Hello,
David Lynch, one of the last great smokers, died this week aged 78, ironically after being evacuated from the Californian wildfires. The master of weird had a paradoxical nature to him, as both a pretty chilled practitioner of Transcendental Meditation and the creator of some truly unnerving cinema.
I first really heard of him when working with these two musicians as demolition men who both sort of grimaced as they talked about Eraserhead and their broad consensus was it’s a great film but they’d be loath to recommend it. It was only during the pandemic when I made a big list of films to fill my weekends with, that I watched it along with Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet.
Needless to say it was an unsettling afternoon but I became fascinated with the mind that concocted these dreamy/nightmarish films. There seemed to be a disconnect between the kindly old man with a nasally voice describing daydreams or sitting in his workshop as if he was painting watercolours and the incredibly dark creations he produced. I suppose it comes with the territory if you embrace your subconscious and then try to paint it, rather than pretending it’s not there.
Lynch once said “human beings are like detectives, we want to know what’s going on in the world” and it’s very much in that spirit that I write to you on a weekly basis. Now all we have to do is cross our fingers and home there are no horrific posthumous accusations.
It was all a dream,
Hugo
Chief Weirdness Officer
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
Apple suspends its error-strewn AI-generated new summaries 🍏 - needless to say there has been a lot of anger from journalists about the inaccurate headlines as they’ve already been battling against a lack of trust in the media. They’ve now withdrawn the feature and promised not to release it until there is zero risk of hallucination.
Bloodletting makes a return on the island of Jersey 🩸 - sometimes the old ways are the best ways and unfortunately this appears to be the best way to reduce the volumes of toxic PFAS in the blood of some residents. These have ended up in drink water supplies thanks to the use of firefighting foam which went on for several decades before the alarm was raised.
Pokémon cards continue to rise in popularity 🫵 - a few years 1-2 billion were sold per year and now we’re up to 12 billion cards in 2024. I’m fascinated as to whether these numbers are driven by millennials who haven’t grown up (but I’m weirdly jealous off, they must have a shiny Charizard by now) or if children still like trading cards. I hope the latter, it’s quite reassuring to think parents today are still having to shell out several quid for some bits of cardboard in a silvery wrapper.
Japan experienced a 47% rise in tourists last year 📈 - thanks in part to a weak Yen the country has experienced a boom in visitors. This has resulted in a much needed cash injection but inevitably, the locals are ticked off and want tourist taxes to upgrade infrastructure. Japan still has far fewer tourists per capita than places like France, Italy and Spain.
Sweden joins the burying nuclear waste party ☢️ - following in the footsteps of Finland (who is quite close to actually storing some waste) and the UK (who is seriously giving it some thought), Sweden is planning to build an underground facility to store spent nuclear reactors. Currently most countries just put them in cooling ponds.
Advertisements for jobs in the UK fall to pre-pandemic levels 📉 - the number of active job postings in December 2024 was 1.41 million, which was almost exactly the same level as in 2019. Particularly hard hit recently have been roles in IT and accounting, whereas it’s a good time to be a childminder (up 106%) or an optometrist (up 89%). The question is how much these jobs will recover or if they’ll just be given to the robots now.
Asda turnaround gets underway after a disappointing festive season 🛒 - the supermarket was bought by private equity firm TDR for £6.8bn four years ago at the top of the market. Since then inflation has hit and Asda’s market share has dropped from 14.8% to 12.5%. TDR holds vast swathes of the UK’s retail landscape but much is at stake with Asda, so they’ve started making some big replacements in the executive team in an attempt to shake things up.
North Korea are all in on crypto 🇰🇵 - the world’s most antisocial country has been linked to crypto heists worth $650million including $235million being stolen from a Indian exchange. The lack of traceability is clearly appealing but the majority of attacks require an unsuspecting employee at a crypto firm to click on a dodgy link, either through appealing job offers or impersonations.
Walgreens rollout of smart doors on fridges turns into a fiasco🥤 - I’ve been saying for years that cleverer fridge doors are the future. Walgreens has clearly listened but it ended in disaster as the fridge doors regularly flickered, crashed, showed the wrong items or spontaneously burst into flames. A legal battle then ensued between Walgreens and Cooler Screens (who made the dodgy hardware), in the midst of which Cooler Screens cut data feeds to a number of fridges, resulting in Walgreens taking out a restraining order.
People don’t seem to mind about Shein’s approach to employment 👕 - despite a recent investigation by the BBC into worker’s conditions and plenty of concern about the environmental impact of their products, demand does not seem to be slowing down as it makes tens of millions of pounds in the UK. There is of course always some onus on buyers to choose carefully which companies they support but some would say the government should be looking more closely at enforcing supply chain laws.
Quote of the week
“This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.” - David Lynch