Friday Inspiration 511

NOTE: I will not be sending out a Black Friday email about all the merch in my DFTBA store, but I put a bunch of images and links to mugs, t-shirts, posters, and signed books at the end of this email (including some new stuff!), so scroll to the end if you're starting to do some holiday shopping.

Sometimes this space gets filled by a video of a person skiing some insanely dangerous line in the mountains or a person taking on some other difficult challenge in nature, but sometimes you get a 3-minute video titled “Some Interesting Apples,” which is actually about interesting apples. Some of them, anyway. (video)

I love The Pudding, and I can’t resist a story about someone dreaming up and attempting an adventure just for the hell of it, so of course I clicked on this story about Russell Samora deciding to walk across Massachusettsafter a winter of rehabbing his achilles tendon (and reading books about people who walked or hiked a long ways). What makes it particularly Pudding-esque, I think, is the option to read the long-form essay with illustrations, or to choose the TLDR version, which is mostly images from his walk.

In the future, if anyone ever tells me they would like to write a book someday, I will be certain to enthusiastically tell them Martin Brodsky’s story, in which he:

started a Substack
wrote essays on that Substack fairly regularly for three years in the time when he wasn’t working his day job + being a dad to two kids
compiled said essays into a book
self-published the book and titled it “Allow Me To Waste Your Time”
(He also mailed me a copy of the book (because I’m one of his paid Substack subscribers), and when I opened the envelope and saw the title, thought, “LOL, bullshit, this will NOT be a waste of my time.”)

I am finally, begrudgingly, admitting that I cannot just run and bike and hike and ski, and that I need to start strength training a couple days a week, despite the fact that it will probably cost a little bit of money and also, as I have heard, mostly takes place indoors. So I have a browser tab open for the gym in our neighborhood that everyone I know goes to, and I am also clicking around the Precision Fuel and Hydration website for information on strength training for endurance athletes, since the stuff PFH puts out usually aligns with my fitness goals—like this piece, How to start strength training for endurance, which seems extremely reasonable. (Reminder: if you click on that link and buy anything from the PFH website, it will apply 15% off your first purchase)

I used to read Dave Barry’s column when it was printed on newspaper that was delivered to my parents’ house in the 1980s and 90s, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, and I saw that he started a Substack a while back but I intentionally didn’t click on it because I wanted to preserve the Dave Barry of my childhood as he was. So: Thanks to Emily for sending me this Dave Barry piece about the exploding whale of Florence, Oregon, in 1970, which, as I learned in this story, will soon be the subject of a short documentary, and even though it’s been 55 years, I think it will be quite relevant to our current times.

About four years ago, I was thinking of starting a podcast in which I would interview people about their favorite art—because this is what I often end up talking to friends about: Books, movies, shows, music, visual art, et cetera. And also because most of the creative work I put out in the world involves me sitting at a desk by myself and making things, so I thought, you know, maybe it would be good to talk to other people every once in a while. So, about three years ago, I did the first of these interviews, and never put it out—long story short, I was trying to add music and make it all fancy. Then at some point last summer, I was listening to the Some Work, All Play podcast and realized that David and Megan Roche don’t do fancy shit—they just record a conversation and upload it, and they have a bajillion listeners. So I figured I’d just do that. I have now recorded six podcast interviews, and published three of them. It’s called “My Favorite Things,” and all the episodes are here on Substack, or here on Apple Podcasts, or here on Spotify, or here on YouTube. I’m scheduling an episode every two weeks for now.

Speaking of creative ventures that don’t result in any income and actually cost time and money, please enjoy this masterful tweet-length joke.

It was a baseball stadium, then a football (soccer) stadium, then an abandoned stadium, and now it’s a community garden—basically a huge set of concrete terraces full of container plants.

Finally, some new designs in my DFTBA shop that might make for fun gifts for someone on your list (here's a link to the whole collection):

We only printed 100 of the Grand Canyon Groovers calendars for 2026, and they're a little smaller dimensions (8.5 inches by 5.5 inches), so you don't have to take up a huge chunk of wall space with them:

And I designed a Running Calendar for 2026! Same deal—only 100 printed, 8.5 inches by 5.5 inches:

Also a new design that I thought would be irrelevant this year but apparently they're shooting a season 4 of Ted Lasso (!), so here's a Ted Lasso x Punisher mug:

This was requested by the person I married who owns a 2005 Subaru Outback that she bought for $5000 in 2012, because she thought there should be an "Old-Ass Subaru Club" mug: