Old Jews Telling Jokes
The site is updated every Tuesday and Thursday. (via yewknee)
dear clusterflock
Do you like onion in your stir-fry?
PTSD Dog
I simply cannot stop looking at this.
Pasties (Not [Cornish] Pasties)
Amy says she wanted to buy her some pasties the other night. Here’s a tip: Pontefract cakes make the cutest pasties.
from the spam
Within limits her fur under again upheaval flung the lady but also what is sarafem and sail absolute confidence always needed every year she reached the terminal avodart.
quote out of context
“Today we made the decision to close this stretch of ill-gotten, illegally accumulated sand,” said Patricio Patron, Mexico’s attorney general for environmental protection. “This hotel was telling its tourists: ‘Come here, I have sand … the other hotels don’t, because I stole it.‘”
screenshots from Wednesday’s footage
Into My Arms – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
This moved me today. I hope it does you.
I don’t believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Not to touch a hair on your head
To leave you as you are
And if He felt He had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms
Pepto-bismol ice cream
Homemade, to boot:
So the search for a hangover cure has become paramount. I need something to ease my mind back into the day, something to tighten up the valves downstairs, and several years of intensive trial and error have led me in the direction of two remedies.
Stage one is ice cream, which I believe works for me for two reasons. Firstly, the coolness of product helps to counteract the inevitable post-alcohol sweat. Secondly, both dairy products and eggs are a valuable source of Vitamin B12, a deficiency of which is normal in hangovers – my body is telling me it needs more, and ice-cream delivers.
Stage two is the imbibing of Pepto-Bismol, that remarkable, vibrantly pink remedy for bowel anguish. This stuff is weird, but it does the trick. Years ago, when I worked for outlandishly hirsute rockers The Cure, the band wouldn’t tour without stocking up first. I’d be at my desk, and the call would come in. “Fraser? We’re in Rio, and we’ve run out of Pepto. Can you Fedex us a crate?” And so I would.
Ice cream. Pepto-bismol. Pepto-bismol. Ice cream. After a while, it became obvious. I should combine the two.
The Power of the Pentatonic Scale
This reminds me of an odd, impossible to find book Tonality by Molly Malcolmson Gustin who happened to be an odd, crotchety Math Professor of mine. She argued that tonality and the pentatonic scale are part of the objective criteria in judging music because they are mathematically rooted in nature. This means that atonal music, since it does not conform to the mathematics of the nature world, is objectively bad (so, no post-1954 Stravinsky for you).
I am not sure I entirely I agree with her argument, but it always makes me think, much like Bobby McFerrin’s observation above, of the complete cadence. The idea behind the complete cadence is that certain chords go well together and actually “resolve” a musical phrase. In other words, the ear hears certain notes and actually expects particular notes to follow. Of course, this is better heard than explained, so go here and scroll down to find examples and you’ll hear exactly what I mean.
the future meets the stupid
EATR, a DARPA-funded joint venture of Robotic Technologies and Cyclone Power Technologies, was designed to “find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment” in order to work long missions without having to be manually refueled. But news outlets, notably Fox News, interpreted this factoid to mean that it would consume the corpses of fallen soldiers and—who knows?— maybe even the occasional live one.
Robot Technology’s press release (pdf):
In response to rumors circulating the internet on sites such as FoxNews.com, FastCompany.com and CNET News about a “flesh eating” robot project, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. (Pink Sheets: CYPW) and Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI) would like to set the record straight: This robot is strictly vegetarian.
Axixa, the street urinal
Big Wheel
My love of cars started here: I could pack a lunch in the back compartment (a special edition, I guess) and pedal the driveway and sidewalk to my grandparents’ neighbors’ for an afternoon of swimming and Evel Knievel launches before pedaling home.
slimeheads, goosefish, rock crabs, whore’s eggs
What happened when the slimehead was renamed the orange roughy?
Some of those worst-hit were fish that have been renamed to make them more marketable. For threatened animals on land, a more attractive name might be a blessing. But for these creatures — slimeheads, goosefish, rock crabs, Patagonian toothfish, whore’s eggs — it was a curse.
That fishermen have turned to them shows what’s left in the ocean. Today’s seafood is often yesterday’s trash fish and monsters.
“People never thought they would be eaten,” said Jennifer Jacquet, a biologist at the University of British Columbia. “And as we fish out the world’s oceans, we’re coming across these species and wondering, ‘Can we give them a makeover?’”
