I wish
Each of thee a lovely 2011.
The Black Heart Procession — A Heart The Size Of A Horse
Tea growers want the Indian government to fund studies to examine the flavor fallout from climate change
Growers in tropical Assam state, India’s main tea growing region, say rising temperatures have led not only to a drop in production but to subtle, unwelcome changes in the flavor of their brews.
The area in northeastern India is the source of some of the finest black and British-style teas. Assam teas are notable for their heartiness, strength and body, and are often sold as “breakfast” teas.
“Earlier, we used to get a bright strong cup. Now it’s not so,” said L.P. Chaliha, a professional tea taster.
Rajib Barooah, a tea planter in Jorhat, Assam’s main tea growing district, agreed that the potent taste of Assam tea has weakened.
“We are indeed concerned,” he said.
Auld Lang Syne (1950)
quote out of . . . something
Tater Tots are widely recognized by their crispiness, cylindrical shape and small size.
DIY Transhumanism
Anonym is a biohacker, a woman who has spent the last several years learning how to extend her own senses by putting tiny magnets and other electronic devices under her own skin, allowing her to feel electromagnetic fields, or — if her latest project works — even magnetic north.
Since doctors won’t help her, she does it in her own apartment, sterilizing her equipment (needles, scalpels, vegetable peelers) with vodka. Good anesthetic is largely impossible to buy, so she screams a little, and sometimes passes out.
sign of the times
the death of smooth jazz
“We were one of the last smooth jazz stations to bail on the format. But it’s been in trouble for a while. There’s been a shift in the industry, where the quantity of listeners became more important than the quality of listeners. The radio stations that have lots of listeners, regardless of how long they listen, will be rewarded, and the stations whose listeners listen passionately aren’t rewarded. The ’JZA listeners weren’t button-pushers.”
I feel like there’s an if Kenny G was a gunslinger joke here somewhere.
(via marginal revolution)
now you know
Do you know why Fig Newtons are called Fig Newtons?
quote out of context
Do you spend time with a lot of friends? That might mean a particular part of your brain is larger than usual.
from the comments
Just got My Prizes, newly available in translation, for Christmas, and it’s classic Bernhard, but because it’s literally autobiographical, it offers some interesting insights into the mind of the author that could only be inferred from his fiction; it also has some surprising sweetness(!!) and possibly even goofiness, at least in one of the accounts (I’m halfway through) of the circumstances and experiences surrounding the literary awards he had won through 1980 (when these memoirs were compiled).
I love his work; but almost everyone I try and turn on to him doesn’t respond the same way. I was holding My Prizes in a bookstore while Christmas shopping, but then realized that nobody on my list would likely enjoy it, so I put it back. I mentioned this to my sister, who—quick on the uptake—got it for me.
from the comments
So far my vanity trumps my penury, but that probably just means that my folly is triumphant.
spam name
Billy Jannet.
Andeeeeee monthly (wee hope) gazette | For Andrew
Andeeeeee monthly (wee hope) gazette: The journal of the Andy Warhol Fan Club of New York City, ca. 1965 / Andy Warhol Fan Club of New York City. Newsletter : 5 p. : ill. ; 36 x 22 cm. Leo Castelli Gallery records, circa 1957-1990. Archives of American Art.
Saharan Cell Phone Mixtape
Music from Saharan cell phones is a compilation of music shared between cell phone owners in Mali.
Rosie the Riveter, dead at 86
Geraldine Doyle, the woman who came to be known as Rosie the Riveter, died December 26th at a hospice in Lansing, Michigan.
Rosie’s rolled-up sleeves and flexed right arm came to represent the newfound strength of the 18 million women who worked during the war and later made her a figure of the feminist movement.
But the woman in the patriotic poster was never named Rosie, nor was she a riveter. All along it was Mrs. Doyle, who after graduating from high school in Ann Arbor, Mich., took a job at a metal factory, her family said.
One day, a photographer representing United Press International came to her factory and captured Mrs. Doyle leaning over a piece of machinery and wearing a red and white polka-dot bandanna over her hair.
In early 1942, the Westinghouse Corp. commissioned artist J. Howard Miller to produce several morale-boosting posters to be displayed inside its buildings. The project was funded by the government as a way to motivate workers and perhaps recruit new ones for the war effort.
Smitten with the UPI photo, Miller reportedly was said to have decided to base one of his posters on the anonymous, slender metal worker – Mrs. Doyle.
For four decades, this fact escaped Mrs. Doyle, who shortly after the photo was taken left her job at the factory.
Meditation
A mind is a tone. What we know is known in rhythm or it is not known. We hold music we have not yet heard, and the sound of what we will do is here now. That bird outside, now, is the one Wallace Stevens wrote about near the end of his life. Do I know this because the bird is here now, or because I read Wallace Stevens and heard it in this way? Lanes descending at my feet as I cross the day.
Now somebody is using a leafblower just down the street, and I think:
Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rains down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
(Anonymous, ca. 1300)
I think of this poem almost every time I open a window in winter.
Cindy is napping on the couch in this break between years, and I am reading and writing and listening to her breathing. Pen scratch on paper–bird on the sill. Sometimes everything that has ever been seems so close.
Everyone kind of disappears — one by one — no one notices
quote out of context
Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world.
Mom, this is how Twitter works
Help your mom, or someone else, get acquainted with Twitter.
(via @zeldman)
from the comments
Lately I’ve been reflecting on how I managed to screw up most every aspect of my life over the past few years. These reflections are not pleasant. One deeply disturbing observation: to speak aloud (or to put into writing) my desire or intention to do a thing almost guarantees I will not do the thing. It is as though the words substitute for the act. So for me to do as Rick has done here — to say out loud — would feel almost like placing a hex on myself.
An Appreciation of Thomas Bernhard
The 21 years since Bernhard died after a lifelong battle with tuberculosis have witnessed a slow but steady trickle of translations, including Old Masters, The Loser and Extinction, which, with Woodcutters, form a loose tetralogy (or, in the formulation of the Bernhard scholar Gitta Honegger, a classical trilogy to which Old Masters is appended as satyr play). These four books, along with “Concrete,” “Yes,” “Wittgenstein’s Nephew” and the five-volume memoir “Gathering Evidence” — oh, and the plays, the plays! — together constitute what some people, this writer included, regard as the most significant literary achievement since World War II.
I feel similarly, although I’d put Correction at the top of that list.
(via marginal revolution)
Update: If you haven’t read Bernhard, I’d start with Wittgenstein’s Nephew or The Loser.
Beach Balls
I find this oddly calming.
headline of the day
Man Hit By SUV During ‘Frogger’ Game
Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die
Patton Oswalt:
Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie? The Shining can be remade into a comedy trailer. Both movie versions of the Joker can be sent to battle each another. The Dude is in The Matrix.
The coming decades—the 21st-century’s ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s—have the potential to be one long, unbroken, recut spoof in which everything in Avatar farts while Keyboard Cat plays eerily in the background.
