Our own Mary Jeys
“We want people to be excited,” said artist Mary Jeys, 30, who dreamed up the Greenpoint greenbacks. “This medium of exchange has more to do with meeting people and feeling that you’re connected to a community versus a monetary system.”
And noticed at Marginal Revolution, no less.
“Income inequality
is at an all-time high”
(via Washington Monthly)
dear clusterflock
Who do you miss?
R.I.P.
Clusterflockin’
Check out Ze Frank’s latest message to Sports Racers and tell me if you can’t find Christopher Walken in there.
Brooklynites are floppy slobs too
It’s not just in the UK, turns out the NYT also says it’s cool to have a gut:
THIS summer the unvarying male uniform in the precincts of Brooklyn cool has been a pair of shorts cut at knickers length, a V-neck Hanes T-shirt, a pair of generic slip-on sneakers and a straw fedora. Add a leather cuff bracelet if the coolster is gay.
In truth this get-up was pretty much the unvarying male uniform last summer also, but this year an unexpected element has been added to the look, and that is a burgeoning potbelly one might term the Ralph Kramden.
The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare
Jack Mackey the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods gives some alternative ideas for health-care reform. For example:
• Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.
• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.
• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor’s visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?
Man Blames Cat For Child Porn Downloads
Who am I kidding? That story is all headline, so no quotes. I do believe, however, that this is still in order.
Dear Aaron
I forgot to tell you. When I was filming a Masquerade Costume Ball burlesque performance last weekend, I was setting up before the show, filming an almost empty stage. There was just a simple vinyl table chair and maybe a step stool or something. The stage itself was oak and the background a tall, dark red-velvet curtain with plush folds.
As I was standing there, setting up the shot, the DJ started to play the dawn of man sequence from 2001. I held the shot throughout, and at some point a woman walked on stage, off camera, her shadow falling across the stage next to the chair. Then she retreated — her shadow with her — while the music faded.
Only one detail here is a lie. The rest of it is true. The lie itself does not change any of the impact of the scene.
If you are interested, I will tell you what the lie is.
This was a Top Ten hit
about the time that Sheila and I met.
you don’t bake key-lime pie
(thanks, Aaron)
Ferrari ringtones for your iPhone
I’m pretty sure I’m going to do this.
A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention
It took me three tries to finish this article. I kept getting distracted:
We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.
Flobby slobs FTW!
Half of humanity received some much-needed assistance from an unexpected source last week. Out of the blue, Lion Bar Ice Cream leapt to the aid of men. Like maggots in a wound, they didn’t know they were helping — they thought they were just garnering some desperately needed publicity in an ice cream-unfriendly summer — but they may have contributed to saving the world’s males huge sums of money and an even greater expense of time and effort.
Lion Bar Ice Cream commissioned a survey into what sort of men women find attractive, presumably in the forlorn hope that “a man with his face in a Lion Bar Ice Cream” or “those hunks made ripplingly obese by an ice cream-only diet” would be among the responses.
They didn’t quite get that, but more than 4,000 of the 5,000 respondents claimed to prefer a slightly scruffy fellow, with messy hair and even a beer belly, to the toned, groomed, David Beckham type, although I imagine they wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating a Lion Bar. The media spin on it is that: “Women have turned against the metrosexual look”, presumably because there’s something very unattractive about a chap running after a tube train with a hard-on. [...]
No, the reason this study is good news for malekind is that it’s being taken by the media as a blow to the previous trend, which it had itself created, towards male grooming, exercising and general body-image fretting. The results have been reported as if they contradicted what was formerly thought about women’s taste, as if preening dandies were the established norm of attractiveness and more traditional “manly” attributes a weird fetish.
The whole article is hilarious.
quote out of context
“Signaling revolution” edition:
In Palermo I also saw an ugly young man, but he was very macho, haughty, and full of swagger. He was with a very beautiful young woman. He was wearing a designer T-shirt — presumably sold to thousands — with the single word “Rebel” emblazoned just below the neck. She gazed at him admiringly.
