Mayor Plaster Caster?
Via @pastemagazine:
Cynthia “Plaster Caster” Albritton has announced her candidacy for the Mayor of Chicago.
Man, I want to attend that inauguration ball.
What Was the Hipster?
Mark Greif traces the genealogy of the “movement” to find common threads. It’s core is very reminiscent of Smith’s review of McCraken’s Hipster Christianity, Greif’s “rebel consumer” is Smith’s poser:
Through both phases of the contemporary hipster, and no matter where he identifies himself on the knowingness spectrum, there exists a common element essential to his identity, and that is his relationship to consumption. The hipster, in this framework, is continuous with a cultural type identified in the nineties by the social critic Thomas Frank, who traced it back to Madison Avenue’s absorption of a countercultural ethos in the late sixties. This type he called the “rebel consumer.”
The rebel consumer is the person who, adopting the rhetoric but not the politics of the counterculture, convinces himself that buying the right mass products individualizes him as transgressive. Purchasing the products of authority is thus reimagined as a defiance of authority. Usually this requires a fantasized censor who doesn’t want you to have cologne, or booze, or cars. But the censor doesn’t exist, of course, and hipster culture is not a counterculture. On the contrary, the neighborhood organization of hipsters—their tight-knit colonies of similar-looking, slouching people—represents not hostility to authority (as among punks or hippies) but a superior community of status where the game of knowing-in-advance can be played with maximum refinement. The hipster is a savant at picking up the tiny changes of rapidly cycling consumer distinction.
This in-group competition, more than anything else, is why the term hipster is primarily a pejorative—an insult that belongs to the family of poseur, faker, phony, scenester, and hanger-on. The challenge does not clarify whether the challenger rejects values in common with the hipster—of style, savoir vivre, cool, etc. It just asserts that its target adopts them with the wrong motives. He does not earn them.
Grief’s article is worth the read, if only to see a clear picture of how the modern hipster came to be. (hat tip to @rewordsmith)
the first photo of a human?
Back in September, we posted a set of old photos of Cincinnati daguerreotypes from 1848 where I caught a glimpse of two people at the Ohio River’s edge. That would make them among the very first people ever to appear in a candid photograph. 1848 is a long time ago. They looked like a pair of men, one tall, the other short. They were standing with what looked like a bucket between them. I figured they were there to fetch some water.
Here’s the original image:
Christmas is too damn close!
Talking version available for just $49.95.
The place is so big and he’s so little, it’s easy to get lost
James Bond’s DB5
Speaking of James Bond, one of two remaining Aston Martin DB5s tricked out for 007 was sold at auction for four million dollars.
The DB5 comes complete with all the original 007 specifications fitted to it by the Aston Martin factory for 1965′s “Thunderball.” They include front machine guns that shoot blanks, an ejector seat (that doesn’t work), radar navigation, a nail spreader, tire shredders, bullet shield and a revolving number plate.
The DB5 has only had one private owner, U.S. radio station owner and philanthropist Jerry Lee. He bought it straight from the Aston Martin factory in 1969 for $12,000. The self-confessed “huge” Bond fan says he’s kept the car at home in Pennsylvania in his “James Bond room” for the past 41 years.
The DB5, modified or not, is one of my favorite ever cars.
from the comments
Hearing nothing, I pronounce: “At one point, Barnum noticed that people were lingering too long at his exhibits. He posted signs indicating “This Way to the Egress”. Not knowing that “Egress” was another word for “Exit”, people followed the signs to what they assumed was a fascinating exhibit . . . and ended up outside.”
The Mimic Octopus
Although all octopuses can change colour and texture, and many can blend with the sea floor, appearing as rocks, the mimic octopus is the first octopus species ever observed to impersonate other animals.
Based on observation, the mimic octopus may decide which animal to impersonate depending on local predators. For example, when the octopus was being attacked by damselfish, it was observed that the octopus appeared as a banded sea snake, a damselfish predator. The octopus impersonates the snake by turning black and yellow, burying six of its arms, and waving its other two arms in opposite directions.
