Monty Python meets Marble Madness
I don’t know when Rock of Ages is coming out, but I will own it.
headline of the day, II
Porpoises rescue Dick Van Dyke
And another.
32 year old Real Estate Agent’s dating profile:
The one thing I wish MORE people would notice about me:
that I lived in Italy for One year and speak some ItalianThe first thing people notice about me:
My voice is not loudSome additional information I want you to know:
None
the piglet bank
Mary Jeys sent this one over to me.
Designed for anyone who has far too much money and loose change, this is the piggy bank of all piggy banks. Its a real piglet that has been taxidermied and inserted with what all piglets probably dream of as babies, a coin storage unit and a cork plug. Make your plush overpriced apartment complete with this little guy.
The piglet bank will take up to 12 months to produce from the time of order. We expect half the money up front and half when the piglet had been completed. Just so you know that we don’t actually kill the Piglets, they die of natural causes and these are the ones that we use.
quote out of context
If nothing else I think it’s a sign of how far we’ve come as a nation that a middle-aged Jewish woman and an African-American man can participate in paramilitary-leaning right-wing ravanchist politics on a equal footing with white people.
One of my favorite sounds
is the whoosh of a hot air balloon’s propane burner. I hear it outside my window right now.
TSA drama
I happen to be going to Atlanta next week. I’m so excited.
riding an ostrich
an explanation for those strange predictive text errors
Has your phone ever changed text into a word that you know couldn’t be in the dictionary? Here’s why it does that:
Instead of a dictionary, it’s got a word model. The model probably looks something like this: a collection of letter patterns, and the frequency of each pattern in some body of text. Given a sequence of letters, you can determine how many patterns it matches, and how frequent they are, and therefore how wordlike it is (relative to your model, of course). You can see intuitively that ‘sodomad’ looks a lot more like an English word than ‘roflmao’ does; the model just lets you put a number on it. (Try searching for #so, sod, odo, dom, oma, mad, and ad#; then try the same for #ro, rof, ofl, et cetera, and you’ll get the idea. This model is from a million-word collection of 1960s edited American English. The default one in your phone is probably more representative of the kinds of things you type in chat, and probably has more patterns and less round-off error.)
headline of the day
Night owls vs. morning people: Who’s smarter?
grief, memory, and a video game
I will be writing on video games every other week over at The Idler. My first piece is on a French RPG about bereavement, Winter Voices. Three thoughts about my writing:
1. This article feels a little rushed. I was trying to do too much in too little space.
2. Some of the language could be structurally improved (Strunk would probably weep).
3. I used a form of the word perichoresis in a video game review.
The perfectionism stemming from these little eccentricities (to my mind), however, also betrays that I was on to something. A person doesn’t get worked up over something he doesn’t care about. So, you should probably go read it.
Bonus dear clusterflock: Is it strange for a long time blogger to be profoundly embarrassed about his public writing?
from the comments
After a dozen years in retail where the fat man started coming the first of September and didn’t stop whackin’ it until mid-January, I lost most of the joy I once felt during the holidays–at least when it comes to decorating. The past few years, I have managed to pull the boxes out of the attic and put up the tree. We like to give things, we make the stuff we give. Last year, Danny and I decided to allow each other $20 to spend on each other and to see how far we could get with it. Like Sheila, I went on the 23rd to Walgreen’s, Danny got three games (Topple, Trouble and Jumpin’ Monkeys) and ice trays (because our old ones were finally cracking apart). I got ice trays, real nice silicone ones that make cubes in a perfect square. I tried to make a Magi story about selling our vodka to buy ice trays, but I couldn’t make it work. It was the best Christmas ever.
Paul Metcalf, an appreciation
Paul Metcalf was Herman Melville’s grandson. He made novels by weaving found texts together. A good example of this is Apalache, where he tells the story of the population of America through the words of those who came, and accounts of those who were here, chronologically, woven forward.
His books are poetic in a rough sense, like Whitman. In fact, I put him in the tradition of American innovators that includes Whitman, Melville, and, in the visual arts, Richard Serra.
