Fucking awesome
This makes me so happy.
[Y]ou’re about to hear the President of United States using language that would finish Cheney off once and for all.
Barack Obama is tired of your motherfucking shit
(Via Rose)
world class athlete tarnished by marijuana scandal
In the past six months, four wrestlers have been kicked out of the ancient sport [of Sumo] for allegedly smoking marijuana, creating the biggest drugs-in-sports scandal that Japan has ever seen.
“We are appalled by his utter folly,” The Asahi, a major newspaper, said in an outraged editorial. “Some young people casually try pot. It is vital that we educate them on the risks of this drug from a fairly early age.”
Sumo wrestlers are expected to live the old-school life of a disciple. They wear their hair in topknots, dress in traditional robes and train in communal “stables.” Their schedules are tightly regulated and the word of their coaches, who are still called “masters,” is absolute and final.
“In the most recent cases, the normal connections are not there anymore,” said David Shapiro, a sumo color commentator [Sumo color commentator!] for broadcaster NHK. “Stable masters normally are your surrogate fathers and now they are your surrogate stepfathers. There are certain stables where this never would have happened.”
“It is hard not to call them lenient in this case,” said Sports Minister Ryu Shionoya. “This is utterly shameful.”
Wakakirin reportedly became interested in marijuana after reading about it in magazines and seeing others smoking it at hip-hop clubs.
Despite its status as Japan’s national sport, sumo has been hit with several scandals in recent years, including persistent accusations of bout-fixing, the hazing death of a young wrestler two years ago, and the antics of its top champion, a fiery Mongolian who fights under the name of Asashoryu.
Ubiquity
Reminscient of Dash, Quicksilver, or Launchy, Ubiquity will be, if it isn’t already, an essential extension for Firefox. Looks like I will finally be ditching Chrome.
Update: Rather than just give you better context to bait you into watching the video, I think I’ll just quote Deron:
Andrew, this is fucking incredible. maybe we should put more context in the post so we make sure people will watch this. this feels transformative in the way the iPhone did.
See? Now you have to watch this.
Tell Cindy
to grab a big fluffy white towel to comfort her before reading what’s below:
Whiskey the Turnspit Dog
The picture above is of Whiskey, the last surviving specimen of a turnspit dog, albeit stuffed.
From Wikipedia:
The Vernepator Cur was bred to run on a wheel in order to turn meat so it would cook evenly. This took both courage (to stand near the fire) and loyalty (not to eat the roast). Due to the strenuous nature of the work, a pair of dogs would often be worked in shifts. This may have led to the proverb ‘every dog has his day.’ The dogs were also taken to church to serve as foot warmers. One story says that during service at a church in Bath, the Bishop of Gloucester, gave a sermon and uttered the line “It was then that Ezekiel saw the wheel…”. At the mention of the word “wheel” several turnspit dogs, who had been brought to church as foot warmers, ran for the door.
Weekly Picture 140
Open Sky, Austin TX, 2.5.2009, 6:46:38
Gold-fin-ger!
I abandoned the frosty metallic look after one final fling around 1976, when I was poking around a southern Illinois dime store and discovered a stash of circa 1967 Yardley Slicker Lip Polishes in the Good Morning and Good Night shades. Bought ‘em up and actually used ‘em on the odd occasion.
Didn’t work on me seriously in 1967. Didn’t work on me ironically in 1976.
So I don’t know what possessed me to start slapping on the gold nail polish tonight. But I wish you were here to see how really really mesmerizing it is by the light of the laptop. The camera-phone snap hints at only a fraction of the weirdness.
When Inauguration Inebriation Goes Wrong
A true story of hope and change.
Around 4pm on Inauguration Day, I was walking my elderly Corgi about a block from my house in central Austin when I heard a woman’s voice call out, “WHO WANTS TO PARTY?”
A middle-aged blonde woman in a robe stepped out onto the front porch of a house across the street. She looked at me and clearly didn’t think I was party material. Let me reiterate: It was 4:00 pm on a Tuesday.
“Did you vote for McCain?” she asked, in a surly voice.
I kind of half shook my head “no,” half did the “don’t engage the crazy person” head tilt. The woman apparently took this gesture to mean “Yes, I voted for McCain and I’d do it again if I could!”
“I KNEW IT!” she slurred/yelled. “I could tell just by LOOKING AT YOU!” (I was wearing sweat pants and a hoodie with owls on it. Not matching. Just the hoodie had the owl print.)
