Timbuktu Rocks
And the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project rocks.
An acrylic version
of the shy nude, if ye’re interested.
Don’t take my word for it…
…but Timbuktu is like for real y’all.
Or if goats are your thang, here’s more from Timbuktu.
Spirit Like a Cat
SPIRIT [LIKE A CAT]: All goes still to our delight.
Either come, or else refuse, refuse.
(Macbeth. Act III. Scene 5.)
Helicopters
Sycamore seeds
and he smote them in his mercy
But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.
A slide show, if you can stomach it.
PS22 Choir, Eye of the Tiger
Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas
I am a firm believer that the ridiculous and absurd play just as an important role in our thinking as the sane and reasonable. Steven M. Johnson understands this:
In discussing his often fantastical, sometimes silly, sometimes visionary concepts, he has said, “If I could use two words to describe what it is that I enjoy it is that I love to be sneakily outrageous . . . [It may be that] I have decided an idea has no practical worth and would never be likely to be adopted seriously (like most of my ideas), but I like it anyway.”
My favorite “sneakily outrageous” idea of outlined in the NYT article was the pedal train, a bike-train hybrid. It’s so crazy, it would work.
From the Jobs Forum
azeem in chicago, Illinois
19 months ago
hi guys, i have a interview coming up with raytheon. any info regarding interview process and questions would be helpful.
thanks
Juan P_123 in Redmond, Washington
3 months ago
Depending on the job…
It literally depends on the job, division, position, location…AND most importantly, the person. I recommend a lack of arrogance will help. Also, gauge their interests! If they are into girls, you make sure a hot girl-friend, like I had, comes along into the interview, or drops you off — and they notice. If they are into cars, you better know that sh#$. You already got the job because you got the skills, but they want to know — CAN I WORK WITH YOU — are you cool? I’ve seen some of the brightest mo-fo’s not get a job, because they had no social skills! I sh#$ you not! Good luck.
dear clusterflock
I still get along pretty well with my ex. Do you?
That’s a lie. I don’t still get along with him well, I’ve reached a point where I can get along with him well again. Not that I don’t occasionally remember why he’s my ex.
The Voice of the Age of the Cornerstone
Werner Herzog on Klaus Kinski
via Chewing Pixels
Top Searches
humantauria, fuck my life, clusterflock, circumcision, lucien freud
But I was so much older then…
…I’m younger than that now.
10/21/07 e-mail correspondence from me, to him:
“I don’t know what I would say to Lynch. Sometimes there’s just not much to say when you feel so deeply about things, it moves beyond words into a stage of pure image, and that’s all I see. David Lynch and I in a clearing, and everyone’s there, the elephant man, Eraserhead, Rita and Betty and Diane, Agent Dale Cooper is smiling so broadly, and we’re all laughing at a joke and talking free and easy. And I’m skipping stones and I never really join in with the rest, it’s just enough that I get to be here for a few hours, listening to the conversations, laughing at the jokes, and watching the shadows lengthen. “
Dear Clusterflock
Do you use “ma’am” or “sir” when speaking to a stranger?
Honest Pint Act
I somehow expect this from Oregon:
House Bill 3122, better known as the “Honest Pint Act,” passed the House by a 34-26 vote on Thursday. The law allows businesses serving draft beer to post state-issued stickers if their pints measure up to 16 ounces, or a full U.S. pint.
The movement to recognize Oregon establishments that aren’t skimping on pint service was begun by Jeff Alworth, a beer blogger who petitioned to make honest pints an issue for state regulators of standards and measurements.
Some establishments serve beer in 13 or 14 ounce glasses but charge customers “per pint” of beer.
It is predicted to cost the state, at least, $20,000 for “forms and training.”
What makes us happy?
An exhaustive (and exhausting) study of the lives and relative happiness of 268 Harvard men from 1937 to the present.
Vaillant became a kind of godfather to the field, and a champion of its message that psychology can improve ordinary lives, not just treat disease. But in many ways, his role in the movement is as provocateur. Last October, I watched him give a lecture to Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions—awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). “The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?
