Talking Book
Of course, now that we’re all grown up, we understand that it gets complicated; still, is this not a cool message to offer kids? “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.” Especially when you lay it onto a groove.
Fan Wins $1 Million
That sure beats the fan I saw win $10,000 at a Dallas Stars game
Garfield minus Garfield
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?
car stock exchange
Automotive research site Edmunds.com has taken a cue from the popularity of fantasy sports and applied it to what the site knows best: car sales. It has created what it calls the Car Stock Exchange, or CSX – an online game where members can buy and sell stock in upcoming automobiles, which is valued based on predicting the sales of particular models in the U.S. The money used in CSX exists only in the virtual world and new members receive $1,000,000 in funny money for joining. A stock price of CSX$1 equates to 1,000 units of predicted sales. Users can buy stock in vehicles, like the 2008 Smart fortwo or 2008 BMW M3, that they believe have a price below what the actual market sales numbers will illustrate.
Owen Wilson in Life and Art
Mapping the idea of “life imitating art” onto Owen Wilson’s biography and Wes Anderson’s films reveals their startling convergence. As Anderson’s works increasingly addressed themes of depression, psychiatric treatment, and “hitting bottom,” so too did Wilson’s life chart a course towards collapse. Wilson’s characters in Anderson’s early films-the sublime geniuses born of commingling depression, emotion and creativity-gradually give way to caricatured objects of psychoanalytic explication.
Derren Brown – “Paying with Paper”
Incarceration Facts of the Day
1 in 100 U.S. adults is behind bars.
Furthermore, 1 in 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars.
It costs an average of $23,876 a year to imprison someone.
Which 20th century classic of American conservative political thought has held up best?
I opined that none have held up particularly well, mostly because they underestimated the robustness of the modern world and regarded depravity as more of a problem than it has turned out to be.
suicide fact of the day
I went back to the original data source (imagine that!) and found that the stereotype is dead wrong: suicide rates are notably lower for teenagers than adults…Suicide rates do rise throughout the teen years, but they plateau at about age 20 and remain flat throughout the years 20 to 65. Then they jump again for the 65+ demographic. In case you’re wondering, teen suicide rates have not been rising, either. They’ve been in decline since the late 1980s.
in defense of clarence thomas
I attended a speech by someone from the Office of the Solicitor General last year, and he spoke about this exact topic. He has argued many, many cases before the Supreme Court. He said that for most cases that receive media attention (i.e. those that deal with politically sensitive issues), there is little, if any, possibility that oral arguments will make any difference. However, in some of the more technical types of cases, such as cases that deal with obscure procedural nuances, oral arguments can help to flesh out a party’s case. On occasion, orals can change the opinion of a justice, but probably not in the cases that laypeople care about.
Hey Jude
via iacas
the situation is
that the doc don’t know the situation, never mind the insurance and then the clinic where you pay cos the printer in the hospital ain’t working so they don’t give appointments but at the clinic it takes so long you get to snooze in expensive couches… all for the purpose of delivering this to the docs postbox or to reason what those hangy jowl things are or that explosion between the eye sockets, while a bit of photoshop can change the whole dynamic of a jolly roger afternoon… moral? no docs please!
Cold Light of Day
Funny how a different slant of light can alter what we see. Example: ‘Round midnight, after I’d posted my recollection of a lost trotter, Deron emailed me to express privately a sense of awe and mystery and his fear that a public comment on my post might “sully” it. I was feeling pretty reverential both toward the post and myself; you know, “I shall not murder/The mankind of her going with a grave truth/Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath” and all that.
Then comes the morn and with it, Rick’s comment. Jars. A supermarket chain. Pocahontas . . . Arkansas.
I love clusterflock.
Superstition (Stevie Wonder Live on Sesame Street, 1973)
Je Ne Regrette Rien . . . except for . . .
Deron’s comments about wild hogs in north central Texas call to mind one of my few regrets.
Sweet Relish
Okay, so the hot dog does not literally resemble a cock nor the bun a cunt. And that Kelly green relish . . . Still, it has possibilities. (Courtesy of The Condiment Packet Gallery via the Museum of Online Museums.)
xkcd brilliance
Read the comic, then read this and, if you don’t understand how you have been pwned, read this.
whatevers
So, I disconnected the waterline to the fridge cause I’m building the pantry that goes around it and we had to slide the fridge out to get the pantry in but dropped the top portion of the pantry on its corner so I am having to reset it with wood glue until it dries so that we can give it a go again which means the water line to the fridge is still disconnected so I got some water out of the tap and mixed some gatorade in with it — which is my wont — when it occurred to me that these tests you hear reported that there’s no difference in how tap water tastes compared to bottled water — or in this case, filtered (as the water from the fridge is filtered) — are, well, a load of crap.
Global Cooling?
January 2008 capped a 12 month period of global temperature drops on all of the major well respected indicators. I have reported in the past two weeks that HadCRUT, RSS, UAH, and GISS global temperature sets all show sharp drops in the last year.
Maya Blue
Feinman said at the bottom of the cenote, a layer 14 feet deep of blue goo has been found, likely composed of pigment that washed off sacrificial victims and objects. “The Maya used indigo, copal incense and palygorskite for medicinal purposes,” said anthropologist Dean Arnold of Wheaton College and the Field Museum, who also worked on the study. “So, what we have here are three healing elements that were combined with fire during the ritual at the edge of the Sacred Cenote. The result created Maya blue, symbolic of the healing power of water in an agricultural community,” Arnold said.
holy crap
Caterhams have always been the model for minimalist motoring and it’s rare that owners have been wanting for more motivation, but RS Performance has answered the call of a few owners that want insane power to match the Caterham’s spartan looks. Packing a supercharged 2.4-liter, V8 driving the rear wheels through a six-speed gearbox, RS Performance is giving well-heeled drivers 550 hp (at 10,000 rpm!) to simultaneously dry their hair and wet their pants. With a curb weight of almost 1,150 pounds, that means a power to weight ratio of around 1000 hp per ton and a 0-60 time of under three seconds.
Pininfarina Sintesi concept
dear clusterflock
What was your first car?
coolness
Okay, next week I’ll be guest blogging at kottke.org, so please take the opportunity to knock the socks off clusterflock while I’m away. Of course, I probably won’t actually be able to be away entirely, will I? Either way, please commence with the knocking of the socks.
LEGO-esque media players
