quote out of context
The car chase is like a bullfight. A lot of drama. Dramatic turns. Different strategies. Good color. But the bull always dies. Even if he gores the matador, he still dies. And similarly, the target in the car chase always gets caught because with 29 misallocated police cars, three police helicopters and 13 media helicopters all on the case, how can you possibly get away?
like, really bad
Pollution in Beijing was so bad Friday the U.S. Embassy, which has been independently monitoring air quality, ran out of conventional adjectives to describe it, at one point saying it was “crazy bad.”
headline of the day, II
Chinese woman sent to labor camp for retweeting
from the spam
I’m a tiny drunk and fairly bored.
Here’s one fucked-up sentence now.
From today’s Dayton Daily News:
General Electric Co. on Monday is to announce at the University of Dayton details of a $51 million center to develop advanced electric power systems for aircraft, ships and hybrid automobiles, people familiar with the announcement said.
‘Spect I should be happy that GE might announce plans to invest in our town, but this sentence pissed me off to twitterpated extremes. I needed to vent, so I came here.
Interesting North
Suw Charman-Anderson giving a talk about Eyjafjallajökull, The Little Volcano (pronounced aya-feeyalla-yurkul) in the rather elaborate Cutlers Hall in Sheffield. Part of Interesting North.
headline of the day
Wis. man accused of shooting TV over Palin dance
the small matter of anti-matter
Scientist have created, and sustained, anti-matter — equally abundant to matter soon after the Big Bang, but since disappearing — in the lab.
Hangst and his colleagues, who included scientists from Britain, Brazil, Canada, Israel and the United States, trapped 38 anti-hydrogen atoms individually for more than one tenth of a second, according to a paper published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.
Since their first success, the team has managed to hold the anti-atoms even longer.
“Unfortunately I can’t tell you how long, because we haven’t published the number yet,” Hangst told the AP. “But I can tell you that it’s much, much longer than a tenth of a second. Within human comprehension on a real clock.”
High Society
With the illicit drug trade estimated by the UN at $320 billion (£200bn) a year and new drugs constantly appearing on the streets and the internet, it can seem as if we are in the grip of an unprecedented level of addiction. Yet the use of psychoactive drugs is nothing new, and indeed our most familiar ones – alcohol, coffee and tobacco – have all been illegal in the past.
From ancient Egyptian poppy tinctures to Victorian cocaine eye drops, Native American peyote rites to the salons of the French Romantics, mind-altering drugs have a rich history. ‘High Society’ will explore the paths by which these drugs were first discovered – from apothecaries’ workshops to state-of-the-art laboratories – and how they came to be simultaneously fetishised and demonised in today’s culture.
High Society exhibition. 11 November 2010 – 27 February 2011 at the Wellcome Collection, London.
Naomi Harris: America Swings
A friend’s paraphrasing of this episode of WFMU’s radio show Too Much Information from last night:
I was listening to the radio and Benjamen Walker (the host guy) was talking about some photo on the playlist page, and so I glanced over to look at the page I didn’t look at when I opened it two hours earlier. Just then he said to the photographer he was interviewing, “The people in your photos of American swingers don’t look like average Americans; they are, like, 300 pounds overweight, white, kinda crazy and distracted, and, well, really, they look more the Tea Party than any other group of Americans, even if they are crawling around their living rooms having group sex while they watch football on TV and drink beer.” As I was glancing at the photo, the photographer generally confirmed that, yes, the people in her photos were, as a rule, in the Tea Party.
I did not need that. Nooooooo…
The photographer being interviewed is Naomi Harris. If you are over 18, or under 18 with the ability to sense a trick question, you can page through her book, America Swings, at the Taschen site.
Please note that just because you can does not mean that you should. I’m just saying.
ibogaine for drug addiction
Ibogaine, a potent hallucinogen used by West African tribes as sacramental medicine, has shown promising results in reversing the effects of drug addiction.
