Quote of the day
I now realise that parenting involves only two things: persuading a child to eat and persuading a child to put on a coat.
from the comments — The Book
So, for the past month or two, I’ve been working on a project to commemorate the five-year anniversary of clusterflock. I wanted a way to capture and present a little of the history of the site, what has happened here, since we first came online. Every once in a while someone would say, you should do a best of clusterflock book. The idea of that excited me, and also was overwhelming — how would I, or anyone, jump into the archive and sort through the posts and come up with anything that approximated anything?
One day, though, it occurred to me — a from the comments book — a brief snapshot of some of the conversations and observations that get started here. We always joke about coming for the posts, and staying for the comments, and the more I thought about it, the better it felt to have some of those comments speak for themselves.
So, that is what I have done. I have culled through the from the comments posts — the from the comments theme really only got started about three years ago — and, with some minor editing, have made a book out of them:
Owl Hauling Day
I was looking at an image of Chicago’s Harold Washington Library Center, and it reminded me of a funny day at work back when I worked there.
It was the day that they put the frosting on the cake, so so speak. It was a Saturday. It was the day that the acroteria were put in place. That was a new word for all of us. Acroteria is the plural form of acroterion: “[a] decorative pedestal for an ornament or statue placed atop the pediment of a Greek temple; the term has also been extended to refer to the statue or ornament that stands on the pedestal.”
Read more
tahssa
A conservative Maryland physician elected to Congress on an anti-Obamacare platform surprised fellow freshmen at a Monday orientation session by demanding to know why his government-subsidized health care plan takes a month to kick in.
finally
Iconic 1950s clean-cut crooner Pat Boone has partnered with an Oklahoma businessman to launch a mail-order steak business that will benefit conservative Christian causes.
How much does it cost to print a book?
My cult would like to make children’s books in Klingon for our children, how can we get the book done professionally and how much would it cost per book? Can we translate cinderella and pinocchio?
from the comments, biscuits and gravy edition
One of my favorite travel stories…
My wife and I are at a Hampton Inn in Massachusetts, and we’re partaking of the “free” breakfast. Lois is a pescatarian. The only thing she’s eaten with legs in the last 20 years has been lobster and crab. She even avoids soup with anything but fish or veggie stock.
Looking over the breakfast offering at the hotel, my wife fills a bowl with what looks to her like some sort of hot creamy cereal. Maybe muesli…
Maybe not…
The look on her face after a good spoonful was priceless.
spam name
Chan Jacquetta.
Darlene Fern.
Cinco
clusterflock turns five today.
Chair In Water. Pachia Ammos (Παχειά Άμμος, Κρήτη) Crete.
Biscuits. And gravy.
Have you? Do you? Will you? Again?
Does it all come down to cream sauce and where you come down on cream sauce?
Or does it come down to the biscuit (Pl. Collective noun)?
Is it a happy match or a mésalliance?
Of sunsets and blood splatters
Some years ago a dear friend suffered through the Divorce from Hell. At one point during the related custody battle both he and his wife met individually with clinical social worker-type evaluators to take Rorschach ink-blot tests.
When shown a series of blots that looked distinctly like blood splatters, my friend hesitated to respond honestly, fearing that the evaluators would think of him, “Hmmmnh — inclined to the dark side; attuned to violence.” So he said that they looked like glorious sunsets. When the results came back, his evaluation was mainly positive, but it did add that he had “a tendency to repress.”
He’s wondered ever since if the response “Blood splatters!” was the expected (and normal) one.
Sondre Lerche
Sondre Lerche, warming up for a show at the Mondrian Hotel on 11/13/10.
Sasquatch Stories
Deron Bauman published my first big collection of stuff, I USED TO BE ASHAMED OF MY STRIPED FACE, in 2001. Now, years later, I have a new book from Publishing Genius called SASQUATCH STORIES, with a cover drawing by Tao Lin and a frontispiece drawing by former Silver Jew and poet David Berman. You can read about the book and maybe order it here.
you look like shit
Facebook Email
Mark Zuckerberg’s company is expected to make a big move today against rival Google by announcing its own e-mail service. So, if you’re one of the 500 million active Facebook users, your online activity may become even more streamlined. Depending on the depth of the service, it could mean that your chats, posts, photos and e-mail will all come from the same window — or app. It’s been dubbed a possible “Gmail killer,” a tough name to live up to, but if it can pull it off it may solidify Facebook’s spot atop the tech mountain.
Auctioning Madoff
Bernie Madoff’s estate was auctioned off Saturday.
Another unidentified man paid $1,700 for 11 pairs of designer boxer shorts — all new, according to the catalog — accompanied by more than 200 pairs of socks, some new, some not so new.
photo out of context
Quote out of context
“It has been our goal in building this new campus that it would, architecturally, point people to Christ.”
the future called, guess what it wanted back
(via kottke, via marginal revolution)
A rhinoceros attacks an elephant carrying people
(via Cynical-C)
I am going to Atlanta
this Tuesday through Friday. Tell me what I need to know.
Typotheque 2011 Pocket Calendar
The new-and-improved limited edition of the pocket-size, no-nonsense Typotheque calendar and sketchbook. Main features include: a year overview, week overviews on double pages, and 12 different pre-printed grids in the sketchbook. International holidays (multi-religious), design events and other days of interest are listed on an index page, as well as on day overviews. The coated cover offers extra protection, and the book is specially bound to ensure that it lies flat when opened.
A nice post on why they call the calendar new and improved.
Nowadays ‘New and Improved’ often seems to mean that your deodorant is pink now instead of blue, so we thought it might be good to talk about the development process that led up to the seventh “new and improved” version of our calendar.
Yoel Hoffmann’s Curriculum Vitae
For Deron and Amy, and all you other dog lovers out there: chapter 97 of Yoel Hoffmann’s remarkably wonderful fictionalized memoir Curriculum Vitae (New Directions, 2009):
Maybe ten years before the end of the second millennium my son Yotam came back from school and behind him walked a Great Pyrenees.
The dog lay down in the yard (where, some ten years earlier, the three cows had lain) for two days and looked toward Mount Meron. And now I want to send him a kind of text message wherever he is today (most likely the Eden of dogs.):
Thank you for allowing my soul to come so close to yours. There are things that only the two of us know. Things that are impossible to say because words are made of materials resembling cut sheets of tin and man doesn’t have the tools to bring great spirit into them.
But since you were willing to look at me (for a moment) with those eyes of yours two or perhaps three times I knew something that you knew — something immeasurably more profound than these thoughts of mine and than the great river of memories that we call life.
Plastic Jesus
It occurred to me, after making my Plastic Jesus reference in the comments, that most of you would have no idea what I was talking about.
Consider yourselves educated.
