Aaron Perlut, who has preferred to be called Dr. Perlut since bestowing upon himself a Ph.D. in nuclear mustachology, has been a mustache advocate for several years now
Do you have a personal favorite mustache aesthetically, apart from historical significance?
I have always been a big fan of former major league pitcher Al Hrabosky. Al, when he was playing, wore a Fu Manchu mustache that was so intense that it could strip paint, lead paint, off a windowsill, and he had a personality to match it, and I have always been kind of taken by old photos of Al’s mustache. I would also say Robert Goulet is also a personal favorite, which is one of the reasons we named the Robert Goulet Mustached American of the year award after him.
And further thoughts on the state of the ‘stache.
two ways to read
Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist at the College de France in Paris, has helped illuminate the neural anatomy of reading. It turns out that the literate brain contains two distinct pathways for making sense of words, which are activated in different contexts. One pathway is known as the ventral route, and it’s direct and efficient, accounting for the vast majority of our reading. The process goes like this: We see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word’s semantic meaning. According to Dehaene, this ventral pathway is turned on by “routinized, familiar passages” of prose, and relies on a bit of cortex known as visual word form area (VWFA). When you are a reading a straightforward sentence, or a paragraph full of tropes and cliches, you’re almost certainly relying on this ventral neural highway. As a result, the act of reading seems effortless and easy. We don’t have to think about the words on the page.
If I excerpt everything I’m interested in talking about, I will have quoted two-thirds of the article.
(via marginal revolution)
The DTV Shredder — Segway, meet Tank
Some context, if you’d like:
The DTV Shredder was invented by Ben Gulak — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wonder-student behind the bizarre, but equally impressive Uno motorised dicycle. Canadian company BPG-Werks is accepting $250 (£161) pre-orders for the device, with a view to putting it on general release sometime in the near future. A final price is still to be confirmed.
pseudo tilt-shift Van Gogh
via lines and colors
Bells for Jill Johnston (1929-2010)
I don’t know whether Jill Johnston means or meant anything to flockers or friends of clusterflock, but she died a few days ago, and the best tribute I have read is this from fellow dance critic Deborah Jowitt:
During the late ’60s and early ’70s — a time of mental disturbances for her — [Johnston] became more interested in writing about herself; her Voice column was still called “Dance Journal,” but the “dances” she saw (and participated in) ranged over road trips, foreign cities, art-world parties, political disasters, meetings with friends, and sudden revelations. Her prose became increasingly wilder and woollier and syntactically daring — and often uncannily poetic. At one point, she abandoned all punctuation except for the occasional period.
In 1969, she organized a panel to discuss her writings; it was called “The Disintegration of a Critic.” And that same year, in the course of a long rant, “Ergo Sum,” about everything in the world, she wrote, “As a dance critic I’m even falling apart, I’m too good to be true. I know I’m ideally suited to the work I’m not doing.” But whatever she chose to call her columns or herself, many of us (by then, I was writing for the Voice too) could hardly wait to read what she’d write next. We might have been maddened; we were also enthralled. Revisiting her articles in the revised and expanded edition of her early collection, Marmalade Me, I’m excited all over again.
headline of the day, II
Karaoke champs vie for fame, dumplings in Russia
On the benefits of ambient seminal fluid pulsing through one’s veins
Jesse Bering of Scientific American:
Unfortunately, rather than investigate the possible psychobiological effects of semen exchange in this dynamic, Holmes and Warner leer through a fairly typical postmodernist lens to explore the symbolic nature of semen exchange in barebackers. Now, I ask you, which is the more informative paradigm for understanding why gay men would practice unsafe sex through unprotected anal intercourse: an evolutionary biological account taking into consideration the chemical composition of seminal plasma and its possible affects on attachment among gay men, or a symbolic, postmodernist perspective like the following one advanced by Holmes and Warner (in all fairness, this is just a snippet, but a good taste of their approach):
The body becomes the locus of never-ending fights, a carnal battlefield. The escape route (lines of flight) is intrinsic to the deterritorialization of the Body-without-Organs through which one becomes someone else. However, the lines of flight could have paradoxical effects. Indeed, they can be avenues of creative potential or, conversely, paths of great danger. Yet, it is ‘always in a line of flight that we create’ … ‘that we must continue to experiment with such lines.’ Lines of flight (nuclei of resistance of resingularization and heterogenesis) permit freedom to surge through a process of creative transformation and metamorphosis.
