A Walk to Remember with Nicholas Sparks through a Bookstore
What does Nicholas Sparks think of Cormac McCarthy?
“Hemingway. See, they’re recommending The Garden of Eden, and I read that. It was published after he was dead. It’s a weird story about this honeymoon couple, and a third woman gets involved. Uh, it’s not my cup of tea.” Sparks pulls the one beside it off the shelf. “A Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway. Good stuff. That’s what I write,” he says, putting it back. “That’s what I write.”
Cormac McCarthy? “Horrible,” he says, looking at Blood Meridian. “This is probably the most pulpy, overwrought, melodramatic cowboy vs. Indians story ever written.”
Even hearing a passage about a sunset in which “the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples” doesn’t sway him.
I don’t know which part of this I like best.
(thanks, Luke)
Farm to Market Road 356, Trinity, TX 75862
headline of the day, II
MRI scan shows Apple stimulates same areas of brain as religion
How it’s going to work on May 21
. . . when we get to May 21 on the calendar in any city or country in the world, and the clock says about — this is based on other verses in the Bible — when the clock says about 6 p.m., there’s going to be this tremendous earthquake that’s going to make the last earthquake in Japan seem like nothing in comparison. And the whole world will be alerted that Judgment Day has begun. And then it will follow the sun around for 24 hours. As each area of the world gets to that point of 6 p.m. on May 21, then it will happen there, and until it happens, the rest of the world will be standing far off and witnessing the horrible thing that is happening.
From a New York conversation with Harold Camping, Judgment Day prophet.
from the comments
1. Draw pants on Donald Duck
2. Look at the pants
3. Understand why they left the pants off
from the comments
The swifts were one of my many favorite parts when I visited your home for motherfucker last summer.
headline of the day
Secret Service issues mea culpa for accidental anti-Fox News tweet
Elementar
Gustavo Ferreira’s new font system for Typotheque.
Elementar was designed to bring more typographic flexibility to digital screens. It increases the available range of possibilities by exploring the pixel grid systematically using combinations of basic parameters. This parametric approach enables the generation of thousands of single fonts in different styles, heights, weights, widths, element shapes etc.
Animated Fowl and (or in) Trousers
“You’ll notice you never saw an animated duck wearing pants.”
Nope. Never. Same for animated parrots.
But take a look at the animated rooster, Panchito Pistoles, in this clip from Disney’s The Three Caballeros (1944).
“Get that cock into a pair of britches, fer crissake!”
from the spam
Is this true?
photo out of context
1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom 10EX
A 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom prototype goes up for auction June 23 and is expected to fetch between $650,000 and $1,300,000.
In the interest of swaying the mascot vote
A goat.
More pics & videos of goats, elephants, parrots, starlings, ducks, etc. Tried to find a honey badger, but alas, besides being nasty-ass they are elusive, and nocturnal.
My 6 year old from his bunk bed
R: Dad do you remember before I was born?
Me: Yes.
R: Was everything the same?
Me: You weren’t here, so it was different. We were lonely but we didn’t know it.
R: Where was I?
Me: You weren’t made yet.
R: Sometimes I think I remember.
Me: Before you were born?
R: Yeah. It just was like space or something.
Me: What did it feel like?
R: Sad. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know what to think. Maybe I was lonely. I don’t know. It’s complicated to think about. I remember things from a long time ago.
[Quiet]
R: Did you ever travel to a high mountain before I was born?
Me: Yes.
R: I remember that. The stars were beautiful.
—
Later:
And if you believe the Earth was given to you to kick ass on while gloating? You’re not really a Christian…you’re a Texan
Ask a law librarian
Caller: “How much does it cost to file the petition for a name change?”
Librarian: “About two hundred twenty.”
Caller: “Per name? If I change my middle name too do I have to pay two twenty more?”
Crete
1954 AJS E95 Porcupine
Called the Porcupine (due to the spiked cooling fins on its cylinder heads), this 1954 racing bike was one of just four built by British motorcycle manufacturer AJS. (Another of the four, incidentally, won first place when Pebble Beach inaugurated its first motorcycle class in 2009.) The centerpiece of the collection at England’s National Motorcycle Museum, this particular example has recently undergone an extensive overhaul and is expected to fetch upwards of $750,000.
Also, women were the first computers
The Crimean War was the first major conflict experienced nearly in real-time by an audience scattered across the globe, because of the telegraph. But first, fast reports, especially those bearing sensational stories, often had to be corrected later. News style was changing, too. Because telegraph operators charged by the word, reporters’ writing became terse, abrupt, factual, economical. Telegraph style became a signal of the writers’ modernity, to be enshrined in style guides like Strunk & White’s.
From Tim Carmody’s excellent review, and parsing, of James Gleick’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. The book is available on Amazon. I think I’ll probably read it after I finish The Singularity Is Near.
from the spam
Architecture is a visual art, along with the buildings speak by themselves.
Quote out of context
In an effort to salvage at least something from their mishap, many farmers are now feeding the messed-up melons to fish and pigs.
Gene Harrogate?
Chimney swifts
We have lived in the same house for 20 years, and each spring a family of chimney swifts nests here. As the name would imply, they build the nests directly in the chimney. They make the most wonderful sounds. The chirps and peeps are nice, but my favorite sound is the whooshing noise that comes down the chimney as they fly about. When the babies hatch, they let out loud chirps when a parent nears with food. Over the years, a couple of babies have dropped to their deaths onto our hearth. But the vast majority survive. One day we notice all is quiet and realize they have moved on. I’m always a bit sad when that happens, though I know I shouldn’t be. And we always know they will return the following year. I wonder who comes back? It can’t still be the original pair. I like to think it’s some of the babies, returning to the place of their birth, to begin the cycle again. I’m honored that they do it here. We never build a fire, so that they can keep this place.
We are about to put our house on the market, and I will not sell it unless I trust the buyers to protect the swifts.
Adam Curtis, It Felt Like a Kiss
Sheila suggested I check out documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis’s found footage montage, It Felt Like a Kiss. A collaboration between Curtis and improvised theater company Punchdrunk, I’m not quite sure what the immersive experience would have been like, but I have rounded up the various pieces of it available on YouTube, and if you are interested — you’ll only need to watch a few minutes to know if it’s right for you — you can take a look.
Here is what the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker had to say:
One particular segment, set to River Deep, Mountain High, feels like being repeatedly stung on the mind by a hallucinogenic jellyfish while inhaling huge clouds of history through a pipe. The marriage of Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Curtis’s wall of images is so perfect, so strange and striking, it jangled around my head for hours afterward. And I only saw it in a tiny window on an Apple Mac, in a corner of Curtis’s tape-strewn “lair” at BBC Television Centre. God knows what it’ll be like on a big screen as part of a live-action, funhouse-style experience. It’ll probably kill people.
anybody know what this little feller is?
Update:
It’s a mantisfly, family Mantispidae. It’s a member of the order Neuroptera . . . and not a praying mantis.
smokestack
Part of the (now closed) Iron City Brewery.
