neighbor’s house
Remembered from winter.
Goldfish – We Come Together
The music video abounds with game references.
The June/July issue
of elimae is now posted.
from the comments
Grand Rapids lip-dub video
The entire city of Grand Rapids seems to turn out to lip-dub “The Day The Music Died” all over town. Pretty amazing, I don’t even know how they did this.
quote out of context
Rev. Ted Haggard will make a cameo as himself in a Christian sex comedy promoting abstinence, with the tagline “abstinence never felt so good.”
headline of the day
Cyclists lament hard time peddling nude ride in Edmonton
My phone just buzzed
“Not recommended”
by the Bulletin of the Children’s Book Center, The University of Chicago Library (December 1954):
Dixon, Ruth. Scalawag the Monkey; photographs by Rie Gaddis. Rand McNally,1953. 30p. (A Book-Elf Book). 25¢. Scalawag, the monkey, runs away from his organ-grinder boss Murdstone Mastiff and has various adventures at a play school for puppies and kittens. The coy text is painfully contrived to go with the pictures which are color photographs of animals dressed like people, and looking hunted and uncomfortable. (Pre-school)
See also: “No animals were harmed . . . “
The difference between a good picture and a mediocre picture, it’s a question of millimeters
This video of Henri Cartier-Bresson, told in his words, overlaid with his photos, is too long to describe succinctly, but if you’re interested in art, how to see and think, in learning about the world through taking photos, it is worth the 18 minutes.
In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published his book Images à la sauvette, whose English edition was titled The Decisive Moment. It included a portfolio of 126 of his photos from the East and the West. The book’s cover was drawn by Henri Matisse. For his 4,500-word philosophical preface, Cartier-Bresson took his keynote text from the 17th century Cardinal de Retz: “Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif” (“There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment”). Cartier-Bresson applied this to his photographic style. He said: “Photographier: c’est dans un même instant et en une fraction de seconde reconnaître un fait et l’organisation rigoureuse de formes perçues visuellement qui expriment et signifient ce fait” (“Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact”).
Dallas
Carrollton man crashes, undresses, dies in second of two accidents in Far North Dallas
Man found dead in South Dallas pond after using drugs, talking about walking on water
(thanks, Patrick)
coming out of sleep
Algorerhythm.
Related to….
En Garde – Puzzle Muteson from Bedroom Community on Vimeo.
Puzzle is part of the “Bedroom Community” Nico Muhly shows up on.
Palace Brothers (Will Oldham), You Have Cum In Your Hair and Your Dick Is Hanging Out
It’s not what you think. It might take a few listens. It is one of my favorite songs.
James Gleick, The Information
I’m only a couple chapters into James Gleick’s The Information, but already it deserves a recommendation. It is both a straightforward history of the transformation toward information culture and a poetic and metaphorical exploration of it. I could give dozens of examples — the chapter on the talking drums of Africa comes to mind — but if the subject of how we came to transform ourselves into thought is interesting to you, you will want the pleasure of unfurling it for yourself.
Previously on clusterflock:
Also, women were the first computers
I said
Sluts gotta shop, y’all.
A wonderful Jack Gilbert poem
I found this while Cindy and I were searching for various Japanese words related to kinds of beauty. This poem seems to be an illustration of the language we were swimming in this morning.
photo out of context
quote out of context
4. This isn’t a column about driverless cars at all. It’s about our ambivalent attitudes toward major innovations. It’s also about how the true costs of regulation are often hidden. A lot of potentially good innovations never even reach our eyes and ears as concepts, much less realities. They don’t have tags comparable to that of the driverless car.
She wore a raspberry beret.
I saw Prince last night perform at the L.A. Forum. Mary J. Blige opened for him, and it was something else entirely. They sang a duet of “Nothing Compares 2 U” that was incredible. I wouldn’t say I was a Prince fan before this, but I am now. He played the Forum for 21 days, and made a deal with Ticketmaster so the tickets would be 25 dollars flat, all fees included. Some friends, the Brions, took me as a birthday present.
Then I found this clip on YouTube of Prince appearing on the View.
I can’t explain why I find this so funny, I just do.
Broadcasting the Indy 500
Fourteen years ago a group that included Amy, Patrick, Espen (the designer of the first version of the site), and me broadcast the 81st Indianapolis 500 on the web. We built sites commemorating the history and the cars, provided a place for information about the Indy Racing League, and streamed a very small, very pixelated feed of the race, live, as well as constantly updated telemetrics about each car. My recollection is it was one of the first, if not the first, live video feeds on the internet. It felt good to be part of that group, to make the weekend happen. The internet felt transformative then, full of potential. It still does.
Three words that I do not like
Simpatico
Copacetic
Segue
I am known.
Yesterday was a wonderful birthday. In addition to the immense and unending generosity and love that you all pour out daily, I was surrounded by friends and drank an enormous amount of champagne. My remarkable friends brought food and cake and gave the best presents. I told him once, awhile ago, about the best kind of ice cream, and he brought me a large bottle of gin and a container of the best kind of ice cream.
Today I had to go to a production meeting and feebly spooned yogurt into my mouth as my chipper producers orchestrated my life for me. I’m going to see Prince in a few hours.
Thank you for being. I am glad to also be.
Cowboys and Pit Crews
Atul Gawande delivered this year’s commencement address at Harvard Medical School:
You are the generation on the precipice of a transformation medicine has no choice but to undergo, the riders in the front car of the roller coaster clack-clack-clacking its way up to the drop. The revolution that remade how other fields handle complexity is coming to health care, and I think you sense it. I see this in the burst of students obtaining extra degrees in fields like public health, business administration, public policy, information technology, education, economics, engineering. Of some two hundred students graduating today, more than thirty-five are getting such degrees, intuiting that ordinary medical training wouldn’t prepare you for the world to come. Two years ago, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement started its Open School, offering free online courses in systems skills such as outcome measurement, quality improvement, implementation, and leadership. They hoped a few hundred medical students would enroll. Forty-five thousand did. You’ve recognized faster than any of us that the way we train, practice, and innovate has to change. Even the laboratory science must change—toward generating treatments and diagnostics that do not stand in isolation but fit in as reliable components of an integrated, economical, and effective package of care for the needs patients have.
A Good Deed I Did
I thought I might have told y’all about this good deed I did. (There aren’t many.) But I don’t think I have, at least not on the site. It involves a kind of role reversal.
When I lived in downtown Chicago, there was a nearby chain convenience store where I bought newspapers and, you know, sundries. The chain had a policy requiring clerks to card everybody who wanted to purchase alcohol. No guesswork. Across the board. You wanted to buy booze, you had to show ID.
This was news to an old man who wanted to buy a bottle of malt liquor one night when I was in the store.
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