customers who bought milk also bought
Weekly Picture 164
Climbing Wall, Cape Charles, VA 8.13.2009
Renner on Weather | From the Archives
From his 2007 travel log, to be precise.
It was about 11:20, and it was partly sunny. Now most of you live in parts of the world where it is mostly to completely sunny on many occasions throughout the year. But you don’t live in Britain, where mostly sunny is as rare as the return of the monarch butterflies and completely sunny is a phrase that occurs only in novels of other worlds. Partly sunny is marvelous, and–to tell the truth–even though gray clouds blew across from time to time and the temperature dropped 5 degrees every time they covered the sun, it is quite possibly mostly sunny right now, at 7:20 p.m., if you don’t count high haze as cloud. What if it were to be mostly sunny tomorrow? Oh my, oh my. I hope it is mostly sunny in London. London has been the warmest place I have been while in the British Isles, but this afternoon I was actually able to take the windbreaker off and actually wander about wearing only two short-sleeve shirts. At about 5 p.m., back at Aldemiro, I sat out in the garden with a cup of tea and read. Yes, outside; yes, in short-sleeves. For a while. Marvelous.
Phil, does this answer your question?
Seriously
How many times would you zipper yourself before you stopped going commando?
The old saying is
“If you don’t like the weather in Texas, wait fifteen minutes.”
My saying is, “If you don’t like the weather in Texas, you’re a lot smarter than I thought you were.”
from the spam
The Math lesbians
things that stress me out
Figuring out how to transcribe sung nonsense words (e.g. Tick-Tock, do-do-do-doodoo).
Girl in train
Honda U3-X personal mobility device
moral hummers
As we studied American Hummer owners and their ideological beliefs, we found that they consider Hummer driving a highly moral consumption choice. For Hummer owners it is possible to claim the moral high ground… The moralistic critique of their consumption choices readily inspired Hummer owners to adopt the role of the moral protagonist who defends American national ideals.
quote out of context
Another reason, we suspect, for infrequent sexual encounters among future-oriented men is their tendency toward perfectionism. Sex becomes performance and thus induces evaluation apprehension and the expectation of receiving gold stars for getting erections, sustaining them, and achieving orgasms.
Birther infomercial airs in Texas
I’m thinking of a number (of dots)
Scientists had 10 volunteers watch either numerals or dots on a screen while a part of their brain known as the intraparietal cortex was scanned – it’s a region of the parietal lobe especially linked with numbers. They next rigorously analyzed brain activity to decipher which patterns might be linked with the numbers the volunteers had observed.
When it came to small numbers of dots, the researchers found that brain activity patterns changed gradually in a way that reflected the ordered nature of the numbers. For example, one might be able to conclude that the pattern for six is between that for five and seven.
Oddly, the article begins by saying scientists can also see numbers, but ends with this:
In the case of the numerals, the researchers could not detect this same gradual change. This suggests their methods simply might not be sensitive enough to detect this progression yet, or that these symbols are in fact coded as more precise, discrete entities in the brain.
So much for relaying information.
Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered
While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus.
comment after farting
Let the record show.
My moonlighting
On the left is the rear cover for Flushed: Women Writers Take On Menopause and on the right the front cover for The Mother, the Son and the Holy Ghost, both edited by Tim Jones-Yelvington and published by Bannock Street Books. I did covers and interior illustrations for the former and covers for the latter. I don’t think they are yet linked in at the website, but if you contact the press, you can order them. Both are chapbook anthologies of flash fiction.
Sondre Lerche
(via)
Here is where you would have read the interview I did with Sondre Lerche.
Here is where you would have learned about what books he’s been reading, what sort of music makes up the pattern of his days, what he thinks of his home in Norway, New York, California, and much more. But his management wasn’t able to get back to me, even though I’ve interviewed him in a professional capacity before, and submitted my request over a month early. At most, the interview would have taken twenty minutes to a half-hour, and all it does is garner him free publicity. I realize this isn’t his fault, he’s hired these people to take care of the business end of these things, and they make decisions the best they can, but this was a terrible decision.