In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.
(via andrew sullivan)
Low-Fi Sci-Fi
“Sanda created each cover using A4 paper, with all the typography printed and placed on the structure by hand,” Jones continues. “We then photographed each paper structure and, upon seeing the original black and white images, we didn’t feel that any tweaking or further alterations were needed.”
(via kottke)
Should cars make noise?
Dan Hill waits for the day that car noise no longer spams the streets:
Buses – the public transport mode that car-based cities tend towards – are often the worst offenders. Sydney buses are particularly egregious, amongst the loudest I’ve heard in any city. As I’m that way inclined, I’ve taken to sporadically measuring the decibel level on city streets using the promising but currently flawed iPhone app WideNoise (see also NoiseTube), and find levels well over 100dB when a bus or two roar by, even on an open street corner. This is akin to standing in a sheet metal workshop, and you can watch people actually grimace, subconsciously feeling how unpleasant it is. It leads to iPod users turning the volume up further as a form of aural arms race (a lose:lose scenario). More importantly, it flattens the possibility of varied urban sounds. (That people have started to cover their ears for the last few years, denoted by white headphones, may be telling in itself.)
This long, thoughtful, lunch-time read is a response to an Economist article that suggests electric cars should be engineered to make sounds.
Connie Converse | How sad, how lovely
I have recently discovered an incredible songwriter called Connie Converse. Connie wrote and recorded a number of songs over 50 years ago, in an apartment in Greenwich village. These songs have only recently been unearthed. You are about to be among the first ever to hear them.
These recordings have something of the power of those hot San Antonio nights when Robert Johnson sang into a horn in a hotel room in 1936. This woman wrote her songs before the Beatles showed up. Before Elvis showed up. Before rocknroll showed up. Long before the singer songwriter paradigm showed up.
Connie Converse was writing songs in the fifties of such intimacy, wit and poignancy that would not be heard in the mainstream until Joni Mitchell came along, a hundred cultural light years later. There’s an uncanny quality in Connie Converse. Her songs go on journeys into yearning, into the uncanny.
And her story is as mythical as Johnson’s, albeit in a completely different mood. Connie Converse left Greenwich Village – dispirited at lack of record industry interest in her songs – in 1960, right when Bob Dylan was arriving in town. She moved to some city beginning with M: somewhere she never really felt right in, though she had by the sound of it a very close supportive group of family and friends around her. One day in 1974, she packed up her volkswagen, dispatched a bunch of farewell letters, and headed off. She has not been heard of since.
She would be 85 now. I so much want to call out to her, to tell her that people are listening, that we love her songs, that there will be so many people who will listen to and love her songs now. That she was living out of time and place, that people care about her story. That I care about her story.
Connie Converse! I care about your story. I love your songs. You matter. You absolutely matter.
Now, listen.
And these are the people who literally unearthed Connie’s songs from the bottom of a filing cabinet, and made them available for the world to buy and to listen to.
UPDATE: Connie Converse is now on Bandcamp. The full album is streaming and directly purchasable there too.
The Beastie Boys and Mr. Spock
This isn’t like the last few Trek movies where the die-hards would go to watch it on opening day and then have to go back into the Trek closet come Monday morning.
But there’s one thing that’s been bothering me and I finally put my finger on it. It’s quite possible that the Beastie Boys inadvertently invented Mr. Spock’s Vulcan nerve pinch.
At the very least the Brooklyn rappers prophesied Spock’s existence 200 years before his birth.
The new elimae
is now posted.
My Life Is Average
Remember Fuck My Life? Well, for those who prefer ennui to angst, there is My Life Is Average.
Christian Humility Before Pagan Exuberance
Or pagan protuberance.
A cup holding boys holding boys
A little reflective moment to finish things off gently, in the form of a silver Roman cup from the 1st century AD. Et voila. Most of the images from today’s ancient erotica fest, came from The Guardian and this site.
