What English sounds like to Italians, the musical
Try not shacking shaking your ass when you watch it.
(via Eric Baker, via marginal revolution)
android double for Christmas
They will be built by Japanese robotics firm Kokoro, which is best known for its line of attractive Actroid receptionist humanoids.
The company will create the sitting robot out of silicone with the same face, body shape, hair and eyes of the recipient. Their speech will be based on recordings of the owner’s voice.
The android’s facial expressions and upper body will be modeled on the movements of the buyer.
Unfortunately it won’t be able to walk . . . .
On the female models:
Her astonishingly small face is capable of creating exotic facial expressions. Her girlish and cute gestures are also polished.
(via marginal revolution)
from the duh
Some critics charge that the new policies pursued by President Obama and the 111th Congress generated the huge federal budget deficits that the nation now faces. In fact, the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.
Costco management was “determined” to avoid another tomato-throwing incident
A Costco in Salt Lake City, Utah reportedly removed all of its tomatoes ahead of a Sarah Palin book tour event, after a man was arrested for attempting to hit Palin with a tomato at an earlier event in Minnesota.
the end of checks in England
British banks, after three centuries of use, are beginning to phase out checks.
The board of the UK Payments Council, the body for setting payment strategy in Britain, agreed on Wednesday to set a target date of October 31, 2018 for winding up the check clearing system.
“There are many more efficient ways of making payments than by paper in the 21st century, and the time is ripe for the economy as a whole to reap the benefits of its replacement,” Paul Smee, the council chief executive, said in a statement.
A little history:
The oldest surviving check in Britain was written in 1659, according to the council and made out for 400 pounds (equivalent to around 42,000 pounds today). It was signed by Nicholas Vanacker, made payable to a Mr Delboe and drawn on Messrs Morris and Clayton, scriveners and bankers of the City of London.
In those days, checks would have been exchanged informally in coffee houses. It was not until 1833 that the first clearing house was built in London to exchange checks.
Paper Sculptures by Karen Sargsyan
via Snarkmarket
ritual desperation
Every week my dad played the lotto. It was a ritual. He’d pull into the small parking lot of the liquor store around the corner from our house and walk straight to the counter. Not much was said. Last week’s ticket would be passed across the counter and scanned while my dad put his numbers on a new ticket. Sometimes, if I was with him and had opted not to wait in the car, he would buy a scratcher and hand me a quarter. With the rough edge of the quarter I’d scratch off the flaky silver coating.
As far as I know he never won a dollar. I imagine that in that moment, as he passed the old ticket over to be scanned, he would think about the money he was about to win. My dad would imagine his new life. The one without the shitty job and the hard work putting four kids through private school required. The lottery would hand him the keys to his new life.
Eventually, he would get a new life. One day, in one of those surprising twists you knew was coming the whole time, he would leave. My mom would cry but mostly because she didn’t know what any of it meant.
By now, he’s found a new liquor store. And, while he probably doesn’t play our birth dates anymore, he dreams of a new escape, from his new problems, as he waits for the clerk to scan his weekly ticket.
Add Me
Sounds like they got up again.
Nhà truyền bá Phúc âm Oral Roberts từ trần
Nhà truyền bá Phúc âm Cơ đốc Mỹ Oral Roberts từ trần, hưởng thọ 91 tuổi.
Một Phát ngôn viên cho biết là ông Roberts qua đời tại bệnh viện Newport Beach, California hôm thứ Ba vì những biến chứng liên quan đến bệnh sưng phổi.
Ông là sáng lập viên trường đại học Oral Roberts tại thành phố Tulsa, bang Oklahoma, miền trung nước Mỹ.
Read more
99 years later
“Facts I Ought to Know about the Government of My Country” was supposed to have been returned by May 10, 1910.
The overdue book fine was a penny a day in 1910.
PRATE Interview: Brian Beatty
I’ve probably ruined a lot of perfectly decent jokes trying to justify what I think about the world. So it goes, to quote Vonnegut. I’m not doing stand-up to become famous. I only started telling jokes because of a magazine article that nobody remembers. I took a four-week comedy class, wrote about the experience and was instantly addicted to the immediate response of a live audience. I’d never gotten that kind of feedback as a writer. Now it’s about figuring out new ways to exploit the limits of the stand-up genre. That’s why I sometimes perform in a bear suit.
