from the comments
Vegetable men still drive the streets of El Paso. When I was visiting my mother recently, I answered the door to find a lovely older Mexican man with long, curly hair holding three beautiful tomatoes in one hand and a Presidio cantaloupe in the other. My mother has bought produce from him for years.
When I was a child, we were visited frequently by a peddlar named Jake. I was a sickly child, and for long stretches the only food I could keep down was watermelon. This was in the 1960s, when foods were not available year-round as they are now. Jake would make trips to far South Texas to find melons just for me. He called me — as did my mother — Cindita.
The White Horse Dialogue
Can it be that a white horse is not a horse?
Advocate: It can.
Objector: How?
Advocate: “Horse” is that by means of which one names the shape. “White” is that by means of which one names the color. What names the color is not what names the shape. Hence, I say that a white horse is not a horse.
I don’t know where to look at the camera
Something unusual is happening in Kansas
I think the Guardian’s best work is done when they find people at the heart of raging issues, and let them tell their own stories. This article is about a highly unusual doctor in Kansas who has set up a clinic for people who are uninsured, people who can’t afford any healthcare. Dr. Sharon Lee treats them, free of charge. Dr. Lee’s clinic exists on the basis of donations and the fact that all staff – remarkably, including Dr. Lee herself – are paid a flat rate of $12 per hour. Just let that fact sink in for a while.
Featured in the article is the story of a porsche-driving gynaecologist who lost his practise when he developed symptoms of Huntingdon’s disease – it took a while for him to even get diagnosed – that made it impossible for him to work, and with it went his health insurance, and with the cost of his medication, very quickly went the snazzy house, the cars, and the rest of it. He now lives in a small flat in the suburbs and regularly has to choose between food and medication. The fickleness of American life never ceases to amaze me.
And while you’re at it, check out this five minute audio sample from Dr. Lee’s clinic. What a fucking hero.
Polaroid Alert
In about 48 hours, on August 27, 2009, a U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Minneapolis will hold a hearing on a motion from the PBE Corporation (formerly known as Polaroid Corporation) seeking permission to auction off the Polaroid Collection of Photographs through Sotheby’s. Problem is, it seems that many of the prints PBE Corporation has asked the court to authorize for sale may be owned by the contributing artists — not the Polaroid Corporation or its successor.
A.D. Coleman has been writing about the impending dispersal of the Polaroid Collection of Photographs on his Photocritic International blog, where he suggests action that may be taken by artists whose work Polaroid did not purchase outright for inclusion in the collection. He also urges others who oppose the piecemeal dispersal of the collection to write letters both to the presiding bankruptcy judge and to the director of Sotheby’s department of photographs.
The background? A scam whose perpetrator is set to face trial in September.
Read more
“fuck me in the goat ass”
Hot Tamales
Robert Johnson. “They’re Red Hot.” From The Complete Recordings.
And they’re red-hot.
Yeah. She got ‘em for sale.
quote out of context
He was renamed Brett and placed in foster care.
For Chris
quote out of context
The vermiform appendix is a slimy dead-end sac that hangs between the small and large intestines.
Instead of ice cream, it’s produce
In Detroit of all places:*
In a neighborhood served by 26 liquor stores but only one grocery, a community group is peddling fresh fruits and vegetables like ice cream.
Five days a week, the Peaches & Greens truck winds its way through the streets as a loudspeaker plays R&B and puts out the call: “Nutritious, delicious. Brought right to you. We have green and red tomatoes, white and sweet potatoes. We have greens, corn on the cob and cabbage, too.”
The truck set up like a small market brings affordable produce to families on public assistance, homebound seniors and others who can’t reach the well-stocked grocery chains in the suburbs
*Actually, it makes more sense than you think.
meet the new meth
The decline of meth-labs across the country, and subsequently methamphetamine and meth users, was due in large part to regulation of over the counter allergy medicine — limiting the quantity a person could buy in bulk. That equation is changing.
