spam name
Roaden Katzer.
Nice to Wake Up from This One
I worked for a company that produced building materials made to look like they were composed of recycled materials when they weren’t. Apparently the company was branching out: my job was to attach small gasoline motors to various electronic devices.
My push-up bra will help me get my man
Thanks to my cousin Sarah for this one.
Synchronicipee
Amy’s word for when two people need to pee at the same time.
Bag Your Bananas (Don’t Bag Your Bananas)
was the message my mama left me,
Read more
Hawksley Workman – No Sissies
Many Worlds
The highly sensitive Kepler has now leveled the playing field, indicating that there are many more exoplanets twice the size of Earth and smaller.
This makes me wonder how many other worlds are noticing this at this moment.
A Very Big ‘T’ On I-45, Corsicana, TX 75110
An oddly empty day as I meandered back to Houston for the flight home.
Wildflower meadow
In Yetts O Muckhart
from the comments
When I was in college my grandfather came for a visit and we spent an evening talking: grandfather, father, son. I heard family history and personal anecdotes — reasons for choices made long ago. That night, after everyone had gone to bed, and the extended family had left, I was in the kitchen getting a glass of water — there was a sound I couldn’t quite figure out, a repetitive, almost meditative, cyclical looping. I paced all parts of the kitchen trying to figure it out. Finally I opened the microwave and found — it’s hard to describe now because I don’t know if they still make them — but a battery powered gyroscope type of thing a cousin had set to spinning and placed inside there — too quiet to hear until everyone had gone away.
1939/47 Rolls-Royce Phantom III Vutotal Cabriolet
The 1939/47 Rolls-Royce Phantom III “Vutotal” Cabriolet by Labourdette, now in the John Rich Museum collection, started off as a standard Phantom III designed by Henry Royce.
And now, for the rest of the story.
no longer
I know some people like this.
In Preachers who are not believers, a provocative new paper in Evolutionary Psychology, Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola interview five preachers who no longer believe in God.
The 26th US Go Congress
If you don’t have enough geek in your life, the Go Congress starts Saturday.
Update: What is Go?
Ok, just in case anybody missed this
A boat made of recycled plastic bottles has just crossed the Pacific. Yeah.
Memorizing Milton
John Basinger memorized all twelve books of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Just how did JB manage to pull off this incredible feat? He studied for about one hour per day, reciting verses in seven-line chunks, consistent with Miller’s magic number seven — the capacity of short-term, working memory. Added together, JB estimates that he devoted between 3000 to 4000 hours to learning the poem. Seamon’s team interpret this commitment in terms of Ericsson’s ‘deliberate practice theory’, in which thousands of hours of perfectionist, self-critical practice are required to achieve true expertise.
Basinger says:
‘During the incessant repetition of Milton’s words, I really began to listen to them, and every now and then as the whole poem began to take shape in my mind, an insight would come, an understanding, a delicious possibility. … I think of the poem in various ways. As a cathedral I carry around in my mind, a place that I can enter and walk around at will. … Whenever I finish a “Paradise Lost” performance I raise the poem and have it take a bow.’
(via marginal revolution)
“I over-repented,” he said.
“Tiger Woods needs to golf. Michael Vick needs to be playing football,” Mr. Haggard said as his new congregation joined him and Gayle in their backyard for a post-worship picnic. Little kids, shrieking with joy, splashed in the pool. Men grilled burgers. Women set out chicken salad.
“Ted Haggard,” Mr. Haggard said, “needs to be leading a church.”
Penguin House
I love the concepts here that result in a small house that doesn’t feel at all cramped. This clip gets more and more interesting as it progresses.
Actors, Models & Talent for Christ
AMTC is a company centered on God. We embrace His values in an industry plagued with secrets and scandal.
I am a Christian. We have based AMTC’s 28 years in business on the Christian values of truth, faith, hope, and righteousness. For our first 24 years, we were quietly Christian. We focused on running a good business, because we thought business and faith should be separate.
(thanks, I-30 Tom Landry Highway Super Bowl Highway billboard)
Cupcakes and Libraries
Call it a hunch, but it seems to me that the thing is in the air that happens right before something — families with a million kids, cupcakes, wedding coordinators — suddenly becomes the thing everyone wants to do happy-fuzzy pop-culture stories about. Why?
Libraries get in fights. Everybody likes a scrapper, and between the funding battles they’re often found fighting and the body-checking involved in their periodic struggles over sharing information, there’s a certain … pleasantly plucky quality to the current perception of libraries and librarians.
top searches
clusterflock, dogue de bordeaux, cupcakes, natural harvest, the end of history ale
from the comments
Once (more than 20 years ago) I had cancer and was getting chemo therapy. I often couldn’t sleep so I would stay up writing. The drugs made me sort of frantic and caused borderline hallucinations. Anyway, I wrote a story about a solitary almost homeless woman who spent long nights in a storeroom at a church, making doll clothes to sell. One night she begins to play at making something different, even though she knows she can’t afford such frivolity. I was up all night writing it. When I went in and woke Cindy that morning the first thing she said was “I had the strangest dream. It was like I was right there, in a place I have never seen.” Then she told me more about the dream–and it was the story I had just written, recounted in astonishing detail. Here’s a link to the story, “Issue from the Grotto of the Street Hermit Saint.”
from the comments
Here’s one story: About a year ago, I went with some friends to a “haunted” hotel (the Hotel Lawrence in Downtown Dallas). Something about this place just turned something “on” in me. Everything was familiar; I knew my way around the hotel completely. I entered one of the rooms and immediately knew someone had died there. I didn’t see it happening, but it was almost like I was reading about it in a newspaper — a series of journalistic cliffs notes. A woman. 1940s. Suicide. Window. That window. We talked to the hotel staff and they showed me the article from the mid 1940s about a woman who had committed suicide by jumping out the window of a room on the 10th floor. No one had ever confirmed why she had jumped, but I know why. I also know she was wearing a red scarf.
from the comments
There is a wind-storm and I am probably sixteen or seventeen, driving along a single-lane country road in my Ford F150 truck. It’s been windy for a few days, by now, and this road is elevated slightly, with a drainage ditch on either side, but no brush. Farmland. A single row of telephone poles are on the left side of the road, and I am probably driving too fast — the wind is pushing against the truck, which somehow makes me feel not only invincible but impossibly cool. Even though I know the road is deserted, I look behind me in the driver’s side mirror and think “That is so odd, the poles are sideways.” I realize that they are falling and I look up and see them begin to fall in front of me and one is about to hit my car. I turn the wheel sharply and start driving over the tilled soil. For some reason it doesn’t occur to me to slow down. I drive to the edge of the field, and get back on the road. Other cars are here now and they’ve stopped. The road is completely blocked, back for a ways since as one pole started to fall it brought all the others with it.
no I swear — just raspberries
Rick, Danny, Andrew et al — au plaisir de vous revoir….
– Doc