Change I can unequivocally believe in
(via)
Dear Clusterflock: You forgot to remind me.
I was gonna ask this question a while back, but I asked something else instead. Nobody reminded me about this question but I woke up and I thought about it and I couldn’t sleep without putting it down on paper. Except that by “paper” I mean “the internet.”
Which of the following statements do you identify with? If both, do you feel one more strongly than the other? Describe how you feel about this relationship, or whether you think one exists:
- When things in my life go wrong I wonder what I’ve done wrong.
- When things in my life go well I wonder what I’ve done right.
It is very late at night and my wording is coming off more like some survey than a thoughtful question. I hope you’ll forgive me. Don’t be limited by the wording. Extrapolate, share, grow, embrace, interface… you know, all those things George Carlin wasn’t going to be doing.
google is a verb
Is ExtenZe a Scam?
FUCK EXTENZE THAT SHIT IS A WASTE FUCKING WASTE OF FUCKING MONEY.
I WILL KILL ALL OF THOSE MUTHERFUCKERS!!!1
Whole Families Hooked on Opium in Afghanistan
In a small village in northeastern Afghanistan, it’s estimated more than half the residents are addicted to opium. Even the youngest of children are given the drug.
Diane Williams will teach this fall
For the writer with the courage to produce his or her own most vehement voice.
The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction is pleased to present another writing workshop with author, Diane Williams this September and October. Fine-grained attention to the drama of the sentence is offered — as well as to the drama of the whole text. First look to NOON or to Williams’s own fiction to consider if you share the aesthetic values represented.
8 Sessions
Tuesdays: September 15th through November 3rd
6:30pm–8:30pm
$500; Special financial needs considered
For more information, please call
212-755-6710 or email info@mercantilelibrary.org
Diane Williams’ most recent book is IT WAS LIKE MY TRYING TO HAVE A TENDER-HEARTED NATURE. Her fiction appears frequently in a variety of magazines including, Harper’s Magazine, Bomb, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is the editor of the acclaimed, prize-winning literary annual NOON which she founded in 2000. She was co-editor of StoryQuarterly for twelve years. She is considered the foremost advocate of the genre dubbed flash fiction and has been called by Jonathan Franzen “…one of the true living heroes of the American avant-garde.” Winner of three Pushcart Prizes, she has taught creative writing at both Bard College and Syracuse University and has been an invited reader at colleges and universities nationwide.
Cosmic Dust Rocks Tonight!
Perseid meteors (red) streak past stars in the skies over Amman, Jordan, in August 2005.
The peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower will be especially dazzling in August 2009, experts say, due to a gravitational boost from Saturn.
Photograph by Ali Jarekji/Reuters.
terrible yellow eyes
wrap me in nostalgia and sendak me packing.
Is public healthcare in the UK as sick as rightwing America claims?
There is a demything of the current US healthcare controversy in the Guardian. E.g.,
The claim
In England, anyone over 59 years of age cannot receive heart repairs, stents or bypass because it is not covered as being too expensive and not needed – an anonymously authored, but widely circulated, email, largely sent to older voters
The response
Totally untrue. Growing numbers of patients over 65 with heart conditions are having surgery, including valve repairs and heart bypass surgery, says Professor Peter Weissberg, the British Heart Foundation’s (BHF) medical director. For example, the average age at which people have a bypass operation has risen from 58 in 1991 to 66 in 2008.
Of course, as Gruber mentioned, “the current reform proposals are not at all like the U.K. system.” Sadly (*cough*), that means we will have to judge the current healthcare proposal on its own merits. And that means the pundits on both sides will have to resort to rational argument to get the public thinking substantively on the issue. In other words, we’re fucked.
Silent Conversation
Silent Conversation by Gregory Weir couches literature in a simple flash game and definitely worth twenty minutes of your time. I recommend playing, at least, the first two levels (after the tutorial) to get a feel for it. The way Greg plays with words does justice to the text.