Trust me, even in context that paragraph reads like the authors were cobbling together a braille sentence using the random distribution of acne on someone’s back. Sorry to sound a bit testy, but while such soupy postmodernist rhetoric may still have its place in certain scholarly circles, in dealing with something as clinically important as unprotected sex among vulnerable populations, a scientific understanding of these people’s motivations is essential before any intervention of their high-risk behaviors can even begin to occur.
The whole thing makes me giggle and gawk.
King Harvest Finna Come
My friend Charlie and I went out yesterday location-scouting in the cornfield.
I’m whipsawing myself between the Scylla of inspiration and the Charybdis of thought.
I know that the clock is ticking and that the combine looms. Literally. Any day now, guy rents the cornfield plot finna commence threshing with this big-ass machine.
Perfection is the enemy of the good. [Repeat.] Best get my sorry self back out to the cornfield and get it while the getting’s good.
Thought: Inspiration suggests both receptivity to a creative muse — and breathing. You lose it and you might just die.
Result: despair, sorrow, torment, trouble, unhappiness. Cessation of breath. Death.
headline of the day
Mont. woman fends off bear attack with zucchini
Microsoft’s Vision of the Future
new shit has come to light?
The Titanic hit an iceberg in 1912 because of a basic steering error, and only sank as fast as it did because an official persuaded the captain to continue sailing, an author said in an interview published on Wednesday.
Louise Patten, a writer and granddaughter of Titanic second officer Charles Lightoller, said the truth about what happened nearly 100 years ago had been hidden for fear of tarnishing the reputation of her grandfather, who later became a war hero.
‘Texas has the most churches on the list, with 17′
Eight of the country’s 100 largest churches are in the Dallas area, though the biggest remains Lakewood Church of Houston, a new survey shows.
from the comments
As a teenager I saw an exposé on dressing room peeping toms, and I learned that you can tell a two-way mirror by putting your fingernail up to it. If there’s a space between the nail and the reflection, it’s just a mirror. If there’s no space, someone could be watching you!
Since that time I’ve been a fervent fingernail mirror checker. Dressing rooms, hotels, public bathrooms. And the habit is almost entirely physical. I’m not even really concerned about being peeped. If I ever encountered a two-way mirror, I think I’d just go about my business as usual.
the feeling of rust against my salad fingers is almost orgasmic
Update: There are eight episodes.
Amy’s Gift
something I wish I’d known at 14
Last This week, The New Yorker has a piece about Tavi. The quote below is Tavi talking about dying her hair bold colors.
Based on people’s reaction you kind of know who’s worth talking to.
Look up in the sky
On Wednesday, Reichert, a PhD student at the U of T Institute for Aerospace Studies, announced he had completed the first continuous flight of a human-powered aircraft with birdlike flapping wings, a device known as an ornithopter.
It is beautiful, but I’m not sure I want flight to rely on my dedication to pedaling. I tend to coast a lot….
when you google darkness on the edge of town
Svarte Greiner
Svarte Greiner – The Sickening by _type
headline of the day II
New Guinness world record holders include long-tongued dog, giant bunny, balloon-crazy terrier
Run and tell that
I’m not sure this qualifies as clusterlore, but it was a pretty funny riff that Cooper and I got into, and what set me off today was recalling “Run go tell mapache! That pit bull went and dug under the fence and got loose!”
If TV featured more series like “Axe Cop,”
I might begin watching again.
headline of the day
Horniest dinosaur ever discovered found in Utah
Dear clusterflock
What’s the idiosyncratic behavior or cognition you most recently discovered that you never grew out of?
