Grantland
Bill Simmons welcomes people to Grantland, which launched today:
Life will deliver a few moments when something substantial is about to happen, when you know it’s substantial, when you’ve done everything you could to prepare for the moment, but still, you just don’t know. And it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. I felt that way when I was getting married, when both of my kids were being born, when I graduated college, and incredibly, when I was standing in front of that stupid Carl’s Jr. Oh my God. There is no stopping this now. Please tell me this will turn out all right. You take a leap of faith with life. You inhale and exhale. You hope.
tweet of the day
dear clusterflock
Vegas.
it looks like the wind caused the tree to split as easily as a banana
A tree that predated Columbus fell outside a senior center in a wind storm in Lancaster Ohio.
People at the senior center who carve statues and toys will be given first dibs on the wood.
Cosmo fact checker
Unsurprisingly, the work takes its toll:
Mind-blowing orgasms quickly seemed as boring as corporate-speak about mergers and acquisitions.
SENNA
A trailer for a documentary about Formula One World Champion Ayrton Senna. Regardless of whether you plan to watch the movie, there are some racing moments here that are electric magic.
Senna is considered by many to be the best driver in Formula One history.
(via @gary_hustwit)
“Dig This” is a construction theme park developed by New Zealand-born Ed Mumm
The newest Las Vegas Strip attraction isn’t another mega-resort or Cirque du Soleil show. Rather, it is a heavy equipment playground that lets visitors operate life-size Tonka toys.
I know Mary, Cindy, and Daryl will want to go. Who else?
(via marginal revolution)
quote out of context
During production of a film we were doing, over the phone with the client, we were discussing a scene where the actors begin fighting each other with lightsabers. We explained how we’d create the effects, work it out in post-production. Then the client speaks up and says, “Why don’t we just use real lightsabers?”
from the spam
Your article made me understand some things.
Thoughts on Clusterflock
So yesterday, I was fiddling with a beads and pearls hair comb that I use to pull back my hair on hot days. Rick said, “That’s pretty.” I was flattered. The Iowan is very notice-y. Mr. B. also can be alert, for a teenager. But if I was bound, in front of the wheels of a truck, with the driver threatening to run over me unless those two could name the “cute hair accessory” I had been wearing all week, I would be in trouble. The Iowan wouldn’t be able to say. Mr. Boudreaux would whisper, “What’s an accessory?”
Rick, the writerly friend who also has been a merchandising designer, notices. I see that he takes it all in, maybe even when he is trying not to do that.
I need all of it, my guys at home, my friends who wouldn’t visit this blog and even if they did would click off, baffled. And my Clusterflock. The flock has different meanings for all of us, of course. But to me, it is a shiny bauble, the layer of bubbles that appeared from out of nowhere and now accompany me throughout my day.
from the moderated comments
I feel that this is wrong. Some people do this to endangered animals who are almost extinct. This kills them off. PLease help stop this and UQIDOING IT!!
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie, Master and Everyone
Another of my favorites from Will Oldham.
headline of the day, II
No bodies found in Texas home after psychic tip
Engadget previews iOS 5
If you are interested in a thorough overview of the iPhone/iPad/iPod software that was announced yesterday.
(via daring fireball)
Postcard from DC…
If you’re yearning for a lady with whom to lunch, you couldn’t make a better choice than to fly to Reagan National, get on the yellow-line south to King St. in Old Town, Alexandria and walk King to the Potomac where sits Chart House. A lovely afternoon. Cece is a delight.
Dinner with Dave at La Tomate last night, a delight, too.
Wish you were here.
XOR
Update:
Read more
slow motion landslide in New York
It’s oozing slowly, Kozlowski says, no faster than three feet per day. But it’s so big that scientists have been arriving from all over the country to study it.
screenshot out of context
What if the U.S.D.A subsidized gardens?
Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine-based nonprofit, has put together this nifty graphic that shows the planting layout of the White House vegetable garden – which is more an ideal than a typical garden, but not uncommon in its choice of plants – and then re-imagines how it would look if it were to reflect the crops that the federal government supports. The change is pretty stark. The data is culled from the Environmental Working Group’s fantastic farm subsidy database.
This hits straight to the heart of the heartland.
Today’s gossip
from my preserved-in-nineteenth-century-amber town:
There’s a guy opening a bakery on Diagonal Street. Up till now, he’s worked full-time as a crafter of dentures.
nerdcore
So, I totally nerded out yesterday, and it was awesome. I had two streams of the Apple Keynote going, depending on which updated more quickly. And if I needed to be in the kitchen I had one going on the laptop. (Who am I kidding, if I needed to be in the bathroom.) Then the SSD (solid state drive — as fast as RAM, no moving parts) arrived and I gleefully installed and formatted. Saturday the RAM I ordered arrived, so the laptop is a screaming fast machine now. Anyway, the purpose of this post is to geek out, and to encourage anyone with a slightly aging desktop or laptop to at least increase the RAM. It’s cheap, and that addition alone will make it feel like a new machine. The SSDs are still a little expensive compared to traditional hard drives, but I found a used one on Amazon for less than $200. All told it beats the cost of a new machine, and RAM and hard drive have a bigger effect on everyday tasks than the processor does anyhow. Here ends the geeking.
from the comments
Better to light a $28 candle than curse the flatulence of Rufus.
William Eggleston, Draft of a Presentation
I consider a photograph interesting whenever a photographer’s view of reality does not double my knowledge of the world, but a difference between our respective perception occurs. The smaller the difference, the more intense is its effect on me. Thus, it’s less about a precise representation of reality than the formulation of the representation of the world. From this viewpoint and within the technical medium, we can talk about the photographer as an author who–on the basis of facts and by means of a minimal shift of perception–creates a fiction in close proximity to reality.
Thoughts on William Eggleston, and photography, by Thomas Weski.
The plan was to explore a long-dead language that would reveal an ancient world of chariots and concubines, royal decrees and diaries — and omens that came from the heavens and sheep livers
A ninety year project to create a dictionary of the Assyrian language has finally been completed.
The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is now officially complete — 21 volumes of Akkadian, a Semitic language (with several dialects, including Assyrian) that endured for 2,500 years. The project is more encyclopedia than glossary, offering a window into the ancient society of Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq, through every conceivable form of writing: love letters, recipes, tax records, medical prescriptions, astronomical observations, religious texts, contracts, epics, poems and more.
“The Assyrian Dictionary gives us the key into the world’s first urban civilization,” he says. “Virtually everything that we take for granted … has its origins in Mesopotamia, whether it’s the origins of cities, of state societies, the invention of the wheel, the way we measure time, and most important the invention of writing.
“A lot of what you see is absolutely recognizable — people expressing fear and anger, expressing love, asking for love,” says Matthew Stolper, a University of Chicago professor who worked on the project on and off over three decades. “There are inscriptions from kings that tell you how great they are, and inscriptions from others who tell you those guys weren’t so great. … There’s also lot of ancient versions of ‘your check is in the mail.’ And there’s a common phrase in old Babylonian letters that literally means ‘don’t worry about a thing.’”
headline of the day
Rent A Grandma Begins National Rollout via its Franchises
from the comments
The funny thing is, honest to god, I did think it was a documentary about the Census Bureau. I was 21 and naive and they’d only told me the title. Scott and Mark liked to put me in situations and watch. Like the time they gave me poppers. Like the times they took me dancing at the gay disco. Like the night they got me drunk for the first time in my life and I started re-arranging the paintings on the wall of a restaurant. Stuff like that.
