dear clusterflock
Are my shoes too small or my socks too thick?
Twouble with Twitters
(thanks, Dale)
Against Sports Fans
Marx was wrong: The opiate of the masses isn’t religion, but spectator sports. What else explains the astounding fact that millions of seemingly intelligent human beings feel that the athletic exertions of total strangers are somehow consequential for themselves? The real question we should be asking during the madness surrounding this month’s collegiate basketball championship season is not who will win, but why anyone cares.
fyi
Someone we have all missed at clusterflock is coming back.
Leko
An eco-friendly car from Ikea?
your logo makes me barf
(via josef stevens)
from the comments
An actual quote from when I was in the military police long ago:“I can’t get that — I’m taking a big 14.”
sexual sneezing
We describe a hitherto under-recognized curious response in some individuals: of sneezing in response either to sexual ideation or in response to orgasm. Our review suggests that it may be much more common than expected. We surmise that an indiscrete stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system may be an underlying mechanism to explain this and other reported unusual triggers of sneezing.
Bless you.
50
Greek Fisherman Nets 2,200 Year-Old Statue
where did the time (capsule) go?
The mystery of the location of the time capsule to commemorate Santa Fe’s 350th anniversary has been solved.
The New Mexican said one of its reporters in 1964 discovered the unfilled tube in a back room of an office machine business, being used “as a shelf for empty plastic bottles and other useless objects.”
Mayor Leo Murphy told the paper in the story more than 40 years ago that the project was abandoned because he was too busy trying to pay for bills incurred from the city’s 350th anniversary.
“Those were days of confusion, days of chaos,” he had told the New Mexican. “I was more interested in getting some friends to sign a note with me to cover the deficit the celebration ran up than I was in what happened to the capsule.”
The capsule was supposed to be filled with items “pertinent to Santa Fe’s 350th anniversary celebration” in 1960, around the time when the city was believed to have been founded in 1610. Historians later discovered evidence that it was founded in 1607 or earlier.
Bummer.
by the tracks
We were walking along the freight tracks below Lower Bloomfield, and I saw this building near the curve.
Review of NOON
Dawn Raffell at MORE Magazine gave a nice review of the new issue of NOON. Read it here:
fire rat
Weekly Picture 155
Shrubberies, Highway 71, Bastrop, TX 3.19.2009
‘Tis the Season
Only two days into the season, Lena scored her first spring kill.
Last night I heard urgent but muffled mewing at the back door and went to investigate. There she sat, squirming and wriggling almost as excitedly as the rodent she held in her mouth. NO PREY INDOORS is the rule the household majority adopted a year ago when Lena and I moved into our digs outside Galena, so I resumed whatever task I was about. A minute later, no more: the identical importuning, this time from the front door. I waited till all was quiet to open the door, and in pranced Lena, tail held high. Just outside, on the WELCOME mat, lay the head of the luckless rodent.
And there it remained all night. This morning, before pitching the offending object into the woods, I’d hoped to incorporate it into a staged photograph featuring a prop cat bearing a tray, a sort of cat-Salome and rodent-John the Baptist tableau, but before I could set up the shot, Lena had gone and eaten about half of the head. It would not have made for an aesthetically pleasing image.
This could mark a turning point in my artistic development. The lesson? Seize the moment.
The Great Zucchini
Every so I often I encounter an article that I post before I finish reading it because it is so obviously exciting and fantastic that I want everyone to read it as soon as possible. This is, just so you know, happening right now and the article is about a “unmarried, 35-year-old community college dropout makes more than $100,000 a year, with a two-day workweek.” I have no idea how this story is going to end, but I can tell you it will be amazing, sometimes a guy just knows:
If you want to understand why the Great Zucchini has this kind of success, you need look no further than the stresses of suburban Washington parenting. The attendant brew of love, guilt and toddler-set social pressures puts an arguably unrealistic value on someone with the skills, and the willingness, to control and delight a roistering roomful of preschoolers for a blessed half-hour.
That’s the easy part. Here’s the hard part: There are dozens of professional children’s entertainers in the Washington area, but only one is as successful and intriguing, and as completely over-the-top preposterous, as the Great Zucchini. And if you want to know why that is — the hook, Vicki, the hook — it’s going to take some time.
Truth, Death, and Taxidermy. And Wisconsin.
The Spring 2009 issue of On Wisconsin, the state university’s alumni mag, features a profile of UW alum Errol Morris by writer Eric Goldscheider.
“I thought being sent to the University of Wisconsin was some kind of a punishment,” [Morris] says, “but I found out otherwise.”
The Secret Passage in Practical Terms
I want a simple house of walls where doors only open by knowing where to knock the proper morse code. Turns out these sorts of things can be a reality for somewhere between $5-$250K:
“At Creative Home Engineering, there is no fantasy,” insists Humble. “You dream it, we build it.” Clients have requested devices ranging from rotating fireplaces, moving staircases and levitating wall niches to hidden escape slides and emergency exits disguised as fine furniture. Features can be activated by any means the client wishes, such as twisting candlestick, pushing a wall sconce, selecting a favorite book title from the library shelf or even knocking on the wall in Morse code. For the most exclusive access, biometric security devices like fingerprint readers and iris scanners ensure that only a few may enter.
untitled sequence
for the love of the dance
Amy got laid off two weeks ago, and while we both see this as an opportunity for her to explore new possibilities; obviously it has added to our stress.
Before the lay off, my obligations were finishing the renovation of our house and a book I am writing on Information Architecture. It now looks like I will need to set aside some of these projects until things have stabilized.
Obviously, I could use my experience as an Information Architect, or I could make a concerted effort to design and build furniture, but I am wondering if there might be other opportunities that could supplement our income while allowing me time to finish the Information Architecture book — perhaps a way to leverage my love of interpretive dance into a revenue generating stream.
Anyway, I open the floor. I know a lot of us are going through this now. Any thoughts, suggestions, or opportunities would definitely be appreciated.
“Let’s hear it for the monkey”
One of designldg’s photos of India.
A Brief History of Christopher Walken
Andrew put together a good history of the Christopher Walken accounts.
In April of 2008, Clusterflock decided to try a PostSecret type account and open up the readers to contribute to our blog. There was some debate about the name (it was Garrett who suggested Christopher Walken) and we put it to a vote. Deron, I guess, felt that Christopher Walken was the most compelling of the names: we just kept finding ourselves riffing off it. So, Deron created the account for the blog, not the twitter account.
Around October of 2008, twitter began to become popular with Flockers, so we all exchanged our twitter account information and took the sardonic irreverence to the twitterverse. The next day it struck me that a Walken account on twitter was a logical extension of our twitter presence so I created it.
You’ll notice, however, that the last link is cached. Turns out, after the account was fallow for a few weeks, somebody clusterflock-related took control of the account, changed the password, and started posting hilarity.
Emily Valentine, for Cindy
(via sullivan)
dear clusterflock
How’d you like the second season of Flight of the Conchords?
