For 24 hours…
our internet connection, at the house, has been off. It just came back on 20 minutes ago. I’m FULL of shit to share. (Well, sort of full.) I feel like I lost the feeling in both my arms and got it back.
If you needed a little schadenfreude today
then this will hit the spot. It did for me, anyway.
Comic Sans Criminal
‘What I saw is how splits in consciousness can undermine our capacity to resist false authority by silencing the voice of the core self, and how gender norms that align reason with masculinity and emotion with femininity encourage and enforce these splits’
But in dividing human qualities into masculine and feminine, sexism separates everyone from parts of themselves, creating rifts or splits in the psyche. This fragmentation of the psyche links patriarchy with trauma and explains its deleterious effects on everyone. Boys in becoming men or men wanting to be seen as “real men” will separate their thoughts from their emotions, which are regarded as weak or feminine. As in “boys don’t cry”. And girls will be torn between wanting to be seen as “good girls” or “good women”, meaning not masculine or self-assertive, and wanting to align themselves with the so-called masculine qualities that are privileged and socially valued. In sexist families or religions or societies or cultures, both men and women are pressured to render themselves half-human.
headline of the day, III
Jury rules in favor of doctor who cut off part of Kentucky man’s penis
tweet of the day, II
headline of the day, II
Arizona man accused of stuffing snakes down shorts
tweet of the day
headline of the day
Why I Garden
We’re still dealing with aftershocks and looking forward to this weekend’s hurricane. So I’m thinking about cats. Not really. More like green things. I thought maybe even non-gardeners might appreciate this little meditation on the growing game.
“They are tearing out part of the heart of Buenos Aires”
The interior of the historic Cafe Richmond was gutted a couple of weeks ago; a spot once frequented by Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene may be replaced by a Nike Store.
The plight of the Richmond has dominated local media since the cafe’s insides were gutted last Monday morning. Apparently to ensure it could not be returned to its former splendour even if the local government rules against the Nike shop, the Richmond was emptied of its historical interior, right down to its grandiosely comfortable Chesterfield wingback leather armchairs, in a 3am raid. The movers took the precaution of pulling down the security camera on the front of the building first.
“It’s against the law,” said Monica Capano of the city’s Heritage Preservation Commission. “The Richmond is one of the city’s emblematic landmarks.”
For a personal view: Oh, no: La Richmond by my friend Charlie.
DIVORCER by Gary Lutz & A MORTAL AFFECT by Vincent Standley
Gary Lutz’s new collection of “seven harrowing and hyperprecise short stories about ruinous relationships and their aftershocks,” Divorcer, is available now.
Deron has the honor of being the first one to order one.
And I forgot to mention here, but Vincent Standley (of 3rd bed fame) also has a new book I just recently published, called A Mortal Affect.
Steve Jobs Resigns: an End of an Era
It’s a sad day, at least metaphorically. I’ll point to John Gruber to give the announcement context:
The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility. Directness. Truth. Zoom out enough and you can see that the same things that define Apple’s products apply to Apple as a whole. The company itself is Apple-like. The same thought, care, and painstaking attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like “How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”, “How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also brought to the most important question: “How should a company that creates such things function?”
Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.
Calvados and Dried Currants
You won’t understand why, and I can’t embed the video, but you need to go see Lukas Volger perform this review from a Chowhound comment thread. It will change your life, I know it has changed mine.
Two minutes of your time, a life more fulfilled — I promise.
Dear Clusterflock
Post the most accurate picture and/or link to your first car?
Make Me Over
Please enjoy this magical super-addictive timesuck. Upload a photo and in about 30 seconds flat, transform yourself into someone else. I was going to post the one with the platinum blonde Billy-Idol-esque hairdo, but I chickened out. How about some false eyelashes and bangs instead?
headline of the day
Bull semen forces closure of interstate ramp
What does Google mean by evil?
Aaron Swartz lays it out clearly, it’s about user experience:
Now part of the joke is that Google seems to be using it rather loosely. If you look at their examples of evil deeds, they seem rather mundane compared to cackling supervillains and mass murderers. They specifically name three: only showing relevant ads, not using pop-ups or other annoying gimmicks, and not selling actual search results.
