Loitering
just outside my motel room.
Anyone recognize him?
I sing the song of myself
The WSJ noted one North Dakota resident who voted against a ballot measure to raise taxes to pay for paved roads, right around the time she wrote to the governor, urging him not to allow a major road in her area to be converted into gravel.
Quote of the Day (from Sheila’s email)
Sheila: I liked it when Mr. Potato Head was just a collection of facial parts that you were meant to insert in a real tuber.
from the moderated comments
Maybe if you understood the issue and didn’t cherry pick the story you’d actually be creditable
Learn the facts: FirearmsTruth.com
what’s so great about Texas?
The main players are Daryl, Cindy, and Deron.
[http://www.clusterflock.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/texas.mp3]
Bonus material: Deron’s cock song.
[http://www.clusterflock.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/cocksong.mp3]
For Cindy
Leonardo’s technique
Specialists from the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France found that da Vinci painted up to 30 layers of paint on his works to meet his standards of subtlety. Added up, all the layers are less than 40 micrometers, or about half the thickness of a human hair, researcher Philippe Walter said Friday.
The technique, called “sfumato,” allowed da Vinci to give outlines and contours a hazy quality and create an illusion of depth and shadow. His use of the technique is well-known, but scientific study on it has been limited because tests often required samples from the paintings.
An Open Letter To Errol Morris
Dear Errol Morris:
1. We each love your films. Every one of them.
2. We’re pretty sure we love you, too.
3. If you have not yet read Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, we believe you should.
Love,
Deron Bauman and Cindy Scroggins
Dallas, Texas
Errol Morris’s favorite books
For me, the perfect work of art has to have three basic ingredients — sick, sad, and funny — in equal measure.
What deeper or more satisfying relationship can you imagine than one with a dead dog?
Bierce had a simple idea: Life is a grotesque dream, interrupted by death.
It’s Christianity without the hope.
I dare anyone to read it without an immediate and overwhelming desire to open up your veins in the tub.
I have found that self-fulfilling prophecies are the only kind of prophecy that is really reliable.
from the comments
The bathroom in my childhood home had these ugly light fixtures that were open at the top. My mother couldn’t figure out why the bulbs kept burning out with such frequency for a few years. She didn’t know that between the ages of, oh, four and six or so, I would go in the bathroom, close the door behind me, fill up my Minnie Mouse cup with water, climb up onto the counter, and pour the water into the light fixtures just to hear the snapping and crackling sound it made. Once, I saw a hint of a flash, so from then on I would put my eye very close to the top of the light fixture so I could see what was going on.
from the comments
When I was 5, I walked to the neighborhood convenience store with a penny my grandmother had given me, aiming to buy a single balloon. I picked out a white one (not inflated, you understand–they sold balloons individually for a penny).
As I approached the front gate at my grandmother’s house, I looked down and realized that the penny was still clinched in my hand. I had stolen the balloon! I became distraught, but my grandmother just laughed. When my Papa came home that evening, I insisted that he take my penny and give it to the clerk, which he said he did. I was too ashamed to do it myself.
Years later, when I and my co-workers were asked to take a lie detector test following an in-house theft, the test administrator asked me if I had ever stolen anything. I told him about the balloon.
Politicians in the Age of Twitter
Refudiate, indeed. It’s nice to know someone’s bravely taken up the mantel of unknowingly creating new words.
Only In Texas
A unique loophole in a new security procedure means a gun permit is like a special-access pass into the domed building, allowing people who are certified to carry a gun to bypass lines at the metal detectors that were set up after a shooting incident earlier this year.
“Nobody wants to be the one standing in line behind three hundred kids wearing the same colored T-shirt,” said University of Texas political scientist Jim Henson. “If you’re trying to get in and out really quick and there’s going to be choke points, well, people don’t want to have to deal with that.”
It’s a fascinating line of logic they’re using.
fail better
If you want life paths that quickly and reliably reveal your skills, like leveling up in video games, you want artificial worlds like schools, sporting leagues, and corporate fast tracks. You might call such lives adventures, but really they pretty much the opposite. If you insist instead on adventuring for real, achieving things of real and large consequence against great real obstacles, well then learn to see the glorious nobility of those who try well yet fail.
Amy said
Hey, let’s have a naked bounce-house for my birthday.
Early Suasion: A Comic Review
I found this recently at my favorite used books place, and it brought back memories of being trapped in church with little to do but gaze at Sunday school propaganda and the few inked illustrations in the Bible. I remember seeing many reproductions of parts of this book, and have noted since that credit is seldom given to the editions done by M. C. Gaines, in the early 1940s–illustrations done by Don Cameron, with scripts done by Montgomery Mulford. Even this edition shows the odd understanding of “fair use” in religious publishing: the ISBN on this edition takes one to an entirely different edition. I don’t know what kind of deal Jimmy Swaggart worked out with Scarf Press, but I can’t seem to find any news of how this book with this cover came to be presented.
an alternative to toy story 3…
A Town Called Panic on DVD;
episodes of the series available via hulu and atom
Dirty, bad mannered, unhygienic
This, I believe, is an official notice put up by the Council. I took some photos in London on my most recent visit. They’re here.
Receding Himalayan Glaciers
The NYT Lens Blog has an interesting series on major glaciers in Asia, specifically in the Himalayas. The photos depict the level of recession these glaciers have experienced over the course of a century:
There’s a lot of people who either don’t understand climate change that well and the effects that it’s having, or they want to deny the effect it’s having. These pictures are worth a thousand words. We haven’t done anything to them except print them.
This, it seems to me, is the best form of evidence. People love before and after pictures.
What Daryl Just Said
Piece of shit toilet.
Dear Clusterflock.
Just wondering if any of you have any recommendations for websites, twitter feeds or blogs I would/should/could be reading?
I’m looking for something new to read.
Individuals, major media organisations, anything will do.
this is the 20,000th post
Dear Clusterflock
Yesterday I walked out to my car to find the side of it covered in black spray paint. On the sidewalk next to my vehicle there was a cop, several witnesses, and three boys who looked to be about eight, nine and twelve. The little dummies had stolen a can of auto primer from a store and were running around in the broad daylight painting stuff, my car being the main target. I was annoyed, of course, but it was also kind of funny to see a group of kids being dumb like this and getting caught. The officer took down everyone’s info, took the perpetrators home to their parents, and I took the spray paint off my car pretty easily with rubbing alcohol, so no harm done. Hopefully this will be one of the stupidest things they ever do. But the incident got me wondering: what kind of idiocy did my now civil and intelligent friends get into when they were young and stupid? So how about it flockers? Got any good stories of incredible youthful idiocy?
I didn’t think yesterday was going to suck
But any time you throw your nephew in the pool and he starts crying as you begin to stumble and you realize how calm your niece had been, how happy, when you threw her in, lulled you into a sense of security as you move toward the water and sling your camera in a single, solid motion into your mouth — but at least it’s saved! — before your older nephew asks is your phone still in your pocket? after your brother-in-law pulled you aside to let you know there was a moment your mother didn’t recognize who you were.
September 26
I’ll be in Chicago to see Van Dyke Parks and Clare and the Reasons at Schuba’s. Anybody wanna get together? Wanna go to the show with me?
