The Perfect Peduncle
“If you look at the really old (pumpkin) varieties, their peduncles were really lame compared to the peduncles that are out there now,” Johnson said.
Weekly Picture 64 (Forgive Me)
Mae Cat, 10.26.2006
Free Hugs
(thanks, Wayne)
clusterflock Donations, Almost There
Okay, kids, we’re at 80%. Anyone out there (or anyones out there) willing to put us over the top? (No contribution is too small.)
My last post of the day (I promise)
This youtuber’s video is a must see. ‘Character’ is the word.
Festive
If you like Homestar Runner, I’ve found this Halloween episode to be one of the funnier shorts.
Not impossible, just highly improbable
What he’s saying is that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for a predisposition to favor intelligence in biology. Features like multicellularity, photoreception, long sharp fangs, flight, etc., pop up in life’s history over and over again, independently; but intelligence? Feh. The universe doesn’t seem to like smart guys. We happened once, and what’s more, we seem to be teetering at the end of one long chain of improbable events in the history of one marginal set of lineages, of which most of its members are in decline.
Link (via Blowing and Drifting)
I do.
Bums nap. Healthy, productive adults do not nap.
Plath
An unpublished sonnet that Sylvia Plath wrote in college while pondering themes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” will appear Wednesday in a Virginia online literary journal.
Drugs are bad kids…
…particularly when writing essays. (Champion)
I know somebody here has the answer.
If a man were looking for a sweet wallet that is small, sexy and still useful, where would he go?
Tortoise
Yep, I’m recommending the 3 CD + 1 DVD Tortoise box-set A Lazarus Taxon, available for $20 or less. So far I especially like “Gamera” (for Disk One) and “Cornpone Brunch” (Disk Three).
Let’s just make this easy.
I was going to post a great link from a favorite website and another one popped up. I thought, “Well, I suppose I could post two from the same place,” until a third and then a fourth were posted. Let’s just makes this easier on everybody and go straight to Table of Malecontents Malcontents.
David Byrne
I would maintain that a healthy (i.e. substantial) amount of denial is therefore genetically heritable, that it allows us to blithely go on (despite reading Beckett) and to ignore the basic sadness and desperation of life. We can live in an illusion — in fact we are genetically predisposed to do so. These illusions can be small — I am just as good at catching game as Bob, my rival, for example — or they can be very large — that death is not the end and that I will be rewarded for my faith and Bob, the apostate, will rot in Hell.
Calorie-Restricted Diet
Aside from direct genetic manipulation, calorie restriction is the only strategy known to extend life consistently in a variety of animal species.
Moral Grammar
His proposal of a moral grammar emerges from a collaboration with Mr. Chomsky, who had taken an interest in Dr. Hauser’s ideas about animal communication. In 2002 they wrote, with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch, an unusual article arguing that the faculty of language must have developed as an adaptation of some neural system possessed by animals, perhaps one used in navigation. From this interaction Dr. Hauser developed the idea that moral behavior, like language behavior, is acquired with the help of an innate set of rules that unfolds early in a child’s development.
Be the belle-vetica of the ball
Or, perhaps, the Monotype Bell[e]?
The brilliant Erin of A Dress A Day has pointed out some aggressively textual textiles for sale on eBay (and, presumably, elsewhere).
She’s made a circle skirt of this already, and is considering making a dress with numbered fabric for the trim. What else can you see being made out of this? Me, I’m thinking that the nasty side chair in my office desperately needs reupholstering. And then I might make some Scrabble™-style throw pillows. What other typefaces would you like to see made into fabric? Some of the Emigre patterns, perhaps? Got any rug ideas?
Reviews
“This book was 600 pages written purly about a bunch of hicks from Oklahoma starving. Thanks, but no thanks.”
I bet you can’t
Deron’s sexual revolution post reminded me of this:
Your two breasts are like two fawns,
twins of a gazelle,
that graze among the lilies.
Until the day breathes
and the shadows flee,
I will go away to the mountain of myrrh
and the hill of frankincense.
You are altogether beautiful
Can you guess where it is from?
Junk Comments
I admit to a fascination with checking out the “Junk Comments” this site gets before they’re deleted. There’s one right now that says “sluts whores chubby thumbs.”
That’s pretty good.
Mirrors Reflect Intelligence — Elephants
ELEPHANTS can recognise themselves in a mirror and use their reflections to explore hidden parts of themselves, a measure of subjective self-awareness that until now has been shown definitively only in humans and apes.
The research findings confirm a long-standing suspicion among scientists that elephants, with their big brains, complex societies and reputation for helping ill herd mates, have a sufficiently developed sense of identity to pass the challenging “mirror self-recognition test”.
The test, which in this case required construction of a huge “elephant-proof” mirror at the Bronx Zoo in New York, where the experiments were conducted, provides an index of an animal’s ability to conceive of itself. It is a quality of self-consciousness that some scientists believe is a prerequisite for the emergence of empathy and altruism.
My Rapist
In the end, I think I chose not to call my rapist for the simplest of reasons: I didn’t want to talk to him.
Ring Lardner
Shut up, he explained.
Summer of 1953
“I am drawn to this project because I feel so strongly about the need for Westerners to look back in history,” she said in an interview with Reuters.
park
Unseasonably warm today, so I sat on the grass in the park and looked up the hill and through the trees toward the point where Fifth Avenue meets Penn. I could just see the porch of St. Paul’s church through a space in the branches. A spider ran over my foot. A distant whistle echoed from the playing field. Traffic streamed up and down the avenues. Another leaf fell.