“Where You At?”
I can be staring at the Potomac River within minutes. And if I time it right, the drive from the D.C. area to the ocean takes less than four hours. I’m there now. Rehoboth, Dewey, Bethany in Delaware, or Ocean City in Maryland, it makes no difference to me. All that matters is the big water.
Do you have a place where you can feel difference within seconds? Like taking a deep breath for the first time in weeks. Or feeling the fist in your stomach unclench.
dear clusterflock
What is this a symbol of?
“.”
More Fuck You
50 Cent adds a few bars of tight rhyme at the beginning of the new Cee-Lo song.
this just in
I bought the nieces and nephews magazines for their birthdays and put a card with some cash in each one. Riley, the oldest, got Tiger Beat. Madie got Golf Pro. Zoe got Guns & Ammo. Jack got Cooking with Paula Deen. I got a text from my sister this morning: By the way, Jack is graciously letting me look at HIS Paula Deen magazine. Possession is nine tenths of the law.
Dolly Freed
The delightfully unusual woman, Dolly Freed:
Between August 1, 1975, and August 1, 1976, Dolly and her father, a.k.a. “the Old Fool,” spent $1,498.75. “When I totaled up the figures and handed them to Daddy, his face went all white,” she wrote. “Then he sat down and checked that his heart was still working okay. ‘Impossible!’ he shouted. ‘Where did it all go?’”
Frank and Dolly had never planned to drop out of society—they just sort of woke up one day and were doing it, or at least the money part of it. They weren’t socially isolated—Dolly would have boyfriends and go out with friends—they simply needed far less than other people did, especially when it came to possessions and status.
Speaking of Holy Ground
via @ebertchicago
the privatization of public schools
It has come to this: Parents are now being asked to send their children to school with their own toilet paper.
The Booty Pop Infomercial
The Ansel Adams Lost Negatives Controversy
Norsigian says he bought the negatives 10 years ago at a Fresno garage sale for $45. He noticed they resembled Adams’ famed photographs of Yosemite National Park and hired Peter to assemble a team of experts to authenticate them.
Last month, Peter announced that his team studied the 65 negatives for six months and concluded “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the photos were Adams’ early work, believed to have been destroyed in a 1937 fire at his Yosemite studio.
Norsigian has set up a website to sell prints made from some of the negatives, from $45 for a poster to $7,500 for a darkroom print with a certificate of authenticity. A Beverly Hills art gallery owned by David W. Streets plans to hold a public viewing of part of the collection next month.
Adams’ representatives have never bought the claim, calling it a fraud. The lawsuit is the latest action to stop what they believe is a scam.
This story has been litigated on the web for a little while now.
from the comments
What I object to, perhaps, is the charade of it all. I resent the feeling that I must get “made up” for men, and I know many women love to do this for themselves, but for me, I don’t even like shaving my legs much less going through the complications of lipstick. Or blush, ugh, don’t get me started on blush. What makes me even more upset is people will ask after my health if I don’t wear make up but when I do wear make up I get hit on and people tell me I am so beautiful. I don’t know quite what to make of that except it makes me see the entire enterprise as a very particular sort of fraud. But fraud that I will commit nonetheless when there is a handsome gent in the offing.
Fashion’s always a bit behind, a bit of a regression, a bit of a return, an homage. Everyone I know looks like they’re living in a weird mixture of the 70′s and the future. I could take a series of pictures for you that would look like they were taken back then, but part of it has to do with actual film stock I think. I can almost always place a film movie to within a year of its actual release or production, based on the look of the film itself.
Normal in Every Respect: Update
At present there is no cure for lymphatic filariasis, the end stage of which is the condition known as elephantiasis, but the tetracycline antibiotic drug doxycycline can help reduce transmission of the disease by killing symbiotic bacteria in reproductive tracts of roundworms.
Doxycycline is the drug I am taking to treat Lyme disease.
Catch of the Day
Sorry, Cindy. No peanut butter. Just cheese on cheese.
The Great Sleeping Bear sleeping bag
This is probably the softest bad idea ever.
(via)
Death Star by PowerPoint
“You can’t see this well on this Micro Galactic ProjectionPoint, but an analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has demonstrated a weakness in the battle station. Follow this link at the bottom of the screen for more info if needed.”
