Cluster Bomb: Cindy Scroggins
Okay, here’s mine. I can poot at will. I can read minds. Babies and animals love me, but people–not so much. I was first married a week after my 17th birthday. Perhaps more shocking, we stayed married for 5 years. I was once touted as a great actress, but I gave it all up because I found the whole enterprise empty and because I generally detest other actors and people who like actors. I can do practically any accent and get frequent requests to “be Chinese.” I’ve never been able to eat without getting food all over me. I have a calming influence on schizophrenics. I’ve been depressed since I was 13. I want to be a Mexican. I can’t imagine life without Daryl.
Cluster Bomb: Deron Bauman
Okay, I’m going to bump this up a notch.
I voted for George Bush in his first second term as Texas’ Governor. Amy and I are in an open relationship. Although I am primarily heterosexual, I find myself becoming slightly more interested in men as I get older. I have a 9mm handgun. I took mushrooms to celebrate my graduation from the University of Texas and spent one of the best days of my life at Lake Travis watching headlights appear across the lake. I love American Idol. I have struggled with depression since I was fifteen. I find myself at odds with myself over a strong desire to integrate with others and a strong desire for self-preservation. And I like a fight but I hate conflict.
Update: I think T.S. Eliot is the most overrated writer of the 20th century.
Cluster Bomb: Sheila Ryan
or, Two or Three Things You Don’t Know About Me
John Buass got me going with his “Different times” post, and now I’m looking to get y’all going.
Here’s the challenge: Reveal a few facts about yourself that you believe would really truly startle most (or many) ‘Flockers and friends. I’ll go first. You jump in after me.
I like guns and enjoy target-shooting my Beretta 92FS.
Every now and again I’ll buy a pack of Camel straights and smoke those coffin nails till what remains in the pack is too dried-out to enjoy.
In 1970 I was elected Homecoming Queen of Justin F. Kimball High School (Dallas, Texas).
Mike Wallace Interviews Frank Lloyd Wright
In 1957, at the age of 90, Frank Lloyd Wright was in New York to supervise construction of his final masterpiece—the Guggenheim Museum. Mike Wallace invited him to be a guest on the TV show, The Mike Wallace Interview. Rarely has a figure of such historic importance been so revealingly captured. Guided by Wallace’s questioning, America’s greatest architect emerges as a wise, idealistic, nonconformist, and uniquely self-confident man. This is the complete soundtrack to that legendary interview.
“Different times”
A man from the class of 1947 (having their 60th reunion) told various stories from the good old days of their class, but one stood out. I didn’t catch what it was, but there was some activity that the principal told the students he would shoot them if they did. The speaker and three other members of his class apparently did the activity, were caught, and were brought into the school. The principal pointed to one of the students and said “You first” and brought him back into his office. The speaker and his two friends were sitting there for a few minutes, and then there was this gunshot from inside the principal’s office. The principal then stepped out with this smoking gun in hand. Of course, he revealed soon enough that it had just been blanks, but, said the speaker, “He still sure got his point across.”
The speaker said in concluding the anecdote, “Different times,” as I was trying to imagine the CNN.com story that would be playing nationwide if a principal did this today.
Design That Solves Problems
From the Comments
Cindy S.:
Asked about immigration, George W. Bush said, “There are jobs Americans aren’t doing…If you’ve got a chicken factory, a chicken-plucking factory, or whatever you call them, you know what I’m talking about.”Sheila, your country needs you. Send names of all known fowl dispatchers to Washington. Do it today!
DDT, tobacco, and the parallel universe
The piles of documents released as a result of litigation against Phillip Morris and Exxon are gifts that keep on giving for those of us interested in the process by which the Republican parallel universe has been constructed. Previous research has shown that the core proponents of global warming delusionism including Stephen Milloy, Fred Singer and Fred Seitz got their start as shills for PM, denying the risks of passive smoking. A string of rightwing thinktanks including Cato, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute helped to promote these hacks and the lies they were paid to peddle.
