MoonPies are an American snack that originated in 1917, whenEarl Mitchell—a traveling salesman for the Chattanooga Bakery—encountered a Kentucky coal miner who wanted a snack “as big as the moon.” Mitchell brought the request back to his company and, soon enough, the “MoonPie” was born. A MoonPie consists of a marshmallow filling between two graham-cracker cookies, all dipped in chocolate and about four inches in diameter. These chewy treats are both filling and easy to transport—ideal for the coal miners who worked long hours, carried their lunches with them, and relied on an extra boost of carbohydrates to get them through their day.
Today, these beloved snacks are the heart of the MoonPie General Store, a retail shop and bakery that serves up fresh MoonPies daily in a variety of flavors, as well as souvenir gifts such as T-shirts, coffee mugs, retro candies, and old-timey toys. There’s also a lunch counter where you can belly up for a MoonPie and RC Cola combo—a pairing that’s especially popular in the South, and one that likely came about during the Depression, when both affordable treats were just a nickel apiece.
MoonPies were sent as a comforting ration to U.S. troops overseas during World War II, and in the mid-1950s, the Chattanooga Bakery transitioned to focusing solely on Moon Pies production. Today the family-owned company produces about a million of the treats daily. These include the MoonPie Double Decker, which features a third cookie and a second layer of marshmallow, Mini MoonPies (approximately half the weight of the original), and the MoonPie Crunch, which swaps out marshmallow for fillings such as peanut butter and chocolate mint.
While chocolate was the only flavor of MoonPie until the 1970s, today they include vanilla, banana, strawberry, salted caramel, and even the new limited-edition key lime. There are also seasonal variations like pumpkin spice and blueberry. Coconut MoonPies are typically available during the Mardi Gras season, since they’re a prominent item to throw at float parades in and around Mobile, Alabama. In fact, they’re so synonymous with Mobile that at the stroke of midnight on each New Year’s Eve since 2008, the city’s been dropping a gigantic mechanical MoonPie from atop its RSA Trustmark building.
Along with a MoonPie General Store that serves as the gift shop for Chattanooga’s Southern Belle Riverboat and duck boat tours, there’s also a smaller general store in the city’s St. Elmo neighborhood, located right beside the historic Incline Railway.
In 2023, the family-owned McKee Foods corporation opened Little Debbie Park to celebrate its famous Little Debbie snack line, which includes a variety of cookies and cakes. This 10-acre space is brimming with shady nooks, ample walking trails, and even swinging benches for adults, but what makes it unique are the oversized play sculptures in the shape of Little Debbie treats.
Kids can try their hand at the Cosmic Brownie climbing wall, featuring grips resembling the snack’s colorful candy-coated chocolate pieces; rest on the cookie-shaped top of an Oatmeal Creme Pie bench; and attempt the Nutty Buddy balance beam that looks like a chocolate-coated wafer. There’s also a Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cake.
Tennessee-based sculptor and muralist Alex Paul Loza created the park’s focal point: a bronze statue of Little Debbie herself holding out a tray of Swiss Cake Rolls. The park also features a bevy of informational signs detailing the story behind McKee Foods, which O.D. and Ruth McKee founded in Chattanooga in 1934. The Little Debbie name, which debuted in 1960, was inspired by a photo of the couple’s then four-year-old granddaughter wearing a straw hat. The same image later became the company’s logo.
The park is located in Collegedale, the same Chattanooga suburb where the company has been based since 1957. A McKee Foods Bakery Store sits less than a mile away, complete with an array of Little Debbie snacks and merchandise, including souvenir mugs.
In 2016, John Henry, a renowned contemporary sculptor, and his wife, Pamela, transformed a 33-acre environmental brownfield in the heart of Chattanooga’s Southside into a showplace for world-class artists and their oversized works. Today, Sculpture Fields is a public parkthat’s home to more than 50 large-scale sculptures from artists around the globe, resulting in the largest sculpture park in the Southeast U.S.
Here, visitors stroll among sculptures that are conceptual, symbolic, and—in some cases—slightly punk rock. There are permanent works such as “Captain Merkel’s Ramming Dragon,” a whimsical painted aluminum and stainless steel piece by lifelong Chattanooga resident Verina Baxter; the bright red and circular “Cinderella” by John Clement; and the abstract “Think Big” by Jane Manus; as well as large selection of temporary pieces that come and go.
