The synopisis: During the Covid pandemic, New York City created an Open Street on 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights and Corona, Queens — which was one of the city’s pandemic epicenter, where thousands died. The Open Street quickly became a lifeline to residents desperate to exercise or socialize in a socially responsible way. But even as the pandemic faded, residents quickly realized that the 34th Avenue Open Street had become an essential amenity in a neighborhood with among the lowest amount of park space per-capita.

Quickly, neighborhood activists rallied and got the administration of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio to commit to a full buildout of the Open Street into its current configuration: Paseo Park, which, as its name suggests, is a 1.5-mile long promenade for cycling, strolling and just connecting with neighbors.

"You have nothing to lose but your sandboxes!"

Didn't know about this bit of history:

veteran U.S. activist S. Brian Willson, who lost both legs in 1987 after being run over by a Navy ammunition train while protesting the shipment of arms to the Contras, and whom the Ronald Reagan administration once labeled a “domestic terrorist.”

2 years before "tank man", is so fucking propagandized

Jules Reidy makes song cycles which abstractly deal with devotional love, transcendence, and death of the self. They use materials such as guitars, voice, percussion and found sounds, deconstructing and augmenting them through non-standard tuning systems, polyrhythmic structures, electronic processing and spatialisation. They aim to express and invoke states of uncanniness, dissociation, dys/euphoria, imagination, and void.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/sheik

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=chic%2C+sheik&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

e: found some more solid evidence of the 20s crossover

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a10095/the-history-of-chic/

1925: During the height of the jazz age in America, being chic was all the rage in fashion circles. Anita Loos's novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (originally published as a series of essays in Harper's BAZAAR) follows blonde Lorelei Lee as she documents her life, diary-style, with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes retained. She writes, "the French use the word 'sheik' for everything, while we only seem to use it for gentlemen when they seem to resemble Rudolf Valentino." (Rudolf Valentino was an Italian-American actor who appeared in the film The Sheik.)

https://thefashionandstyleofthetwenties.weebly.com/flappers-and-sheiks.html

Sheiks were the fashionable young men. They wore suits, fedoras, and large raccoon coats. Their hair was slicked back and their ties were fun and trendy. At first though that wasn't quite true. In the early twenties, suits became more fitted, especially around the waist and many men wore knickers. Knickers were short pants that were gathered at the knee. As time passed however, suits eventually became sleeker and more fashionable into what is seen in the picture to the left. Now they were ready to go dancing with a few flappers.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/08/13/uss-abraham-lincoln-deaths-brawl/

According to U.S. Central Command, however, "These reports are false."

"As we have continuously seen, Iran continues to spread lies and false information," Emma Thompson, Central Command spokesperson, said in an email to Snopes.

We have not rated this claim because we don't have additional details about this rumor. Iranian media included very little concrete information, including the date of the alleged incident, making it more difficult to independently disprove the claim.

Still, there's no evidence that Central Command's statement is incorrect. Given reported communication between those aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and their families — and heightened media scrutiny — it seems unlikely that the military could hide the deaths of seven service members due to a knife brawl.

I wasn't expecting much from SNW final season, but this episode just does some stuff that seemed very uncharacteristic for Star Trek in my recollection (I've not watch TOS, so maybe there's something similar in there). Anyone else seen it and had weird vibes about it?

Trying to avoid spoilers, but will probably get into spoilers in the comments if anyone else has seen it too. About to restart/watch DS9 with my partner (trying to get them into it), so I might not reply for a bit).

sometimes the world of sports and world events just align in such a way that's almost surreal