Holiday Weekend Reading a Go-Go

Here you go. Now you can't complain that you don't have anything good to read this holiday weekend.

• Motherboard: "Why We Still Want Laika the Space Dog to Come Home" by Becky Ferreira
• Smithsonian.com: "The Great Moon Hoax Was Simply a Sign of Its Time" by Sarah Zielinski
• CityLab: "You're Probably Recycling Wrong" by Vicky Gan
• The Atlantic: "Living Test Patterns: The Models Who Calibrated Color TV" by Benjamin Gross
• The New York Times: "A 30-Year American Road Trip" by Jonathan Blaustein
• Envisioning the American Dream: "Predictions for 1975" by Sally Edelstein
• Longreads: "All the Language in the World Won’t Make a Bookshelf Exist" by Nina MacLaughlin
• The Atlantic: "A World Without Work" by Derek Thompson
• Atlas Obscura: "This Mystery Photo Haunting Reddit Appears To Be Image Recognition Gone Very Weird" by Cara Giaimo
• The New York Times: "Moving Wikipedia From Computer to Many, Many Bookshelves" by Jennifer Schuessler
• Curbed: "Revisiting Brooklyn's Abandoned Admiral's Row Before It's Gone" by Nathan Kensinger
• Longreads: "The Art and Business of Book Covers" (which is itself a collection of groovy curated links)
• National Geographic: "George Washington’s Oh-So-Mysterious Hair" by Robert Krulwich
• Brain Pickings: "Wanderlust: Rebecca Solnit on How Walking Vitalizes the Meanderings of the Mind" by Maria Popova
• Smithsonian.com: "The Remarkable Story of the World’s Rarest Stamp" by Alex Palmer
• LancasterOnline: "What do they really put in scrapple?" by Michael Long
• The Onion: "You Can Be Anything You Want, Says Fictional Character"

Random notes
1. The headline is a reference to Bill Rebane's classic Monster a Go-Go. Just because.
2. In other movie news that is almost as inconceivable as me mentioning Bill Rebane in a blog post, Paul Thomas Anderson might be writing and directing an adaptation of "Pinocchio" featuring Robert Downey Jr. as Geppetto. Yes, you read that right. Drew McWeeny ponders this possibility on HitFix.
3. The photo with this post, taken by me, is of a Little Free Library in downtown York. We're happy to have this as another place to take books that are leaving the household. I was on good behavior and dropped off six books and only took one — one of those Alfred Hitchcock fiction anthologies. For more about Little Free Libraries, see the website and check out these two articles from The Atlantic — one from July 2014 about their appeal and one from February 2015 about the people who would stand in the way of book-sharing.

Inspirational Soviet postcard from the 1960s (Yes, I wrote that)

Straight from the Cold War, here's a vintage postcard from the Soviet Union with a great message that transcends ideologies and generations.

The card shows a young boy who is doing some woodworking. He is surrounded by images of boats, an airplane, a rocket ship, birdhouse and a futuristic helicopter.

The caption, translated, essentially states:

Skillful hands do not know boredom
Which is a fantastic message. From anyone, anywhere, at any time. If that's considered propaganda, then it's the kind of propaganda we need more of.

Here's the back of the postcard, which I have not attempted to translate, because Russian cursive is not my specialty.

Here's a closer look at the postcard publisher's logo and that groovy helicopter.