To experience Sculpture Fields on a self-guided tour, there’s a downloadable free app that offers info about each piece in its artist’s own voice. The park also hosts events like the John Henry Invitational, a biannual artist competition in which five sculptors are chosen to display their work in the park for two years. The most recent winning artists’ sculptures went on display in April 2025.
Sculpture Fields is open from dawn to dusk daily and features both free entry and parking. It’s also pet-friendly.
As a nonprofit offering educational programs in everything from guitar lessons to songwriting for kids across the South, Chattanooga’s Songbirds Foundation knows that music has the power to transform. Since its 2017 inception, the foundation has provided a range of educational programming, enriching events, and concrete resources for young artists, such as free guitars and a full recording studio.
The foundation moved into its newest location in the heart of Southside Chattanooga in spring 2024. Along with workshops in songwriting, guitar playing, and music production, the space includes a music venue for hosting live shows, including open mics, rock bands like The Cold Stares and the alt-metal Red Pawn, and cover bands such as Chelsea Drugstore (specializing in the songs of the Rolling Stones). Student performances are also par for the course.
Songbirds also uses the space to showcase its collection of more than 30 rare and vintage guitars, such as two Les Paul Goldtop prototypes and Dolly Parton’s Fender Acoustasonic. There are also guitars by Gibson and Maestro, as well as a collection of vintage effects pedals and amps that you can actually listen to. They’re all on full display for anyone attending a show.
While the venue is open to those 18-plus in age, anyone 17 or under is welcome if they’re accompanied by an adult.
When the Ontario College of Art & Design began the planning process for a new campus building, they consulted not only faculty, staff, and students, but also neighbors. The community expressed concern that the new construction would block their view onto Grange Park, a 200-acre greenspace in downtown Toronto. Architect Will Alsop’s solution was to elevate the building 85 feet off the ground.
The Rosalie Sharp Center For Design is an elevated “tabletop” structure clad in pixelated black and white aluminum skin connected to OCAD’s main building below with a long red stairwell. It’s supported by a dozen colorful steel columns jutting from the ground at odd angles. While the building was initially criticized by some for its appearance and durability, it has since garnered numerous international awards for exactly those things—and also arguably ushered in a new era of inventive modern architecture across Toronto.
Upon an initial visit to Toronto in the late 1990s, Alsop—an acclaimed British architect—found the city’s architecture to be somewhat monotonous. His design aimed to part with the existing aesthetic while still integrating with the neighborhood. A primary concern downtown, however, was that new construction would impinge upon precious open space. Alsop’s solution to elevate the building not only preserved public space, but because the project didn’t require the groundspace it was allotted, ended up actually creating a new public plaza and a walkway into the park. His decision to elevate it 85 feet wasn’t random either: the highest residential floors surrounding Grange Park are just below this height, maintaining for neighboring residents the park views they cherished.
A year after its completion in 2004, Alsop’s daring tabletop received the Toronto Architecture and Urban Design Award of Excellence for the “Building In Context” category. It was also awarded the Canadian Consulting Engineering Award for its structural framework. It came to be seen as an influential building in Toronto as well, presaging a number of modernist projects throughout the city, including the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in 2006, the Royal Ontario Museum’s Crystal expansion in 2007, and the Aga Khan Museum in 2014.
This steel-and-concrete public art installation may not convey the time of day, but it still captivates visitors with its striking form. Erected in Toronto’s Harbour Square Park West in 1995, Sundial Folly is the brainchild of artists John Fung and Paul Figueiredo, about whom little is known. The sphere, bisected down its longitudinal axis, sits in a pool of water that flows into a small artificial waterfall cascading into Lake Ontario.
As you approach it from the rear, you’ll notice a walkway that leads into the heart of the sphere, allowing visitors to enter Sundial Folly and take pictures. The interior affords a slight echo from the lapping water and ambient park sounds as well as a changing ambience throughout the day depending on the sun’s location. During special art events like Nuit Blanche, the sphere has served as a tapestry with lights and films projected onto its exterior.
The building is open to the public 24/7—but if you’re on a schedule, be sure to bring your own watch.
I think my premieres went over well at VidUKon! I definitely going be catching up on/ rewatching vishows this week (timezone stuff meant a missed watching a bunch of them live).
