The Week: May 2, 2014

This week in Seattle has been positively gorgeous. We’re having a spring heatwave, which happens approximately never. It’s been amazing and also really confusing, because I keep grabbing a cardigan when I leave the house, even though there’s no way I could need it (sometimes I wear the cardigan anyway, though, just to … prove a point?)

Apparently the sun will vanish for the weekend, and according to the weather report, we probably won’t see it for a few weeks. But honestly, I feel like the last few days might hold me over until summer. Almost.

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Need to get the creative juices stirring? Researchers suggest going for a walk.

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Environmental activist and entrepreneur Rob Greenfield went a year without showering. (It’s not as gross as you’d think. Not at all. It helps that Greenfield is kind of a dish.)

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This is positively delightful – filmmaker Simon Smith took video of London from 1914, and spliced it with contemporary footage of the city. I squealed when a car from 1914 looked like it might hit a modern-day pedestrian.

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[To heckler] “Hey, I don’t come down to where you work and expose the bureaucratic machine in which you’re embedded as the dehumanizing monolith it is.” (Courtesy of Kafka’s Joke Book)

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Forgive me, but this is so cute, I must use all-caps: THIS IS A VIDEO OF A HAMSTER EATING A TINY BURRITO AND IT IS GREAT.

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An interesting Quora thread on why the desire to travel internationally is so low for Americans (note: I don’t actually agree with the question’s assumption – I think that a lot of us would love to see more of the world – it’s just not that feasible).

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The cast for Star Wars VII was recently announced, along with the unfortunate revelation that there are virtually no women in the movie. Sigh. Another sci-fi sausage fest it is, I guess.

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Mean Girls just turned 10 (wait, what? I think Rand and I went to see that in the theater together. Dear god). Richard Brody on why the film is a classic.

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Is it Math or Maths? An American linguist in England attempts to tackle the question.

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Bob Hoskins died this week. I remember finding his tough-guy characters and American accent so convincing, I was shocked when I first learned he was English.

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That’s it for me this week, folks. If you’ve got sun in your corner of the world, go out and enjoy it.