peers.
And instead of just powering through and googling what I had said to make them laugh later I made a mistake. I said,
"What's so funny?"
And they spent a few more minutes laughing and I just stood there and took it like you have to when you spend your life talking off the top of your head to teenagers and then I said "Seriously, guys, what did I say?"
And the nicest, sweetest, kindest girl who I've maybe EVER had in class made scissors with both of her index and middle fingers and held them up in the air and said,
"Mr. K, imagine two women are in bed together and they want to..."
And then, yes, she smashed the center of those scissors together. Over and over and over and over and over. To everyone's delight.
Luckily it happened in May and I only had to see the kids a few more times. But I will remember it forever. How did I not know what "scissoring" meant? I DON'T KNOW.