I made a bunch of progress on my Georgiou vid (it went from a timeline that was maybe a third full to one that is ~80% full). ...although this did mean I didn't make any subtitle timing progress (I'm planning on working on that tonight).
I like to look at online real estate listings to see how people use interior spaces. I've come to the conclusions that:
A: Few people use more than 2000 square feet effectively. Above that, they seem to run out of ideas about how to use each room*. B: Lots of houses have gratuitous features whose purpose seems to be to make them unusable to mobility impaired people. C: (this is the stupid one) Townhouses are fine but I hate the idea of a duplex. For some reason, having to cooperate with 50 people bothers me more than having to get along with one specific person or family.
* More libraries is always the right answer.
There was a place for sale just up the road from me whose entire basement was given over to sturdy-looking bookcases.
The site that is now the Electric Works began its history as the Fort Wayne Jenney Electric Light Company, where a pair of brothers with a penchant for invention began manufacturing their patented electrical equipment in the late 19th century. Just before the turn of the century, the plant was bought by General Electric and given the moniker it bears to this day: Fort Wayne Electric Works. With the money of a national brand behind it, the plant expanded with features like the first reinforced concrete building in the city. The next 100 years would see the Electric Works graced by inventors, innovators, and some 40 percent of the entire population of the city.
George Jacobs, who revolutionized magnet wire, had his idea while working at the Electric Works. The first refrigerators for residential homes and the first electric garbage disposal also leveraged the Electric Works for vital components. During both World Wars, the Electric Works was the chief manufacturer of airplane components; most impressively, the turbosupercharger that empowered British fighter aircraft found its first footing in the U.S. at the Electric Works.
Despite its history and powerful backing, the rust belt that expanded across the United States still ate away at the Electric Works. By the end of the millennium, the factory was already a shell of its former self, and in 2016 it closed its doors for good—or so thought its workers at the time. Within two years, the city had applied for and been granted several tax credits for renewing the decrepit factory into a business center and urban gathering space. In its current form, the Electric Works has business offices, restaurants, and housing living amidst the old materials; it even has its original clock tower.
I have rewatched the next few MSW episodes and I wanted to share some thoughts with you. The eps in question are: 2.10 Sticks and Stones, 2.11 Murder Digs Deep, 2.12 Murder by Appointment Only and 2.13 Trial by Error.
I took the dogs for a short walk, did a load of laundry and the usual amount of hand-washing dishes, and scooped kitty litter. I paid a couple bills online and placed a puzzle order for mom.
I started Network Effect, watched some HGTV programs, and attended a group birthday party at my sister’s house (including for my niece Leandra and nephew Ian). That’s what I made the cabbage salad for; mom made pulled pork.
Temps started out at 43.1(F) (it was cool enough in the house that I turned the furnace on to take the chill off; it was definitely a hot tea morning) and reached 59.9. On one end of the spectrum we had some sprinkles, on the other, the sun tried to peek out a few times. (The next three days are supposed to have temps of 66, 76, and 86! Talk about a quick turn around.)
Mom Update: My mom had a visit with her oncologist on Friday. She liked him. He told her that the cancer was Stage 1, so she'll need a less aggressive treatment of chemo. They're going to wait until after the surgery (coming up on Monday, June 9) to set it up, but he's thinking two weeks on, one week off for six weeks. (Does that mean only four weeks of chemo total? Or six weeks of chemo around the one week off?) Also, half the usual dose. Hopefully the side effects won't be as bad. (He also said that, no matter what, he'd recommend chemo because this is her third cancer diagnosis.)
My mom's next appointment with him is July 14, so I'm guessing the chemo won't start until after that? Do they normally wait 4 weeks post-surgery to begin? Do they need her to be drain-free?
He also told her that the procedure would be a long one. I joked with mom that we ~do want the surgeon to put everything back together correctly.
1. I absolutely adore my ridiculous children. Fiona is reading War and Peace. It's the book with the most AR points, and we kept telling her that she was probably not going to like it or understand it well, which just fueled her desire to read it more. Joke's on us, I guess, because she's moving through it a pretty fair clip, and while I'm certain that a significant amount of it is going over her head, she seems to be understanding the plot well enough (we debrief what everyone is reading over dinner every evening).
