Month: November 2025

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One of the most interesting sites on the internet belongs to this Amazon staffer

It’s called “Dirona Around The World.” Never heard of it? Not surprising. It’s just some guy’s blog. Except that the guy in question is James Hamilton, a senior Amazon engineer who until recently lived full-time on a yacht — specifically a Nordhavn 52. Dirona is the scientific name for the Alabaster Nudibranch, an invertebrate indigenous to Puget Sound, a name befitting a huge nerd. Hamilton spends a lot of his time — when he isn’t solving problems like the AWS outage that took down millions of global websites recently — travelling around and having adventures. According to the blog, he and his wife have crossed both the Pacific and Indian oceans once, and have crossed the Atlantic ocean three times. Their longest voyage (because of course he tracks everything) was 3,600 nautical miles (nautical miles are different from land miles because they take into account the curvature of the earth, in case you were wondering) and the journey took close to a month. The Hamiltons have also written a book called Cruising the Secret Coast, which is about sailing through all the various bays and inlets of British Columbia’s Inside Passage.

There’s an interactive map on the front of Hamilton’s website that tracks his recent journeys, and recent blog posts include a trip to the Darlington nuclear generating station in Ontario. James, who was born in Victoria B.C., worked for IBM before he joined Amazon in 2009. And what did he do before he worked for IBM? He was a car mechanic who specialized in repairing high-end automobiles like Ferraris, Maseratis, Alfa Romeos and Lamborghinis. Hamilton is often compared to Jim Gray, the database pioneer and Turing Award winner, who ironically disappeared while sailing his yacht Tenacious near the Farallon Islands off San Francisco and whose body was never found. For about a decade or so, Hamilton and his wife lived on board the Dirona, which was docked at least some of the time in a harbour in Seattle near Amazon headquarters, but spent most of the time travelling. He often gives talks on both data-center infrastructure and how to live your life at sea. He holds over 200 patents in more than 20 countries.

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Poet W.H. Auden’s lover was a sex worker who stole from him

A once in a century discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author’s home and was put on trial. Auden, a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unconventional arrangement with the man he affectionally called Hugerl in the posthumously published poem Glad. “Our life-paths crossed,” it reads, “At a moment when / You were in need of money / And I wanted sex”. But little was known about the life and full criminal history of Hugo Kurka until Auden scholar Helmut Neundlinger mentioned his name in an Austrian TV programme occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death in 2023. The next morning, Neundlinger received an email from a woman who had grown close to Kurka and his wife after they settled in the Austrian countryside in the 1990s and inherited their belongings after they died of cancer. (via The Guardian)

A 77-year-old cyclist survived for three days after a crash by drinking red wine

A French cyclist survived for three days after a horrendous 130-foot fall into a ravine, kept alive by the bottles of red wine he had in his shopping bag, police said. The 77-year-old missed a bend on his bike on his way home from the supermarket on a lonely road in the mountainous Cevennes region, careening down a rocky slope and into the ravine near Saint-Julien-des-Points. Unable to climb out, the man tried to shout every time a vehicle passed. But no one heard his cries. As the hours turned into days, he was sustained by the bottles of wine he was taking home to his caravan, rescuers said. Finally, passing roadworkers heard him yelling and spotted the twisted frame of his bicycle. A helicopter airlifted him to hospital, with rescue doctor calling his survival “a miracle … given the cold and the rain, with almost nothing to eat or drink” other than the wine. (via CBS News)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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She survived an encounter with the Dating Game serial killer

The second time I met Rodney Alcala was on March 23, 2013. We were inside one of the North Infirmary Command buildings on Rikers Island, two months after he’d been sentenced for raping and murdering Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover, both women in their early 20s and living in New York City, in the 1970s. He was trailed by a prison guard, his baggy dove-gray jumpsuit hung loosely around his bony frame. His once black hair had turned the color of steel wool, still in greasy ringlets streaming past his shoulders. He was so much shorter than I remembered. Glasses that had been round wires were now rectangular. As he stiffly shuffled toward me, I felt stage fright — then a surge of real fright when I realized he wasn’t handcuffed. The first time was in April 1969, on a wet day on St. Marks Place in the East Village. He introduced himself as Jon Burger; I was 14 years old and he was 25. Four-decades-plus later, I learned his real name when it flashed across a television screen beneath his face: “Rodney Alcala, The Dating Game Serial Killer, Sentenced to Death.”(via The Cut)

Japan’s new prime minister is an Iron Maiden fan and former heavy metal drummer

Speaking on Japanese radio station Tokyo FM’s “BABYMETAL” podcast in August, Sanae Takaichi confirmed a longtime affinity for the iconic British heavy metal band Iron Maiden, but said her favorite artist was Japanese drummer Yoshiki, of the X JAPAN rock band from Chiba. Yoshiki is one of the founding members of the group, which has been around since the early 1980s, and Takaichi said she admired both his drumming and his piano playing, which she called “absolutely wonderful — technically brilliant and beautiful.” She also told Tokyo FM that she still listens to the heavy metal band Iron Maiden regularly. Takaichi’s passion for guitar-driven loud music doesn’t stop at fandom. She rocks. Since her days as a student she’s played both the drums and guitar, and says it’s that parallel that makes her such a fan of Yoshiki. (via CBS News)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “She survived an encounter with the Dating Game serial killer”