September 5, 2010
milk is the answer we were looking for
We’ve been trying to prepare the Iz (for those of you who don’t know, Izabella turned 2 in July) for the arrival of Levi. Today we had the following conversation.
Me: What is Levi going to eat?
Iz: From mommy’s boobs.
Me: But what is he going to get from Mommy’s boobs?
Iz: A special treat?
from the comments
It took longer than my father said to reach Mars. The landscape was always changing, which led us to forego the naming and claiming of place that had guided our Earthly rituals. Time passed in ways none of us had ever felt before, someone would leave for what seemed a few hours, only to find out that weeks had passed. In this way we grew old before we noticed, which made the end all the more bearable, slipping into another dream much like the one we were leaving. My father never told us, and we never knew. My sister said we never reached Mars, that our minds filled in the gaps that were left as we looked at the planet approaching ever so slowly through the slits in our craft. West with the night, up with the dark, I slept and dreamed of gathering burning drops of sunlight, plucking as if from a vine in a stellar garden all across the hull. Stars were small bits of burning blue, as if sliced from a diamond as big as my head, but the sun drops were smoldering, boiling but cool to the touch. I tried to eat one and woke up, a metallic taste lingering in my mouth. Later that month we reached the planet, and I found my father crying as he knelt in the dust.
September 4, 2010
Want a raise? Wash your vagina.
What is the very first thing you should consider if you want a raise? What is the most important thing of all?
Yup, wash that vagina, and wash it good.
A Favorite Scene in Basquiat
Cindy asked me to post this. We watched the film again tonight and, again, this scene struck us as great wisdom presented in an unusual way. Isn’t that the way it often arrives?
the questionable value of happiness
Or, rather, is its perceived value the trump card to end all trump cards?
If the alternative to happiness is not, in the binary way, unhappiness; and if happiness has become so insidious, so hypnotic a single end for a good life, why have we wanted this strange narrowing of our intent? What have we lost, or forgotten, or ignored, or paid insufficient attention to, or protected ourselves from by wanting happiness? Happiness, it would seem, is the most plausible of our aims in life. But what psychoanalysis can chip in with here is that we are at our most defensive when we are at our most plausible
Out of Order: Motel Room with Tanning Bed
From photographer Jan Normandale of somewhere up there north of the US-Canada border.
My truck conked out at 7:00 pm on the Trans-Canada Highway halfway across the top of Lake Superior between Sault Ste Marie, Ontario and Thunder Bay, Ontario, a driving distance of 690 km/431 mi with no services between Wawa, Ontario and Terrace Bay.
Banksy’s Words, Not Mine
Banksy, the reclusive and still-yet-unidentified graffiti artist responsible for guerilla art from Boston to Palestine, gave a brief pseudo-interview to the UK tabloid, The Sun. He speaks a bit about his inspiration:
You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.
And I always felt that it was all right to answer back a little bit, I suppose. That the city shouldn’t just be a one-way conversation. I didn’t see why you’d settle for just walls. So I started vandalising statues and that led to vandalising parks. It just kept going really.
Patriotism
Whatever the reason, it seemed and still seems to me that our attitude towards life can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The Struggle for What We Already Have
The complications notwithstanding, net neutrality, broadly speaking, is what exists now. Among the many benefits net neutrality brings is that it fosters innovation. The great fear of the net neutrality purists, however, is that without federal rules, the Internet providers will begin cutting deals with content providers to give certain traffic priority over other traffic. For instance, Verizon could cut a deal with YouTube that allowed its videos to stream faster than, say, a Hulu video. Or it could even block Hulu. Or it could begin charging consumers extra for Netflix movies that were of better quality than ordinary streaming. As Harold Feld, Public Knowledge’s legal director, puts it: “Companies do what companies do.”
(Which brings up one of the true oddities about the fervor over net neutrality. Cable television distributors make decisions all the time about what people can see and how much they have to pay for it. If special sports-only tiers aren’t an example of placing some content over other content, I don’t know what is. Yet because it is merely television, and not the sacred Internet, nobody seems to view this practice as a crime against humanity. But I digress.)
You’ll notice, however, Nocera’s discussion is about media distribution from large companies to consumers, not those consumers as producers.
How the scam unraveled
Two insurance companies began looking more closely at the claims and hired an investigator to ask questions. The con artists were so unnerved by this that they had the coffin supposedly holding the remains of Jim Davis unearthed. They filled the casket with a mannequin and cow parts to ensure the proper weight and then sent it to a crematory. Then, they filed phony paperwork stating that he had been cremated and had his ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean.
(via TPM)
spam name
Becki Dede.
September 3, 2010
Le Mari de la Coiffeuse (The Hairdresser’s Husband)
Looks as though Cooper and I are sitting at home (our respective homes) on the eve of a (US) holiday weekend. He is listening to Wagner, and I am watching Patrice Leconte’s Le Mari de la Coiffeuse, which I have not seen since 1991.
Carry on.
A Great Fucking Movie
Statement by Roger Ebert, read by Chaz Ebert a couple of days ago (September 1) at a 20th Century-Fox 75th anniversary event: a screening of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, co-written by director Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert:
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls has survived the test of the years, and is one of the most frequently-revived films of its time. It was one of a kind. My congratulations to Dolly, Harrison, and John. I do not believe in dreams, but Russ appeared in one of mine last night and dictated this message:
Quote, “I was deeply offended when Fox ignored BVD in its 50th anniversary book. It’s about time those bastards acknowledged that we made a great fucking movie.”
Russian Christmas Party, 2009
I was asked in the comments to tell the story of last year’s Russian Christmas Party, so I’ll do my best.
I work for a small company that writes custom software for a number of clients, but our largest customer by far is a popular Russian dating site. I’m not going to say which one, for reasons involving my physical security.
Their business was doing well last year, partly because of our work, so they decided to throw us a holiday party. The original plan was a small dinner at a nice restaurant with our spouses, but over time the plan grew to a joint party between their company and ours. They flew all their employees (most of which were ditzy Russian-American girls) and their dates over from Texas, and scheduled dinner at a local Russian nightclub in a semi-sketchy part of town, with a limousine to take us there from our office.
(If you’ve never heard a hybrid Russian/Texan accent, you really should)
spam name
Belinda Ramonita.
