Friday Inspiration 537

bringing spaghetti into a baseball game, an accidental marathon, Fitz Cahall shares his favorite things

Who among us has not wondered, “Can my friends and I carry an entire spaghetti dinner into this Major League Baseball stadium in ziploc bags?” Thanks to Hannah sending me this video, I know the answer. (video)

• [Related: The story about this video in the Milwaukee Record.]

• [Also related: These people looked up the carry-in policies for every Major League Baseball stadium]

• [Also related: The New York Times wrote about all of this [GIFT LINK]

If you watched and loved the birding documentary Listers, boy do I have some good news for you: Owen and Quentin Reiser are working on another documentary project—this time, the pursuit of the rumored-to-be-extinct-but-maybe-not-extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker—and Audubon Magazine wrote a great piece about all of it.

I’m trying to wrap my head around this story of this 22-year-old woman training for her first half marathon, running the half marathon but taking a wrong turn and ending up on the full marathon course, and going ahead and finishing the full marathon in 3:30. (via the very excellent Like The Wind newsletter)

I have been following @artbutmakeitsports for a long time, and have read pretty much nothing about the guy who runs the account and his uncanny ability to see a photo from a sporting event and match it to a piece of fine art. So I was excited to see this interview with the man himself, LJ Rader, a guy with a regular job and way less art history education than you might think: “He’s only taken one art history course at Vanderbilt, but his platform is based on an almost mutant-like talent—when he launched @artbutmakeitsports on Twitter and Instagram in 2019, he discovered he has an incredible memory for fine art images. When he sees a sports photograph, he can recall, off the top of his head, a pose, or a style, or even just a figure or a form, from a painting or a sculpture. And then he posts and just lets the two images comment on each other.”

For episode 15 of the My Favorite Things podcast, It was an absolute joy to interview my old friend Fitz Cahall, who you may have heard of through his podcast, The Dirtbag Diaries, or his other podcast, Climbing Gold. We talked about Public Enemy’s Apocalypse 91: The Enemy Strikes Black album, A River Runs Through It, the sound of a dialup modem, The Gap by Ira Glass, and Winnie the Pooh in a conversation that covered about 35 years of his life, from being a kid to being a dad of two kids.

If you don’t think this quick video of this toddler and his dad on this bike is adorable, you would be disagreeing with approximately 5.6 million people who tapped the heart button on it on Instagram.

This was an increasingly fun read as I scrolled down: Leath Tonino on “17 Ways to Greet the First Wildflowers of Spring” (thanks, Hilary)

We are bringing these mugs back for a limited time, because they have a very specific target market, which is, as you can read on the mug, recovering alcoholics who really love coffee and also have a sense of humor about their past and present: