Uvula
“In Japanese, if you translate our word for that part of the body back into English it comes out as something like ‘throat penis’, something really ugly. So I like the contrast of this beautiful word in English with the weird, ugly word in Japanese.”
from the comments
A friend once found in her closet a grackle killed by her cat and placed inside a shoe.
I don’t think it was lying, apart from lying within a shoe.
from the comments
Oh–-and in the fall of 1980 in New York, I was in a little bookstore I frequented (on Madison, I think?). I was really happy because everyone who was coming in was going upstairs, so I had the entire lower floor to myself to browse the new fiction. An employee came up to me and told me that Joyce Carol Oates was upstairs and was about to begin reading. I said no, thank you.
holographic 3-D
Nasser Peyghambarian of the University of Arizona and colleagues said on Wednesday their new holographic technology can project a near 360-degree image to another location that updates every two seconds.
The earliest use of the technology could be in movies, given the popularity of 3-D films such as “Avatar.”
“We foresee many applications, including for example, car or airplane manufacturing. They can look at the hologram and design the system they have in real-time and look at the model and make changes on it as they go,” Peyghambarian told the briefing.
Coming to a porn theater conference room near you.
When did we start referring to elections as landslides?
1856.
from the comments
Did I ever tell y’all about the time Daryl and I went to a reading by Mark Richard? It was in Dallas at the Border’s at Preston/Royal, and he was doing a tour for Fishboy. I remember being beside myself that we were going to hear him read. Only six or seven people were there — I couldn’t believe it. Anyway, the reading was great, and he took questions, and someone asked whether there was a story behind his writing of “Happiness of the Garden Variety.” And he said, well, he and his friend, Steve, were living in this place where they did work in change for rent, and there was this horse named Buster, and they really did pull it out into the bay after it died of bloat in the tomato patch. But when it washed up at the motel, it wasn’t really at the Armada Inn, like in the story. It was at the Ramada Inn. He’d changed that part.
They’re coming after me, I can’t fight them off any longer
from the spam
Caviar.
&
I didn’t know that.
nowhere
The river is just a boat you can’t swim to.
Company of Thieves – Pressure
Tis the season, apparently.
POSTED
Goats who climb in order to lick
Lucy Foley tipped me to these goats (your Alpine ibex) via Twitter. They climb the wall of the dam in order to lick salt.
Spain’s gender-neutral last name law
Spaniards have two surnames, and under current law for registering babies, either the father’s or the mother’s can come first. Traditionally, however, it is the dad’s and in cases of disagreement among the parents, the father’s name automatically takes priority.
But under a bill presented to Parliament, if a couple does not specify an order or cannot agree on one, a child’s last names would be assigned in alphabetical order.
Orpheus looks around the corner
via Charlie Parker
eat your heart out
In primitive cultures, people believed that they could gain their enemy’s courage by eating their hearts (or, in Great Britain, their pudding). Today, urbanites with disposable income believe they can gain authenticity by buying an “authentic” product.
quote out of context
“If the goal of the majority is to govern, what is the purpose of the minority?” one slide asked.
“The purpose of the minority,” came the answer, “is to become the majority.”
from the spam
Joe grunted and do that way. A good, until i was soft warmth. I can see women that day using this you. I. How my hands already chosen, pumping, tom suggested. Guess i wished shed. She sits on, sugar. I saw the girl. You. No one of her body, i love. Ill.
from the comments
For me it is often more a matter of rhythm than anything else. If the emotional tone is not quite right I can’t turn it loose until it is. It has to have a combination of sound and content (whatever one might mean by “content”) that opens the whole range of feeling one might hope to have by way of a story. It’s that thing that overwhelms me in a way that suggests others might be similarly overwhelmed. Sometimes it’s just me feeling it — but what else do I have to go by? In the end, trust is in there too. Or maybe it’s hope. Hope that I can look at a person in a certain context, and know what will rise when the end comes.
from the comments
Also, I have seen these birds in the dumpsters, rooting about, and my first thought was that he had acquired this badge by way of such diving. But I have also seen that they are very tame around the campus and will walk right up to kids eating their lunches while sitting on raised flowerbed walls. So maybe the cost of taking a piece of hamburger bun was the quick placement of a tag between the wings. Then I went all Kafka and had to look about to see if anybody had seen me thinking this way.
The Atlantic Ocean Reversed Direction
In the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream brings warm surface water northward from the tropics to high latitudes, where it cools, sinks and flows southward in the deep ocean. The way that water flows in the ocean helps redistribute large amounts of heat — and in this way is critical to how the world’s climate works.
The manner in which this Atlantic circulation behaved when global climate was different has proven controversial. Contradictory lines of evidence from during the cold peak of the ice age — the last glacial maximum — make it difficult for scientists to determine whether this ocean circulation was strongly or weakly southward back then.
Now scientists have evidence that such circulation was not only weak, but actually flowed in the opposite direction. The current pattern apparently only arose in the past 10,000 years.
headline of the day
10-Year-Old in Spain Is Not the First or Youngest Child Mom
headline of the day, II
Germany unveils new ‘psychic’ octopus — and he’s French
Omens
Today I saw a grackle walking in the gutter. He had a Chiquita Banana sticker on his back.
For Sheila
Has this ever happened to you? I’m reminded of sitting at lunch with a visual merchandising friend in a restaurant on the Plaza. One of those places, a sandwich shop or some such, where one comes in, gets in a line and travels the line with a tray to collect what one has ordered and pay at the end. My friend and I were talking about, “How do you know?” I couldn’t really answer except to say, “I don’t know, but it’s there.” (This, in the days before the word “gaydar” was on the radar. A few months before I met Danny.)
We were sitting, eating at a banquet in a row of two-tops. My back to the wall, a wall of mirror behind me. She sat facing me. I could see the entire room. She could, too, in reverse. (This wasn’t too long after I had “come out.”)
The outside door opened. I saw a beautiful couple, a man and a woman, enter. They seemed a “couple.” The man cast his eyes about the room and settled them on mine. “Here’s one.” I said.
She said, “No!” I said, “Watch.” She watched in the mirror, as I watched directly, as he looked back at me, quickly, furtively sort of, no less than four times as he was in line ordering, collecting at the end, what looked like lunch “to go.” Everytime he looked, my eyes met his.
As they headed for the door to leave, I said, “Watch, he’ll look one more time.” When they got to the door, him holding the door for her to exit first and carrying their lunches, he looked back at me. The word “sadness” comes now to me to describe the expression on his face.
“What?” is what Don Draper says.
All the times Don Draper says, “What?”
