Running Commentary 5/6/2025

Hello,

This coming Sunday is Mother’s Day in the US, so if you’ve lost track of that, there’s your reminder. This past Sunday was May the 4th, which came with some new Star Wars animation about Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane; I haven’t seen these yet, and once I do I intend to put out a quick review as a main site post. As always, I’ll link it in the next RC after it’s published.

Also, it was announced that we'll have more BattleBots on their YouTube channel this Thursday.

Anyway...

Watching...

Andor

• Much of the fourth episode is focused on Syril Karn, who we see operating as a double agent on behalf of Meero, infiltrating the Ghorman Front. I suppose he knows little about what the Empire ultimately plans for Ghorman; even most of the ISB doesn’t know what Meero’s really up to. I’m curious to see where Karn goes as a character this season. The feel-good move would be to have him join the Rebellion. He’s not a rebellious person; he’s very law-and-justice focused, but he could come to realize that the Empire’s laws are whim-based and capricious. I could see him turn against them over some corrupt thing he witnesses. Of course, one of the great tragedies of the Empire is the way it uses basically decent people towards its ends, so I could also see Karn get a bad end. We’ll just have to see.
• We know that Season 2 of Andor was originally going to be several seasons before Gilroy, et al, realized they’d be making Andor for the rest of the lives if they did that. Nothing’s felt like it was something bigger that got compressed until this episode: the scene of Cassian booking a flight to Ghorman was pretty detailed and involved for no apparent reason, as he gets there without incident. Maybe something from this will show up later, but for now I have the feeling that this was a remnant of something bigger in an early draft.
• Cassian and Bix taking out the Imperial interrogation facility felt like another thing that originally would have been a larger plotline that got cut down to just the few scenes.
• I’m not entirely sure where all this with Wilmon and Saw is going.
• Overall the nascent Rebellion needs to up its bug game. Way too many listening devices are getting left unattended where they can be found.
• Luthen’s people talk a lot about how the Ghorman Front isn’t really up to the task of fighting the Empire, and it seems like they aren’t really, but the lack of trust Vel and Cinta placed in them to be able to do anything but load crates was pretty striking here, and I think pretty directly led to Cinta’s death. I wonder if they’re setting up a theme that the Rebellion, once it’s publicly announced, will be more all-in-together than what was seen here.
• I found the art gallery scene pretty tense and well-played but I must say that the whole bugging-the-sculpture storyline to have been raised and dropped pretty quickly without much impact to the rest of the show.
• No K-2SO, yet, halfway into the show. Hopefully he doesn’t only show up at the end.

Bird of the Week

I’ve never been particularly happy with my picture of the northern flicker, which is a pity, since it is a bird I see often and wanted to capture really well. I’ve re-drawn it from my original line-art this past week. I think it looks better. Here is my write-up from 2023, edited a bit and re-formatted with better citations:

This week, it's time for another woodpecker. I've tended to avoid woodpeckers in this space since they're mostly quite similar to one another: they peck at wood, they eat insects, and they don't cushion their brains with their tongues, no matter what you may have read saying that they do. They're interesting enough as a type of bird, but you quickly get a sense that once you've seen one woodpecker, you've seen them all. But that's not entirely true; there are a few oddities among the woodpeckers that stand out, one way or another, from the rest. For instance, this week's bird, the Northern Flicker.

The northern flicker is one of the largest woodpeckers in North America; in Michigan, it is second only to the pileated woodpecker in size. It has an extensive range, stretching from Canada in the north to Central America and the Caribbean in the south. This is one of the few woodpecker species known to migrate; birds in the U.S. and further south tend to stay put all year, but Canadian flickers only stay for the summer, while those in central Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico only stay for the winter. Wherever they're found, they're an important part of the ecosystem, as the holes they bore in the sides of dead trees to nest in later serve as homes to other creatures. This makes them what ecologists call a "keystone species", one that provides environmental modification that makes a habitat more hospitable.

Nesting for northern flickers is a subject of much study. In a reversal of the expected, usual pattern of woodpecker nesting, female flickers will mate with multiple males in a breeding season,¹ and males will do more work tending to the nest than females will.² But, most extraordinarily, excavation of the nest cavity is nearly the only time these woodpeckers will actually peck wood. Rather than finding their favored insect meals under the bark of trees, flickers are characterized by their habit of probing for insects in the ground. They peck into the earth like a woodpecker with the mind of a chicken.³

Northern flickers vary across their range. There are several subspecies, but generally they can be categorized as either red-shafted or yellow-shafted. While these birds are generally gray and tan with black accents, their wings have bright color in the shafts and undersides of their flight feathers. This color is either bright yellow (as I've drawn here) or pale poppy-red. This unexpected pop of color make the bird fairly easy to identify in flight if you're familiar with them. But relatively few non-birders are. You might remember that I mentioned the northern flicker back in my "Among the Birds of the Mitten":

There is a recurring motif in the story of my life wherein people ask me to identify a northern flicker.

I think this is because the flicker sits in an awkward spot between common and uncommon birds. They aren’t a bird that everyone grows up knowing, like blue jays or robins or cardinals, but they also aren’t a bird you’ve got to go out into the wilderness or get lucky to catch during migration, either. Most people in their range will see flickers, but most of those won’t know what they’re looking at. So they wind up asking me and others like me about this bird, in particular, quite often.

To science, the northern flicker is Colaptes auratus, or the "gilded chiseler".⁴ Red-shafted northern flickers were previously considered a distinct species, called Colaptes cafer; this name was apparently given in error after the Bay of Good Hope, on the coast of British Columbia (where a red-shafted flicker was found) was confused with the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa (where red-shafted flickers are very much not found). "Kafir", meaning "non-believer" in Arabic, was a term applied by Muslim slavers to black Africans who did not follow Islam,⁴ and the word was later adopted into Afrikaans as a highly pejorative term for native South Africans. Calling a person that would get you in a lot of trouble today, but many animals from South Africa (or thought to be) still have some form of the term in their scientific name.

Curation Links

A history of… hair products | by Paul Lenz, Histories

People have been doing something or another to their hair pretty much forever. We have evidence of the ancient Egyptians applying oil and grease to their hair for styling purposes, and we’ve had many more things to put in our hair since.

Bee review: I outsourced my memory to AI and all I got was fanfiction | Victoria Song, The Verge

Product review of a little gadget worn on the wrist, intended to function as your very own mechanical Will Kellogg, remembering your every voiced thought and conversation and recalling them for you at the end of the day. Powered by generative AI, the “Bee” is both oddly impressive and oddly incompetent, almost, but not quite, delivering on its promises. But even if it did work, would you want it to?

What is Classical Music? | Matthew Aucoin, The Atlantic

“Rather than defend the “classical” in classical music, I want to champion a particular creative process. What links Hildegard von Bingen and Kaija Saariaho, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Benjamin, is not a specific sound or aesthetic but a shared technology of transmission. At its core, classical music isn’t “classical.” It is written music.”

Bexar Scrip No. 2692 | O. Henry

[FICTION] A western story, though not one about cowboys or outlaws, one of the earliest written by the famed short story writer O. Henry, pen name of William S. Porter, who had worked at the Texas General Land Office as a draftsman before taking up writing.

See the full archive of curations on Notion