The mimic octopus is often confused with Wunderpus photogenicus, another recently discovered species. The Wunderpus can be distinguished by the pattern of strong, fixed white markings on its body.
The Wunderpus.
Be sure to watch about a minute eighteen in when the mimic turns into a cute fuzzy something running on two legs. Yeah, I don’t know how to describe it, but that is one of the more fascinating characteristics of the octopus, when it turns into things we can’t figure out.
(via marginal revolution)
a thousand faces, 10
headline of the day
Male castration: The easiest way to live to 100?
I remembered a joke!
Middle-aged guy at the doctor’s office for a check-up.
Doctor: Have you had sex in the last two weeks?
Man: No, my birthday’s in April.
quote out of context
search Canadian Police Agents Provocateurs
This stuff happens world wide to silence decent.
curiouser and curiouser
I still can’t fully believe the Texas Rangers are in the World Series.
iPhone games that don’t suck
Four games I’ve bought and played for more than twenty minutes without deleting:
Canabalt: brilliant port of the one button web game.
Flight Control: route planes to land without a mid-air collision. Simple and addictive.
Game Dev Story: a game about game development.
No, Human: prevent humans from colonizing space with glowing red asteroids. I sometimes run the game just for the music.
Egret Nursery
Before we moved from Bonham to Corsicana, my family visited an egret nursery. My father spied a few hatchlings on the ground and encouraged me to retrieve them.
Because of the smell, or noise, or awkwardness of the birds, I was unable to, and my father made his way across the barbed wire and retrieved them himself.
There must have been three, because I remember that one was sick and one was well and that the one that was sick got better and the one that was well died and we ended up with two birds, living in the closet my dad used as a study, in the room my brother and I shared.
By the time we moved, the birds had bonded to my father, and would follow him, through the air, flying twenty or thirty yards around him, invisibly tethered.
I have an image of him riding his bicycle along the streets of Corsicana and the birds always somewhere, moving from house to house, in the air.
good morning, II
Kirk Douglas
At 93, Kirk Douglas has a myspace.
I’m really an actor, but I like writing books because I can play all the parts, men, women, boys, and girls; and no director to criticize me. I work on a scene in my mind, I say “Kirk, that’s terrific!” I write it down.
from the spam
Dances topless and has the largest natural bosom in the world it seemed the Senate Finance Committee squid may reach a length of 55 feet, including its 35-foot tentacles.
dear clusterflock
How elite are you?
In the Washington Post, Charles Murray suggests that answering these questions might help determine if you’re a member of the “New Elite.” How do we do?
1. Can you talk about “Mad Men?”
2. Can you talk about the “The Sopranos?”
3. Do you know who replaced Bob Barker on “The Price Is Right?”
4. Have you watched an Oprah show from beginning to end?
numerology
My juror number: 1679
The last four digits of my Google Voice number: 1679
things I hadn’t posted
Anonymous street artist is awarded $100,000
Where is Kirk Gibson’s home run ball?
Big fans put 2 houses to hurricane-force wind test
Mexico Burns 134 Tons Of Confiscated Marijuana
College student named police chief in Mexico; no one else applied
How Beer, Oprah and Sergey Brin Can Help Cure Aging
Inside the Soviets’ Secret Failed Moon Program
And one moderated comment:
good morning
How to Explain It to My Parents?
A documentary video series “in which 5 abstract artists explain to their mom and dad what their work is all about,” by Lernert & Sander.
How to explain it to my parents – Bart Julius Peters from Lernert & Sander on Vimeo.
Do your parents understand what you do? No matter what my current job title may be, my mom has a strange compulsion to tell people I’m an editor—one of the few jobs in publishing that I haven’t had and don’t want. Maybe I should make a video.
(Via Good, via somebody else. Perhaps it was you? @the99percent)
Ukranian Polka Band plays Katie Perry
Hot N’ Cold, but can we get them to working on Teenage Dream?
The Only Living Boy in New York
Here’s Simon performing the song live in 2008.