The “shake-and-bake” approach has become popular because it requires a relatively small number of pills of the decongestant pseudoephedrine — an amount easily obtained under even the toughest anti-meth laws that have been adopted across the nation to restrict large purchases of some cold medication.
“Somebody somewhere said ‘Wait this requires a lot less pseudoephedrine, and I can fly under the radar,’” said Mark Woodward, spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control.
While my philosophical stance on drugs and drug use is about as libertarian as you can get, I have seen the impact of this particular drug on a person I love very much, and if I could have eliminated what he went — and continues to go through — I would do almost anything.
Another Boxer
I like this preliminary
better than the finished product, but the viewers at Flickr seem to disagree.
No! No! A Thousand Times No!
Harvey is being remade by — wait for it — Steven Spielberg.
Quote out of context
Investigators used the serial numbers on her breast implants to identify her.
Duck, Duck, Goose?
I look like a duck, I walk like a duck, and, hell, sometimes I even talk like one. I do not, however, think like one. So, what am I supposed to call myself?
thinking about The Game itself
The Game is an ongoing mind game, the objective of which is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which, according to the rules of The Game, must then be announced. How to win The Game is not defined in the rules; players can only attempt to avoid losing for as long as possible. The Game has been described alternately as pointless and infuriating, or as a challenging game that is fun to play.
(via kottke)
Art of the Arcade
via Quips
meaty desserts
It’s one of culinary history’s little twists, then, that chocolate, which drove the savory out of dessert, is now the vehicle for ushering it back in. It’s too bad, too, as chicken breast blends into tavuk göğsü’s creamy, soothing base better than it ever could into chocolate. But don’t look for a full-fledged comeback of the meaty dessert, even in more unified recipes such as this one: the modern palate–or mine, at any rate–finds it difficult to get past the concept, especially when there’s no irony to help it along.
(via marginal revolution)
The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction by John Sutherland
The appearance, after more than twenty years, of a second edition of John Sutherland’s The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, is exciting news for Victorian enthusiasts, whether students, academics or readers. For the book represents a staggering achievement that is unlikely ever to be equalled. That a single scholar, working un-assisted, should undertake to synopsize 554 (now 560) novels and offer biographical accounts of 878 (now 900) novelists, as well as compiling entries on forty-seven magazines and periodicals, twenty-six major illustrators and thirty-eight (now forty-one) miscellaneous items (“Sandism”, “the Yellowback”, “The Nautical Novel”), is a feat that beggars imagination, especially since much of the work was completed before the availability of the internet and searchable digitized texts.
(via marginal revolution)
I grew up on ping pong
spam name
Amaka Banvard.
Phone Phreak
I desperately wanted to be this kid when I was fourteen. (via waxy)
By 14, Weigman was conning his way through AT&T and Verizon, tricking them into divulging insider information — like supervisor identification numbers and passwords — that gave him full run of the system. If he heard a supervisor’s voice once, he could imitate it with eerie precision when calling one of the man’s underlings. If he heard someone dialing a number, he could memorize the digits purely by tone. A favorite ploy was to get the name of a telephone technician visiting his house, then impersonate the man on the phone to extract codes and other data from unsuspecting co-workers. Once he called a phone company posing as a girl, saying he needed to verify the identity of a technician who was at “her” door. Convinced, the operator coughed up the technician’s company ID number, direct phone line and supervisor — key information that Weigman could later put to nefarious use, like cutting off a rival’s phone line.
X-Rays of gaming consoles and controllers
Sort of a Something
Last night I had dozens of dreams–or at least many distinct sub-lines of larger ones, and as I was about to wake up I noticed my mind reviewing them all in a sort of catalogue of clips. I thought–This is great! There they all are; now I can hold onto them! Then I woke up, and now I can only remember the fact that I was looking at a sort of catalogue.
But it made me wonder: If we have memories of past events that are at least vaguely organized by a sense of time, might there be another tier of memory that holds the history of our dreams? I know–Jung beat me to this idea….
