woken by mosquito hawk
It’s the time of year the mosquito hawks get stuck behind the blinds — flapping against the paper — and you have to decide if you are going to kill them to get some sleep or hunt them in the dark so you can fling them into the yard.
from the spam
I was going 2 punch an elephant in the face & then I remembered, they never forget. So I punched an old person, they forget everything.
Update:
Do the children of porn stars make tapes of themselves doing Neil Simon plays to get back at their parents?
Update:
Whoever said peeing in the urinal for kids causes no “splash back” is an idiot.
Look!
Zazie dans le metro is coming to Criterion, finally!
Louis Malle is quickly becoming a favourite and I will likely get this one as a review copy. All is right with the world.
dear clusterflock
My hair: red as it ever was, but I’ve been urging Kristine to get more creative with the cut. Now it’s a kind of asymmetrical cross between Millie Small’s 1964 ‘do and James Brown’s 1985 coiffure.
Do you use your hair (or have you used it) as a playground for your evolving self?
Any other part of your person?
Truth in Advertising at Sam’s Club
Boxing.
Your tits are not my speed bag.
Micah P Hinson – For Your Eyes
For your eyes, holds the ocean tide
Drifting me off to sleep
Breathtaking, for as far as I can see
And all the times that I tried
Left me as lonely as I could be
Rearranging The Bookshelf
Bravo.
Dangle
Dangly earrings. A continual point of contention between me and my late mother.
Read more
the Antikythera mechanism
The second century B.C. astronomical calculator found in a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera was even more sophisticated than thought.
Earlier research showed the device also accounted for a subtle weirdness in the motion of the moon. Because the moon’s orbit around the Earth is an ellipse, not a perfect circle, the moon seems to speed up and slow down over the course of a month. In 2006, Tony Freeth of Cardiff University and colleagues showed that a clever configuration of two overlapping gears, with the top gear laid off-center from the bottom gear, could give the moon’s marker its irregular speed.
Because of the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun, the sun makes a similarly variable trip across the sky, speeding up and slowing down over the course of the year. But the effect is much more subtle than for the moon.
caption out of context
Old friends: Roddy McDowall and Liz Taylor, years after her nude picture was taken
‘Though many of Moniz and Freeman’s patients became essentially catatonic, while others were unaffected, enough seemed “cured” that the lobotomy became standard practice in mental institutions in the 1940s and early 50s’
From a history of the lobotomy:
Freeman apparently found Moniz’s techniques a bit stodgy, and he began experimenting with an outpatient procedure, where he would drive an icepick into his patients’ brains through the base of their eye sockets. Once the pick was inside the brain, he would literally wiggle it around, cutting through the white and gray matter.
It was not a precision surgery. Using a hammer and his pick, he boasted that he could do a lobotomy in 10 minutes and didn’t even need anaesthesia (though usually he gave the patient shock treatment first, so they were unaware of what was happening). The icepick method was too much for Moniz, who distanced himself from his former partner.
Flinging to the Ceiling…
My brother, on Wednesday nights (this after we were deemed “old enough” to choose whether we’d go to church on Wednesday nights and we opted out to watch Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In on television), would lie on the couch in the living room, pick and flick boogers up toward the ceiling to see if he could make the booger go the distance to the eleven-foot ceiling and whether it would stick. He was quite successful with many.
One night Mom was lying on the couch, looking up as we were all in the living room watching, oh, something on the black-and-white, I don’t know, Red Skelton or the Carol Burnett Show or Lawrence Welk. She said, pointing to the constellation of darkening spots on the ceiling, “You see what these boys do, Eldridge? They flick boogers at the ceiling. This is what they do when they’re alone, when we’re not here to watch them.”
I don’t remember what happened next. I vaguely remember Daddy laughing.
Two Weeks with Love
It was fun today having lunch with a friend at the suburban lesbian bar and watching part of Two Weeks with Love (1950), starring Jane Powell, Ricardo Montalban, and Debbie Reynolds.
The Robinson family, father, mother and two daughters, are spending two weeks of summer vacation at a resort in the Catskills. Older daughter Patti vies with her friend, Valeria, for the affections of Demi Armendez but Patti is at a disadvantage because her father thinks she is too young for boys. But with Patti singing at an amateur show and a dance, her adventures in quest of Armendez end happily.
Note to Deron: Two weeks of summer vacation at a resort in the Catskills.
The Red Button
Bieber Face
From: Simon Dempsey
Date: Thursday 31 March 2011 12.37pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: No Subject
Did you draw Justin Biebers face on all the images in my stock images folder and save them over my files?
From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 31 March 2011 12.44pm
To: Simon Dempsey
Subject: Re: No Subject
Yes.
(thanks, Joel)
a thousand faces, 11
tweet of the day
from the comments
I hope that the midget who was into conspiracy theories is still at that one library where I worked for a while.
The Spaghetti Harvest of 1957
The Browser reminded me of my favorite April Fools’ joke, The Spaghetti Harvest. For some reason embedding has been disabled, but don’t worry Andrew, I’d never take the opportunity to link to something like this.
the case of the bronx zoo cobra, twitter, and the honey badger
The Honey Badger is obviously following the Cobra but thus far the Cobra seems oblivious to the Badger’s existence. Regardless, this is completely amusing to watch play out and a tiny news story has basically turned into an ARG (Alternate Reality Game). If you look at the replies to those accounts the engagement is insane and there are over 150,000 people already following the Cobra. Remember, this is a pretend account for a snake that no one even knew existed a week ago. I actually think the Honey Badger account is the funniest of the bunch, but the existence of the cobra’s account willed that into even happening.
(thanks, Amy)
dear clusterflock
Best April Fools’.
‘The Indians had jammed burning stalks of river cane into balls of clay and hurled them at the ceiling’
The story of North America’s cave art, most as recent as the past two thousand years, some as old as four thousand, with the bulk located in middle Tennessee.
Jan went a few yards and then lay down on his back on a sort of embankment in the cave. I did likewise. We were both looking up. He scanned his light along a series of pictures. It felt instinctively correct to call it a panel—it had sequence, it was telling some kind of story. There was an ax or a tomahawk with a human face and a crested topknot, like a mohawk (the same topknot we’d just seen on the woodpeckers). Next to the ax perched a warrior eagle, with its wings spread, brandishing swords. And last a picture of a crown mace, a thing shaped like an elongated bishop in chess, meant to represent a symbolic weapon, possibly held by the chiefly elite during public rituals. It’s a “type artifact” of the Mississippian sphere, meaning that, wherever you find it, you have the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, or, as it used to be called (and still is by archaeologists when they think no one’s listening), the Southern Death Cult. In this case the object appeared to be morphing into a bird of prey.
What did it mean?
“We don’t know,” Simek said. “What it is clearly about is transformation.”
