Bill Waterson’s college sketches
Drawn for The Kenyon Collegian in 1979. Even then you see his trademark style.
thought of you
A short animation set to music which is shorthand for “Andrew Simone link bait.”
Quote Out of Context
The flawed bills, which cost around $120 million to print, will have to burned.
I guess this quotation and article will have to be burned too.
vuvuzelas used to discourage software piracy
This is the best:
A novel anti-piracy measure baked into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience makes copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas.
Instead of “Beat It,” players get “Bleat It.”
I don’t know what happened
Google eBooks
Google opened its ebook store today.
We designed Google eBooks to be open. Many devices are compatible with Google eBooks — everything from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers. With the new Google eBooks Web Reader, you can buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud. That means you can access your ebooks like you would messages in Gmail or photos in Picasa—using a free, password-protected Google account with unlimited ebooks storage.
That left only one option — burn the home down.
Neighbors gasped when authorities showed them photos of the inside of the Southern California ranch-style home: Crates of grenades, mason jars of white, explosive powder and jugs of volatile chemicals that are normally the domain of suicide bombers.
Prosecutors say Serbian-born George Jakubec quietly packed the home with the largest amount of homemade explosives ever found in one location in the U.S. and was running a virtual bomb-making factory in his suburban neighborhood. How the alleged bank robber obtained the chemicals and what he planned to do with them remain mysteries.
Now authorities face the risky task of getting rid of the explosives. The property is so dangerous and volatile that that they have no choice but to burn the home to the ground this week in a highly controlled operation involving dozens of firefighters, scientists and hazardous material and pollution experts.
Boom goes the dynamite.
Danny MacAskill, Way Back Home
Way Back Home is the incredible new riding clip from Danny MacAskill, it follows him on a journey from Edinburgh back to his hometown Dunvegan, in the Isle of Skye.
I know this made the rounds, and here it made it as far as the comments, but over Thanksgiving we watched it three times.
I feel the same way when I watch this as I felt when I watched the Andy Goldsworthy documentary.
The Bad Sex Awards, 2010
And this one only made the short list:
“Love me!” she moaned lustily. “Oh, Ward! Love me now!”
He jumped out from his pajama pants so acrobatically it was like a stunt from Cirque du Soleil. But when he went to remove her slip, she said, “Leave it!” which turned him on even more. He buried his face into Hannah’s cunt like a wanderer who’d found water in the desert. She tasted like a hot biscuit flavored with pee.
– Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut
Dandy Don Meredith, R.I.P.
Former Dallas Cowboy, and Monday Night Football announcer, Don Meridith, died this weekend. He was 72.
He quickly became one of the most popular broadcasters in sports because of his folksy sayings and country humor.
Meredith’s signature call was singing the famous Willie Nelson song “Turn Out the Lights” when it appeared a game’s outcome had been determined.
Meredith left ABC after the 1973 season for a three-year stint at NBC. He returned to the “MNF” crew in 1977 before retiring in 1984, one year after Cosell left the team.
Calamari stirrup bootstrapping methodology
My grandfather’s mantel
There is enough of my love for everyone
Miniatures (IV)
Miniatürk is an Istanbul attraction featuring over 100 miniature models of Ottoman Empire structures.
The park also includes go-carts and trampolines.
(Thanks, Tom Sale.)
Who was that Guy?
This story seems to sum up rather concisely how we’ve been handling Afghanistan. Apparently we’ve been in multiple negotiations with a fellow pretending to be Taliban leadership:
For months, the secret talks unfolding betweenTaliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.
But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.
“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”
I worry for our future.
In Other News
US Weekly reported on Friday that reality royals Kate Gosselin and her eight children, of “Jon & Kate Plus 8” (and currently “Kate Plus 8” fame) will appear on an upcoming episode of Palin’s show, helping to officially crown the Alaskan family as reality stars.
US has a clip from the episode, showing the two families joining forces in the great outdoors.
In the short clip, Sarah Palin approaches her daughter Piper and asks how she would feel about going camping with “Kate and her eight kids?!” Piper shouts out a high-pitched “yeah!” and gives her mom an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
This newsflash comes compliments of Politico, who seems to have made its journalistic priorities pretty clear, I think.