Garr Reynolds makes the point he always does, but this time he uses Star Wars.
Just so y’all know
It’s 107 degrees right now in Dallas.
Surrendering
There’s a bird on my head in this picture. I’m posting it to demonstrate my ease in the natural world. But that has not been the case in my dealings with the inanimate, ever. I was thinking about this after Shelia helped me work out a vexing problem with website posting that doesn’t bother anyone else in the least.
I started out young in this. I could not wear a watch. My uncle, who owned a jewelry store, said there are people who demagnetize them. He would give me a watch to wear to see how long it would take to stop, then he would fix it and observe. When battery watches became popular, apparently I “stripped the power” from them. I started wearing watch pendants. They stayed powered up longer because of the clothing barrier.
Later, the head tech at the news service where I worked said I could “walk into a room and throw a bank of teletypes out of whack.” When I was named bureau chief in Baltimore, my boss told me to use the office fund to buy that tech his favorite Jack Daniel’s to make sure the experts stayed on the BW Parkway keeping my computers running “because you especially need them.”
All of these hardware issues contributed to my phobia/fears about computers. But my relationship with the inanimate world has been getting better of late. I surrendered to it, stopped fighting and getting mad. I would say to these technical things “it’s all okay.” I am not intuitive about them, still, but I am no longer breaking them when I walk into a room. Maybe if I start loving them, somehow, the way I love plants, who knows what could happen. I can even wear watches now as long as I baby them a bit. I alternate them now and then, giving them each little rests.
Ceelo Green – FU
A very, very good and catchy song that has been floating around the web. If you haven’t heard it, you must.
hepburn
Beauty would be boring and many women malnourished if they all looked like Audrey, but damn.
(via, appropriately, the impossible cool)
holy spit
A fantastic image by John Hendrix referencing to John 9:1-7.
The Phantom Menace, Ground Zero Edition
Seems we have been underestimating the dimensions of the Ground Zero Jihad Victory Mosque:
The planned “ultra-mosque” will be a staggering 5,600ft tall – more than five times higher than the tallest building on Earth – and will be capped with an immense dome of highly-polished solid gold, carefully positioned to bounce sunlight directly toward the pavement, where it will blind pedestrians and fry small dogs. The main structure will be delimited by 600 minarets, each shaped like an upraised middle finger, and housing a powerful amplifier: when synchronised, their combined sonic might will be capable of relaying the muezzin’s call to prayer at such deafening volume, it will be clearly audible in the Afghan mountains, where thousands of terrorists are poised to celebrate by running around with scarves over their faces, firing AK-47s into the sky and yelling whatever the foreign word for “victory” is.
No, not really, but Brooker makes the salient point very well:
Perhaps spatial reality functions differently on the other side of the Atlantic, but here in London, something that is “two minutes’ walk and round a corner” from something else isn’t actually “in” the same place at all. I once had a poo in a pub about two minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace. I was not subsequently arrested and charged with crapping directly onto the Queen’s pillow. That’s how “distance” works in Britain. It’s also how distance works in America, of course, but some people are currently pretending it doesn’t, for daft political ends.
There is no longer anything resembling coherence in modern politics.
dear clusterflock
Where’s the best place to go: St. Maartens, Aruba, or Barbados? Or somewhere else in the Caribbean like Jamaica?
Not looking for a touristy experience, just beautiful beaches and an island to ride a motor bike around, perhaps.
Portable Ice Fishing Tent on a Sled
We have an ice fishing tent that is on a portable plastic sled, zips shut and is easy to carry. Reply if interested.
Must be willing to drive to Dubuque.
Note: I am not the Freecycling “Sheila” who is offering this portable ice fishing tent on a sled.
There’s a Promise That I’m After and It’s Better Than a Bone
The Beijing-Tibet expressway slowed to a crawl on August 14 due to a spike in traffic by cargo-bearing heavy trucks heading to the capital
The state-run newspaper said the jam between Beijing and Jining city had given birth to a mini-economy with local merchants capitalising on the stranded drivers’ predicament by selling them water and food at inflated prices.
That stretch of highway linking Beijing with the northern province of Hebei and the Inner Mongolia region has become increasingly prone to massive jams as the capital of more than 20 million people sucks in huge shipments of goods.
stats drawing
Either the Grand Tetons or Batman.
