Trading Houses
My name is Kyle MacDonald and I traded one red paperclip for a house. I started with one red paperclip on July 12 2005 and 14 trades later, on July 12, 2006 I will trade with the Town of Kipling Saskatchewan for a house located at 503 Main Street.
At one point, he had a Kiss snowglobe that lights up with a variable speed dial!
Reading Dog Posture
Slaw
A few hours ago I wrote my fourth message of the day to a dear dear friend who early this morning had written me of sundry matters, including her impending expedition to buy cabbage, carrots, and apples for slaw. The message:
Hope you don’t mind the bombardment. I don’t expect replies to each and every one of my messages or to every damn thing that pops into my head and finds its way into them. It’s just that it’s 5:15 PM on a Saturday night, and I’m sitting here alone in a house in the forest where in forty-five minutes it might as well be night for all you can see the sun.
Well, poor pitiful me. Maybe I should get off my ass and sell the horrid thing. But you know what I mean.
Anyway, as to the slaw, the putative ‘subject’ of this message: I would dearly love to figure out the key elements in My Ideal Slaw because then I bet I would eat it every day. Do you have the knack (or a secret)? What I seek, of course, is that ideal blend somewhere between the mayonnaise- (or Miracle Whip!) and sugar-logged glop of my cohorts’ youth and the oh-so-moderne but sauerkraut-like versions that are all vinegar-and-oil and mustard and such.
Body Language
U.S. Drought
“I could see this coming in May,” Smokov said of the parched pastures and wilted crops. “That’s the time the good Lord gives us our general rains. But we never got them this year.”
188-Year-Old Bible
“I go up there all the time to drop off my household trash, and there it was,” Hoskins told the Danville Register & Bee. “There were three or four boxes of books leaning up against the concrete wall behind the Dumpsters,” Hoskins said. “I found the Bible in four pieces, put them together and took it home.”
Hemingway’s Six-Toed Cats
“What they’re comparing the Hemingway house to is a circus or a zoo because there are cats on the premises,” Cara Higgins, the home’s attorney, said Friday. “This is not a traveling circus. These cats have been on the premises forever.”
Derrida on Forgiveness in South Africa
Visual Grammar
Life in the image world has made us all voracious, if not always deliberate, consumers of visual messages. Easy access to computer graphic tools has turned many of us into either amateur or professional image producers. But without a basic understanding of visual language, a productive dialogue between producers and consumers of visual communication is impossible. Visual Grammar can help you speak and write about visual objects and their creative potential, and better understand the graphics that bombard you 24/7. It is both a primer on visual language and a visual dictionary of the fundamental aspects of graphic design.
Body Farm
“We use their real names to remind people that these are real people,” Williams said.
Noise
Noise is a social nuisance, a cause of deafness and high blood pressure, and an all-around annoyance. But what is noise really? As Kosko simply states, “Noise is a signal that you don’t like.” It occurs at every level of the physical universe, from the big bang to blaring car alarms. Today, noise is considered the curse of the information age, but, in fact, not all noise is bad. Debunking this and many other commonly held beliefs about noise, Kosko gives readers a vivid sense of how deeply noise permeates both the world around us and within us. Along the way he covers many compelling topics, from noise’s possible role in the ice ages to noise pollution laws, the use of noise to generate synthetic speech, and Hedy Lamarr’s contribution to noisy wireless communication. The result is a vastly entertaining and illuminating scientific journey that promises to do for noise what James Gleick did for chaos—make it vital, fascinating, and relevant.
Okra Blossom
Umoonasaurus and Opallionectes
ideal bite
We know that you would just love to “do the right thing” for yourself and the planet if it were convenient, fun, inexpensive, and made you feel good. But until now you have lacked a good source of advice for real people leading busy lives.
The Stability Of Beliefs
“Writers on the nature of science who unquestioningly believe in science and may assume the same of their readers, will find no difficulty in carrying out an analysis of science in objective terms.They may define science as the simplest description of the facts or the most economical survey of sense data; they may pretend that science is not concerned with the truth or that it only makes provisional statements so as to provide stimulus for new experiments. They may say that science is a free creation of the mind, forming part of a conventional game or that its value lies entirely in its usefulness. As long as everybody is tacitly agreed about the nature of science and implicitly accepts the authority of science, it may not become apparent that statements of this kind only refer to certain formal aspects of science which do not account for its authority. I suppose there should be no difficulty for a positivistically inclined member of the Zande tribe to describe the system of magic accepted by Azande as the simplest description of the facts, or as the most economical survey of sense data, or as a conventional framework valued for its usefulness.
The situation is different once a system of beliefs is fundamentally challenged. It must then be defended on its true grounds. I suggest that for this purpose our beliefs, including our belief in science, will have to be declared explicitly, in fiduciary terms.”
–Michael Polanyi, written in 1952.
The Sweet Sounds of Football
I’m listening to the first official press conference of the Dallas Cowboys 2006 season. Jerry Jones never sounded so lovely.
Vegan Diet and Diabetes
People who ate a low-fat vegan diet, cutting out all meat and dairy, lowered their blood sugar more and lost more weight than people on a standard American Diabetes Association diet, researchers said this week.
Borat — Dating Service
Loop
Erwin Hauer
Caption Contest
Radiographer (Pirate Keyboard)
Radiographer (Input Needed – Names for Bicycle Gang)
If I could tap just half of the support for the custom safari suit then I would be stoked. Feel free to vote for any or none.
Possible names for the bicycle gang include:
1. Midnite Rollers
2. San Anto Street Surfers
3. The Downtown Highlife Bicycle Club
4. Saytown Bombers
5. The Cruise
I have to decide on the name and crank out the flyer “code blue” (hospital term suggesting an urgency of action) so I can hand them out at a soapbox derby on Saturday…
Style It Takes
J. Hoberman on Andy Warhol Screen Tests/The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisoneé: Vol. I, Callie Angell (Abrams) in London Review of Books, 20 July 2006:
In a sense, Angell uses Warhol’s portraits to orchestrate a social history of the mid-1960s New York art world in a way reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov’s construction of a novel from the annotated poem in Pale Fire . . . . Given the quality of the writing, the beauty of the reproductions, and – crucially – the difficulty of putting Warhol’s enterprise between pages, Andy Warhol Screen Tests is not simply a catalogue raisoneé, it’s a work of art.
It’s Easy Being Green: A Handbook for Earth-Friendly Living
Surveys find that over 80 percent of Americans agree with the goals of the environmental movement. Unfortunately, most Americans admit to doing little more than basic recycling when it comes to acting on that feeling. What is the reason for this great divide between environmental sentiment in this country and individual actions? Author and environmental consultant Crissy Trask seeks to answer this question—and solve the disparity—with a new book that offers a day-to-day guide and simple, practical suggestions that anyone can put into action.