The poets, it seem to me, have offered us an opportunity to “particularize”—i.e., to break a narrative into its particular parts, and rearrange them according to an original pattern. There is a significant connection between the images from the world of electromagnetics, images used in one case by Pound, and the other by Olson. Pound speaks of the poem as the “rose in the steel dust,” and Olson describes the poem as a thing among things, that must “stand on its own feet as, a force, in, the fields of force which surround everyone of us. . .” Both these images suggest particles in a state of chaos, drawn into shape through an act of imagination, but retaining their character as particles, distinct from one another.
from the comments
I once had a delightful conversation with a Frenchman who was visiting a mutual friend. His English was about on par with my French, so we communicated like 2-year-olds. We ultimately told each other how animals speak in each of our countries. Cows say moo in France like they do here (though they pronounce it wrong), but cats don’t say meow. They say mio, mio, mio.
Some Crazy for Your Thursday
from the spam
I loved being able to make a life for my dolls.
Some shell cases on the roadside in the front area, the contents of which have been despatched over into the German lines.
Lone soldier surrounded by a mountain of empty shell cases, France. This lone British soldier up to his knees in spent shell cases, offers a striking impression of the destruction that took place on the Western Front. However, this picture only tells half the story, with the other part of the story being the damage that the shells from these cases inflicted upon the enemy. This photograph was taken by Tom Aitken, and may well have been used for propaganda purposes.
[Original reads: 'OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ON THE BRITISH WESTERN FRONT IN FRANCE. Some shell cases on the roadside in the front area, the contents of which have been despatched over into the German lines.']
Most years, on this day, I’ve tried to post something recalling the Great War, and here is this year’s remembrance.
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Armistice.
Donkey, for Deron pt. II
I’m still wrapped up in trying to organize a suitcase heaped with analog photos (what happens when you’re looking for something in particular), when I came across this shot. So to test Deron’s theory, did you climb Popocatépetl back in ’69 with static hemp rope wearing pink and brown striped flooders/capri pants?
Amy said
I would be so fucking prolific if I had Down Syndrome.
Meet the Flockers: Joel Bernstein
Fun facts about Joel Bernstein:
He’s been reading this site for about a year, commenting for about eight months, posting anonymously for about four months, and has been an official member for about two weeks.
He procrastinates everything, even fun things.
His favorite Jelly Belly flavor is coconut.
He thinks cilantro tastes like soap.
He sneezes when it’s sunny.
Republican v. Democratic TV Shows
From a dating profile of a 30 year old surgeon.
The one thing I wish MORE people would notice about me:
How polite I am, haha.
The first thing people notice about me:
How polite I am. I would always astound girls when I was in high school because of my impressive chivalry and manners.
Carnival Splendor down for the count
The 4,500 passenger ship was disabled by a fire on Monday and is expected to be towed into port on Thursday. They’re all eating flown-in military rations.
With communications largely cut off, it’s unclear what kind of hardship passengers have had to endure. But Carnival Chief Executive Gerry Cahill acknowledged in a statement that passengers were dealing with an “extremely trying situation.”
“Conditions on board the ship are very challenging, and we sincerely apologize for the discomfort and inconvenience our guests are currently enduring,” he said.
I’m not kidding when I say I would so much rather have been in the our-boat-is-on-fire-no-fun-for-us situation than a seven day cruise to the Mexican Riviera.
Overheard at the hospital cafeteria
Two women, middle-aged, probably sisters.
You call Jesse?
Uh-huh. All he did was gripe, gripe, gripe.
That’s all he ever does.
I told him Mama was out of surgery, and he said what room’s she in, and I said I already told Darlene, and he said Darlene don’t tell me squat, and I said, well, I can find the room number if you really need it right now, it’s in my purse, and he said oh, just don’t bother, I didn’t know you’d make a case out of it.
Typical.
Well, I’m ready to go for a walk.
You not gonna eat the rest of your lunch?
I didn’t like it. We shoulda gone to McDonald’s.
They sure charged us plenty. Wait, I wanna get a refill before we go.
They charge for refills.
You gotta be kidding me! I paid $1.99 for 32 ounces and they want more to refill it?
They got people over a barrel, I guess. No competition.
give me notes
