headline of the day
Singer, sausage businessman Jimmy Dean dies at 81
Trying to finish the Sunday crossword.
Need your help: what’s a four-letter word for snatch?
(Ronya)
Vast Mineral Wealth Discovered in Afghanistan
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
This could get interesting. And by interesting I mean fucked?
Weekly Picture 186
Painted Old Faithful Geyser, Ink and Water Color on Media, 2010
Ken Sparling tipped me off to Jean-Michel Pilc
Common life problems
This made me laugh ten years ago. Still does today.
S O M E C O M M O N
L I F E P R O B L E M S , W I T H
P O S S I B L E S O L U T I O N S .
BY TIM CARVELL
- – - -
1. Have you ever noticed how, if you are with a friend — let us call him Gary, because I don’t actually know any Garys — and he is doing something annoying, like cracking his knuckles, and you say, “If you crack your knuckles one more time, Gary, honest to God, I’ll kill you right here and now”, and then, of course, Gary — because it would be funny — deliberately cracks his knuckles, and then what you do is, you lunge at his neck and scream this sort of exaggerated, joking scream, because that is what people do in this situation in cartoons. But then there’s always an awkward moment, once you’ve lunged, because you then need to stop lunging and sort of withdraw and compose yourself, because you’re not really going to kill him just for cracking his knuckles, but you did have to follow through on the premise of your joke. And now you’re both in this weird state of not having the joke followed through in a satisfactory manner, like it would be in a cartoon. I have a solution for this. I would suggest that, instead of saying, “If you crack your knuckles one more time, Gary, honest to God, I’ll kill you right here and now”, you should say, “If you crack your knuckles one more time, Gary, honest to God, I’ll gouge your eyes out with my thumbs.” And then, once he’s cracked his knuckles and smirked, you can wipe that smug fucking smile off his face by gouging out his eyes, and you’d be totally justified. Is my thinking.
Conditional ethics
I don’t know if you do this but once I realize I’m stuck in an awkward situation with someone that won’t be able to end for a while, I try to enjoy myself. Take Philadelphia, for instance. I’m there with this guy, singing the Rocky theme song and eating apple dumplings from the Pennsylvania Dutch. He likes to say he’s happy so long as I’m happy, and when he catches me laughing I tell him I’m having a terrible time. There’s almost no reason to think I’m not kidding.
The Wisdom of Friday Night Lights
It’s an old truism that each of us has to make our hardest decision twice.
Embrace the Alien Within, Phyllis Galembo
via But It Does Float.
Do you feel dumb yet?
a catalogue of fear, 4
I didn’t know then what sound it was that woke me but I do know now there are things that sound like fear that aren’t.
The Book of Enoch, a translation, Chapter One
Because we live in a time of great transition . . . .
Because the orbit of the moon, and planets, and stars are all that are available to us. To guide our impressions of the world. To help us mark the tracking of time. To remind us when to plant and when to harvest . . . .
Because the star map provides such comfort in its regularity, in the patterns we recognize and invent, imagine the terror we must feel when the constellations that mark our year — the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the winter and summer solstices — because of patterns we recognize but do not understand — begin to shift . . . .
All hell has broken loose.
Quote Out of Context
Kim Jong-il: putting the dick in dictator since 1994.
The Immortal Jellyfish
From Yahoo Green:
Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).
Also known as the Benjamin Button Jellyfish.
Sustainable
What does this word mean to you?
Absolut Brooklyn
Absolut Brooklyn is the latest in a line of limited edition infusions dedicated to American cities, with previous entries including Los Angeles and New Orleans. Spike Lee designed the packaging.
The infusion is apple and ginger, but I have a hard time believing it could be better than their shout-out to Beantown, Absolut Boston.
from the comments
I was no more than two, and was playing in a pile of sand in the back yard. I rolled down the pile and came to rest near a weed called sensitive briar–or “cat’s claw”–that has pink puff flowers that look like what Horton was holding in Horton Hears a Who. The bloom is pink, like a mimosa bloom, but round, and the tips of the pink spikes have a bit of yellow pollen on them. I looked at them and fell into the beauty–then looked up and vaguely saw my parents walking around to the front of the house without me. They were probably just moving water hoses, but in that instant I knew that I could be forgotten. I still love those flowers. And it seems right that it is regarded as a weed.
