We’ve used these pages to proclaim our general love of space and science, as well as our general appreciation for NASA’s Image of the Day series. Well, here’s another pretty impressive shot of nature in action courtesy of NASA.

As they explain:

“During the afternoon of March 9, 2016, a total solar eclipse was visible in parts of southeast Asia. An eclipse occurs when the moon passes directly between Earth and the sun. The MODIS instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of the total solar eclipse moving across the south Pacific Ocean at 03:05 UTC on March 9, 2016.”

Beautiful.

Image Credit: NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team.

Our March mix is still in the works but, in the meantime, we wanted to share a new track by longtime favorites, Augustines, out of old home, Brooklyn, NY. Actually, as we learned in a 2014 interview we did with multi-instrumentalist and song-writer Eric Sanderson, we lived just a few blocks away from him for a good many years without knowing it.

The band just announced a coming 2016 album a few weeks back and debuted a high-energy single from the album, “Are We Alive”. Listen to track below and head over to Augustine’s site or give them a like on Facebook to stay in the know on the new full-length and coming shows.

We’ve mentioned the fine folks at Louisville Vegan Jerky Co. on these pages before—first on the company in general, then when they started making vegan bacon bits. But now LVJC has started their very own mail-order vegan jerky of the month club and, thanks to Katie, I am a proud member of said club.

Here’s the deal: Basically, you choose your plan—month-to-month, three-month prepay, or six month prepay—and then, every month you’re signed up for, you receive a lovely, excellently branded box of three bags of vegan jerky. The first two bags are from the company’s excellent regular stock (Bourbon Smoked Chipotle, Maple Bacon, Bourbon Smoked Black Pepper, Sriracha Maple, or Sesame Teriyaki), but the third is a test kitchen batch that changes monthly.

The first month I received the jerky, the test batch was Perfect Pepperoni, made using tamarin, beet juice, liquid smoke, fennel and crushed peppers—an excellent, dry meatless cousin of the pepperoni and one we eventually used to top a homemade pizza. Last month, the test flavor was a really nice, peanut-less Peanut Thai, a slightly sweet jerky made with soy nut butter, sriracha, and fresh ginger.

If you love vegan jerky, or love someone who loves vegan jerky, we highly recommend the Louisville Vegan Jerky of the Month Club. Excited to see what March brings!

Below, pictures of the jerkies, packaging, and said pizza.

We’ve never been huge fans of Baltimore’s Animal Collective—we like ’em but we wouldn’t wait in line for three hours in the ran to see the guys—but you’ve got to admire the unflinching audio weirdness they’re putting forth these days. And the most recent example, their single “Golden Gal” from their new album, Painting With, starts out with a line Golden Girls, which, as everyone knows, makes everything better.

Check out the trip video for it below. If you’re up for it, check out the even more bizarre “Florida”.

Well-done, you weirdos.

In our ongoing effort to fit studio improvements into our usually pretty packed work days, we just completed this wall-mounted palette planter. Yay, us!

Want to make one yourself? Here’s a step-by-step guide:

Step 1: Find an abandoned wooden palette in your neighborhood. Usually, this is pretty easy. Don’t live in a big city? Head down to your local Industrial Way and have a look-around. Still no? Dumpster-diving time.

Step 2: Do not lick or raise your child in found palette—these things are chemically treated and you found this thing on the street or in a dumpster for god’s sake. What kind of parent are you‽

Step 3: Knock out every other plank on the top of the palette. This can be done with a rubber mallet or a hammer or you can pry them off with a crowbar or the like. Watch out for the disease-covered, rusted nails. And don’t worry about harming the remaining panels much—that’s called “rustic charm”.

Step 4: Paint the palette with primer; allow to dry for a day or so; paint the palette with crazy-bright paint; allow to dry.

Step 5: Steal a bunch of succulents from your neighborhood. If you don’t live in Southern California, change this step to “Go to the plant store and buy a bunch of plants”.

Step 6: Buy some tight-weave landscaping material, usually found in the gardening section of hardware stores. The tighter the weave, the better. You want some breathability, but you don’t want to the soil to spill through. Measure the spaces between the two or three (in our case) vertical beams and cut panels of the fabric so that you’ll be able to form rough pockets for the soil and plants, using nails or thumbtacks (easier) to pin the front, back, and both sides so you’ve got more of a thee-dimensional pocket than a two-dimensional pouch.

Step 6: Fill the pockets with soil and carefully arrange the plants, ideally in an artful, adorable manner.

Step 7: This is the tough one. Attach the palette to the wall. If you’ve got shitty drywall, find studs. If you’ve chosen an outer concrete wall like we did, ideally use your trusty hammer drill to drill holes for Red Head wedge anchors or the like. Don’t have a hammer drill? Yeah, we didn’t either. In that case, buy a concrete drill bit and be prepared to stand against the wall drilling for, oh, two or so hours? And it might break your drill’s motor. Concrete, man. Don’t want to bother with all this? We get it. In that case, lean the sucker against a wall and be done with it.

Step 8: Use a water spritz-y thing to saturate the soil around the plants so the succulents (or other plants) will take root.

Step 9: Water according to the types of plants you use and enjoy.

We wish you the best of luck, DIY-ers!