Hardly the stuff of comic books. But what do these three have in common? They’re all instances of refusing to make things worse for your users in order to make more money. Perhaps that still seems like a mundane conception of evil, but I think it gets at something important. Evil isn’t just about doing terrible things — it’s about doing terrible things for bad reasons. The evil villain cackles and brags about how they’re on the side of evil — they explicitly oppose doing good. And this definition of evil is all about that: if you’re working against your own users, you must have crossed the line and joined the other side.
(via everybody)
cars I’d buy, classic, vol. 1
Aston Martin DB5
Not much to say about James Bond’s Aston Martin. It’s perfect. Squat, fat, ugly. Shapely, aggressive, beautiful. It’s the embodiment of what classic car lust should be.
tweet of the day
a library for extroverts: check out a person, not a book
At a library in Canada, you can check out experts, not just books:
The library has assembled a group of volunteers with particularly interesting skills or histories, and has a system in place to put these people in touch with knowledge seekers. If you’re looking for someone to practice your German with, or to ask about their experiences during the Great Depression, or their struggle with illness, the library will put you in touch with an appropriate individual. Once in touch, you can meet in the library’s cafe, keeping the entire operation under one roof.
‘In this study, all they had to do was introduce competition for resources and summer camp became Lord of the Flies’
Some of the Eagles boys discovered the Rattlers’ flag standing unguarded on the baseball field. They discussed what to do and decided it should be ripped from the ground. Once they had it, a possession of the enemy, a symbol of their tribe, they decided to burn it. They then put its scorched remains back in place and sang Taps. Later, the Rattlers saw the atrocity and organized a raid in which they stole the Eagles’ flag and burned it as payback. When the Eagles discovered the revenge burning, the leader issued a challenge – a face off. The two leaders then met with their followers watching and prepared to fight, but the scientists intervened. That night, the Rattlers dressed in war paint and raided the Eagles’ cabins, turning over beds and tearing apart mosquito netting. The staff again intervened when the two groups started circling and gathering rocks. The next day, the Rattlers painted one of the Eagle boy’s stolen blue jeans with insults and paraded it in front of the enemy’s camp like a flag. The Eagles waited until the Rattlers were eating and conducted a retaliatory raid and then ran back to their cabin to set up defenses. They filled socks with rocks and waited. The camp staff, once again, intervened and convinced the Rattlers not to counterattack. The raids continued, and the interventions too, and eventually the Rattlers stole the Eagles knives and medals. The Eagles, determined to retrieve them, formed an organized war party with assigned roles and planned tactical maneuvers. The two groups finally fought in open combat. The scientists broke up the fights. Fearing the two tribes might murder someone, they moved the groups’ camps away from each other.
The story of two groups of boys, under the supervision of psychologists, left to fend for themselves, in Oklahoma’s Robber’s Cave State Park in the 1950s.
(via Aaron Cohen at kottke, and the browser)
on reading The Atrocity Exhibition in Brighton
«There are one or two other bits and pieces, but together the inventory is an adequate picture of a woman, who could easily be reconstituted from it. In fact, such a list may well be more stimulating than the real thing. Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions.»—JG Ballard
More musings on Brighton, Ballard, Quadrophenia, Joy Division, presidential pubic hair, Beachy Head, mods, rockers, cars, crashes, 911, partying, sex & suicide.
from the spam
I really enjoy the smell of an Ice Cream shop. Much more than the wacky ice cream flavors they have these days.
bonus spam name: ‘Klaus Hergershimer’
The Decemberists – Calamity Song
The unembeddable music video (/grumble) recreates a section of DFW’s Infinite Jest. The NYT describes the scene:
Adolescents from a New England tennis academy are seen ritualistically serving balls on a court onto which a map of the world has been superimposed. The balls, which represent five-megaton nuclear warheads, are aimed at objects labeled as military targets — power plants, missile installations — while a lone child oversees the game from a nearby computer terminal.
All in all, it ain’t exactly Battleship. Wallace himself wrote that the athletic skills required by Eschaton separated it “from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around kitchen tables.”
