Month: April 2021

Review: Greta Van Fleet – The Battle At Garden’s Gate

Adam Grundy

When I first examined the curious case of Greta Van Fleet, I sat on the positive side of the review field when Anthem for the Peaceful Army hit the streets. With so many reviewers piling on the negative words and takes on their debut record, I could see where these writers were coming from, but I didn’t feel like the comparisons were fair. Sure, the obvious connections to sounding like Led Zeppelin come with its own set of risks for paying direct homage to one of the most legendary and creative rock bands of all time. However, these young musicians, made up of three brothers and their drummer Daniel Wagner, were making the music they loved and wanted to share with the world. This fruitful path led to several sold-out tours worldwide, multiple TV appearances, and with those accolades came a brighter spotlight shining on them to deliver on their sophomore effort, aptly titled The Battle At Garden’s Gate.

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Make Everything Important

Jason Tate

What a great interview with Mads Mikkelsen:

Q: Is there a life philosophy that you feel has carried you through your career?

A: My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.

They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines

McDonalds
Jason Tate

Andy Greenburg, writing at Wired:

Of all the mysteries and injustices of the McDonald’s ice cream machine, the one that Jeremy O’Sullivan insists you understand first is its secret passcode. 

Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine’s vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike error messages.

“No one at McDonald’s or Taylor will explain why there’s a secret, undisclosed menu,” O’Sullivan wrote in one of the first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year.

Wild story.