Victor Borge’s Phonetic Punctuation
(hat tip to Robert Ledgerwood)
exactly
A.V. Club: Is there such a thing as a joke that’s too dirty?
Sarah Silverman: Nah, not if it’s funny enough.
Giant Species of Rabbit Discovered on Minorca
The Rabbit’s extinct, but will henceforth be known as The Minorcan King of Rabbits.
“There is an underlying assumption that rabbits appeared some 40 million years ago and have been perfectly happy to stay just about the same,” [Brian] Kraatz, an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy at the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific, told Discovery News. “This new species is interesting in that it’s quite different from what we know of living or fossil rabbits. Aside from its incredibly large size, its hind legs are rather short, not so good for hopping.”
Ugandan English
The Broadway play The Vagina Monologues had a brief, but notorious, appearance on the Ugandan stage before being banned by government censors. The brouhaha led to the entry of the word monologue into Ugandan English as a euphemism for vagina. The newspaper Red Pepper popularized the use of the word kandahar and after the 2010 World Cup, vuvuzela for vagina, and whopper for penis.
From a wiki article on Ugandan English.
(via marginal revolution)
dear clusterflock
Books you haven’t read.
fermented clothes
Lee got the idea for fermenting textiles from a biologist who planted the idea in her mind that she could create a dress from bacteria, yeast and sweetened green tea (or sweetened water). Left to ferment for two to three weeks and the result is bacterial cellulose that, when dried, resembles sheets of translucent paper, vegetable leather or even dried human skin.
The bacterial cellulose might also be used to make furniture or blood vessels, and could potentially replace bone tissue.
from the comments
My sister’s gonna take me to get a toilet seat mine is broke it was sliding I almost fell off of it WHOA.
from the comments
I was jumping up and down to a Devo song in a gay club and lost my balance (as I am wont to do) and knocked a man clear off the elevated dance floor. But I can’t say that I regret it.
from the comments
Mostar, Mahomedan woman, Herzegowina, Austro-Hungary
a postcard from Gordon
I got a postcard this afternoon. I couldn’t make out all of it, but this was the gist:
Resolved to fasten my attention on your film last night, frustrated that you gave us so little of the coots: the farmer in coveralls, the barber, the fella blotched with paint (or plaster) ditto the old boy who plugged the [unreadable] and did [unreadable], for doing so. Wish you concentrated more on the less liberated, the less self-aware. Perhaps you can do so in subsequent work. Let me know. And tell me how your life is. Can you read this? Arthritis defeats this hand of mine.
I think he’s probably right, but I wouldn’t have seen it at the time.
Blödes Orchester
An orchestra of electric appliances by Michael Petermann (via).
This Is A Metaphor For Something
(via)
Deadbeat Diary, 3
So, it’s September and our house is on the market. There’s no pretending when your house was built in 2007 and at the end of 2010 it’s on the market. Everyone assumes you’re a deadbeat. Everyone assumes you’re contributing to the mess. The neighbors ask because they want the gossip. You tell the people you like before the sign goes up. There’s a need to explain.
People are nice. Too nice. They ask what the house is listed at and try not to cringe. They go to the open house and make judgments about our style choices. I know. I’ve done the same thing.
Alicia is basically 9 months pregnant and we’re forced out of the house on a nightly basis. We walk to the park and, from a block and a half away, watch the Real Estate agent show people in and try to imagine them living in our space.
I can’t decide if the fact that we picked out the tile, carpet, cabinets, banister, fixtures, etc. makes it worse. “I’m going to miss that kitchen,” I say. The things we hate about the house never come up. Like the fact that we have to go outside to get to our attached garage.
We also don’t talk about the couch we bought to fit along that wall. Or the table for that oddly shaped dining area. I try not to think about the hours I’ve spent running drip irrigation into the back yard. And we definitely don’t talk about the fact this is the house we first brought our daughter home too.
“It’s just a place,” I say, beginning to detach before we even have to pack a box.
Then we get an offer. It’s not long after the house was listed and we’re optimistic about what it means.
We cringe.
It’s hard not to feel like someone’s offered us less than nothing for the last 3 years of our lives.
Portal 2 is now pre-orderable
The sequel to one of the greatest games of all times is now available for pre-order, iffen you didn’t know.
Tweet of the day, honorable mention
Specifically, he’s been tweeting gorgeous photos from this collection all afternoon.
tweet of the day
google image search
Monday Morning Musical Moment
A Girl and Her Rat
In which my image is featured in a Flickr gallery devoted to . . . girls and their rats.
Looking for Stanley
Photographer Neil Hall searched out and photographed the areas around London Stanley Kubrick used for locations as varied as Vietnam, France, rural America, and the dystopian future.
The project is one of the most detailed presentations of Stanley Kubrick’s film locations. It was undertaken over a number of months and utilized extensive research from Kubrick’s own archive matching behind the scenes photographs, call sheets and other original material. It shows the interiors, buildings, architectural details and landscapes that Kubrick incorporated into his vision. The choices were not arbitrary. The project shows the painstaking effort Kubrick put into his location choices. For A Clockwork Orange (1971), Production Designer John Barry and Kubrick spent two months agonising over ten year’s worth of architectural magazines selecting appropriate locations. For his 18th century-based masterpiece Barry Lyndon (1975), Designer Ken Adam nearly had a breakdown, so demanding was Kubrick’s pursuit of perfection….
(via Gary Hustwit)
Hearing things
Intermittent tinnitus is an annoyance that’s afflicted me for years. I’ve learned to cope by redirecting my attention.
But over the past month, in the wake of a protracted encounter with a malfunctioning smoke alarm, I’ve experienced constant tinnitus. It’s always there.
Except when I’m not listening to it.
Which may say something about the power of attention.
It’s like watching ice melt, backwards
This video was created by Andrey Muratov for Gosudarstvennaya Transportnaya Lizingovaya Kompaniya, thus GTLK, but honestly I’m not sure what it has to do with anything at all. But I can say that it’s shot, lit and edited rather well. I mean, it’s just a ball of ice being melted, you know? But it looks and sounds and feels like so much more.
(thanks, Grace)
quote out of context
If someone had taken my mother aside when I was three and told her I would grow up to stand naked in a cupboard gnawing a chicken leg, I don’t think she would have been surprised.
O’Donnell’s performance as Beth, has been both praised as “disturbingly accurate” and criticized as “over the top.”
In 2005, the book was adapted into a television movie for CBS in which Rosie O’Donnell appears as Beth, a woman with a developmental disabilitiy who is dependent on her father. When her father dies, her sister, played by Andie MacDowell, comes to stay with her. At first, they fight about Beth’s rampant consumption of junk food, resulting in bringing her cholesterol levels up, but after six months Rachel realizes that Beth is content with her life.
Nurse Normal
“Nurse normal,” the swain says every time the baby cries. “Like the cows do.”
By Cooper Renner. In Once was blip.