Now it’s turned out that one of the hardiest of parallel universe beliefs, the claim that Rachel Carson and the US ban on DDT were responsible for millions of deaths in the third world, arises from the same source.
Grammar Nazis
Buzzfeed has a posted and a number of links on grammar Nazis, just thought you flockers should now.
A Few URLS
A Few Urls is a new site that lets you put several links in one link. This is occasionally useful when some website asks for one URL, but you really want to stuff in a few.
It Feels Good to Be Good, and its Natural
Placing the interests of others before our own activates a primitive part of the brain. In new research, results show…
“that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.”
Business Loans 2.0
Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.
It is a legitimate question.
“What am I eating?” Pollan asks in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “And where in the world did it come from?” Those two questions, and Pollan’s ability to unpack them with an enviable, discursive essay style, have made him into a food writer who can scare ceos and, maybe, move markets. In the past few years a raft of reporters and writers have stepped forward with him to answer those twinned queries in all their anthropologically thick complexity. Their work draws together issues of taste, ethics, and politics, bridging the gap between James Beard and Rachel Carson.
Peter Sellers in Kubrick’s Lolita (1962)
The Secret Life of Gummy Bears
My friends, I’m not dead. After another long semester, my penultimate at the University of Illinois at Chicago and which earned me a spot on the Dean’s List, I have been resting and searching for something appropriate with which to return to the Flock. Thus, I give you The Secret Life of Gummy Bears:
Since we don’t know how many gummy bears have actually been released into the world, there’s just one immediate solution: Eat them
I’m off to the Philippines on Sunday for a month to do some archaeology, but I’ll try to return to active status here at Clusterflock. Hooray! 
The Smartest Man in the World is Gay
Is the line on the cover of the most recent ‘Advocate.’ The link shows a ‘side-bar’ from the magazine. You may have to get hold of the magazine itself to read the full article. (Which kind of makes this blow as a post, perhaps.)
From the Comments
Cindy S.:
Y’all’ll be sniffing my butt if you don’t give me back my balloons.
Hey, Y’all, Gimme Back My Shoes!
Police seized more than 1,500 pairs of girls’ shoes from the home and storage unit of a man arrested for breaking into a high school, police said Tuesday. “He liked to smell them,” said Lt. William H. Graham.
Hey, Y’all, Gimme Back My Balloons!
An argument over birthday balloons escalated into a fight that ended with one person in the hospital and two others facing criminal charges.
Vagina Power
Amy posted about this video below, but I found it on youtube. It is definitely not safe for work, but who gives a fuck. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in a long time.
found this yesterday
Cevicherashi
Thought you clusterflockians might be interested in my recipe for cevicherashi.
(hint: file under Mexipanese).
The Mutable Brain
For patients with brain injury, the revolution brings only good news, as Dr. Doidge describes in numerous examples. A woman with damage to the inner ear’s vestibular system, where the sense of balance resides, feels as if she is in constant free fall, tumbling through space like an ocean bather pulled under by the surf. Sitting in a neuroscience lab, she puts a set of electrodes on the surface of her tongue, a wired-up hard hat on her head, and the feel of falling stops. The apparatus connects to a computer to create an external vestibular system, replacing her damaged one by sending the proper signals to her brain via her tongue.
But that’s not all. After a year of sessions with the device, she no longer needs it: her brain has rewired itself to bypass the damaged vestibular system with a new circuit.
Miss Universe
In another hitch, Miss Mexico was made to change her outfit for the regional dress contest after her original dress, decorated with brutal images of rebels in a 1920s religious uprising being hanged or shot, drew accusations of poor taste….
Dental Faith Healer
Since he began praying for teeth in 1987, the former coal miner and amateur boxer says he has seen crooked teeth straighten in slow motion, cracked teeth heal, and blackened amalgam fillings turn to silver and gold.
“Healing teeth is funny, but turning water into wine is funny, spitting on the ground and putting it in a man’s eyes is funny,” Jones said.
