🎵 Music of the Week: W32, 2018
Say hello to Car Seat Headrest:
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🤬 SWAG is no longer stuff we all get
I frequently hear people talking about swag. I’ll see a Reddit post titled “Check out all this free swag company X sent me!” or I’ll hear a podcaster say, “Head to our podcast store to purchase our swag!” These statements bother me because they demonstrate that the person speaking or writing does not understand what the word ‘swag’ means.
SWAG is an acronym which stands for Stuff We All Get. I don’t know where the word originated, but I first heard it used when the company I worked for purchased a bunch of t-shirts to hand out to every employee in the company. In that case, we were truly receiving swag. It was stuff that everyone in the company got.
Nowadays, people not only refer to anything they got for free as swag, they even refer to products they purchased as swag. Clearly, if you had to purchase a product, that product is not something we all get. Only you get it because you paid for it. That’s not swag.
/rant
Further reading: What does ‘swag’ mean? [Merriam-Webster]
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🖼️ Cutting it close
This morning I wondered whether I was getting close to hitting the monthly Comcast bandwidth limit. Glad I checked.
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🎵 I Thought You Didn’t Even Like Leaving
This album, released in 2016, comes from the band Prince Daddy & the Hyena. I don’t have anything particular to say about this album other than I like it. Track 3 is my favorite.
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? TIL heat waves kill more than all other natural disasters
When one thinks of natural disasters, events such as flooding, fires, and hurricanes come to mind. Few will include heat waves in that list, but they are in fact natural disasters. What is even more surprising is learning that heat waves kill more Americans every year than all other natural disaster combined.
The combined number of Americans killed by earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, tornados, avalanches/land slides, sink holes, volcanoes, tsunamis, blizzards, lightning, and hailstorms totals around 200 to 300 people every year. The total number of deaths from heat waves totals around 1,500 people every year. Most of the heat related deaths occur in areas which are not accustomed to regularly experiencing heat. Cities such as Chicago are known more for experiencing frigid cold wind rather than sweltering hot afternoons. These locations do not have air conditioning installed in all buildings like you would find in other locations like Arizona or Texas. Because of these conditions, the poor, the elderly, and the sick all become vulnerable to overheating.
Currently, heat death statistics are not captured in a way that makes it possible to accurately chart heat related deaths over time. However, given that we live in a warming world it is quite possible that Americans will see heat deaths increase over the coming decades.
Most Deadly of the Natural Disasters: The Heat Wave [New York Times, 2002]
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