Rear Derailleur Bokeh
I thought that I’d share a recent photo that I took. It was taken a few days ago, late at night, with a Nikon D700 and a 135mm f/2 DC lens. The photo is of the rear dérailleur of my bike.
And remember, don’t touch anything
Dear Clusterflock
The mom reach
update: Apparently the term is not part of the general consciousness. Coming to a sudden stop or going around a turn, a mother will reach over to hold whoever is in the passenger seat. This is the mom reach.
quote out of context
What stance should a future Ron Paul candidacy take on how animal rights influence the Trilateral Commission, with relevance to Austrian business cycle theory, the morality of the gold standard, the likely success of “game,” the most obnoxious blogger in the world, and the delusion of free will?
poem on the toilet
Oh stupid youth
please come back
and let me keep
what I have found.
The Market Approach
Tyler Cowen points to a restaurant who’s taking an interesting market approach to their menu:
The Exchange Bar & Grill, set amid the bustling shops and pubs of the Grammercy Park neighborhood, is replete with a ticker tape flashing menu prices in red lettering as demand forces them to fluctuate.
Customers can move prices for all beverages and bar snacks such as hot wings ($7 for 6 pieces) or fried calamari ($9). The prices will fluctuate in $.25 cent increments, but will most likely plateau at a $2 change in either direction.
A glass of Guinness starts at $6 but could be pushed to a high of $8 or a low of $4, depending on popularity.
So if one drink is in heavy demand, its price will rise, causing the cost of other equivalent drinks to drop. A rush on a particular beer would increase its price, and cause other beers to drop.
Rudolph Dunbar
A neat little World War 2 anecdote found by my friend, Robert:
Dunbar was an accomplished symphony conductor as well as a journalist, and he conducted the London Philharmonic multiple times while stationed there. Interestingly, he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic after the war ended as a kind of double-jab at the Nazis: a black man could not only meet them on the battlefield, but he could conduct their derrieres, too. I was looking for any description of the nightlife and music scene in Berlin during the war, because Dunbar marched on Berlin with the U.S. forces.
Unfortunately, Robert didn’t find any descriptions of the music scene during the war in Berlin, but he did find a letter by Dunbar written on Hitler’s stationary!
are we there yet?
For India: a Dinner in Morocco
My friends Rick and Teel recently told me another amazing tale of a memorable meal, in the mode of an earlier one I have written about here. This one involves a meal at the home of Jacqueline Rosenblum, who taught at Mohammed V University in Rabat in the early ’60s. Rick was there as a Fulbright Lecturer in 1963-64, teaching American literature, and his wife, Teel, was teaching English. Their friend, Jacqueline was (is…?) a remarkable polyglot; she was teaching Latin, but was also fluent in Arabic, English, German, French, and other languages. I’m not quite sure of the details, but apparently control of the university was soon to change hands (in 1965), and with the change would come the exclusion of all Jewish faculty. Jacqueline arranged a dinner party and invited a number of faculty members to her small house, where she served a meal she prepared herself: a leafy salad, flat bread, couscous, a large platter of lamb’s eyes, and a bowl of snails, stacked in a spiral cone. As Rick and Teel sat in the murmur of a dozen different languages at the table, they looked at each other with trepidation. A woman sitting next to Rick asked him, in French, if he would be able to eat what had been set before them. Rick, whose French was not terribly strong at the time, answered with “Je sui pouissant.” He meant to indicate something along the lines of “I can take it,” but had apparently told the woman he was “potent.” Instantly the woman’s husband, seated across from them at the table, was up and rushing around to get at Rick, saying in Danish “Did you hear what that man said to my wife?” Fortunately Jacqueline swept in, making good use of her many languages to explain to all what he had meant to say.
What a microcosm of cultures and conflicts that dinner was! I asked Rick and Teel if they ate any of the lamb’s eyes. They said they liked the snails but passed on the eyes.
from the comments
Ross, I ponder this often and I don’t think it does. All the constituent elements are there with the photographer left to try and show you what he is seeing. I guess viewing a photo in isolation (especially if you do not know the place) enables you to turn it into what you want it to be — a bit like the way we make characters of a book our own (poor example, what I’m doing is a breeze compared to writing a book!) the blocks of the character are there — the mind does the rest. I guess it also depends if you are just trying to record things or give people a peep into the world that you see.
from the spam
I held her hips and fucked her hard. So the undertow can’t kill you.
quote out of context
Kiss my black ass, we’re going it alone, George W. Bush style.
Clusterflockstock 2 Awards
Maybe we should call them the “I feel like I’m not wearing my pants” awards. And here are some game possibilities:
Best drunk driver (closed course)
Best drunk Ministry of Silly Walks walk
Best morning after bruise
Best use of a pee chute
Best drunk argument involving Foucault
Best improvisational woodcraft while lost
Best loss of an electronic device
Best story brought back from a beer run….
Got more? And what will the prizes be?
The Stardust Motel, U.S. 90, Marfa, TX 79843
dear clusterflock
Has anyone ever noticed how Cluster Flock is an awful lot like Calista Flockhart?
bingo!
What a Wonderful World – Death Metal Style
The rest of the guy’s videos are great too, including Reggae “Detroit Rock City”
via Twitter
resolved
An island at the heart of a dispute between India and Bangladesh has disappeared.
New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said.
“What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming,” said Hazra.
Stornoway – I Saw You Blink
via I don’t remember who (mea culpa)
top searches that brought people to clusterflock
adults photos
cheetos
cupcakes
say no to socialism
dogue de bordeaux
from an article about chimp culture
We could look at them and ask, why don’t we have sex rather than kissing on the cheek? There’s nothing default about chimpanzees.
from the spam
Telephone Servant, rain must apparent control request animal danger wish signal responsibility use help application finger
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Based off the comic book. Um, squee?
To all modern Sons of Liberty: THIS is your time. Break their windows. Break them NOW.
“The central fact of the health-care bill is this, and we find it tyrannical and unconstitutional on its face,” Vanderboegh said. “The federal government now demands all Americans to pay and play in this system, and if we refuse, we will be fined, and if we refuse to pay the fine, they will come to arrest us, and if we resist arrest . . . then we will be killed. The bill certainly doesn’t say that, but that’s exactly and precisely what is behind every bill like this.”
He said his call for people to throw bricks is “both good manners and it’s also a moral duty to try to warn people.”
Vanderboegh said he once worked as a warehouse manager but now lives on government disability checks.
“Frankly,” he said, “my phone’s been ringing off the hook with death threats the last few days.”
Drunk History: Frederick Douglass
I am getting HBO just for this show.
You might let this one breathe a little.
(thanks, Aaron)
