by way of explanation
Hi guys,
You seem to have some confusion about why your comments are no longer appearing on clusterflock.
Read more
weird iPhone smiley finger snap
work in progress, 21
He buttons a shirt, starts at the bottom, doesn’t notice until he has gotten to the top. He starts over, lines the buttons up, feels for each hole. A sequence of birds. A row of trees. The movement of the sun. The rest of the house with windows shuttered. He feels it as progression. His attention to what is framed outside this window. His paintings on the wall. The bed. The shutters and windows. All in order. He sits to feel the texture of the floor. His attention toward the ceiling. A slant across it. He reckons there will be a gap. He is looking at his hands against the floorboards. Unaware of himself. Of the impression he would make. Imagines someone walking through the door. Looking up, what does he notice?
Count Basie – Corner Pocket
Dora the Streetwalker?
Mattel and Nickelodeon tried to expand the Dora the Explorer franchise by introducing a slightly older version of the character and were met with outrage.
But as Coca-Cola infamously discovered when it trotted out “new Coke” almost 25 years ago and Tropicana recently found out when it changed — then reverted to — its famous cover design after public confusion and outcry, making any changes, or even additions, to a famous brand can upset consumers.
In this case, Dora is more than a just a cartoon character. The bilingual adventurer, praised for encouraging kids to explore and use their imaginations, is a not only a TV sensation, but a global brand that attracts millions of kids through dolls, clothes, touring shows, DVDs and other merchandising and events.
“A lot of people think of Dora as something for their small kids. And part of the reason people like Dora is because it teaches their kids to be inquisitive and curious in an educational way, because no one wants their kids to grow up fast,” says Jean-Pierre Dube, professor of marketing at the University of Chicago’s graduate school of business.
Discovered
We’ve added a new clusterflock category–Discovered. We hope you’ll use this category to point the rest of us to little known artists whose works amaze you.
I want to start with someone whose photos I recently discovered on etsy, of all places. I mean, I like etsy–it’s a great place to get a hand-knitted scarf, for instance, and I found a pair of oven mitts stenciled “Sylvia Plath” for my daughter’s wedding gift. But I never expected to find anything as marvelous as what I came upon the other day:
Yellow and Sometimes by Erin Tyner. From her Half Awake series. See more.
USB Finger (For Deron)
A fellow gets into a motorcycle accident, loses a finger, and makes a USB prosthetic.
Original Batmobile at Southern California Car Wash
AIG WTF
So far, American taxpayers have extended $170 billion to AIG, an insurer deemed ‘too big to fail’. Setting aside a political interpretation of this intervention, let’s take a look at what’s happened this weekend.
When chastised by the Treasury Secretary for planning to distribute over a hundred million in executive bonuses — bonuses in many cases to the divisions responsible for the monumental failure the company is faced with — the now head of AIG said, essentially, sorry, we’re going to do it anyway.
Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, observes:
I don’t believe the bonuses themselves are the heart of the matter, nor the fact that they’re going to the very executives who caused AIG’s implosion or even the galling reality that, since all money is fungible, they’re being paid with taxpayer dollars. What’s really driving this forward — and what makes it such a dangerous moment for the White House — is the jarring image of the administration’s impotence.
Secretary Geithner found out about the bonuses. He told AIG CEO Edward Liddy it wouldn’t fly. And Liddy, in a curiously imperial letter, tells Geithner that much as he is pained by the situation — to blow it out his ass. Which he apparently proceeded to do.
My question is, is this the most blatant, articulate expression of the reality that a realm of power exists — an awareness that feels either paranoiac or naive depending on your perspective — that transcends governmental systems? And if so, if we are now faced with the obviousness of systems to which the laws of governance, economics, ethics, morality, and civility no longer apply, what does this mean for our notion of centralized, democratic leadership? What does it mean when the beggar is more powerful than the one that extends the coin?
Update: Robert Reich furthers the point.
Our Glass Lake
“Would it bore you very much,” quoth Haze, “to come with us tomorrow for a swim in Our Glass Lake if Lo apologizes for her manners?”
(Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov.)
Difficult to see in the daytime
. . . and impossible to see at night.
Homage to Steve and Glenda Medlin’s cattle from John Buaas at Blog Meridian.
BMW designs gaming computer
I’ll apologize
in advance if you want me to, but I think that one of the most famous things Nietzsche ever wrote–
What does not destroy me, makes me stronger–
may have been true for him, but is utterly ridiculous when applied to people in general.
Dog Armor
The March issue
of elimae is now posted.
A drawing
which ponders an old theological question.
when gamers die
When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father’s gaming friends know that he hadn’t just decided to desert them.
It wasn’t easy, because she didn’t have her father’s “World of Warcraft” password and the game’s publisher couldn’t help her. Eventually, Melissa Allen Spangenberg reached her father’s friends by asking around online for the “guild” he belonged to.
One of them, Chuck Pagoria in Morgantown, Ky., heard about Spangenberg’s death three weeks later. Pagoria had put his absence down to an argument among the gamers that night.
