Watching the world go by
I just love this.
The madness of Nebuchadnezzar
I like sweetmeats because they are made of meat and they are sweet
Your call is so valuable
(Via I do believe I came with a hat.)
I do believe I came with a hat.
“One gentleman’s guide to not getting thrown out; not throwing up; and how to throw a party.”
When residing in the terrace house in question, I happened to cohabitate with a character you might be previously acquainted with, Stampy McNasty. For the uninitiated, she was a two-thousand-pound quadruped who would skulk around the house with a face as long as the animal she was emulating; and whose mane of horsehair would clog the shower on a daily basis. Living in a house with noise issues and with my bedroom stationed above the kitchen where most of the activity occurred, I was privy to her stomping around like a fairy elephant each morning, the whispered phone conversations to her drug dealer (presumably for horse tranquiliser), and on occasions her hissy fits to uncompliant friends and relatives. Unfortunately, on the rare occasion that Stampy would ensnare a stallion, I would learn of his presence by extended patterns of her snorts and moans: she was a grunter. The sound would filter from the crack beneath her bedroom door and would float into my adjacent room and fill the silence with a chorus from the coital filly. It was rather unpleasant for all concerned, I assume.
—”Close your eyes and think of England.”
(Via Manhattan User’s Guide)
Read more
The Shield
The Official World Championship of Custom Bike Building
“Don’t Buy Any Food You’ve Ever Seen Advertised”
After agribusiness co-opted his “5 ingredients” rule, Michael Pollan came up with a new rule of thumb for buying healthy food:
To boast about your product not having high-fructose corn syrup as being some kind of virtue is really stretching it. And I think what we see here is another example of the food industry’s ingenuity in taking any critique of industrial food and turning it into the next marketing strategy. It’s a lot like the low-fat campaign, you know, which began as a government critique of food, you know, beginning with George McGovern in the ’70s saying we should eat less red meat because of heart disease. Whatever you think of the science of that, which turns out not to have been that good, it was a well-meaning campaign to improve the American diet. Industry came back and re-engineered the whole food system to have less fat in it and no fat in it. And that campaign sold a lot more food. And, in fact, since that campaign, we’ve been eating about 300 more calories a day, and we’re a lot fatter. So, you can’t—you just can’t underestimate their ability turn any critique into a way to sell food.
So, I’ve had to update my rules. And with all this new marketing based on these ideas, my new suggestion is, if you want to avoid all this, simply don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.
the case of the missing vessel
The Arctic Sea, a Maltese-flagged commercial ship, has disappeared in European waters.
“We have no idea where the ship is,” company managing director Kari Naumanen told the AP in Helsinki.
quote out of context
Isn’t it awfully convenient that a man with no discernible British accent suddenly claims that he is British just after it’s pointed out the the UK health system would have euthanized him as a child? Where is his birth certificate? And, if he is proved to be a Brit (long shot, I bet) then ought he not be forced to alter his speech-machine to clearly add a few “guv’nah” and “by jove” references to his speech so that he’s no longer able to hide it?
WASP wobbles backwards
A newly discovered planet orbits its star backwards.
WASP-17 is about half the mass of Jupiter but bloated to twice its size. “This planet is only as dense as expanded polystyrene, 70 times less dense than the planet we’re standing on,” said professor Coel Hellier of Keele University.
The bloated planet can be explained by a highly elliptical orbit, which brings it close to the star and then far away. Like exaggerated tides on Earth, the tidal effects on WASP-17 heat and stretch the planet, the researchers suggest.
The tides are not a daily affair, however. “Instead it’s creating a huge amount of friction on the inside of the planet and generating a lot of energy, which might be making the planet big and puffy,” Seager said.
Chris and Malcolm are both wrong
Remember the Free debate between Gladwell and Anderson? Well, Brad Burnham thinks they are both wrong:
Both sides of the debate about Free do not seem to acknowledge how fundamentally different the relationship between suppliers and consumers is on the web. Services are not offered for free at all. There is an exchange of value between users, the creators of the raw material – data, content, and meta-data, and the network where that data is converted into insight. This exchange is still governed by the basic laws of economics but the currency is not dollars, it’s attention. The network that takes attention and converts it into insight is also quite different than a traditional firm. The services they provide are more like those we expect from a government than a company. Craigslist, Facebook, and Twitter all provide (or try to provide) a robust stable reliable infrastructure (hosting, bandwidth), security, safety, and dispute resolution. In all three cases, the product users create and consume emerges organically from this environment.
In a world where the scarce resource is some combination of time, attention, relevance and insight, those commodities become the medium of exchange in a parallel economy alongside traditional currencies, debating what a traditional firm charges for something they produce and distribute to customers who have no role in the product’s creation sheds very little light on what is going on today.
The Mystery of Times New Roman
Mike Parker, the man who brought Helvetica to the Linotype library, set out to solve the mystery of Times New Roman.
Eighty-year-old Parker is one of the world’s leading experts on type. As the head of typographic development at the once-formidable Mergenthaler Linotype company in New York from the 1950s to the 1970s, he had enormous influence over the fonts available to the American public. [...] But ever since he received an invitation in the early 1990s to view some interesting archival material, Parker’s time has been consumed by the hunt to solve a mystery.
The invitation came from the late Gerald Giampa, an eccentric Canadian master printer who, in 1987, purchased the remnants of the Lanston Monotype company. Giampa delved into the company’s archive, where he claimed to have unearthed documents that refer to a typeface known only as Number 54 – the font, Parker says, that we now know as Times New Roman. Except that these documents dated from 1904, and bore the name of a different designer: William Starling Burgess.
China trusts prostitutes “more”
The survey found that 7.9% of respondents considered sex workers to be trustworthy, placing them third behind farmers and religious workers.
Soldiers came in fourth place.
The Other World Kingdom
The Other World Kingdom is a micronation on the grounds of a 16th century chateau in the Czech Republic founded in 1997.
The OWK is a Matriarchy, in which all women rule men. The state therefore has strong BDSM and Female dominance themes. The state’s goal, “is to get as many male creatures under the unlimited rule of Superior Women on as much territory as possible.”
Hello Saferide – “Anna”
A new favorite.
The most expensive car in the world
Hardly Anything Is a Damn Fruit
Grapes, currants (red and black), elder- and gooseberries are all proper upstanding berries which will not deceive you or smuggle themselves into your house in pies before stealing your silver while you sleep.
—”The Fruit Is a Lie,” Schrödinger’s Kitten: Irreverent Science for Everyone, August 11, 2009
(Via Margaret)
“Rice Pudding”
Magic Missile, Y’all
For all of your spell casting needs.
Hey, Deron
Rice pudding?
Cybraceros
(Via Microkhan)
Eunice Kennedy Shriver
Repose en paix:
“When the full judgment of the Kennedy legacy is made — including J.F.K.’s Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress, Robert Kennedy’s passion for civil rights and Ted Kennedy’s efforts on health care, workplace reform and refugees — the changes wrought by Eunice Shriver may well be seen as the most consequential,” U.S. News and World Report said in its cover story of Nov. 15, 1993.
Edward Kennedy said in an interview in October 2007: “You talk about an agent of change — she is it. If the test is what you’re doing that’s been helpful for humanity, you’d be hard pressed to find another member of the family who’s done more.”
from the comments
In my mind this is related to something else: do you ever sing loudly in the car, hit a bad note–and then look around into the back seat, as if the worst thing about a hidden assassin possibly being there is that he would have heard you singing?
