million dollar arms
The Pittsburgh Pirates signed two men from India who participated in a reality TV show looking for raw athletic talent in a country of more than a billion.
Singh and Patel came to the United States six months ago after being the top finishers in an Indian reality TV show called the “Million Dollar Arm” that drew about 30,000 contestants. The show sought to find athletes who could throw strikes at 85 miles per hour or faster.
The contest was sponsored by a California sports management company that believed it could locate major league-worthy arms in a country of more than 1 billion. After working extensively with Southern California pitching coach Tom House since May, the pitchers staged a tryout in Tempe, Ariz., on Nov. 6 that was attended by 30 major league scouts.
(via marginal revolution)
Are you ready for STAR TIME?
“JAMES BROWN is a concept, a vibration, a dance,” he told us recently. “It’s not me, the man. JAMES BROWN is a freedom I created for humanity.”
JB quoted by Cliff White & Harry Weinger. From the booklet accompanying the James Brown STAR TIME compilation (1991).
Foodscapes by Carl Warner
“Carl Warner is a London-based photographer who makes foodscapes: landscapes made of food. In the picture above, a pea pod boat sails away from a land made of bread and potatoes, over a sea of salmon.”
(Via Make)
Purple Rein
I love Felt Up.
At first I thought Prince was surely leading up to a whole “Blue + Red= PURPLE” segue and then Wendy and Lisa would appear and they’d all strip down to ’80s lingerie and launch into a barbershop quartet version of “Purple Rain” while Charlie Murphy played tambourine, and all would be right in the world; but alas, ’twas not to be. This quote was taken by just about everyone to mean that he is anti-gay and anti-whatnot and now the internet is all, “Not PRINCE! Say it ain’t so! He of the be-velvet-and-ermine-robed-and-platform-shoed personal style and pansexual musical explorations? Why, it simply makes no sense!“
Ahem. Squirkey.
You know who you are…
blowjobs as performance art
(via buzzfeed)
the morality of cleanliness
People who washed their hands were more likely to be ethically ambivalent than people who watched episodes of Trainspotting.
To do so, she conducted two experiments. The first asked 40 volunteers to unscramble sentences. Half were given sentences containing words associated with purity and cleanliness, such as “pure”, “washed”, “clean”, “immaculate” and “pristine”. Those given to the other half contained only neutral words. The volunteers were then asked to describe how they would rate a series of acts on an ethical scale ranging from zero (perfectly okay) to nine (very wrong). These varied from taking money found in a lost wallet, via eating a family’s dead dog to avoid starvation, to using a kitten for sexual arousal.
The second experiment exposed 44 volunteers to a three-minute clip from “Trainspotting”, a film that is well known for eliciting feelings of disgust, to make them all feel unclean. The volunteers were then asked to describe how they would rate the same series of acts as in the first experiment. However, after watching the clip and before being exposed to the ethical questions, half of the participants were told that the room in which they were to do the rating was a sterile staff space that needed to be kept clean. They were therefore asked, please, to wash their hands with soap and water when entering.
The researchers report that those who were given the “clean” words or who washed themselves rated the acts they were asked to consider as ethically more acceptable than the control groups did. Among the volunteers who unscrambled the sentences, those exposed to ideas of cleanliness rated eating the family dog at 5.7, on average, on the wrongness scale whereas the control group rated it as 6.6. Their score for using a kitten in sexual play was 6.7; the control group individuals gave it 8.3. Similar results arose from the handwashing experiment.
(via marginal revolution)
The Test
From an actual conversation, 28 years ago:
Cindy: If you just had to have a flocked Christmas tree, what color would it be?
Daryl: I think … … green.
Cindy: Okay, I’ll marry you.
Advice from a Half-Assed Gardener
I like to read garden writing, particulary when it’s written by people of a literary bent: Katherine White, Jamaica Kincaid, and so on. But I don’t think I would be very good at it myself. I can be handy with the word part of it at times, but when it comes to the actual gardening I’m at best a happy fraud. So here’s my whole gardening book:
1. Don’t tell people ahead of time what you are growing.
2. Be generous with the produce you give away–and don’t be afraid to buy more at the store if you have to.
3. Get your wife to help you root things in a jar in a window.
4. Look in the compost bin to see what “dead” plants have started to feel better.
5. Don’t be discouraged when your mother comes over.
6. Don’t give any more cuttings to the jerk who wanted to “trade” for some of your purple irises and then never came back.
7. Don’t garden if you want to keep thinking that squirrels are cute.
8. Stuff that comes up again without you doing anything is good.
9. Let problem plants keep going at least until after the weather changes.
10. Don’t bother asking asshole down the street how he keeps his ____ looking so good.
Bruce Lee Plays Ping Pong with Nunchucks
Andrew sent this, unable to post, from the airport. Holy. Fuck.
