something, 34
Sheila Ryan. Dwell.
Kyoto Station
warehouses
On 33rd Street, in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh, are some warehouses with giant tires stacked beside them.
Mental Calendar–Just had to Draw It
Dear clusterflock
Do you have a mental calendar?
I see the year in two parallel, vertical lines of months: January – August on the left side, September – December on the right. The biggest transition of the year is the jump from August 31 (lower left) to September 1 (upper right). The jump from December 31 to January 1 is lesser but still significant.
Walken Goes Gaga
Who can resist a little shameless self-promotion?
Via Ezra Klein.
Half Past Louis Quatorze
This weekend I chatted via Skype with a couple of fellow Flockers — Lucy (in Ireland) and Phil (in England) — and I had to double-check to make sure that we were on the same clock, me being in the central USA and all. This Daylight Savings Time and all is not so straightforward, as anyone who has traveled in Arizona, USA may know.
Anyway, Phil and I got to talking about the arbitrary nature of our measures of time. There was your Julian calendar, and there is your Gregorian calendar. Some folk date time from before and after the putative birth of Jesus of Nazareth; others from the Hijra. You got your lunar calendars, your Mayan calendar — you got however you want to break it down.
Who’s to say that when the sun is straight up in the sky over Greenwich that it’s ‘noon GMT’? Call it anything you like, I say!
So Phil and I got thinking: say that the monarchs of France — or England — were your points of reference.
“I’ll meet you at half past Louis Quatorze.”
“When’s dinner?” “A quarter to Henry the Fifth.”
“When are you off work?” “Edward the Second.”
Draw like a walrus, and post when you can!
That Renner. He asks me whether I’ll be doing DrawMo! this year, and I tell him that I’ll try to draw every day but that daily posting may be impossible, and he says:
Draw like a walrus, and post when you can!
Put This On
Put This On confuses me, if only because Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor are the creators. It’s not that they are unstylish, it’s that I just didn’t picture them as stylish.* The episode has its moments and I definitely learned a thing or two, but it still felt a little slow to me. That said, I’m interested to see more.
*This is a fault of my imagination, not their character.
Quietube
Quietube is a bookmarklet “to watch web videos without the comments and crap.” An unintended use of the script, however, has been the creation of a proxy for heavily censored areas in the Middle East:
So it turns out, I think I accidentally created a YouTube proxy being used by tens of thousands of people in the Middle East. I’m not sure if I should be writing about it, but if it’s that easy to do, I’m sure others can do it too. It’s just a matter of embedding the video elsewhere, and it shows how extraordinarily flexible the digital systems we build are. Information does indeed want to be free.
Flame Retardant Shorts
I thirst!
Why Network Neutrality Matters
A fake advertisement that very effectively communicates why network neutrality is essential for the web.
Oh, Yeah? Well, our Church is Bigger than your Church!
“For more than 140 years, God has put First Baptist Church at the center of Dallas, the nation’s fastest-growing city in the heart of America,” Dr. Jeffress continued. “Jerry Jones recently unveiled a new $1.2 billion ‘temple to sport.’ In these tough economic times, why can’t we use our gifts to build a church building that provides a spiritual oasis and matches the splendor and majesty of God?”
Thank you for all your support!
Thank you for your idea of having some items auctioned on ebay. I’m including three pictures another inmate did after I first got here. As you can see, he is very talented. His name is Jason Dubrowski and is one of the best artists I’ve seen in here. The drawing of the man and woman at Tiller’s tombstone was done in response to the opinion page depiction which I included. The drawing of the field of babies tombstones with the newspaper headline comments of Obama was done after a Christian newsletter printed this illustration which a lady in Valley Center sent to me. The David and Goliath depiction was my idea. I hope they help get the message out there.
(via)
cat people in the field of dogs
Cypriots were the first civilization worldwide to have a cat as a pet. A human and a cat were found interred in the same 9,500 year old site, Shillourokambos (Cypriot dialect meaning Field of Dogs) by French archaeologists in 2001.
Water Trick Bob
I can’t explain.
Randy
Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.
Icy Failure
A product review for Ben and Jerry’s Pumpkin Cheesecake took a delightful turn.
Of course nothing can compare to Ben & Jerry’s raspberry brownie shit, which is the best ice cream I’ve ever had. I always imagine the CEO of Breyer’s or Edy’s taking it home in a brown paper sack, eating it furtively in his home office, and wanting to kill himself right on the spot because he knows he could never, ever, not in 2,000 years, make an ice cream as good as that.
(Edy’s is known as Dreyer’s out here on the Best West Coast.)
Last night in dreamland,
I noticed just as we exited the elevator that the First Lady’s floor-length black gown was a few inches too long. I offered her some of that double-sided tape made especially for basting or other temporary hemming jobs.
Later, the Chief Executive and I had a tête-à-tête over by the door to the kitchen. We draped arms casually over one another’s shoulders, and he confided that “you come in for a lot of shit in this job.”
“I know the feeling,” I replied.
can you dig it?
bad driving in the genes
In a small study, researchers found that people with a gene variation performed 20 percent worse on simulated driving tests and did as poorly a few days later. Almost one in three Americans have the variation, the team said.
But don’t be alarmed if you think you have this gene variation — it has its good side. The researcher say the gene also slows mental decline for people with conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease or multiple sclerosis.
“It’s as if nature is trying to determine the best approach,” Cramer said. “If you want to learn a new skill or have had a stroke and need to regenerate brain cells, there’s evidence that having the variant is not good. But if you’ve got a disease that affects cognitive function, there’s evidence it can act in your favor. The variant brings a different balance between flexibility and stability.”