Well, this makes clear that I do not share taste in poetry with the editors of the Times Lierary Supplement, all however many of them served for the 20th century. Lol
So many war poems, which I get given the time period, but I am not a fan of most war poetry. Also so much rhyming, way more than I'd anticipated.
I did like some of the poems, but on the whole not for me.
I kept finding myself in the pages of this book as I read it. My people are not mountain Southern, but some things about being Southern are universal. The backstory of poverty and wringing a living out of the land with backbreaking work in Bragg's memoir could easily describe many aspects of the backstory on both side of my family. Most especially, though, reflected here is that truth that no matter how poor my grandparents were or how stingy my parents were when I was growing up to avoid poverty we still ate well. Like Bragg, my family was almost self-sustaining in eating what we grew, caught, and raised, and we ate like kings. Still do.
This collection of short stories is divided into four sections: queer places, queer genders, queer attachments, and queer things. Most of the stories in the queer things section don't seem to be queer to me (especially the Melville one where the protagonist is obsessed with his chimney and the Hartman story where a little waif girl drowns herself in the sea). Many of these stories are sad and/or violent, but a few of them are happy and hopeful--notably the Walt Whitman and the Mary Wilkins Freeman. The titular story of the book is incredibly fascinating.
Chris Warren, aka the Echo Thief, sits in a chair in the center of his sound lab and sings. Each note hangs in the air, layering onto the next like a cake and building into a complex chord, creating a rich cathedral of sound. He is harmonizing with himself. What we hear has been filtered through an algorithm Warren created that takes a mathematical average—a geometric mean—of 150 different echoes he has collected from around the world: the underside of Byron Glacier outside Anchorage Alaska, which he says has a delicate glassy resonance, like the inside of a fishbowl; the Fort of the Three Kings in Havana, Cuba, which has a long and meaty echo; a storm sewer in Tijuana.
“It’s my opinion that as musicians, we really need to care deeply about reverb because it’s a good portion of our sound,” says Warren. “It’s the spicy, colorful part.”
For 15 years, Warren has carried a magic backpack full of recording equipment into all manner of cavernous spaces, mostly inspired by tips he collects from other musicians. When he gets there, Warren sends a simple rhythmic sound into the space and makes a series of recordings of the ways it reverberates in that space. These recording sessions, which can run anywhere from 30 seconds to 48 hours, reflect how the space responds to different high and low frequencies and the amount of time it takes for sound to bounce back.
ECHO THIEF: Chris Warren harmonizes with himself in the sound lab he helped to build at the University of San Diego. Photo by Kristen French.
Warren later feeds the recordings into a script he has written in a scientific computing language known as MATLAB, which processes the echo into a high-resolution sample. It averages the reverberations he recorded over time, canceling out variation in environmental noise, such as water dripping or birds chirping. The algorithm Warren uses to average out the noise is based on a type of modeling first developed by Swiss mathematician Marcel Golay in the mid 20th century to investigate the spectral patterns in visible light. A professor of Warren’s at Stanford University, Jonathan Abel, had already repurposed Golay’s modeling for audio, but Warren tweaked it further so that he could record over periods longer than a second.
The library of echoes Warren has amassed is extra crisp and precise, can be digitally applied to any sound—this is called convolution reverb—and is available online for musicians, video game designers, and anyone else who might like to explore the world’s echoes. Warren and his wife use it to create music for their experimental duo OmniHarmonium. The echoes provide a kind of epic scenery for their songs, he says.
It used to be that to capture reverb, sound engineers would fire a starter pistol, pop a balloon, or clap in a cavernous space, but this would leave a lot of noise residue in the recordings. The longer Warren records, the quieter the sound he sends into a space can be—which not only limits the noise in the recording but gives him access to public places where humans might be hanging out. “You can’t go around popping balloons or firing starter pistols everywhere,” he says. He could even, theoretically, capture precise reverb in a concert hall while an orchestra is playing. Warren ultimately wants to figure out how to take continuous measurements that can gauge how reverb varies over time in a space, with changes in crowds, air temperature, wind.
Warren helped to build the sound lab at the University of San Diego, where he runs a program in music recording technology and audio design, to study immersive reverberation for augmented reality—to allow gamers to experience acoustics as realistically as possible as they wander through different digital spaces. He also uses the lab to teach his students how different kinds of reverberation affect the playing of musical instruments. Every performance venue is different and a musician typically won’t know what the acoustics are like until they are on the stage.
