Nero, Power Moduling, unedited
A Matter of Taste
This post reminded me of how sometimes some foods have tastes that remind me of other things.
For example:
- black tea with milk and sugar = artichoke hearts
- salted, roasted cashews = band aids
- fresh banana = bubble gum
Olympus E-P1
Amy has been waiting for an interchangeable-lens, dslr image quality, rangefinder form-factor camera she can fit in her purse.
Never Before Seen Photos of Audrey Hepburn
The Flickr set is just fantastic.
tweet out of context
netw3rk @petehoekstra Someone walked in on me while I was in the bathroom. Reminded me of Pearl Harbor.
unparalleled in its scope and brazenness
It’s stories like this that restore my faith in human-kind.
Irene Prusik has been dead for six years. But in April, someone showed up at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Brooklyn to renew her driver’s license. The explanation given by prosecutors rivals the Hitchcock classic “Psycho”: It was her son, in drag.
Any final thoughts?
Authorities claim that following his arrest, Parkin told them that because he held Prusik when she breathed her last breath, “I am my mother.”
his father scoffed
John Barnes has long suspected the couple who raised him were not his biological parents, and now he’s awaiting DNA tests to find out if he was the 2-year-old boy who disappeared outside a bakery in Long Island, New York while his mother shopped inside.
sensory amelioration
The casing of one of my medications gives to the palate a hint of what the goose head gave to the nose.
Yes Men hit the streets today with a fake International Herald Tribune
You remember the fake New York Times that was distributed last November announcing the end of the Iraq war? Well, there is a fake International Herald Tribune being circulated today, in an action by Greenpeace, which is being released in advance of the Copenhagen summit on December 19 2009. In it, EU leaders thank the European public for having engaged in months of civil disobedience leading up to the Copenhagen climate conference that will be held this December. “It was only thanks to your massive pressure over the past six months that we could so dramatically shift our climate-change policies…. To those who were arrested, we thank you.”
The Yes Men have supported a website which is urging non-violent civil disobedience in confronting climate change in the face of reluctant bureaucrats and politicians.
From a press release sent out today:
“Non-violent civil disobedience has been at the forefront of almost every successful campaign for change,” said Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men, who helped write and edit the newspaper and are furnishing the technology for BeyondTalk.net. “Especially in America, and especially today, we need to push our leaders hard to stand up to industry lobbyists and make the sorts of changes we need.”
You can get the horoscopes here.
Tool Signs Video Game Visionary Jason Rohrer
Looks like he won’t be a starving artist any longer (via):
“I see video games not as addicting time-wasters, but instead as powerful tools for communication and expression through their unique channel, which is interactivity,” noted Rohrer. “Deep interactivity is missing from most digital brand campaigns, and I’m hoping to change that. Tool shares my vision, and I’m fortunate to be working with them.”
You may remember Jason from such games as Passage and Gravitation. See, also, an interesting bio in Esquire (via).
“glimpse into id of a small town”
glimpse into id of a small town, found when seeking newspaper coverage of that tractor business: http://tinyurl.com/nwt29b. Read&weep,BKLYN
—2 hours ago by @hyla_crucifer
Selections from “Readers’ Column week of June 14, 2009,” Owego Pennysaver, after the jump.
Read more
Diane Benscoter, former Moonie
My friend Shanna did a wildly fascinating interview with Diane Benscoter, a lady who joined the Moonies at the age of 17 and was later “deprogrammed.”
Could you speak a little bit about deprogramming? You were deprogrammed and became a deprogrammer, but it’s a rather controversial practice and many think that it brings up ethical issues relating to free will.
Yeah, I have a lot to say on this topic, but I’ll try to give the main points first. One — involuntary deprogrammings, which I was involved with, aren’t really taking place anymore and definitely not as they were. Looking back on it, I think there are ethical issues there. Still, I totally understand why people did it, why I did it — desperation, not knowing what to do, love of their child. You’re dealing with a problem that hasn’t been defined psychologically, so you can’t lock people in a mental hospital for it.
