tattered and handled
Holding — and smelling — the tattered and handled copy of Lolita Amy specifically requested I buy for her from Half-Price Books, she said: I like this. It smells like glue and man.
“Some of us have harder heads than others”
Dude in Oregon damn near blew himself to bits the other day. Clearly, not a graduate of explosives camp.
“About the last three weeks, there’s been like big, big bangs,” said neighbor Bobbie Hall. “I thought maybe they were celebrating or something and I thought it was like a shotgun.”
Carmona said he has known Hibler for 12 years. While he said Hibler may have an interest in explosives, he doesn’t believe Hibler was making a bomb for mass destruction.
“I truly believe he wasn’t making a device to hurt anybody,” Carmona said.
. . .
“He liked to make a big noise and apparently he told one of the kids he was going to make him a little firework thing,” neighbor Charlotte Scott said.
Hibler lives with his mother and sister. Neighbors said he had a similar accident a few years ago, which prompted his mother to ask him not to make fireworks this year.
“Some of us have harder heads than others and don’t get the message the first time,” Scott said.
—”Evacuation Still In Effect Near Salem Home: Hazardous Materials Being Removed from Home, kptv.com, June 18, 2009
It took them two days to clear the house of explosives. Also, um, they found a bunch of pot plants.
What Cindy Said
We’re driving out of a parking lot in Rich Republican Town when an old guy starts to walk in front of us without looking, then stops and glares at us (white buzz cut, dark aviator glasses, white polo shirt, khaki shorts), and whips his hand in a Move It motion. Cindy rolls her window down as we pass and says “Stand down, Major!”
MyVibe iPhone App
headline of the day
With prey scarce, wild dolphins turn to humans
this is it. The big one
A TED interview with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran.
What do you make of what’s going on in Iran right now.
I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.
look, ma, no hands
Fitter, happier, more productive
Following up on my post of last week that started with a quote from Matthew B. Crawford’s article “The Case for Working With Your Hands,” here is a review from the New Yorker of of Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, from which the article was excerpted.
Crawford’s brief for skilled manual labor is rooted in firsthand experience: repairing motorcycles fills him with a “sense of agency and competence.” But what would he say to the accountants in de Botton’s book, who express “earnest pride in their mastery of a labyrinthine craft”? Crawford decries our “ignorance of the world of artifacts,” and mourns “the disappearance of tools from our common education.” But he never quite gets around to explaining what counts as a tool, and why.
—Kelefa Sanneh, “Out of the Office: Fast bikes, slow food, and the workplace wars,” New Yorker, June 22, 2009
(Also via Dervala.)
We’re not kids. We’re artists.
When I was 22 and living in an apartment in Madison, Wisconsin with my soon-to-be husband, our resident building manager, Byron Blotky, came by one evening to look into some problem or other we had phoned him about.
I was in the kitchen, where I had just heated a straightened-out coathanger over a gas burner till it was red-hot, and I was using it to shave off portions of a 45 rpm vinyl record (“Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks) and shape it so it would fit into an Art Deco toaster I had bought at the Good Will downstairs from the apartment.
Byron peered into the kitchen and hollered, “What in the heck are you kids doing?”
“We’re not kids, Mr. Blotky,” I said. “We’re artists.”
I don’t want your bourgeois accolades.
I scrabbled about as fast as ever I could to meet Doc’s clitoral challenge, yet I missed the 8:00 PM CDT deadline. So I scrabbled again, and the result is what you see above. And still it was past the revised deadline of midnight.
Down below is my first desperate race-against-the-clock attempt.
Read more
Deadline Extended
Due to unforseeable technological difficulties, I hereby extend the deadline for the clitoris vs fucking clitoris illustration contest to 12 am (that means midnight tonight). Judging will commence Saturday morning or afternoon or whenever.
Father’s Day with Dodson and Ross
The Internal Clitoris
shit sandwich
1. Longish, emotionally involved conversation with a dear friend.
2. 32k bill from the first surgeon who operated on my hand who says my insurance will not cover it.
3. Nephew’s best friend backing into the hood of the car Amy is trying to sell.
1000 FPS video
I-Movix SprintCam v3 NAB 2009 showreel from David Coiffier on Vimeo.
Every Friday for me is Bowie Friday
It gets pretty freaky in the office on Fridays
Arrested Development Documentary
(via kottke)
the last archival storage devices we would ever need
The quest for a billion-year storage device is under way.
A team led by Alex Zettl, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has devised a robust nanoscale system that could store massive amounts of digital information for very long periods of time. Any products that eventually emerge from this work could conceivably be the last archival storage devices we would ever need.
iPod saves girl’s life
Her family is calling her “Sparky.”
Sophie Frost and Mason Billington, both 14, took shelter under a tree in King George V Playing Field, in Rayleigh during a thunderstorm on Monday night when they were hit by the 3,000-volt lightning bolt.
Sophie passed out as the current travelled through her iPod headphones, which were hanging from her school uniform, and burned her chest and stomach
Peta2
1.
2.
Still, “swatting a fly on TV indicates he’s not perfect,” Friedrich said, “and we’re happy to say that we wish he hadn’t.”
Orange Crate Art: Brian Wilson & Van Dyke Parks
From I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times (1995), directed by Don Was.
Amy said
Step one for most men to enhance is to get a book and find out where the fucking clitoris is.
Why do you take pictures?
Rora put his black Canon down in his lap, then under the table. He snapped a picture of the graces’ legs, covering the click with a false cough.
Why did you take that picture?
That’s a stupid question, Rora said. I take pictures.
Why do you take pictures?
I take pictures because I like to look at the pictures I take.
It seems to me that when people take a picture of something, they instantly forget it.
So what?
So nothing, I shrugged.
They can look at the picture and remind themselves.
But what do you see when you look at a picture you took?
I see the picture, Rora said. What’s with these questions?
When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.
Drink more coffee, Brik, Rora said. It will pick you up.
An excerpt from the book I’m reading, The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon.
This resonated with me. I have an online library of almost 2,500 photos and an offline one of at least half that. I also like to look at the pictures I take, and they often make me wistful. I’m a nostalgic person, much like the narrator of Hemon’s novel. I, too, have thought, What I can see is what I am not.
Why do you take pictures?
Hypocrisy sucks
New research suggests that while religiosity (defined as religious involvement, frequency of prayer, and perception of the importance of religion) influences the attitudes of young women towards abortion, it does not affect their actual behavior.
In other words, even religious women, if unmarried and pregnant, resort to abortion—particularly women in their teens.
The Black Heart Procession – A Cry For Love
Do any of you guys dig The Black Heart Procession? They hail from San Diego. If you like this then check out any of their back catalogue for a real treat.
