Phil
I bought some film — and batteries — and headed out to the farmers’ market yesterday with my old Nikon. If I can find a place to process them properly, I’ll let you know how it turned out.
De-signs
Just fantastic work by Austin Kleon, the fellow who does blackout poems.
levi’s gran fondo | king ridge, 2
This is the part of the ride where I retreat into my own head. Carrie disappeared around a corner, never to be seen again, and I put my head down and watched the pavement. The truth is that I can’t tell you much about the narrow wooded road that snaked up the hill.
It was shady and cool but I was quickly overheating. I stayed to the outside around the switchbacks, avoiding the steep inside corners. My eyes looked at my hands and my pedals, at the back wheel of whatever bike was in front, but they avoided the handle bar mounted bike computer that displayed my current speed and distance traveled.
I didn’t want to know how much climbing was left or how long it would take.
The climb was brutal. It didn’t take me long to realize I was under prepared for this type of punishment. From base to peak it was 10 miles with one short descent in the middle that divided it into two parts; the break was just long enough to make me forget the desire to get off my bike and call it a day.
When I looked up, the views were spectacular. Hills of brown grass fell away to valleys of green treetops. We couldn’t see the ocean but there was that sense that it was out there.
Then there were cows, huge, black beasts in the golden grass just off the road. An entrepreneur sold ice cold lemonade at the peak of the climb and cyclists stopped for a cold drink. I was already forgetting the most difficult parts of our first big climb and looking forward to the next half of the ride.
At the next rest stop we ate. They had peanut butter sandwiches, again, cookies, water, roasted potatoes, even a lettuce, tomato, and cheese whole wheat wrap. We ate, filled our bottles and ate some more.
High Culture in a Low Place
There were three of us, and we were eleven or maybe twelve years old. We improvised an opera that we performed for an audience of zero down by a storm sewer near the school. The Devil was one of the principal characters. There was a precious ring. The ring went missing. One of the protagonists questioned another about its fate.
“The Devil has EATEN it!” [Sung in a child's imitation of an 'operatic' voice.]
Followed by a chorus: “Induce vomiting, vomiting, vomiting, vomiting — VO-mi-ting!”
Read more
Louisiana judge denies interracial couple marriage license
“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”
tabloids fall for flaming beehive
A filmmaker duped some of the country’s top tabloid newspapers into printing fake stories about celebrities, including one about Amy Winehouse’s beehive catching fire, he said on Thursday.
Chris Atkins and his team put in hoax calls to some newsrooms, including that one girl band singer was a physics wizard, only to see the details printed — unchecked — in the press the next day.
Among the celebrity ‘sightings’ they invented was a tale about how troubled singer Winehouse had been playing music with friends when the fuse blew and set fire to her hair in its trademark beehive style.
The story appeared in two major tabloid papers, before being splashed across the Internet, Atkins told the Guardian.
6-year-old boy floats away in balloon
A 6-year-old boy climbed into a homemade balloon aircraft in Colorado and floated away Thursday, forcing officials to scramble to figure out how to rescue the boy as the balloon hurtled through the air. The bizarre scene played out live on television and prompted fears that the flying saucer-shaped balloon would crash with the young child inside. The balloon rotated slowly in the wind, tipping precariously at times.
Update: Apparently the kid isn’t in the balloon.
Update: Thank goodness.
Tonight… We Are All Rush Limbaugh
An Irish bullock, mid-stampede
This is probably the most evocative image from our recent neighbourhood adventure.
Stuff Christian Culture Likes
Brilliant caricature. For example, when I was in Seminary I totally knew these dudes:
American evangelicals conventionally eschew the smoking of anything but an exception is somehow made when a seminary student takes up the inevitable pipe. It makes him feel Inklings-esque.
Bible college (seminary’s inferior cousin) also fosters pipe smokers. Students and faculty who identify as missional/emergent will furtively gather to ponder Kierkegaard and epistemology whilst chomping on pipe stems. From here it is just a short hop onto the hookah train. Next thing you know they’re congregating in hookah bars (the married guys must first convince their wives, who are initially horrified) to discuss tobaccos, reformed theology, and IPAs. This makes them feel relevant.
I am more of a cigarette man, myself, since it’s more expedient, but I did dabble with a pipe in college.
thoughts on digital photography
Chess players who train with computers are much stronger for it. They test their intuitions and receive rapid feedback as to what works, simply by running their program. People who learn economics through the blogosphere also receive feedback, especially if they sample dialogue across a number of blogs of differing perspectives. The feedback comes from which arguments other people found convincing. Do the points you wanted to hold firm on, or cede, correspond to the evolution of the dialogue? This feedback is not as accurate as Rybka but it’s an ongoing test of your fluid intelligence and your ability to revise your opinion.