The 2-D Fetish article from the NYT may have been just that
Remember? Well, it turns out there may have been a few inaccuracies:
Yes, there is a subsection of otaku who are unapologetic about their dedication to anime porn and proudly wear their virginity on their sleeves. But it’s a stretch to characterize all moe anime fans as walking a blurred line between normalcy and 2-D Love, and it’s even more of a stretch to equate all 2-D Lovers with Nisan, who is clearly in a class by himself. It would have been much fairer to start with the Okayama character. He is a collector of body pillows but isn’t public about it, which is far closer to the typical consumption pattern for these products, though even he is on the extreme side. Most American men have seen porn, but you know you’ve lost your way if you buy one of those fake rubber vaginas. In Japan, most men are probably more like economic commentator Takuro Morinaga who grew up on a diet of anime and maybe even dabbled in some “2D Love” content but never made the plunge into Nisan territory (btw, Morinaga is not one of “Japan’s leading behavioral economists.” He teaches at Dokkyo University but only has his bachelor’s and is best known as a populist TV pundit who commonly makes no sense).
Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline
Gruber argues that Microsoft’s declining earnings are more because of their strategy and little to do with the market climate.
During the late-’90s dot-com boom, it was standard operating procedure at many companies for professional web developers and designers to have two computers on their desks: one Windows, one Mac. One for primary development, one for testing in browsers on the “other” OS. (Virtualization wasn’t yet practical.)
But which to choose as the primary platform? Many chose one, many chose the other. But it was an interesting test group, because they were exposed to both platforms. These web developers were not like the people who, in a form of tribalism, claim to despise one or the other platform without having actually used it. Web developers had to know both the Mac and Windows, at least with passing familiarity, and the truth is that many, if not most, preferred Windows.
Today that is simply no longer the case. Microsoft has lost all but a sliver of this entire market. People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.
It is a long article, but a must read for the computer enthusiast. Also, for the record, the only Apple product I have owned in my adult life is their phone
Changing my soles but keeping the stache
The way some of you’all get your knickers bunched up over a car is how I get about running shoes.
One of these boxes
was the one that came from Daryl and Cindy, with the aforementioned candied borage flowers in it. I was going to acknowledge said lovely gift with proof of a cake bearing said floral accoutrements, but because of some kittens (shown), I have not yet made said cake.
Kittens are distracting, y’all.
clusterflock interviews clusterflock: toothbrush edition
Aaron, is the Colgate 360 the best toothbrush you have used?
From the Imaginary Diary…
of the King of Pop?
…Dr. Byron did not seem to believe me when I said his last prescription was no match for my insomnia…but I saw through his tricks and insisted he prescribe the mightiest pill extant…[he] finally agreed to give me something that, he said, ‘would really work’; and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries.
No, friends, it is Lolita. Part one, chapter twenty-two.
Lord, folks, I will never finish it in time.
Casper the commuter cat!
A cat has become such a well-known user of a Devon bus service that its drivers know where to let him off.
Casper has been queuing with other passengers to get the number three service from his home in Plymouth for months, bus company First said.
It added that he often sat in the queue and then quietly padded on board and curled up on a seat for the ride.
Casper’s owner Susan Finden, 55, who picked him from a rescue home in 2002, said he had always been a free spirit.
Mrs Finden said she named her pet after Casper the Friendly Ghost, as he has a habit of wandering off.
Rick’s Custom Squirrels
No. It’s not our Rick, but I still endorse the concept of custom squirrels.
Quote out of context
The school mascot may be a Husky, but the school grounds are currently being invaded by a colony of bunny rabbits.
Larger and Mightier than Ever
The August 2009 issue of Twin Cities METRO magazine features a cover story (These People Are Killing Us) devoted to “six local comedians who are redefining what’s funny now”. Largest and mightiest of the six is Brian Beatty. Former ‘flocker. elimae contributor. Dude with a beard.
Fortune favors the brave
Chance, by definition, is what we cannot control. But luck is not wholly implacable. A little observation of our lives tells us that some people attract more of it than others.
In his book The Luck Factor the psychologist Richard Wiseman describes the behavioural habits “scientifically proven to help you attract good fortune”. Lucky people are “social magnets”, he says, who build “networks of luck”. They have a relaxed attitude towards life. They are open to new experiences. Lucky people listen to their hunches and gut feelings, and they anticipate good fortune in the future. They expect their interactions with others to be successful.
Wiseman erroneously gives a list of actions, instead of the disposition they spring from. But he is correct to say that Fortune has likes and dislikes. Above all, she is attracted to confidence.
So, with that in mind, how lucky are you?