spam name
Laverne Mayo.
Delayed Message
I want to thank you for not letting me date your daughter.
Bodies of Water – We are Co-Existors
The Irrelevance Of Modern Political Science
As my late friend Tom Silver once wrote: “Imagine yourself marooned on a desert island with only ten books to read, but in this case ten books not of your choosing. Suppose them all to be books written by behavior political scientists during the past twenty years. Question: Do you think that you would die first of boredom, or of self-inflicted wounds?”
headline of the day
Teen in wheelchair nails double backflip
New York Magazine’s profile of Jon Stewart
“Even if you’re eating delicious chocolate cake, there are moments you feel like, ‘I’ve had too much,’” Stewart says. “Now replace ‘chocolate cake’ with ‘shit taco’ and you know what our day is like every day. But this is not a fragile country. I’m not suggesting we couldn’t find ourselves in deep conflict. But we had slaves, and we fought a civil war; now we’re down to Glenn Beck being hyperbolic with his audience about nostalgia. This too shall pass.” Which doesn’t mean that Stewart is so confident in the inexorable triumph of good and right that he’s going to stop ridiculing the evildoers and charlatans.
Media Cyborgs
A must read for media junkies:
It’s not just people with, you know, gun-legs; it’s anybody who uses a cell phone or wears contact lenses. It’s anybody who brings a tool really close in order to augment some capability.
Aren’t there people who have brought media that close? Aren’t there people who manipulate it, in all its forms, as naturally as another person might make a phone call, or speak, or breathe?
When you think of someone like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, you can’t think only of their brains and bodies. Lady Gaga in a simple dress on a tiny stage in a no-name club in Des Moines is—simply put—not Lady Gaga. Kanye West in jeans at a Starbucks is not Kanye West.
To understand people like that—and, increasingly, to understand people like us (eep!)—you’ve got to look instead at the sum of their brains, their bodies, the media they create, and the media created by others about them. All together, it constitutes a sort of fuzzy cloud that’s much, much bigger than a person.
Quote out of context
But remember, this is for the rest of time, so there is no limit to the liability. The rector could cancel his insurance policy, burn down the church, bill me for the repairs, burn it down again, bill me for the repairs, over and over and over again. He could be the start of a great family with thousands of descendants, all who become arsonist rectors at my local church. True, that would probably be illegal, but only if they got caught with petrol and a lighter, and only if their shares in the local building company were discovered.
Good Fucking Design Advice
The SkyRider
The new airplane seat, to be unveiled next week at the Aircraft Interiors Expo Americas conference in Long Beach, would give passengers an experience akin to riding horseback.
Saddle up.
corn syrup bad
Corn sugar good!
Man Falls Out of the Sky in NJ?
I am morbidly fascinated with this news story about witnesses who saw a person free-falling, head first, out of the sky in Egg Harbor Township, NJ. No parachute, no glider.
They can’t find him.
Friends have pointed out that Egg Harbor isn’t far from Atlantic City – did this man have some gambling debts settled in an unpleasant manner? Was it a mob hit? Was he a landing-gear stowaway? Viral marketing scam? Bizarre accident?
should we assemble a posse?
Police in Santa Fe are searching for the suspect or suspects in a drive-by shooting that killed a pet goat.
For when product placement is simply too damned subtle
As we begin our broadcast day, a word from our sponsor…
love = -2 friends
I often tell friends who are getting married that it was nice knowing them, only I’m not really joking:
“If you go into a romantic relationship, it costs you two friends. Those who have romantic relationships, instead of having the typical five ‘core set’ of relationships only have four. And of those, one is the new person who’s come into their life,” said Dunbar.
The Lotus Effect
I feel like this may have been here before, but my searches yielded nothing. Regardless, the Lotus effect is always worth a second look.
headline of the day, II
Nashville Nuns Lead Nation in Number of Newcomers
Stairs And A Chair. Pachia Ammos (Παχειά Άμμος, Κρήτη) Crete.
Tomato Ketchup
Ever wonder about why a Heinz bottle uses the seemingly redundant labeling “tomato ketchup?
Your answer (and you’ll never guess where ketchup traces its culinary genealogy, fish sauce):
…why is ketchup called “tomato ketchup” (or “tomato catsup”; I’ll deal with the spelling issue later). Doesn’t the mention of “tomatoes” seem redundant? After all, if I walk down the hill to El Amigo, my local corner bar, and order a margarita, I don’t order a “tequila margarita”. A margarita is made of tequila. Otherwise it would be a daiquiri. Or a gimlet, or, God forbid, a mojito.
The answer is, of course, that the name “tomato ketchup” didn’t used to be redundant. Ketchup used to be made with something other than tomatoes. The recipe for ketchup has changed quite dramatically over time; tomatoes were only added to the recipe around 1800, and sugar even later, well after the Civil War.
Where modern ketchup is a very thick sweet and sour chutney of tomatoes, ketchup from about 1750-1850 mainly meant a thin dark sauce made of fermented walnuts or sometimes fermented mushrooms.
I need to get me some mushroom ketchup, but it appears to be out of stock everywhere I look.
(hat tip to thinly spread)
Jet-Powered Lawn Tractor
Imagine waking up on a Sunday morning to this puppy. It cranks out sound at 112 dB (cars at 10 meters, for reference, are between 60 – 80 dB)
bestiality
New research being released Wednesday shows steadily increasing recognition of unmarried couples — gay and straight — as families. But there’s a solid core resisting this trend who are more willing to include pets in their definition than same-sex partners.
fishbowl handwash
Yan Lu designed a sink that theoretically should motivate people to conserve water.
How do you think that’ll work out?
via GOOD
case 1 | Donald T
The fact is that Donald’s not a bad golfer: tee shots mostly on the fairway, passable short game, can nail a six-foot putt. His swing, however, is an unfolding pantomime, a ritual of gestures he seems compelled to repeat with almost every shot—especially when he really wants the ball to travel.
He licks the fingers of his right hand, and then his left. Squaring himself to the ball, he raises his club skyward, until it’s straight up over his head, as if he were hoisting a banner. Sometimes he holds his arms up there for a long moment. Then he brings the club head back to earth, stopping not far from the ball, before taking it back up. He goes through a series of these backswings, picking up speed with each iteration until, stiff-legged, he inches forward to get his head over the ball. With one final stroke, he commits to contact. Crack! It’s gone, and Donald, bouncing up and down at the knees, peers down the fairway to see the result. As a swing, it’s the opposite of fluid. But it’s Donald’s own. And he never whiffs it.
It’s all in the way you trick yourself
As a student again, the only money I spend is on groceries, school supplies, and rabbit litter. It’s cathartic, really, to have fewer options. These days riding a bus — as opposed to my bike — is a $2 luxury I don’t use. I buy only the produce in season or on special. Legumes are boiled from scratch. Meat is brought home from the butcher including the extra fats and bones for future flavors.
But coffee! In trying to reduce the quality (cost) of my daily fix, I think I’ve come up with a solution. Since the only money I spend on myself outside the home is a cup of coffee twice a week at a cafe for studying, why not make that $1.50 extraordinarily worthy (delicious) by drinking gruel every other day of the week?
See what I did there?
Lovely
Hollie Chastain makes beautiful things. Go buy some of them.