Not many outsiders understand what a powerful learning mechanism the blogosphere has set in place.
In case you were wondering about Rybka.
Google to launch platform for selling books online
I have been waiting for this to happen:
The company said Google Editions marks its first effort to earn revenue from its ambitious Google Books scanning project, which attempts to make millions of printed books available online. Although the scanning program has faced complaints from authors and publishers over copyright, Google Editions will cover only books submitted and approved by the copyright holders.
The books bought through Google Editions will be accessible on any device that has a Web browser, including smart phones, netbooks and personal computers and laptops, putting Google in competition with Amazon.com Inc and its Kindle e-book reader.
Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search’s publisher partnership program, said Thursday the e-book market is evolving to allow access of books from anywhere and from any device.
Consumers can buy directly from Google or from any number of retail partners using the Google Editions platform, including online stores like Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon. Google will actually host the e-books and make them searchable.
We expect the majority will go to retail partners not to Google,” Turvey said at the 61st Frankfurt Book Fair. “We are a wholesaler, a book distributor.”
toxic Chinese drywall
During the height of the U.S. housing boom, with building materials in short supply, American construction companies imported millions of pounds of Chinese-made drywall because it was abundant and cheap. An Associated Press analysis of shipping records found that more than 500 million pounds of Chinese gypsum board was imported between 2004 and 2008 — enough to have built tens of thousands of homes. They are heavily concentrated in the Southeast, especially Florida.
The defective materials have since been found by state and federal agencies to emit “volatile sulfur compounds,” and contain traces of strontium sulfide, which can produce a rotten-egg odor, along with organic compounds not found in American-made drywall. Homeowners complain the fumes are corroding copper pipes, destroying TVs and air conditioners, and blackening jewelry and silverware. Some believe the wallboard is also making them ill.
pregnant-belly art
Seriously, I didn’t know which to pick.
“Painting the belly to look like a ball works really well,” says Greenawalt.
Mom, that catfish is French
Why Snark Works
I alternatively love and hate snark depending on what day you catch me for this reason:
Flippancy works best for people who already agree with you in principle. Jokes and references have to be gotten; irony and sarcasm need to be picked up. They’re fun when they’re for you. The earnest, thorough stuff, on the other hand, has to waste its fun doing the boring work of reaching out to all possible listeners—explaining where it’s coming from, inserting caveats, acknowledging exceptions and counter-arguments, etc. It builds a case; flippancy gets to just dance entertainingly on a case. One is the way you talk to people who get you, the other is the way you explain yourself to people who don’t.
all the single babies
Like some rogue Baby Einstein offering, the black-and-white “Single Ladies” video provides visual and aural stimulation well suited for the under-2 crowd. Babies love high-contrast colors, steady beats and smiling women’s faces. “Single Ladies” has all of these things. It’s almost as if Beyoncé designed it for children.
There’s always gotta be the asshole.
“What putting babies in front of this video does is deprive them of hands-on creative play, which is the foundation of learning,” says Dr. Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and author of The Case for Make Believe. “Babies aren’t asking to be put in front of these videos. They’re not congregating in front of the watercooler to talk about Beyoncé. They don’t get anything from the video that they couldn’t gain from parents who play music around the house.”
Logicomix
Logicomix is a comic (but not funny) story about the development of the Foundation of Mathematics.
“faster than we thought”
“In about 10 years, the Arctic ice will be considered as open sea.”
Thank You, Lex A
From the comments. I’m in heaven.
Pooping, Japanese Style
Thought Deron might enjoy this… the options on our toilet at our first hotel in Tokyo:
The difference between “Spray” & “Bidet” was subtle, but noticeable. Basically, as you might expect, though spray might better be called high-powered jet nozzle.
An additional feature not listed is the initial automatic courtesy flush to avoid embarrassing noises. Apparently this comes standard with all Japanese toilets.
Here’s our toilet now in Kyoto:
I haven’t had a chance to try the “oscillating” feature yet.
The only place I have seen such well-equipped toilets in the states is at Hisake in NYC.
Why Wall Street Nearly Collapsed
Seriously. Go read the article:
“IF you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.”
via Gruber
The Referendum
Tim Kreider mentions a truth few people outwardly acknowledge in an essay about “arrested adolescence”:
Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.
Incidentally, the James Salter quote which struck Jason Kottke, “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox,” is exactly what Rohrer’s Passage was trying to pin down.
including the works of Mother Teresa
A Baptist Church near Asheville, N.C., is hosting a “Halloween book burning” to purge the area of “Satan’s” works, which include all non-King James versions of the Bible, popular books by many religious authors and even country music.
Russian Underground Press, 1905-1906
Illustrations from the 1905-1906 Russian underground press. (via yewknee)