While Hunter Thompson brought ibogaine into popular parlance, credit for discovering the drug’s medicinal potential is widely attributed to a man named Howard Lotsof. Ten years before the events that gave rise to Fear and Loathing, Lotsof was a junkie living in New York. Having bought some ibogaine for recreational use, Lotsof was astounded to find that when the hallucinogen wore off, he no longer craved heroin. Days passed, and he didn’t experience any of the excruciating withdrawal symptoms associated with kicking a dope habit.
from the comments
I have an uncle who is five months older than me. Mom is the oldest of her siblings, Clifton, the youngest. Their ages span 77 to 55. My grandmother had six children over 22 years. Clifton might have been a surprise.
His sons are my cousins, I still have trouble fathoming that, they seem like nephews. They’re all stalwart men. Honestly, Clifton seemed more brother to me than uncle. We spent a long time together, then many years apart.
When he hugs me, when he sees me, when I’ve seen him, these last few years, the years fall away for a few moments as we talk while we’re together.
The alley was the dividing line. To the north (naturally), Yankees and their Yankee ways. Plus the one Mexican family. The Rosales family.
South of the alley were Texans and southerners.
And we had these ferocious peach wars. Sit up in my family’s peach trees and heave peaches real hard at kids on the other side of the line.
We didn’t heave peaches (though we had peach trees), but we developed an odd obsession with the little nibbits that appear on mulberry trees in Spring. They look like worms and were valued by neighborhood children like currency, for reasons nobody understood. I had a whole tree of ‘em, but I never let on. Would’ve resulted in an invasion.
from the comments
My brother was a genius when it came to farts. I was not far behind him.
ftc — the book — progress report
After a day of domain name servers, prematurely expired registrations, cease and desist letters, and — what else? — I finally got what I wanted to do this morning taken care of.
More printing tomorrow.
Y’all wanna know something?
Daryl sits alone in the house and plays with his fart machine and laughs.
Other People’s Families
Rick’s post about Nashville Chrome (by Rick Bass) called to mind the neighbors who lived kitty-corner to us on the other side of the alley.
I thought that the mother, Ginny, must be very smart and sophisticated because her job involved transistors. Transistor radios! In truth she worked on a factory assembly line. She had red hair and a bouffant hair-do and wore Arabian Nights-style slippers studded with fake gems. And in 1962 Ginny had a brush with fame.
Read more
headline of the day, II
If the Science Guy passes out and nobody tweets it, did it happen?
headline of the day
We’ve ‘Feminized’ Medal Of Honor By Not Giving It To Soldiers Who Kill More People
Pretty Well Sums ‘It’ ‘Up’
Thanks, Lara.
Quick Update
The site is down at some locations, but with Patrick’s help, the issue has been resolved and should sort itself out within the next 24 hours. I am making and binding books today, so I’ll be back and forth.
A very important update
Because of a copyright infringement notification from Actors, Models & Talent for Christ, I have updated the original post.
Update: Would this be fair use?
Dutch machine lays brick road
The Dutch-made brick laying machine utilizes an angled plain that enables workers to feed pavers into the machine without bending over and wrecking their backs. At the same time workers are feeding the electrically-powered machine, gravity is used to lay down the pavers in an orderly fashion. Fresh bricks are fed into the system via telescoping forklifts, further removing human blood, sweat and tears from the equation. The machine moves methodically down the pre-leveled path, enabling up to 400 square meters of 18-foot wide paved roads per day.
new shit has come to light
Hello,
We have received a formal DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice regarding allegedly infringing content hosted on your site. The specific content in question is as follows: (from DMCA notification) “This site has been displaying without permission copies of an image taken from the website of AMTC, Inc. This is a breach of
copyright. Go to: http://www.clusterflock.org/2010/07/actors-models-talent-for-christ.html”
Harley and the Ivy
My offering for the silent auction at DIFFA’s Holiday Fund Raiser this weekend.
from the comments
Thank Lester? Thank Lester? You should be thanking me, Smith. I’m doing your work while you’re off breastfeeding.
