Jenny Diski, one of the few people left worth reading, died this morning. Diski, whose cancer diary for the London Review of Books became the basis for her recently published memoir In Gratitude, was 68. You can read some of her LRB stuff here, and you are warmly advised to do so.

Why do people still love “Friends”? I have a theory: People are stupid and lazy and easily satisfied, and if you give them something that makes them feel like they are being amused without having to work very hard they will be infinitely contented. A nice thing about this theory is it also helps to explain the inexplicable sense of affection we are told young people have for the show, young people being even stupider than the general population which, as we have established, is rather stupid indeed. So there you have it: People like “Friends” because people are stupid. It’s no big mystery, but I’m glad we got a chance to clear it up if you were troubled by the question. Anyway, Ross from Friends is a pretty good name for an act. Enjoy. [Via]

“It was born in Philadelphia but is as much a part of New York’s aural landscape as taxi horns, ‘that heavenly coffee’ and ‘watch the closing doors.’ An annual herald of summer for more than half a century, it is exquisitely Pavlovian, triggering salivation or shrieking — sometimes both at once. It is the textbook embodiment of an earworm: once heard, never forgotten. It is the Mister Softee jingle, which for generations has sprung from ice cream trucks throughout the metropolitan area and beyond after first springing from the mind of Les Waas, a Philadelphia adman who died on April 19 at 94.”
 — This is very sad news for everyone who is unable to imagine summer without this tune going through their heads. Margalit Fox’s Times obituary offers a few of the song’s words, but neglects to acknowledge the alternate lyrics we revealed here three years ago:

I am the fucking ice cream man, the man who sells the fucking ice cream
I am the fucking ice cream man, I sell you fucking ice cream
You want some fucking ice cream? Well, I’ll tell you what to do
Come by my fucking ice cream truck, I’ll sell that shit to you
I am the fucking ice cream man, the man who sells the fucking ice cream
I am the fucking ice cream man, I sell you fucking ice cream
Bitch shit cock piss dick ass balls, fucking ice cream

Whichever version you prefer let’s all have a moment to reflect on the passing of the jingle’s creator. A silent moment, because that song is going to be in my head all day now.

★★★ One large piece of trash, then another, blew slowly by outside the 27th-floor window. Again the morning was cloudy and grimy-looking; this time it turned near clear by midday. Striking Verizon workers blew whistles, shrill on the breeze. The vestibule outside the fancy bakery had been taken down for the season. The temperature map on the phone was full of violently irreconcilable numbers, but nothing right outdoors seemed ominous. Things finally darkened, and headlights gleamed on the wet avenue. Then, without fuss, things brightened again. The cycle repeated, a little darker in the dark part, yielding to full light, and that was the extent of it all.

This morning, as I was watching the official trailer for Snowden, I laughed. I cackled at Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s weirdly froggy voice, I loled at the trope of the smart kid finishing a Really Hard Test In A Fraction Of The Allotted Time (yes I’m sure it actually happened! Still a trope!), and I guffawed at Nicolas Cage saying “internet haystack.” But what I’m here to talk about is the Rubik’s Cube. Snowden is a known Rubik’s Cube do-er, carrier — I don’t know if “enthusiast” means anything here because I think literally anyone who knows How To Rubik’s Cube immediately qualifies as an enthusiast, but sure — enthusiast. He told Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald that they would be able to spot him in that fateful hotel lobby in Hong Kong because he’d be holding one. Sure enough, Glenn Greenwald wrote in his book, “The first thing I saw was the unsolved Rubik’s Cube, twirling in the man’s left hand.”

But in this movie trailer, JGL-as-Snowden uses the Cube as a hiding place for his little microchip with all the data about the NSA program in order to secret it out of the office. IRL Snowden just used a thumb drive like a normal. The Rubik’s Cube, however (or do we just say Rubik’s Cube? Does it take the article?), has become a total TV-and-movie trope for “quietly smart nerd who can A-Beautiful-Mind his way through complex mental rotation tasks.” And this movie trailer (and presumably also the movie) takes that trope and really runs with it.

I am not a Rubik’s Cube enthusiast, and I have never gotten past the frustration of just wanting to peel off the stickers and move them around so it looked like I had solved it. I’m sure it’s genuinely hard! And being good at it means your brain is good at mentally rotating cubes through planes! I just love keeping track of scenes in movies where someone (usually a dude) quietly solves a Rubik’s Cube as if it were the big math problem from Good Will Hunting. The dopiest example of this is Will Smith’s character solving the cube in Pursuit of Happyness, thereby proving his fitness to be a stock broker. But there are certainly others. This was going to be a listicle, but then I found a nice Dutch man who smartly jumped on the opportunity to buy the domain rubikscubesinmovies.com; he did exactly what you’d think. Please contribute to this wonderful project! I will be tweeting at him shortly. Please don’t send me links to the people solving Rubik’s Cubes blindfolded; I’ve seen those too.

“Mr. Cohen said he believed dogs might look anxious in the hugging photos because they didn’t like having their pictures taken, or because a person was trying to pose them or get their attention.”
 — Good news for all you dog-hugging monsters out there: Someone is ready to rationalize your abusive behavior.

If you’re going to play around in a virtual environment, you may as well go to a depraved sex den where a master whips a boy and forces him to serve someone. Alas, something weird happened when I entered the dungeon: It kept pulling to the right. It was like trying to eat a plate of fries when the waitress was steadily moving it inches away from me. To look “straight ahead” in the scene, I had to keep my head cocked over my right shoulder — incredibly uncomfortable considering all the other strenuous activity I was engaging in.

Virtual reality porn is here! How soon till someone is caught watching one of these things in an Uber?

The two albums that I have listened to more than any other this year are Third Coast Percussion’s album of Steve Reich pieces and The Field’s The Follower. Here’s a remix from the latter, done by the terrific Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Enjoy.

“Scarface is dead. No, not the character from the 1983 movie starring Al Pacino. This Scarface was the real deal — a 25-year-old Yellowstone National Park grizzly bear who received his nickname from the extensive scarring on the right side of his head. Scarface the bear and Scarface the movie character do have one other thing in common besides their name, though: they both died of gunshot wounds.”

Look, a machine that actually floats above the surface of the earth! Everyone else shut the fuck up.