Thomas Gabel – “Anna is a Stool Pigeon”
The Dogmatic Gourmet Sausage System
A corporate briefing from Dogmatic, an outfit doing something or other with baguettes, spike toasters and sausage.
Research shows that most Americans are doing virtually nothing to take the journey to the path that heads toward a quality sausage.
tangerine peel
The house is filling with people and food. I find a quiet moment and draw what’s in front of me, first with a white china marker, almost invisible on the white paper, then with a brush, ink, and water.
Confession
I watch Reba reruns on Lifetime. Who am I?
Thank you Sarah Palin!
The Truman Syndrome
If it’s true — and they are — and it is — how can it be a syndrome, I ask you?
Researchers have begun documenting what they dub the “Truman syndrome,” a delusion afflicting people who are convinced that their lives are secretly playing out on a reality TV show.
Scientists say the disorder underscores the influence pop culture can have on mental conditions.“The question is really: Is this just a new twist on an old paranoid or grandiose delusion … or is there sort of a perfect storm of the culture we’re in, in which fame holds such high value?” said Dr. Joel Gold, a psychiatrist affiliated with New York’s Bellevue Hospital.
Within a two-year period, Gold said he encountered five patients with delusions related to reality TV. Several of them specifically mentioned “The Truman Show.”
Update: The camera crew is here now.
Shit
Q: What does the U.S.’s current level of sanitation do to health care costs? What would you suggest we do to improve our sanitation and what could the effects of that action be on health care?
A: I don’t have figures for nationwide health costs, but you can guess by looking at the few studies that have been done. For example, a study out of Stanford in 2006 found that sewage outfalls near 28 California beaches caused up to 1.5 million excess gastrointestinal illnesses, which cost California up to $51 million in health care costs (in year 2000 dollars). And that’s just 160 kilometers of coastline.
Sewage outfalls are common in all water bodies across the U.S., and discharges of raw sewage are far more common than most people realize; because most sewer systems are “combined” (meaning they also take in surface water from streets), and because of population growth and the fact that many sewers are decades and sometimes centuries old, they are very vulnerable to heavy rainstorms. Every week, New York discharges over 2,000 Olympic swimming pools worth of untreated sewage into waters nearby.
Criterion Releases Bottle Rocket Tomorrow
Hard Candy Christmas
With budgets tightening and corporate sponsors vanishing, communities from coast to coast have moved to trim the trimmings. They’re hiring fewer elves and renting smaller floats for their Christmas parades. They’re stringing fewer lights.
Santa bookings have dropped so steeply that the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas, which represents 700 jolly souls in red velvet, held a series of meetings to discuss their economic survival. Among the tips: If clients can’t afford an extended Santa visit at $125 an hour, offer them a quickie drop-in.
keyboardr
keyboardr is a homepage. It speeds up your internet expirience. And if you like, it helps you keeping your hands on the keyboard.
In the first place keyboardr is a meta-search. You get Google, Wikipedia, Youtube altogether. The instant search and the keyboard navigation are replacing the feeling of “searching” with the feeling of “launching”.
via Rands
from the comments
We have a Lancaster outside of Dallas, too. It has a really good Luby’s. In fact, there was a great story in the newspaper last week about a rich old guy who secretly married the tea cart pusher from that very Luby’s. The tea cart pusher (who cannot speak English, by the way; neither can the rich old guy speak Spanish)–anyway, the tea cart pusher went on to spend about a million of the rich old guy’s dollars on things like a house and cars for her boyfriend and children. She and her lawyer say she spent it all on groceries. The rich old guy’s grown kids (who, oddly enough in a tale like this, actually seem to be good, loving children) are trying to force a divorce so that the rich old guy doesn’t get taken for every cent. The tea cart pusher’s lawyer was asked how his legal fees are being paid, since the tea cart pusher only uses the rich old guy’s money to buy groceries. He said she is paying him from proceeds she’s getting from the sale of homemade tamales.
It’s true: Texas is a great state.
finishing touch or step too far?
Overheard in the Kid’s Section at the Bookstore
A woman was browsing books with a boy who appeared to be about four years old.
“Mama, why can’t we just buy this book?”
After a moment’s delay: “That’s not age appropriate. We’ll look some more and find something better.”
“But it’s not too scary. It doesn’t make me afraid.”
Another pause. “Well it would scare me to read it,” the mother says. “Why don’t you read it?”
The boy opens the book. “Once there was a T-Rex who wondered if anybody was going to read this book….”
dear clusterflock
Unfinished
Artistic endeavors which I have envisioned but not completed.
Singing Fish, electronic installation – An installation of singing and dancing toys (dancing Santa Claus, Billy Bass, etc.) reprogrammed to perform art music and poetry. Touches on the disposability of pop culture, the subversion of viewer expectations, and the awesomeness of Billy Bass reading Howl.
