{"id":274800,"date":"2025-06-16T08:54:06","date_gmt":"2025-06-16T13:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=274800"},"modified":"2025-06-16T08:54:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T13:54:13","slug":"you-can-tell-war-is-imminent-by-the-pentagons-pizza-orders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2025\/06\/16\/you-can-tell-war-is-imminent-by-the-pentagons-pizza-orders\/","title":{"rendered":"You can tell war is imminent by the Pentagon’s pizza orders"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Futurism<\/a>: “A flurry of activity at pizza delivery outlets near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, is a surprisingly accurate predictor of war, as hungry military leadership hunkers down to monitor unfolding military activities. As painstakingly documented by X account Pentagon Pizza Report, a “busier than usual” indicator on the Google Maps profile of the Domino’s in Arlington has been associated with major acts of war taking place around the world. Most recently, the franchise received an onslaught of orders just before closing last night \u2014 almost perfectly coinciding with Israel’s devastating attack on Iran. Even long before the advent of live, GPS-based customer tracking on Google Maps, famished Pentagon workers have long given away that there’s something much darker going on by ordering copious numbers of pies. “The Pentagon Pizza Index has been a surprisingly reliable predictor of seismic global events \u2014 from coups to wars \u2014 since the 1980s,” wrote The Economist<\/em>‘s head of data journalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You’ve never heard of her but she has played bass guitar on thousands of pop hits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Wikipedia<\/a>: “Carol Kaye is one of the most prolific recorded bass guitarists in rock and pop music, playing on an estimated 10,000 recordings in a career spanning over 65 years. Kaye began playing guitar in her early teens; after some time as a guitar teacher, she began to perform regularly on the Los Angeles jazz and big band circuit. She started session work in 1957, and through a connection at Gold Star Studios began working for producers Phil Spector and Brian Wilson. After a bassist failed to turn up to a session in 1963, she switched to that instrument, quickly making a name for herself as one of the most in-demand session players of the 1960s, playing on numerous hits. She moved into playing on film soundtracks in the late 1960s, particularly for Quincy Jones and Lalo Schifrin. During the peak of her years of session work, Kaye became part of a stable of Los Angeles\u2013based musicians known as The Wrecking Crew.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: 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\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Brazil is up in arms over a craze involving hyper-realistic baby dolls<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From the New York Times<\/a>: “A young woman posts a video that appears to show her holding her baby, Bento, and packing his bag for a trip to the hospital. She calls it \u201cone of the busiest and scariest days for me.\u201dShe grabs onesies, a bottle and medical documents and tucks him in the back of a car. At the hospital, he is weighed and lies in a bed, where she removes his pacifier, bottle-feeds him and wipes a few drops of formula from his cheek.But this was not an actual medical emergency \u2014 it was role-playing by a content creator \u2014 and the baby was not a real baby. It was a shockingly lifelike doll, called a reborn doll, which is handcrafted to look and feel like a baby.The video, which received more than 16 million views on TikTok, is part of a social media craze that has turned into a cultural and political flashpoint in Brazil. Widely circulated videos show women taking the hyperrealistic dolls to the park in strollers, celebrating their birthdays with cake and songs, and simulating childbirth.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either <\/em>through my Patreon<\/em><\/a> or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called <\/em>The Torment Nexus<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Researchers say that how we use language alters our sense of how time works<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From The Conversation<\/a>: “In the film Arrival, Amy Adams discovers the way aliens talk about time gives them the power to see into the future. As one character in the movie says: \u201cLearning a foreign language rewires your brain.\u201d A new study shows that while language doesn’t allow us to see into the future, learning a new way to talk about time really does rewire the brain. Visualising the future as in front of us and the past as behind us is very common in English. But for speakers of Aymara (spoken in Peru), the word for future means \u201cbehind time\u201d \u2013 so the spatial axis is reversed: the future is behind, the past is ahead. The logic in Aymara appears to be this: we can\u2019t look into the future just like we can\u2019t see behind us. The past is already known to us, we can see it just like anything else that appears in our field of vision, in front of us. Mandarin Chinese employs a vertical time axis: the word xi\u00e0<\/em> (down) is used to talk about future events, so when referring to \u201cnext week\u201d a Mandarin Chinese speaker would literally say \u201cdown week\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ready to be bored? Welcome to the International Dull Men’s Club<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From The Guardian<\/a>: “The 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson once wrote, \u201cHe is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others\u2019. It\u2019s a sentiment eagerly embraced by The Dull Men\u2019s Club. Several million members in a number of connected Facebook groups strive to cause dullness in others on a daily basis. In this club, they wear their dullness with pride. The duller the better. This is where the nerds of the world unite. Maintaining standards of dullness is paramount. Alan Goodwin in the UK recently worried that seeing a lesser spotted woodpecker in his garden might be \u201ca bit too exciting\u201d for the group. In the same week, a flight tracker struggled to keep his excitement to an acceptable level when military jets suddenly appeared on his screen. This is the place for quirky hobbies, obscure interests, the examination of small, ordinary things. It is a place to celebrate the mundane, the quotidian. It is a gentle antidote to pouting influencers and the often toxic internet.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A doctor reduces this little girl’s dislocated elbow so quickly she doesn’t even notice<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Acknowledgements<\/strong><\/em>: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as <\/em>The Morning News<\/em><\/a> from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s <\/em>Curious About Everything<\/em><\/a>, Dan Lewis’s <\/em>Now I Know<\/em><\/a>, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s <\/em>The Browser<\/em><\/a>, Clive Thompson’s <\/em>Linkfest<\/em><\/a>, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s <\/em>Why Is This Interesting<\/em><\/a>, Maria Popova’s <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em><\/a>, Sheehan Quirke AKA <\/em>The Cultural Tutor<\/em><\/a>, the <\/em>Smithsonian<\/em><\/a> magazine, and <\/em>JSTOR Daily<\/em><\/a>. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Futurism: “A flurry of activity at pizza delivery outlets near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, is a surprisingly accurate predictor of war, as hungry military leadership hunkers down to monitor unfolding military activities. As painstakingly documented by X account Pentagon Pizza Report, a “busier than usual” indicator on the Google Maps profile of the Domino’s in Arlington … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “You can tell war is imminent by the Pentagon’s pizza orders”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-274800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsletters"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274800"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274803,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274800\/revisions\/274803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}