Skateistan
From photographer Noah Abrams‘ photoessay Skateistan, which chronicles a budding skateboard culture amongst the rusting war-machines in Afghanistan.
(GOOD)
Enlist!
Conspicuous drinking is the deliberate theme in both photographs—the soldiers appear absolutely mellow—while the entertaining fencing match can only invite speculation. Endorsing drunkenness as [a] means to lure recruits seems to be an outlandish proposition, or can this be taken as a brash if surreal recruiting scenario? The table is rich in detail replete with a little brown jug, bottles and corks, full drinking glasses, and smoking apparatus—sufficient vice to sooth[e] the rigors of campaigning and the terror of the battlefield.
From the catalog for Cowan’s auction 2010, American History, Including the Civil War, which took place on June 11. These beauties sold for $1,057.50.
There is about ten thousand times more information about American history in this auction catalog than the sum of everything I ever learned about it in school.
Al Green’s apex (in my book, anyway)
Ask Swearengen
Dear Al,
I’m having problems at work. The people I work with are petty, dishonest, and sleazy. They undermine each other and attack people for the tiniest things. They put meetings and pointless documents ahead of their families and their own health. A day at work is almost entirely about dealing with politics and incompetence rather than getting anything meaningful done. I realize that a lot of this is just part of the organizational culture, but what causes people to abandon basic human values to behave so unnaturally? I really feel like I need to take drastic action.
Cockblocked by my Coworkers
—
Dear Cockblocked,
Now it’s not for me to tell anyone in this camp what to do, as much as I don’t want more people gettin’ their throats cut, scalps lifted or any other godless thing that these godless bloodthirsty heathens do. Or even if someone wants to ride out in darkest night. But I will tell you this. I’d use tonight to get myself organized. Ride out in the morning clear-headed. And startin’ tomorrow morning, I will offer a personal $50 bounty for every decapitated head of as many of these godless heathen cocksuckers as anyone can bring in. Tomorrow. With no upper limit! That’s all I say on that subject, ‘cept next round’s on the house. And God rest the souls of that poor family. And pussy’s half price, next 15 minutes.
Al
Pride ’87 LA
“Two-four-six-eight. You can’t even get a date.”
The Weakerthans – Reconstruction Site
[http://www.clusterflock.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/03-Reconstruction-Site.mp3]
This band has been hitting the spot recently.
Meet the flockers: Carole Corlew
I am the poster also known as Cece.
I’m a freelancer, living in Northern Virginia. For years I worked in the news business, which I considered a legitimate cover for just being nosy.
I cry at operas. In the hobby department, I make a little jewelry and something called wire art. And I am crazy in love with gardening. I write, confer, research and obsess about gardening, losing all sense of time in the flower patches.
Unsuspecting strollers might find me kneeling in the dirt at night, inhaling near the lip of a bloom. Sometimes, during a full moon, I swear I can see a bud opening, ever so slowly.
I was born in Texas, but we moved when I was five to a house in the middle of an Alabama cotton field. I still have friends from first grade. I moved to Washington, D.C., for work and lingered for 30 years, which is surprising, because political talk can drive me to clamp my hands over my ears.
My husband is from Iowa. Every year I hear him drawling a few more words – fiiivvviiii sted five, for instance.
I’m fascinated with the things we can’t see or measure. There are people who are so very sure of their beliefs. But how do they know?
That’s probably why I’m so drawn to Clusterflock. I knew the minute I landed. Y’all know you don’t know. So you — we — are looking and watching, eyes wide open. And that, my friends, helps me breathe. Deeply.
It is an honor. Thank you for having me.
a catalogue of fear, 3
The streets were paved with tar. We stopped to look as they patched the road. When I looked up, my mom was gone. It didn’t matter that I was dreaming.
