quote out of context
It ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by Ayn Rand than by Karl Marx.
my year of living a nouveau-Thoreauvian conceit
Thoughts on the genre of denial.
No Impact Man’s appeal to the media is no mystery. His shtick deals with a serious subject but is easy to poke fun at. Colbert characterized it as “like ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ only completely implausible.” The Times called it, at best, “a scene from an old-fashioned situation comedy and, at worst, an ethically murky exercise in self-promotion.” (The headline was “THE YEAR WITHOUT TOILET PAPER.”)
Ferret with mouse papoose
(thanks, Autumn)
Sugar can alter your DNA?
A study on the genetic impact of eating sugar that should be accompanied with Hitchcock knife screeching music.
Eating a single chocolate bar might cause harmful genetic changes or mutations that could have serious effects on your DNA, changes that could last for up to a couple of weeks.
Wouldn’t a title just make it worse?
Absolut vs. Sagmeister
I was thinking the same thing.
Frank Bruni’s Last NYT Column
He addresses such questions as:
- What’s the best Sushi Place?
- Is there any best, safest way to navigate a menu?
- Where can I find great value?
- Where do you spend your own money to go out and eat?
This is a must read for New Yorkers.
Mini Cooper Coupe
My first reaction was no.
Something I didn’t know
Barry Cowsill apparently drowned in floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina. His body wasn’t found till late December 2005 and then identified in January 2006.
“Obama condoms, for long and hard times.”
Seen and heard on the streets of New York.
Hot Knives
This is, and I do not say this lightly, the most bitchin’ food blog I’ve ever read. Hot Knives is two dudes who love to eat tasty food. One of them imports cheese for a living. They are hilarious, and the food looks incredible. Like here, they’re talking about how lame lasagna is:
Something about boiling those flat noodles and stuffing them with plain jane veggies seems a) mundane and b) inappropriate for young dudes to make, like wearing your mom’s stockings when she’s not home or something.
This recipe for Smokey Chocolate Chip Cookies is a full on yes, from me.
Ivor again
Are you going to buy
any of the newly remastered Beatles CDs, due out September 9?
Catalogue of an Exhibition
Catalogue of an Exhibition is a new collaborative (un)book by Derrick Mosley and Dave Gray. The publication announcement was as follows:
Cowbird Books is pleased to announce the publication of Catalogue of an Exhibition: Selected Works of the American Painter G, by Mark Osrick Graveley, D.E.D.
A photographic facsimile of the incomplete catalog from the seminal 1983 Woodstock Galleries retrospective of the painter G. As the original catalogs are quite rare, this edition offers to reproduce the crucial text in American art criticism for decades of graduate students at Columbia, who, by tradition, read it after having ingested mushroom caps.
M.O. Graveley is a noted art historian, lexicographer and philosopher. She grew up in Brooklyn sometime in the nineteen-fifties and graduated from Yale in the class of 1963. She is blind, and specializes in delivering customized epistemological experiences tailored to the discerning collector. Beyond that, little is known. Preview and buy it here.
The unbook was created by crafting a fictional story around a fictional exhibition around Dave Gray’s art. The authors encourage people to riff off the idea and contribute/edit/rehash/remix the content and the next edition of the unbook will include the best material from the pool of ideas under the same pseudonym. Think layer tennis for literature.
If you are wondering what the heck an unbook is, this is a good place to start.
For Your Safety
Surveillance camera. Wal-Mart. Galena, Illinois. July 2009.
Listening to Randy Newman singing “He Gives Us All His Love”.
(Newman, 1979: “You know, Dylan has a religious album coming out. He’s changed completely. But I haven’t changed. I don’t believe a word of this song. Just did it for the money.”)
Things By 30
I’m 23. In seven years, I will be 30. I have already begun some important changes, a steady vegetarian/vegan diet and weekly steady yoga, all things that are important to becoming the sort of person that I am, just not yet. These are a few of the things that I would like to do by the time I am 30.
1. Visit Iceland
2. learn to sail
3. own a catamaran
4. learn to fly.