This afternoon, we hosted a lunch meeting with our friend Chef Minh Phan of the Jonathan Gold-approved Porridge + Puffs. She also helped open the Beachwood Cafe a few years back and has been an integral member of our local non-profit, the Hollywood Orchard form early on.

Porridge + Puffs’ Hollywood Farmers’ Market longterm pop-up has come to a close, but Minh’s been going strong with private events in the greater Los Angeles area and some other big ideas. She brought by some Vietnamese food from Echo Park’s Xoia to showcase some of her awesome vegan sauces and savory jams.

If you’d like to enjoy some of the same, Minh + co. will be serving at Food Forward’s 6th Annual Spring Melt Fundraiser mid-April in Glassell Park. If you don’t know Food Forward, they’re a local non-profit that rescues fresh produce that would otherwise go to waste and gets it to people in need. Great group and greta opportunity to support them. Find out more on their event page.

And we highly recommend befriending kind chefs in your area. It’s a richly rewarding prospect.

Confetti-filled photo-shoot in the studio.

We’ve got a good friend who used to make a point to stop and pick any spare dropped change on the street—everything from a lowly penny, to a dime, to a twenty he once found on the streets of DC if I remember correctly. He may still make a habit of this day, for all I know, but, point being, he gathered all this change with the intent of eventually using it to buy something he’d never otherwise spend his money on; it was “free money” in his mind, essentially.

In the days leading up to this year’s leap day—the quadrennial retroactive accounting we engage as a society to make up for the fact that it takes the Earth 365.242199 days to circle the sun, not 365—I’ve come to view Leap Day in the same manner. We just got handed 24 hours that we don’t usually have, and we should do something awesome with it. Why not build a kite with a friend and fly it in the park? Or go to an old folks home and spend some time with some lonely elders? Or publish a satirical newspaper? Or just sit and do absolutely nothing in this age of doing way too much of everything?

Time is fleeting, our days on this earth uncertain, and, though it’s all essentially a trick of math in this made up, clearly flawed system of time measurement, why not take advantage of this fake holiday to guide your life in a positive direction it wouldn’t otherwise be steered in? Like doing something really special for someone you love on Valentine’s Day even though you know full well it’s a pseudo-holiday that’s been co-opted by commercialism.

Or you can just propose to dudes if you’re traditional turn-of-the-century British women. Or Amy Adams.

This morning, we heard that Anhoni—the transgendered artists formerly known as Antony and best known for his work as Antony and the Johnsons and his collaborations with, among others, Björk—announced she will be boycotting this year’s Academy Awards.

As reported yesterday by the LA Times, Anhoni was nominated for the best original song Oscar this year for her track “Manta Ray”, a song “about ecocide” she wrote with composer J. Ralph for the Discovery film Racing Extinction. Anhoni’s letter yesterday beautifully, eloquently, and heartbreakingly explains the reason, after so much initial excitement for being nominated, she decided she could not attend the Academy Awards this year:

“I am the only transgendered performer ever to have been nominated for an Academy Award, and for that I thank the artists who nominated me. (There was a trans songwriter nominee named Angela Morley in the early 70’s who did some great work behind the scenes.) I was in Asia when I found out the news. I rushed home to prepare something, in case the music nominees would be asked to perform. Everyone was calling with excited congratulations. A week later, Sam Smith, Lady Gaga and the Weeknd were rolled out as the evening’s entertainment with more performers ‘soon to be announced’. Confused, I sat and waited. Would someone be in touch? But as time bore on I heard nothing. I was besieged with people asking me if I was going to perform.” She continued—”My anxiety increased as weeks passed. I slowly realized that the positive implication of this nomination was being retracted. The producers seemed to have decided to stage performances only by the singers who were deemed commercially viable. Composer David Lang’s song “Simple Song #3” performed by South Korean soprano Sumi Jo was also omitted.”

Anhoni admits she realizes she wasn’t omitted from the performances as a direct result of being transgender, “but if you trace the trail of breadcrumbs,” she writes “the deeper truth of it is impossible to ignore. Like global warming, it is not one isolated event, but a series of events that occur over years to create a system that has sought to undermine me, at first as a feminine child, and later as an androgynous transwoman. It is a system of social oppression and diminished opportunities for transpeople that has been employed by capitalism in the US to crush our dreams and our collective spirit.”

We strongly urge everyone to read the full letter themselves at Anhoni’s site, but we just wanted to take a moment to echo Anhoni’s words and applaud her for speaking out and not just, as she writes, being “lulled into submission with a few more well manufactured, feel-good ballads and a bit of good old fashioned T. and A.” The desire to attend such a highly lauded, esteemed event, even in this year of mounting controversy, must have been near-impossible to ignore, but we are at the very least, happy she has brought this all to light and started a public discussion that will hopefully lead to much-needed progress.

You can listen to “Manta Ray” below; additionally, we highly recommend Anhoni’s excellent recent song “4 Degrees”.

We’re about a week behind on all things entertainment (mom came out for her first west coast visit), but please forgive us for not shouting from the rooftops in celebration of Broad City‘s season three premiere last week.

There’s a lot of great TV out there right now, but I nonetheless stand by the opinion that this is the best, smartest, funniest comedy on television. The season premiere started out with one the best stand-alone intros to date, showing a montage of bathroom hilarity. You can see it below, and head to Broad City’s Comedy Central page to see more clips, full episodes, and a behind the scenes clip from the intro.