Now, I had one foot in and one foot out of the Moonies when I was deprogrammed. My faith was already wavering. Also, I had a loving family. But, to pull a belief system away from someone who doesn’t have the correct support system can be very dangerous. It’s like chemotherapy. Chemotherapy many times cures cancer, but it can also kill people. So, I’m not going to say that deprogramming is the way. And that‘s why I’ve gone in the direction of prevention.
Also, some people came to deprogramming more professionally that others. Some made mistakes and some used really admirable techniques. For the most part, in the ones that I was a part of, we just talked to the person and made sure that they ate and slept well. We were trying to introduce rational thought and a healthy mental state. We presented no new philosophy and no desire for them to take up any of our personal beliefs. We simply tried to explain that much of what they had been told was not true and was possibly brainwashing. We based our techniques on psychological theory, especially the work of Robert Lifton.
Oh, Kelsey!
Miriam Sakewitz, 47, was arrested again Tuesday at a Tigard hotel after an employee reported finding rabbits hopping around in her room.
Nero, Blind Beggar, unedited
Fill In the Blanks
On the way back from lunch, I spotted a cyclist wearing a white t-shirt bearing a message written in black permanent marker. I could make out only two words:
Fart
French
Iran, Twitter, and the Current Administration
An odd but clever request from the White House:
The Obama administration says it has tried to avoid words or deeds that could be portrayed as American meddling in Iran’s presidential election and its tumultuous aftermath.
Yet on Monday afternoon, a 27-year-old State Department official, Jared Cohen, e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.
What World MPs Really Make
Created by Shakeup Media— the distance from the yellow cross to each dot represents the base bay of parlimentarians, expressed as a multiple of percapita GDP ($). The angle from the thick yellow line to each dot represents a so-called Good Governance Metric calculated by taking the average of The Democracy Index (DCI) published by the Economist, the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and the Perception of Corruption Index (PCI) by NGO Transparency. The farther away from zero the angle, the lower the score and the worse the governance.
Thanks, infosthetics.
it’s for kids!
2009 Orphan Car Show: 1927 Graham Child’s Hearse
This one off was built in 1927 as a prototype for a line of funeral cars sized for carrying the remains of children. According to the adjacent sign, Albert H Whittekind spent two years carving the wooden adornments on the flanks. The hearse runs on a Graham chassis, which was the truck division of Dodge Brothers before that brand was absorbed into Chrysler. No funeral homes ever purchased any of these smaller hearses and so this one was never replicated. The children’s hearse is now owned by Cole Funeral Home of Chelsea, MI.
Mortal Remains
We have been speaking of mortal remains.
This, the tail-end of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, has always just shredded me.
I take it personally.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
fresh colonies of purple brown bacteria
Whoa.
Scientists have brought a newly-discovered bug back to life after more than 120,000 years in hibernation. It raises hopes that dormant life might be revived on Mars. The tiny purple microbe, called Herminiimonas glaciei, lay trapped beneath nearly two miles of ice in Greenland. It took 11 months to revive it by gently warming it in an incubator. Finally the bug sprang back to life and began producing fresh colonies of purple brown bacteria.
(via marginal revolution)
Lena
was out all night in the stick-a-burr place, and she came home just studded with hundreds and hundreds of burrs. She looks and feels like a clove-studded ham. No, she looks and feels like a green peppercorn- or caper-studded (furry) ham, except that she is not shaped like a ham. I did, however, feed her half the contents of a jar of Gerber’s ham baby food. Cooperative grooming has now commenced. This could take a while.
poop report
7:47 AM, #5 on the Bristol, alla bolognese.
The Record
Wouldn’t you know that the best things are said before the sound equipment is sorted.*
[http://www.clusterflock.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/Derrick1.mp3]
*You can hear Derrick, but the recording volume is hinky.
Super Keyboard Cat Brothers
(via Waxy)
It’s natural to be afraid
More here.
