I recall being 6 years old and singing the "Wonder Woman lost her bosoms" variant at primary school in New Zealand. This was 1982 so definitely sung internationally prior to The Simpsons.
Can you make the same case using a country sharing a similar lack of public sector corruption with New Zealand? New Zealand consistently ranks as one of the least corrupt countries, Brazil not so much: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
This reminds me of a recent documentary about a billionaire transporting trees, often purchased from families in financial distress, to his private fantasy garden: Taming The Garden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taming_the_Garden
Legowelt and Ceephax Acid Crew have come to dominate my listening over the past decade. Favourite Legowelt release ever (in the guise of The Psychic Stewardess) is Spiritual Foundation: https://shop.hott.mx/album/strange-life-records-slr037-spiri.... I'll never forget how much I was already loving the album on first listen, then Shinobi Theme started playing: my absolute favorite game in the late 80s.
Gutenberg has doubled down on blobs of HTML in the database: everything within `<body>` is stored as one big blob if using "full site editing", including additional markup defined using HTML comments. There is far less separation between data and how it's presented than there ever was with the "classic" editor.
> Page performance from sites made with WP's block editor is pretty good compared to other editor plugins
Perhaps, but it's never been a great idea to use editor plugins at all.
> There's also a performance team (for general WP performance, but also covering the editor/JS) that meets regularly and posts minutes.
Gutenberg is about to enter its 6th year of development while the performance team has only just formed and is yet to contribute anything meaningful in this capacity.
This is certainly evidence that cats are killing birds but characterising the numbers in the studies you've cited as absolute decimation seems unfair. I'm genuinely surprised at how low some of these counts are. For example: 37 bell-free cats deemed "prolific killers" only managed to kill 82 birds between them over the course of a year-long study? Even allowing for a large number of unknown kills the impact here seems small.
The lighthouse story is tragic and maddening. While I opted not to adopt a new cat when my last one died, I don't support the predator-free approach to conservation.
There isn't overwhelming evidence, though. Native bird life in New Zealand has dramatically increased in recent years, despite cats continuing to enjoy relative freedom and huge numbers.
This particular page design can be read as an intentional response to Web2.0, something the authors of this article considered to be part of a broader campaign to remove "amateur" production from the web. They published a book, Digital Folklore, expanding on this idea a few years later: https://digitalfolklore.org/
I recall seeing a behind-the-scenes clip somewhere (perhaps on the Directors Label series that came out in the early 2000s) where Gondry talks about his brother piecing this together from video footage they'd captured. I can't find that clip but came across this very early exploration towards the final product: https://youtu.be/GF0-wGbRqEs
It does feel there's something of a line between the older folklore and the urban, technology-infused tales, but overall it is a great connection to make. Takashi Miike's The Great Yokai War is a nice little take on the old and new sensibilities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Yokai_War