5. own a small plane.
What are your middle-distance goals?
Driftless: Stories from Iowa By Danny Wilcox Frazier
Life in Iowa can be punishing. Many Iowans expend their lives sweating over soil and spilling the blood of livestock; they endure the hardships associated with a life inextricably bound to the ups and downs of nature. Today, those challenges and a shift in our nation’s economy have pushed the youth of rural communities to migrate to the metropolises of America. Those left in the wake of this out-migration continue their lives, seemingly unchanged from the generations that preceded them, and entombed in obscurity.
The tension of contemporary rural life plays out here: the struggle of a family farm to continue, disenfranchised youth, the slaughterhouse, migrant labor, and the aged fading from Iowa’s mythical landscape. Through their stories we gain insight to a way of life that is disappearing, a culture that could be lost forever.
As “community” continues to be homogenized in zones of urban sprawl across the globe, we must consider all that we are losing—development should not come at the expense of more fragile communities.
Not my words – for more, click the photo or click here and enjoy. I was lost in Bloody Iowa for a week!
Rubicon
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Paula Abdul leaving American Idol.
If Jesus returns tonight, who will feed your pets tomorrow?
I believe it is immoral to have sex with animals, and have no desire to do so.
(via marginal revolution)
Doritos Extreme
Former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff Betsey Wright has been accused of sneaking 48 tattoo needles into a death row prison in a Doritos bag.
According to court documents, Wright said she found the Doritos bag at the bottom of a vending machine at the prison and thought she was getting a free bag of chips.
“I guess you don’t get nothing free,” she reportedly told officers.
Guns and Hummers
Friendly. Professional. Unlike Anything Else.
Two great tastes that taste great together.
Radio Currency
Update: It’s posted! Go listen and marvel.
_____
Our very own Mary Jeys was on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show this morning to promote the Brooklyn Torch local currency project! Keep your eye here, for the show to post.
Also, she sat on a couch with Rosie Perez.
more from Sunday
People Against Switching Sides
The island of Samoa is set to switch the side of the road it drives on.
The main reason for Samoa’s switch is that two of its biggest neighbors, Australia and New Zealand, drive on the left-hand side, whereas Samoa currently drives on the right, as in the U.S. By aligning with Australia and New Zealand, the prime minister says, it will be easier for poor Samoans to get cheap hand-me-down cars from the 170,000 or so Samoans who live in those two countries.
Of course, plenty of people are pissed.
The prime minister who hatched Samoa’s scheme . . . compared a prominent opponent of the switch to a local “avaava” fish — a sea creature that swims in shallow waters and eats garbage.
Plus, a history of why countries chose particular sides.
Mr. Kincaid says American drivers of horse-drawn carriages tended to ride their horses, or walk alongside them, on the left-hand side of their vehicles so they could wield whips with their right hands. That made it necessary to lead carriages down the right side of the road so drivers could be nearer the center of the street.
Historical Memory
This observation made by Charles Taylor in a recent interview, to my mind, speaks to the heart of thinking itself:
Bloor: In you work you’ve often been trying to correct a kind of failure of self-understanding of our culture. For example, you called Sources of The Self ‘an essay in retrieval’. In some sense we’re missing what it is to have arrived at this point in our history, so your work is an attempt to explain Western culture in the early 21st century to itself.
Taylor: I think that’s right. I try to do that by delving back into history. If you’ve lived through a transformation you understand something of how you got to where you now are. But further generations may lose sight of history, and they take the mental landscape they’re in as being totally natural. They therefore miss something about the nature of that landscape, about the nature of their reference points of identity. They take them not as adopted possible reference points, but as the obvious ones you can’t avoid. So they’re living their identity, but in a way which hides very important dimensions and features of it. So it is a matter of retrieval – retrieving the trajectory that brought you to where you are. I think that should be a very important part of philosophical work.
I have always suspected that if the United States had a better historical memory, then a great deal of public policy and its attending discussion–and this is a bipartisan truth–would be less asinine. (via Redeeming My Time)
