How is everyone’s weekend going? I hope to watch a little bit of golf this weekend.
There are certain rites of April that signify the changing of the calendar over to spring. One is baseball (and this year, seeing fields all over where I live filled with kids playing baseball and softball) and The Masters. Having spent a year of my life in Augusta, Georgia, where the famous tournament is played, the course grounds look more spectacular (and green) in person as they do on television.
I’ll be spending part of my Sunday watching the action on Amen Corner and feeling grateful for spring and not far behind, summer.
Today’s Six features articles about parenting through the pandemic, the latest TikTok star tries to monetize her fame, the future of space exploration (do aliens really exist?) and another creepily weird animal story (with video!)
Let’s proceed with the Six.
I Haven’t Talked To My Daughter in 12 Years. She Lives With Me.
This is really touching essay sent to me from a writer friend of mine. The essay’s author, Clint Watts, lives with his autistic daughter. Over the past year, she’s been yanked in and out of school (mostly out) due to Covid. Pepper, the daughter, can barely speak and Watts describes what that is like for a parent in painful honesty. “Does she think other kids vanished, abandoned her?” Watts wonders. “Does she know there’s a pandemic?”
The Beauty of 78.5 Million Followers.
I’ve sent out articles previously on The Six about TikTok, the uber-popular social media platform that makes millionaires out of teenagers. I still don’t quite get how it works (whenever I hop on all I see are half-naked Gen Z’ers gyrating to orchestrated dance moves). But I know there’s a lot of traffic, and commerce, being done on the app. This New York Times magazine piece features Addison Rae who at 20 years old and, has nearly 80 million followers on TikTok. Becoming that famous was the easy part. Now she has to figure out how to get paid.
The History of the Green Jacket.
As I wrote in the introduction, this is the weekend of The Masters. Even non-golf fans are probably familiar with the green jacket, worn each year by the winner of the tournament. This is a nice piece by Golf Monthly tracing the jacket’s history and significance in sports culture.
If Aliens Exist, Here’s How We’ll Find Them.
A pair of highly regarded astrophysicists look into a crystal ball about alien life forms and the future of space exploration and all sorts of possibilities that we can barely fathom. One passage from the article: “By 2100, thrill seekers in the mold of Felix Baumgartner (the Austrian skydiver who in 2012 broke the sound barrier in free fall from a high-altitude balloon) may have established bases on Mars, or maybe even on asteroids. Elon Musk has said he wants to die on Mars—“but not on impact.” It’s a realistic goal, and an alluring one to some.”
My Month Doing 100 Wheelies A Day.
I remember going through a Mongoose-biker phase when I was a kid (anyone remember Mongooses?). The best indicator you had a cool bike? The ability to perform a wheelie. This is a fun article from Outside magazine (which does these outdoor-in-the-wild type stories so well) where the author tries to do 100 bike wheelies per day as a self-improvement project focused on a quest to master the cool-kid trick that some of us (OK, maybe once or twice) could pull off back in the day.
Just click the link and watch the video. Believe it or not…this reptile-invades- mankind story did not take place in Florida!
Have a great rest of your weekend everybody. Thanks for reading as always.
Have a suggestion for the Sunday Six? Send email to jon@jonjkerr.com.