PJH Studios

Category: Pop Culture

Popular culture, culture that seems to spread beyond more than three people

  • My 2024 best of list

    Originally posted to Instagram

    Now that we are in the final days of the year, here are 🎵a few of my favorite things 🎶

    (TV, movies, music are all from this year. The book list are my favorites that I read this year, but may have come out earlier)

    TV

    • Shrinking
    • Penguin
    • Arcane
    • Shogun
    • Slow Horses
    • Abbott Elementary
    • Geek Girl
    • Las Azules
    • Interior Chinatown
    • Fallout

    Books

    • Adam Higginbotham – Midnight in Chernobyl
    • Kathryn Schultz – Lost & Found
    • Scott Carson – Lost Man’s Lane
    • Matt Dinniman – Dungeon Crawler Carl series
    • Tananarive Due – The Reformatory
    • Travis Baldtree – Legends & Lattes
    • Adrian Tchaikovsky – Children of Time
    • Rick Remender – The Sacrificers vol 1
    • Matthew Desmond – Evicted
    • Patrick Horvath – Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees

    Movies

    • Mads
    • The Last Stop in Yuma County
    • Wild Robot
    • My Old Ass
    • Caddo Lake
    • Rebel Ridge
    • Inside Out 2
    • Hundreds of Beavers
    • Late Night with the Devil
    • Self Reliance

    Music

    • Etran De L’Air – 100% Saharan Guitar
    • Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed
    • Glass Animals – I Love You So F Much
    • Cassandra Jenkins, My Light, My Destroyer
    • Runnners – Starsdust
    • Rosali – Bite Down
    • Zach Bryan – The Great American Bar Scene
    • Kelly Lee Owens – Dreamstate
    • Ghost Funk Orchestra – A Trip to the Moon
    • Dehd – Poetry
    • Pearl Jam – Dark Matter
    • Phosphorescent – ‘Revelator’
    • Itasca – Imitation of War

  • Dyatlov Pass incident

    In 1959, nine experienced Russian skiers died under mysterious circumstances, referred to as the Dyatlov Pass incident. Bodies found in different locations with varying amounts of clothing and an array of injuries. The facts made for ripe speculation: stumbling on a secret government project, a sadistic murderer, American spies, and the supernatural.

    In 2021, Douglas Preston covered the history of the investigations, and modern science may have solved it. The likeliest culprit? An Avalanche.

  • Texas blade shop owner refuses to add Nazi symbol to knife

    Texas blade shop owner refuses to add Nazi symbol to knife.

    What stands out about this incident:

    • how emphatic on what he would not do “I won’t re-Nazify shit.”
    • offered the woman an out to “add a modern German forestry seal… de-Nazify shit.”
    • how nonchalant the woman was with her request

    The shop, https://www.thebladebartx.com/, is located in Edom, TX, and one of the owners, Jonathan Sibley, competed on Forged in Fire.

  • The Wiki Game

    A fun way to explore Wikipedia: The Wiki Game. Click article links to navigate from one article to another. It’s timed and scored like golf.

  • Red envelopes for Lunar New Year

    Here’s some good background on those red envelopes, Hongbao, shared on Lunar New Year

    The modern concept of hongbao emerged in early 20th-century China. Elders would give money wrapped in red paper to children during the Lunar New Year as a talisman against evil spirits, known as sui (祟).

    But the gift giving traditions go back to about 200 BCE, way before Santa flew across the world.

  • Do dogs watch TV? Yes, but…

    From Sian Cain in The Guardian, You’ve always wondered, here’s the answer: do dogs actually watch TV?

    “We watch TV for enjoyment, for emotional realism, for whatever personal preferences we have,” Mowat says. “I think dogs watch TV because they’re checking if it is real.

    “There’s a reason why dogs go over and sniff the butts of the animals on the screen – they’re looking for the realism and wondering whether it’s worth paying attention to.”

    Get your dog a Letterboxd account.

  • Quantifying baseball caps in Justin Bieber videos

    Craig Robertson of Flip Flop Fly Ball, noticed something interesting in Justin Bieber music videos–the Biebs wore different baseball caps in different videos. Craig meticulously watched the videos, took notes and made an information visualization of his findings of baseball caps in Justin Bieber videos. Screenshots included!

    Interesting: 20% of MLB teams (that’s 6 teams) are featured in the videos. Craig notes he didn’t include shorter, promotional trailer videos in his sample. The numbers would increase quite a bit if he had.

  • Jimmy Fallon and Jeremy Lin

    “Bank this off the back booooooaarrrrd”

    I love this. Being a Pearl Jam fan, any reference to the band in pop culture is amusing. Jimmy Fallon takes the tune of Jeremy, changes the lyrics to reference Knicks star Jeremy Lin, complete with Eddie Vedder’s Jeremy video look and spooky lighting and does a good job.

  • I’ll see your truth and raise you satire

    Too often, we’re sensitive to truth and doing the right thing, or in the case of the New York Times, forget our purpose.

    I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

    Vanity Fair’s Juli Weiner eloquently, in her best Jonathan Swift form, states, “no shit”.

    …we here at V.F. are looking for reader input on whether and whenVanity Fair should spell “words” correctly in the stories we publish.

  • Keep calm and rock out

    keep calm and rock out post