Here.
Michael Kenna’s Hokkaido
Michael Kenna. Fading Light, Furano, Hokkaido, Japan. 2004.
Ordinarily I’d not want to follow so swiftly on Deron’s post about the Andy Goldsworthy documentary, but if I don’t do it now, I might be some time.
A short while ago Phil Bebbington sent me a link to this documentary interview with photographer Michael Kenna. I found Michael Kenna’s Hokkaido calming and beautiful, and I want to share it.
“Even in the midst of a storm, it’s a wonderful place to come to ground, in a sense.”
Rivers and Tides
We watched Rivers and Tides last night, a documentary about the environmental sculpture of Andy Goldsworthy, thanks to Cindy’s suggestion, and it was so beautiful it made me cry like a baby.
“I’m sorry but we had to blow up your laptop.“
The Israeli airport security shot a MacBook three times and the hard drive survived. (via)
Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill
It’s long and informative. Here’s the brass tacks, but you really do need to read the whole thing to get Silver’s argument:
Nevertheless, it’s clear that this family would be receiving a very substantial subsidy, on the order of $10,000 in pretax income, under the Senate’s bill. The reason I picked this particular family is because it provides a reality check against the example selected by the great Darcy Burner, who argued in an article at Open Left:
Affordable coverage for everyone: FAIL.
The latest CBO estimates for the Senate bill say that a family of four with a household income of $54,000/year should expect to pay 17% of their gross income on healthcare – about $9,000/year. (And that was when there was a public option to hold down costs!) That’s more than they’ll spend on federal taxes. That’s more than they’ll spend on food. I’m guessing if you took a poll, very few Americans would consider that affordable. And because of the way they’ve approached this, there’s no effective cost cap on premiums and nothing providing downward pressure, so this is a problem that would get worse rather than better over time.
We can debate whether $9,000 for a family earning $54,000 is “affordable”; what we know is that it’s a hell of a lot more affordable than the status quo, under which the family might have to pay more than twice as much to receive equivalent coverage.
quote out of context
This is possibly the most American thing I’ve ever seen.
an interview with Thomas Bernhard
In an interview from 1986, the late Austrian author Thomas Bernhard discusses the musicality of language, the eroticism of old men and the incurability of stupidity.
It’s hard to recommend Bernhard because of readers’ expectations, but to my mind, there are few better.
(via marginal revolution)
Design Within Reach, fall from grace
Design Within Reach used to offer beautiful, original modernist furniture. Apparently, now they have taken to manufacturing and selling knock-offs of the furniture they used to sell at the same price as the originals.
Fuckwads.
why aphorisms are cynical
A good single sentence saying can’t require background evidencing or further explanation. It must be instantly recognizable as true. It also needs to be news to the listener. Most single sentences that people can immediately verify as true they already believe. What’s left? One big answer is things that people don’t believe or think about much for lack of wanting to, despite evidence. Drawing attention to these is called cynicism.
(via marginal revolution)
spam name
Augustus Yang.
levi’s gran fondo | coleman valley road…
We turned left. At first it didn’t seem that bad. I told myself everyone had made a big deal about this section because of how late in the day it came. I pretended it wasn’t going to be too bad.
Before the ride an acquaintance had told me, as he accompanied me for a training ride, that Coleman Valley road wouldn’t be the so bad because “you could see the top.” At the time I’d thought it was a silly thing to say. As the incline increased more than 16% and I looked up the road at the cyclists half way up the climb the only thought I had was that I was never going to make it.
Read more
tool using octopi
The video is amazing:
The coconut-carrying behavior makes the veined octopus the newest member of the elite club of tool-using animals—and the first member without a backbone, researchers say.
a present
For friends and family, I’ve made a printable calendar for 2010, using some of my drawings of Pittsburgh posted on clusterflock over the past few years. You can download the .pdf here, if you’d like one of your own.
(And if you want to give someone an original drawing, let me know…)
Back in Black
The skin arrived today and the camera is back in business.
A Christmas Classic
I bet I’ve posted this before, and I bet a bunch of you have seen it before — but it’s a Christmas Classic, so it’s time to watch again.
(John Waters. Female Trouble.)
