What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Angry Scott Morrison accuses GM of letting Holden 'wither away' after taking $2bn in subsidies

For context: Holden is an Australian home-grown brand. It became a subsidiary of General Motors in 1931, but it started manufacturing cars in Australia from 1948. The 1950s FJ Holden is an Australian icon. The Holden Commodore was the family sedan for Aussies all through the 1980s & 1990s. Aussie car lovers fell into two tribes: Holden or Ford. If you ask any Aussie to name a few famous Australian brands, Holden will get a mention.

General Motors stopped manufacturing Holdens in Australia a few years ago, but they assured us that Holdens would continue to be made (albeit overseas) and sold here.

Now the brand itself is being axed, at the end of next year.

I don’t like my name, and I never really have. It has nothing to do with ‘tomf’.

My main questions are:

1. How did you go about choosing the new name?
2. How did you manage/roll out the new name?
3. What unforeseen challenges came up?

My main concern is that I’ll settle on a ‘cool’ sounding name and that people will think it’s weird. While I want something normal, I do have some parameters:

1. The name should be free for the .com and major social media
2. I don’t want a main ‘S’ sound, since I don’t like how I say it.
3. I am hoping to have something simple to use over the phone. I use ‘Tom’ for Starbucks and reservations because it’s clear, short, and not me.

Anyway, has anybody done this? Any feedback is great, but I am more focused on changing my first name.

Pardon the crappy tags.

I was reading this twitter post and it made me wonder if you have any ideas to stop speeding by car drivers? Have any of these ideas been tried anywhere? I'm also interested in unintended consequences.

https://twitter.com/agnessjonsson/status/1229103764843438086?s=20

Agnes @agnessjonsson

fact of the day: Sweden once experimented with a “speed camera lottery”. Those who drove within the speed limit were automatically entered into a drawing where the prize fund came from fines that speeders paid.

They tested it in a few different cities and I haven’t read the results of each one, but in Stockholm the average speed on the selected road decreased by 22 percent.

I read a lot (my wife gets mad at me because I read so much faster than her), and these days I do most of my reading on Kindle. Fortunately there are ways to do this for little or no money. If you're interested here are some ways to get more ebooks without spending a lot of money:

1. Project Gutenberg is the grandparent of free book sites, with 60K+ public domain works.
2. MobileRead has an entire forum for fresh uploads of public domain works in Kindle format (they have other formats too).
3. The Libby app (iOS/Android) makes it trivially easy to borrow ebooks from your local library.
4. The Hoopla app (iOS/Android) is another way to borrow from your local library.
5. The Library Extension browser add-on (Chrome/Firefox) will alert you when a book that you're looking at online (say, on an Amazon product page) is available at your local library. (This covers print as well as ebooks)
6. BookBub will send you a daily email with books that are currently on sale at the major ebook stores.
7. I'm not sure how I got into this one; I think it was when I registered a new Kindle for Christmas. But in any case, Amazon is currently in the mode of offering me a $1 ebook credit on every order I have shipped, as long as I'm willing to take non-prime shipping and wait a few days. As far as I can tell this option is available on every Prime order, so I shamelessly take advantage. Need a $4 USB-C cable to replace one that's fraying? Hey, I can get it a few days later and add $1 to my credits. Until they stop this, I'll keep breaking every order up into individual single-item orders. It's not even worse for the planet, because their warehouse software recombines everything into as few boxes as it can anyhow.

Special thanks to Max Woolf and Project Gutenburg for resources, and the Brothers Grimm for such inspiring material.

The Fae in a Bottle

By Reverend William Howland

"Dear brother, thou seest the water
crystallizing, go and show it to the merchant. I will make him a
little bottle of water of the same kind; put it in a corner, and
not open it too quickly, until the reflection shall let him see it."

The merchant, who was standing behind the glass, said, "If that is
the case, I do not see why the name of the fountain should be
changed." "Why not?" asked the merchant. "Because my name is
Dummling." "Dummling, what is that?" "Is a rare and wonderful
name; I do not know how it is to have it." "If you do not see why
the name of the fountain should be changed," said the merchant, "I
will pay you three thalers." "There! now I see what is in my head;
I will pay you thaler, but you must wait until I come back."

Then he disappeared behind the glass. The poor man was forced to go back
on his begging; he had no more money but the three thalers which the
merchant had given him. He had long ago left the village, and wandered far
off, and when he came back, his brother had forgotten him, and thought,
"Why should I travel farther? I have not seen my brother." Then he came to
the town where his brother was again living. "Dear brother," said the
brother, "how are you? How are you getting on?" "Oh," said the brother,
"not well."

"Then just come and eat thy bread."

"That would be very good," said the brother, and went away.

He walked a long time, and came to a great forest. Then he said to his brother,
"Go and bring me with you to-morrow morning." "Nay," said the brother, "I
can't go. I have heard so many lies and stolen things from my brother,
and they have not served me very well, I see very well that they will
do me no harm." Then he went to the gallows, and told them that there
was a poor shivering, peering there from the window. "If you let me in,"
said the brother, "I will do you a favour. In grey hairs you can see
a piece of a horse's heart." So he went into the forest, and saw there
how a greyhound which was his neighbour, was dead. Then he was sad,
and made himself known to the brother. "Dear brother," said he,
"how are you getting on? What hast thou been saying there about
a piece of horse's heart?" "Ah," said the brother, "how can I say that
on the gallows, when I have not a drop of blood on me!" Then he gave him
the greyhound's heart, and had it put in his own. The brother felt for a
while in his pocket, and then he said, "I have a small bottle of wine,
and if thou art inclined to drink, thou shalt find the courage
to hold thy tongue." "To what use is the bottle put," said the
brother, "but to some end I should like to have a sip?" "To win the
Rosen Cup," said the brother with great joy. "To me that is enough,"
said the hare. "To thee alone, it is the most valuable thing that
the world possesses," said the brother. "To me, it is my most valuable
thing." "To me, it is my most valuable possession," said the hare. Then
he turned himself around and went to the gallows. "To-day it was
announced that the very gallows were to be, and to-morrow they were
to be," said the brother. "I do not know to which I should place myself,"
he replied, "but, to-morrow it will be to-morrow, and to-morrow
I will go." Then he was led to the gallows, and was once more there
in the place where he had formerly been. He again said to the greyhound,
"I wish you were still standing there." "To-day it was announced that the
very gallows were to be, and to-morrow they were to be." "I do not know to which I
should place myself," said the hare. "To-morrow it will be to-morrow, and
to-morrow I will go." Then he turned himself round and went to the gallows,
and was once more there in the place where he had formerly been.

"To-day it was announced that the very gall

(E/N: The story stops here abruptly, as the author ran out available memory. I wouldn't like to enforce my interpretation of the story upon it, so I'm leaving it as written.)

Tonight ten songs competed to represent Norway in Eurovision.

Akuvi - Som Du Er

Didrik & Emil Solli Tangen - Out of Air

Kristin Husøy – Pray for Me

Liza Vassilieva – I Am Gay

Magnus Bokn - Over the Sea

Raylee - Wild

Rein Alexander - One Last Time

Sondrey - Take My Time

Tone Damli - Hurts Sometimes

Ulrikke - Attention

(I couldn't find tonight's performance for all of these, so some of them are from the semi-finals.)

The winner was Ulrikke with her song Attention, which will go on to represent Norway in Rotterdam. Did we make the right choice? Let's hear your opinions in the comments!