I kept walking, a bit more quickly. I thought our interaction was over, until I heard behind me, very loudly:
“YOU WHORE! YOU FUCKING WHORE! I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE! WHORE!”
Oh, god, I thought. I was very close to my home. What if she really did know where I live? What was she planning on doing? Burning McCain in effigy? Puking in my yard?
I practically dragged the Corgi down the street. There was an ominous silence behind me. Then I heard:
“IT’S A NEW WORLD ORDER!”
titanic boa from Cerrejon
Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.
Graduate students unwrapping the fossils “realized they were looking at the bones of a snake. Not only a snake, but a really big snake.”
So they quickly consulted the skeleton of a 17-foot anaconda for comparison. A backbone from that creature is about the size of a silver dollar, Bloch said, while a backbone from Titanoboa is “the size of a large Florida grapefruit.”
So far the scientists have found about 180 fossils of backbone and ribs that came from about two dozen individual snakes, and now they hope to go back to Colombia to find parts of the skull, Bloch said.
Dear Clusterflock
Am I the only person who thinks white towels are ridiculous?
Story From North America
A strange little animation by Kirsten Lepore. I cannot put my finger on what the music reminds me of. Daniel Johnston, perhaps? (via shey.net)
Updated: This time with the right video embedded.
Penn and Teller Explain Sleight of Hand
via gruber
Just flat out beautiful
Both the book and the website. I want. (via rands)
Songs
Inspired by that CBS morning show, I’m asking you to tell us some of the songs that are absolutely essential to you; that make you happy to be alive; that. . . whatever. Some of mine are below the fold:
New Books Added to the Read Next Stack
Had some good luck this week when I visited the shop around the corner that sells used books. Here are some of the books I found:
A hardback copy of Noy Holland’s book of stories The Spectacle of the Body, which I confess I bought largely because of the wonderful cover designed by Chip Kidd. A quick browse of the stories shows them to be very promising as well.
Clyde Edgerton’s novel The Bible Salesman. I love Edgerton, and if you ever had the pleasure of hearing our own Cooper Renner read aloud from Walking Across Egypt, as I have, you would rush out and buy all of E’s books. The man is funny in a big way.
Lark and Termite, an advance reader’s copy of a new novel by Jayne Anne Phillips. She hasn’t had a book out in a while but many of you will remember her remarkable book of short stories, Black Tickets, and another of her novels, Machine Dreams. She was always an amazing writer and she still is. I don’t know anybody who is able to manage point of view in the way she does: she can present the whole history of world events and a family’s participation in them–while always maintaining an intimate contact with specific characters. It’s just uncanny, the way she accomplishes this.
The Outlander, a novel by Gil Adamson. I haven’t started it yet, but the premise intrigues me: It’s 1903, in the American West, and a woman of 19 kills her husband and flees into the wilderness, pursued by her two ruthless brothers-in-law.
I’ll report back to you once I have finished these. And I’ll be very happy to hear the views of you who are way ahead of me on the reading of these books.
Christian Bale Goes Balistic With a Remix
I hate celebrity gossip, but I love this audio clip from the set of Terminator 4 where Christian Bale looses it on the Director of Photography. For some background, you can read about it here and here. Seriously NSFW.
Oh, the remix. A guy put together a nice techno remix using audio from the rant. It’s awesome ( equally NSFW ):
Letterman on Bill Hicks
Poignant reflections from Letterman and Hicks’ mother about Hicks’ life and the 1993 bit cut from The Late Show just before Bill died of pancreatic cancer:
With Hicks’ mother as his guest on Friday, Letterman revisited this long-ago episode, finally airing the 1993 routine in its entirety. It’s a fascinating segment, watching him tread on this uncomfortable ground, coming face-to-face with the idea you can’t put your arms around a memory; whatever he’d want to say to Hicks now, he can’t. In the second part of the segment, here he is trying to say it to Hicks’ mom.
and later:
It’s compelling to watch Letterman seeming to struggle from the perspective of 2009 to understand –- or make us understand — a decision made in the far-different television universe of 1993. Hicks’ brand of social commentary -– his routine, embedded below, includes barbs on aggressively mindless pop culture figures of the day, cultural attitudes about homosexuality, pro-lifers, and religious symbolism — must have seemed discomfiting so soon after Letterman lost The Tonight Show gig to Jay Leno, and an endless stream of commentary questioned if Letterman’s ”edgier”-by-comparison approach had a chance to succeed on CBS at the earlier hour.