SENSATIONAL SOUND: Echo Bridge, which spans the Charles River in Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts, is shaped in a parabolic arch. It produces 13 discrete echoes. Warren’s obsession with echoes began here when he was a kid just learning to love music. Photo courtesy of Chris Warren.
Though the sound lab sits next to a performance venue, a sports stadium, and a trolley, Warren and his students never hear a single vibration from the outside world. The floor of the lab is floating, and has its own foundation, so that it doesn’t absorb vibrations from the rest of the building. And the room is an irregular octagon, all of its walls fixed at irregular angles, tilted between three and six degrees from one another, in order to provide a maximum number of surfaces against which sound can bounce. Even the ceiling is not directly opposite the floor. “Parallel surfaces,” says Warren, are “the devil.” They are like an infinity mirror for sound.
Warren fell in love with reverb when he was a kid growing up in Newton, Massachusetts. A friend told him about a spot known as Echo Bridge, a parabolic arch over the Charles River. He learned that if you stand on this little platform under the bridge and clap, “You’ll hear 13 claps come back,” he says. “And so my friends and I, we’d go down there and hang out and sing and scream and make all kinds of noise,” he says.
Those early echoes continue to reverberate through his life and work.
Our sizzling sun hosts plenty of fiery commotion. The star’s interior contains swirling, electrically charged gas called plasma. All this hubbub sparks intense magnetic fields. When the flowing plasma tangles magnetic field lines, it can prevent heat from rising to the surface, which creates freckles on the sun, known to scientists as sunspots. These spots are darker and chillier than the rest of the star’s surface, typically around a cool 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit compared with the average 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The number of sunspots varies throughout the sun’s solar cycle: Every 11 years, the sun’s magnetic field reverses and sets the super-active star back toward a minimum in activity. Astronomers keep tabs on sunspots to gauge where the sun is in this cycle—at the height of solar activity, they will see the most freckles. A reversal of the magnetic field is a major event, which can provoke stormy space weather and interfere with communications systems on Earth.
But most telescopes struggle to capture these spots with just the right amount of detail and scope. The heftiest and most powerful solar telescopes can make visible the most minute details on the sun’s surface, but they tend to have a narrow field of view, so they miss the bigger picture. Meanwhile, smaller, less powerful telescopes can often observe the entire visible sun, but they can’t magnify the nitty-gritty on the star’s surface, including sunspots and moving plasma.
SEEING SPOTS: A sunspot from a single image of the sun, taken by the Vacuum Tower Telescope. On the left, an image from the newly improved telescope. On the right, the view was processed from 100 exposures using a physics-based model. Image from R. Kamlah et al. 2025.
Enter the Vacuum Tower Telescope on the Spanish island of Tenerife, off the coast of West Africa. As seen in this image, the telescope has both a wide field of view and sharp spatial resolution—closing the solar telescope gap. Thanks to a shiny new camera system from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany, the telescope delivers unprecedentedly clear images of the sun. Using this system, researchers could theoretically glimpse the details of a coin in one’s hand from more than a mile away, says astrophysicist Carsten Denker from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, in an email.
The Vacuum Tower Telescope can now also capture wide swaths of the sun at once, around 124,000 miles in diameter, compared to an average for most large telescopes of about 46,000 miles in diameter. Using special filters, the Vacuum Tower Telescope can capture even the most minuscule traces of magnetic fields, which show up as vibrant structures. “We are teaching an old telescope new tricks,” said Carsten Denker, head of the Solar Physics Section at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, in a statement.
Lead image: A high-resolution image reconstructed from 100 solar images captured by the new advanced camera system. The details are much sharper than most telescope snapshots. The image section corresponds to about 124,000miles across the solar surface. Image from R. Kamlah et al. 2025.
Here's the new Korean practice post! I've switched to a post EVERY OTHER MONTH, as everybody is pretty busy. As usual now, it's an open chat.
You can write about whatever you want. If you're uninspired, tell us the story of what you're currently watching/reading/playing... You can talk to one another. You can also correct one another. Or just indicate "No corrections, please" in your comment if you prefer.
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