dear clusterflock
Opinions on center-mounted dashboard gauges in cars?
Laura Marling || A Creature I Don’t Know
Via Lauren Stephenson, who has up and absquatulated to Buenos Aires (in truth, the move was a long time in the making) and who sent this video to my friend Charlie, who’ll be Buenos Aires-bound come November.
I love it when my friends from different realms mix and match.
Lars von Trier
GQ interviews von Trier and it appears he is as unusual as his films:
Have you never done anything in your life that you’re genuinely sorry for?
“No.”
Really?
“No.”
That’s astonishingly unusual.
“Maybe, but that’s maybe where I’m really sick in my mind. You can’t be sorry about something that’s fundamentally you. Maybe I’m a freak in that sense.” He ponders a moment, wondering whether he can think of any exceptions to this rule. Perhaps just one:
“I’m sorry when I was a child I had a little bird that I fed, and I was so young I forgot it when I was on holiday, and then it was dead when I came home. That I was sorry for. That was terrible. But then again, I forgot. And I feel somehow that I was criticized highly for this Cannes, and I must say that I feel like a child who has been falling over on his bike, and I’ve been yelled at for that. Yes, you will yell at the child for some time that he has not been driving carefully enough, but you can’t continuously yell at him because he hurt himself.”
headline of the day
Artificial Leaf Moves Two Steps Closer to Reality
How do I feel about this car?
quotes out of context
What is most problematic about Justice Thomas, for many people, is that he seems unwilling to go along with that illusion.
Due to evolution in engineering, exhaustion of raw materials, and flagging business standards, we will never see their like again.
…all animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with.
“Snappy’s pretty territorial and he attacked the filter [in his water tank] one day, and a few weeks after that, I noticed he was orange,” said Tracey Sandstrom in an interview with the Herald Sun.
Driving while desperately needing to urinate isn’t a crime, but maybe it should be.
I think that almost everything I do – this book included – is of a genre that I guess you could call detective nonfiction
We think we know what we’re looking at when we look at a photograph. We think we’re looking at something objective. We think we can see reality. But often we’re just looking back at ourselves rather than out into the world. We are reinforcing our beliefs with what we see. The idea of my book is that there’s a mystery in every photograph. What are we really looking at? In my experience, trying to figure out just what’s going on inevitably involves an investigation. I like to think of myself as the new Sherlock Holmes of photography.
From an interview with Errol Morris on his new book Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography.
my current desktop
A man who had abused his ex-girlfriend and then plotted to kill her and make it look like she had been mauled by a bear was sentenced to prison for trying to hire someone to kill her in a staged car crash
Clyde Gardner gave up on his first idea: Kill a bear, skin it and wear the pelt while using its claws to kill the woman as she took out her garbage. The plan included him wearing the bear’s paws on his feet so no human footprints would be left behind.
And now, for the rest of the story.
from the moderated comments
Well fuck me to because I just come over this guy on other web sites and if it’s true then what he stated proves time travel is part of the future.
Speed of light fine but the question is time travel the ultimate goal for mankind. To know the future could save America from the hell that’s coming its way. Has time travel occurred? Well futureatme proved it has because the info given before an event happened is info from the future.
This is an extract from an email to the New York Times.
tweet of the day
headline of the day, II
Capitol Police investigating The Onion for fake hostage crisis tweets
William Shatner, Iron Man
Here’s a video of William Shatner recording a version of Iron Man for his new album “Seeking Major Tom”.
Update: Star Trek: Hidden Frontier.
(via ★jkottke)
In a perverse way, his work for the government only encouraged his criminal behavior and pushed his wayward ambitions into the stratosphere
Only 25 years old, with little more than a high school education, Albert had created the perfect bubble, a hermetically sealed moral universe in which he made the rules and controlled all the variables — and the only code that mattered was the loyalty of his inner circle. He even had an insurance policy, one designed to keep him a step ahead of the federal agents charged with tracking cybercrime: For the past four years, Albert had been working as an informant for the Secret Service, helping federal agents to identify and bust other rogue hackers. His double life as a snitch gave him an inside look at how the feds try to safeguard the nation’s computer data — and reinforced his own sense of superiority. “Psychologically,” his sister later told a judge, “it was feeding an obsession that in the end would become my brother’s downfall.”
I felt like the outcome of the story was less interesting than the details, but if you’re fascinated by psychology, and crime, and the internet it’s still worth a read.
headline of the day
Cat with 2 faces lives 12 years, sets record
quotes out of context
She says: “Products that are related to beauty, such as cosmetics and perfume, are presented to us as indispensable allies in any conquest, and to refrain from buying them is the equivalent of retiring to a convent.”
The Kindles are to Amazon what the printed catalog was to Sears a century ago.
What gives us the right, sitting safely at our screens in our living rooms, offices or studios, to dip our fingers into other people’s suffering and gaze at such horrors?
Update:
What they may or may not have done at the cemetery now has parents and administrators up in arms, even if they can’t definitively confirm what actually took place.
my current desktop
from the spam
This can be a really nice web site, too bad I am an asshole.
tweet of the day
Little is known about the details . . .
(yeah, right), but for the past week I have been enraptured with your Octopoteuthis deletron.
These squid just don’t care about the sex of other squid they bump into.
Little is known about the details but it seems that the male ejaculates a packet of sperm at the mating partner, and the packet turns inside out, essentially shooting the sperm contained in a membrane into the flesh of the partner, where they stay embedded until the female (if the shooter has been lucky) is ready to fertilize its eggs. If males are the recipient of these rocket sperm, they are just stuck with them.
I was up late one night last week looking for video. I was over at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute site. Because who wouldn’t want to see “a tentacled invertebrate that shoots sperm into its mate’s flesh”? Sperm in a packet that turns inside out! That’s like something out of a Cronenberg film.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo for this and for indirectly keeping me up all night.)
Jamie with a .44 Magnum Ruger Super Redhawk
A photo series of women and their guns.
So I can’t sleep
It’s probably because of a variety of internal and external stimuli, but I suspect one of the larger factors might be the dude who is always yelling at a Bobby I’ve never met. This neighbor has the strange habit of screaming “fuck you you you you you you you you” around two in the morning. This repetition somehow finds the nexus of hypnotic, tragic, hilarious, and enraging.
Related news: I now have the Kansas City Police phone number in my favorites on my iPhone.
from the archives: April 28, 2006
I always wondered why Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown decided to visit Israel and hang out with Ariel Sharon. Tonight, while eating Country Fried Kalebone™ at phATLanta’s Soul Vegetarian restaurant on N. Highland Avenue, I finally found the answer.
Thoughts on parentheticals and quotation marks
For a long time I applied the same logic to quotation marks and parentheses. If a parenthetical fell within the confines of a sentence, I placed the period after the final parenthesis (which is the logic I also applied to quotation marks). From a consistency standpoint, this still makes sense to me, but then I started to think about the aesthetics of the “periods always inside quotation marks crowd.” (I have to admit, it kind of makes sense to me.)
Robottke — building a Kottke-bot
From an article at Slate about an attempt to automize Jason Kottke:
How does it work? We began by crawling all the sources that Jason Kottke is likely to look at every day—we look at all the sites he links to, and all the stuff that people he follows on Twitter are sharing. The hard part is choosing the best, most Kottke-like links from Robottke’s collection. It’s helpful that the human Kottke meticulously tags all of his posts with keywords. When Robottke finds a link, it searches for topics that it knows Kottke likes—the more it finds, the higher the article ranks.
(via @jkottke, of course)