Worth the twenty minutes just to watch the videos, particularly the excised Hicks bit.
Josh Marshall on denial as political strategy
Partisan, but I think accurate, thoughts on the dynamic of the debate about the current economic crisis as it relates to conservative thinking in other policy matters. At the very least, I think this is a good place to understand the framework through which many liberals, myself included, view much of the contemporary political debate.
The other key into the current debate is that the Republican position is ominously similar to their position on global warming or, for that matter, evolution. The discussion of what to do on the Democratic side tracks more or less with textbook macroeconomics, while Republican argument track either with tax cut monomania or rhetorical claptrap intended to confuse. It’s true that macro-economics doesn’t make controlled experiments possible. And economists can’t speak to these issues with certainty. But in most areas of our lives, when faced with dire potential consequences, we put our stock with scientific or professional consensus where it exists, as it does here. Only in cases where it goes against Republican political interests or economic interests of money-backers do we prefer the schemes of yahoos and cranks to people who study the stuff for a living.
Graham cracker
The graham cracker was developed in 1829 in Bound Brook, New Jersey, by Presbyterian minister Rev. Sylvester Graham. Though called a cracker, it is sweet rather than salty and so bears some resemblance to a cookie (American English) / biscuit (British English) (although the term is unheard of in the United Kingdom/Republic of Ireland – a digestive biscuit is the closest approximation). The true graham cracker is made with graham flour, which is unsifted and coarsely ground wheat flour.
It was originally conceived of as a health food as part of the Graham Diet, a regimen to suppress what he considered unhealthy carnal urges, the source of many maladies according to Graham. Reverend Graham would often lecture about the adverse effects of masturbation or “self-abuse” as he called it. One of his many theories was that one could curb their sexual appetite by eating bland foods. Another man who held this belief was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of the corn flakes cereal.
JR’s photography project in the slums of Kenya
Today, after more than a year of planning, 2000 square meters of rooftops have been covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera. The material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season. The train that passes on this line through Kibera at least twice a day has also been covered with eyes from the women that live below it. With the eyes on the train, the bottom half of the their faces have been pasted on corrugated sheets on the slope that leads down from the tracks to the rooftops. The idea being that for the split second the train passes, their eyes will match their smiles and their faces will be complete.
(via sullivan)
Laser Portraits
iFart, the interview
An interview with Joel Comm, the creator of the iFart iPhone app.
Question: What is the iFart Mobile iPhone application that you created?
Answer: It’s an electronic entertainment or sound machine. It produces flatulence noises. There are a number you can select from. Each has their own name and you push the button to fart now and it makes the sound. We built in a few other interesting features like the sneak attack which you can set to go off after a certain number of seconds or minutes. And the security fart, which when you put the phone down after five seconds, it goes into alarm mode and if anybody picks the phone up, and it detects motion, then it lets off the designated sound. We also included fart a friend, which lets you e-mail a selected sound to another e-mail address. And then there is the ‘record a fart,’ which lets you add a custom sound to the selection wheel.
Boxes for Coraline
The movie folk running the Coraline film campaign are lovely, and have handcrafted fifty boxes, sent out to several prominent bloggers/sites. We didn’t get a box, so, I mean, they’re not THAT great, but I love this idea so very much, (how do I get jobs like this?) and am a bit excited to see the movie now.
(via d*s)
truth in advertising
During NBC’s coverage of Super Bowl 43 a Detroit NBC affiliate crawled the following at the bottom of the screen every time Matt Millen talked.
Matt Millen was president of the Lions for the worst eight-year run in the history of the NFL. Knowing his history with the team, is there a credibility issue as he now serves as an analyst for NBC Sports?
Perhaps the same approach could be applied to a certain Vice President.
Liberal Arts 2.0
Yesterday, kottke linked to Snarkmarket’s book proposal concerning Liberal Arts 2.0:
Paper is the new black, so we’re making a book.
Actually, we’re making it because the comments and conversation on Snarkmarket deserve this kind of durability. And because, hey, we’re a book-ish crew: This will be fun.
The subject is the new liberal arts. The seeds are Jason Kottke’s notion of “the liberal arts 2.0” and the Edge-y idea of “a third culture” and a new humanism.
This inspired me to make a modest argument that design is a form of rhetoric by springboarding off David Gray’s observations about information:
Regardless of one’s pressuposition, however, it is clear that we live in a world where signs and signs of signs of things capture our imagination. We call their collection media and, when we are not consuming it, we are talking about it or trying to monitize it.