All because I’m not from Rolling Stone, they assume that it wasn’t worth the time. When will this attitude change? When will they realize that a fifteen minute interview where their client speaks to things that people care about, answers questions about the music and the creativity that goes into that creation, that these moments of humanizing and honesty will go so much further than yet another round of “What Was It Like Making This Album?”
And you could have read that interview here, you could have been a new fan, we could have shared and loved and discussed, but now we don’t get to in quite the same way.
Vincent Fournier
Vincent Fournier photography at but does it float.
“Cheese Chooses Beer”
Some argue that craft beers play better with cheese than wine (via):
Mr. Di Vincenzo, who led two of the beer workshops, says pairing beer and cheese is a no-brainer — “like bread and cheese. Beer is a bit like liquid bread.”
“The bitter note of hops gives a skimming strength that allows to cleanse the mouth from the fat” in cheeses, allowing for a better savoring of the flavors, he says.
Part of the appeal comes from the fact that beer and cheese are part of a common farm cycle. In the 19th century, Belgian monks would brew beer, feeding their cows the leftover barley husks. The cows’ milk yielded cheese that the monks — many of them vegetarians — liked to munch while enjoying their beers.
“You will often hear the argument that cows don’t eat grapes,” says Justin Philips, owner of New York’s Beer Table, a gourmet beer bar in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. Mr. Philips, who has been serving beer and cheese since opening the bar a year and a half ago, says palates have warmed quickly to the pairing, such as his proposed meeting of Swiss cheese with Swiss Rebetez beer.
Of course, the argument is a journalistic gloss. Any lover of taste (I refuse to call myself a ‘foodie.’) knows that context rules the day: some cheeses may go better with beer than wine and vice versa. The whole experience is contingent on mood, weather, style of cheese and wine or beer, the topic of conversation, etc., etc.
Drum Heads Really Are Heads
A British production house called Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories created this fantastic video of a scientific experiment in which disembodied heads are used as musical instruments.
(Via Panopticist)
Pomplamoose – “Hail Mary”
via kung fu grippe
John Hendrix
Communication Arts did a really fine piece a few weeks ago on John Hendrix. In the conclusion of the article is a quote about his fascination with ambiguity that sounds creepily like many, many sentences I have uttered:
And then, there’s the fact that Hendrix never met a complicated topic he didn’t want to discuss or draw. When he jokes about doing a “controversial figures in history” book series, it’s only sort of a joke. For Hendrix, the disorder of ambiguity is far more interesting than squeaky-clean absolutes.
“As an artist, I just don’t see any other choice but to describe all the uncomfortable, ambiguous and messy things in the world, as well as the things that are good and beautiful. I think that’s why we make art. It helps us sort these things out.”
Nabokov edits Kafka translation
From World of Found via Cynical-C
Trying to Pull it Together
Andrew posted this.
Kelsey posted this.
In a comment on Kelsey’s post, Andrew said this:
I miss being in a culture of ideas like I once was. I certainly was writing more vibrantly and found myself engaging very challenging material. I have less opportunity for that than I did. Then continued with: Or have I only given myself less opportunity for it?
Andrew, I would only challenge your statement (couched in the knowledge that you know, on many occasions, challenging ideas are broached here on the ‘flock) by saying that your writing (and your speech, on occasion) here is vibrant. All the time. Rigorous thought and writing, I think, is present, too. I think, I think you miss the construct of “the classroom situation?” Where ideas, in reading, in discussion, are presented in a formal way?
I do more writing here, than I ever did on my own. (Once again, I suppose, a construct. Here, the continuing conversation is the base.) I was once barely exposed, in an evening Lit Crit class at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, to Derrida and Eagleton (Heddiger and Goethe). At the end of the class, I wanted more. I’ve only pursued it in small ways, since. (If I won the Lottery and could live and do anything I wanted, I would take classes, with the express desire to see/hear the ideas of the past and ponder and wonder and think rigorously with no part of my “mind” given away to the “making of a living.”)
(Feel free to pull out your microphone and speak.)
Dear clusterflock
How did you decide what you wanted to do for a living? Are you doing what you set out to do now?