Sweet and Sour Initiative
In my previous posts I’ve mentioned how growing up in a Chinese restaurant was a fantastic experience. Let me tell you about one peculiar cultural mash-up: birthdays and pu pu platters.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is seeking actual objects from (or closely related to) Chinese restaurants in the US. The Sweet and Sour Initiative seeks menus, carry-out containers, chop sticks, matchbooks, pictures, restaurant signs, ads (in various media), ownership papers, ledgers, supply catalogs, working papers and permits, woks, cookbooks –
You get the picture. Go rummage around and see what you turn up.
Corporate Speak
I’d like to see 100% completion on this so please ensure you have actioned this.
“Animal”
The Telegraph ran a fascinating obituary for Jure Robic, the Slovenian extreme-cyclist who was killed in a car collision in September:
Robic pushed himself beyond any natural physical and mental limits. He confessed that for weeks after the Race Across America his hands were so swollen that he could not hold a key, and as a result of lack of sleep he was prone to violent outbursts of paranoia and terrifying hallucinations.
Towards the end of the Race Across America, he was known to weep uncontrollably and was sometimes to be seen hopping off his bike to fight imaginary assailants – bears, wolves or aliens – which turned out to be mailboxes. He imagined that cracks in the road were coded messages, and on one occasion became convinced he was being pursued by the Mujahedeen on horseback; his support team encouraged him to ride faster, pretending that they could see them too. “Sometimes during races he gets off his bike and walks towards us in the follow car, very angry,” recalled a team member in 2006. “We lock the doors.”
1984-Lite
Five Books interviewed PJ O’Rourke about his five favorite novels of political satire. It’s pretty fascinating:
1984?
It’s eerily predictive of the sort of video camera surveillance world that we now live in. It would be interesting to update 1984 and make all of the things that Orwell foresaw more annoying than dangerous. Well, some of them do get pretty dangerous, but things like television that looks back at you turns out to be a real pain in the ass more than an instrument of government control. We’ve come into the world of 1984 but it turns out to be1984-Lite.
There’s something surrealist about the absolutely unspeakable horror of somebody’s imagination being actually slightly banal.
Sad in a way. Sad, but at the same time quite a relief. Sad, but a relief.
If you’re unfamiliar with Five Books, I strongly recommend it. They interview various philosophers, authors, intellectuals and commentators about their five favorite books from their area of expertise.
Canned Hunts
Audobon Magazine has a fascinating article on the history and continued popularity of canned hunts, where individuals can pay huge sums to easily hunt down and kill tame animals trapped in captivity:
In most canned hunts tame or semi-tame game species, reared in captivity, are placed in enclosures of varying sizes, and the gate is opened for the client, who has been issued a guarantee of success. Canned hunts are great for folks on tight schedules or who lack energy or outdoor skills. Microchip transponder implants for game not immediately visible are available for the proprietor whose clients are on really tight schedules. And because trophies are plied with drugs, minerals, vitamins, specially processed feeds, and sometimes growth hormones, they are way bigger than anything available in the wild. Often the animals have names, and you pay in advance for the one you’d like to kill, selecting your trophy from a photo or directly from its cage. For example, Rachel, Bathsheba, Paul, John, and Matthew were pet African lions that would stroll over and lick their keepers’ hands before they were shot in Texas.
For the clients who are in a hurry, their animals can be drugged first.
from the comments
I think it is about human stains. The mark we leave when we vacate for whatever reason. I think what we leave behind/discard, how we move on, says so much more about us. Sometimes it is beauty I see, sometimes ugliness. Mostly it is neither.
“Ever Fast” Pachia Ammos (Παχειά Άμμος, Κρήτη) Crete
The Payoff in Letting It Go
I’ll stress the incredible part, because much more than my colleagues I can remember when McCain seemed to be a potentially Eisenhower-ish, as opposed to an increasingly Bunning-like, figure in American public life. Broad-minded, tolerant, eager to bridge rather than open divides — this was the way he seemed to so many people starting from his arrival in the Congress in the 1980s.
Seeing him now is surprising not simply because it reminds us: this man could be the sitting president, but also because it again raises the question, how did he end up this way? Even if his earlier identity had been artifice, what would be the payoff in letting it go?
– James Fallows, The Mystery of John McCain.
(image via)
Quote Out of Context
In one school that was closed, Homeland Security Academy, a middle school with a security-industry theme, students regularly set fires in the bathrooms.
