How can #5 be the best, you ask? Longreads picks a “top 5” posts each week, and #5 is typically something whimsical or offbeat. There are some real doozies here! such as…

• The Secret MVP of Sports? The Port-a-Potty Yes, a long read about portable restroom facilities.
• The Undoing of Joss Whedon Just another a Hollywood producer-rapist type, apparently and unfortunately. I could care less about Buffy, but I am a Firefly fan so this is disappointing. Hopefully we can separate the artist from the art in this case. Buffy and the female characters in Firefly could more than hold their own, as I recall.
• What Was the TED Talk? Was? Are they a thing of the past? There were some good ones, but overall I didn’t have the patience for them and thought the point of most of them could be summarized in a paragraph or two.
• I Lived the #VanLife. It Wasn’t Pretty. The author lived “the van life” for “a few days” and apparently wasn’t a fan.
• In the Court of the Liver King. I already covered this one recently, but worth mentioning again because…oh my…
• It’s 10 P.M. Do You Know Where Your Cat Is? Cats vs. birds. This article sounds like it is 100% on the side of the birds, but I have seen some debate on this in the scientific literature, with strong feelings on both sides.
• The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life. It might talk and act exactly like a sentient organism, they say, but it doesn’t actually know what it is doing. Well, none of us can truly ever know the mind of another apparently sentient organism, so if it behaves exactly the way a sentient organism would behave, it is a sentient organism for all practical purposes. We might decide at some point in the future that it is obvious AI has become sentient, and then try to trace backward to determine exactly when it happened. Could 2022 be that year? Maybe, probably not? But maybe it is not far away? This seems like an important story.
• The Weird, Analog Delight of Foley Sound Effects. Godzilla’s original roar was something like a cello in extreme slow motion, as I recall.
• The 50 Greatest Fictional Deaths of All Time. Yes, Sherlock Holmes was the first that came to my mind, and he makes the list even though as we all know he didn’t die (we all know that right? Hopefully I didn’t just spoil that for you.) The Wicked Witch of the West, of course. I just tweeted that at a colleague the other day who refused to come out of her house on a rainy day, so yes she comes in handy. Bonnie and Clyde? They died in real life, in the same way they died in the movie, right? But when it comes to “best scene of people machine gunned in a car”, I would nominate the toll booth scene from The Godfather, which did not make the list. There are several horror movie screamers on this list, which I am personally not into. And surely Yoda deserves a spot? Ahab? Patrick Swayze’s character in Point Break? I mean, Jesus! No seriously, what about Jesus?
• I Do Not Keep a Diary. Neither do I. Well, I did for awhile, but I called it a journal because diaries are for girls. Finally, I got over myself and started a blog, because exploring my inner thoughts about the outside world is more interesting than recounting the mostly uninteresting things that happen to me in daily life (I had Rice Krispies and an orange for breakfast this morning – are you bored yet?). And for the occasional interesting things that do happen to and around me, I can work them in.