“I figured he probably just needed some time to cool off,” Pagoria said. “I was kind of extremely shocked and blown away when I heard the reason that he hadn’t been back. Nobody had any way of finding this out.”
work in progress, 20
The people he meets sit for him or blend into the wallpaper. Their eyes at this point, entertaining him, the way they point from the body — the landscape of clothing and wallpaper — or blend into a tattered pattern. They look at him. He waits. A last adjustment, then loosens his belt. The sitter flatters herself, then tucks it away. He takes it up again. His eyes to the side of the corner. His face divested. He is humming to himself, she thinks, divided. The flower of her dress. The wallpaper she holds in her hand. The prints of her expression. Alert. The sail of paint and scene. Distort. An allotment of time. The space between shoulder and doorway. The color of it. To the right. Stops being him. He pulls it around to his face. The angles and planes.
Have you seen this?
creationists visit the smithsonian
Every winter, David DeWitt brings his Advanced Creation Studies class (CRST 390, Origins) up from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., hoping to strengthen his students’ belief in a biblical view of natural history, even in the lion’s den of evolution.
“There’s nothing balanced here. It’s completely, 100 percent evolution-based,” said DeWitt, a professor of biology. “We come every year, because I don’t hold anything back from the students.”
A 2006 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 42 percent of Americans believe humans have always existed in their present form. At universities such as Liberty, founded by the late Jerry Falwell, those views inform the entire science curriculum.
“Why should we be afraid to test our worldview against reality?” asked Bill Jack, a Christian leadership instructor who leads groups across the country for a company called Biblically Correct Tours. “If Christianity is true, it better be true in the natural history museums and in the zoos.”
At one point, DeWitt called them together under a Nigerian proverb stenciled on a wall. “The Earth goddess fashions the human body just as the potter fashions her pot,” DeWitt read. “So there is some religion here.”
Near the end of the “Evolution Trail,” the class showed no signs of being swayed by the polished, enthusiastic presentation of Darwin’s theory. They were surprised, though, by the bronze statue of man’s earliest mammalian ancestor.
“A rat?” exclaimed Amanda Runions, a 21-year-old biochemistry major, when she saw the model of a morganucodon, a rodent-like ancient mammal that curators have dubbed Grandma Morgie. “All this hype for a rat? You’re expecting, like, at least an ape.”
(via benen)
a couple from Arkansas
Ten children at an Arkansas day-care center drank windshield wiper fluid after the owner served it from a container mistaken for Kool-Aid and placed in a refrigerator, authorities said Friday. The day-care owner voluntarily surrendered her state license Friday.
Police said a woman has been arrested for allegedly slipping some tranquilizers into her boss’s coffee because she felt “he needed to chill out.” Police said the 24-year-old woman admitted to detectives that she slipped the drugs into veteranarian John Duckett’s drink. Officers said Duckett knew something was wrong shortly after drinking some of the coffee Tuesday morning.
Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit (For Cindy)
Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit. Albert B. Farnham. Columbus (Ohio): A. R. Harding Publishing Company. 1944.
A Guide for Those Who Wish to Prepare and Mount Animals, Birds, Fish, Reptiles, etc., for Home, Den, or Office Decoration
In this work also the ladies can take a very effective hand, and numbers have done so; for there is no doubt that a woman’s taste and lightness of touch enables her in some branches of taxidermy to far exceed the average man. Especially in the manipulation of frail skins and delicate feathers, in bird taxidermy, is this so. (From the Introduction to Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit.)
I just had to laugh
The quintessential bureaucratic smack downs of the past decade — essential moments of speaking truth to power — came from people who host comedy shows.
work in progress, 19
Or its opposite. Patterns of light and swaths of color. The earth is a quilt. Scene at an angle. Far off the side of a building higher than the mountains in the distance catching light. And close, in the bushes that are trees the roof of a house too small. Or a shed. Whichever it might be. And the shapes of people and a cart straddling the division of color from one field to another while he stands firmly in this spot, unable to swipe something — a speck of dust, a glob of paint, an eye lash — from his eye. He wipes with the rounded corner of his wrist until the piece comes clear but the landscape blurs until he sees it calmly laid before him — his nose tickles, blurry headed and tainted, the smell of paint. Difficulty breathing against the heat, carrying his canvas down the shallow hill, walking against the grasses. It is distracting, the taste of dust and occasional bug. He spits, carrying the canvas away from him, certain there will be remnants in the pigment, and surprised to find, when he returns, a single strand of hair, not his own, embedded in it. A cup of coffee and time to think as his reflection settles in. Always the taste of paint and the shimmering face and teeth — the stain on his fingers won’t come clean, so he taps it on the chair and stares into the corner where the light is bright above him and below, into the cubed dimension of the corner, tries to press his toe. Certainly there are dimensions less diminishing than this. If one could avail oneself of them. He turns to examine a spider on the wall and its shadow seems too bright so he takes a paintbrush from his pocket and moistens it against his tongue and brings the brush across an inch of plaster until he is decided.
Hark! A Vagrant
I have been addicting to hitting the random button for the last half hour on Kate Beaton’s new site for Hark! A Vagrant, an historical comic.
