the wheel in the sky keeps on turning
Update:
Once wheels came to be, it’s hard to imagine not imagining them, says British writer Jonnie Hughes. Wheels, he thinks, are surprisingly unintuitive. No doubt great grandpa knew that circular things roll, but to get from rolling spheres to wheels, that’s a tricky, subtle, business.
quote out of context
“On the Road” reads like a McSweeney’s parody of a tweaker’s LiveJournal.
(thanks, Tim)
Gary Lutz and Lindsay Hunter
From a review in praise of Gary Lutz’s Divorcer I found an excerpt from Lindsay Hunter’s short story collection Daddy’s:
Sibby had the Ziploc out, the one she filled with the spider’s eggs she’d find in the backyard. These are gifts from the Lord, she told me once. He sprinkled them around for me to find. Now she worked the Ziploc under her shoe, slowly mashing the eggs and baby spiders spilling out, like there was great pleasure in it. That what God told you to do with the eggs, I asked her. God told me plenty of times to smash your face under Daddy’s mallet, Sibby said, but sometimes I don’t exactly obey God. She finished her mashing, took off her one shoe and left it over the Ziploc. Let her sock get black with dirt. Why’d you do that, I asked her. Because, she said. She peeled off her sock, laid it out on the back step beside me. They were fixin to hatch, and without no mother it was dumb for me to let them be born. She disappeared into the house behind me.
(thanks, Derek)
Have a nice weekend
Eel removed from man’s bladder after entering penis during beauty spa
The tags on the sidebar are even more penissy, as if that’s possible.
headline of the day, II
Two Denver men charged after taking their dead friend for a ride
tweet of the day, II
archie out of context
via Daring Fireball
headline of the day
Chinese female condoms too small for South Africans
quote out of context
It’s not clear how many klutzes want to notify their insurers that a doctor visit was a W22.02XA, “walked into lamppost, initial encounter” (or, for that matter, a W22.02XD, “walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter”).
(via the browser)
In case you were tired of cats…
Previously on clusterflock.
the works of the old men
Archeologist David Kennedy has been studying stone geoglyphs that can be seen from the air across Syria and Saudi Arabia. The drawings are perhaps 2,000 to 9,000 years old, and no one knows much about what they were used for or what they represent.
Some of the wheels are found in isolation while others are clustered together. At one location, near the Azraq Oasis, hundreds of them can be found clustered into a dozen groups. “Some of these collections around Azraq are really quite remarkable,” Kennedy said.
In Saudi Arabia, Kennedy’s team has found wheel styles that are quite different: Some are rectangular and are not wheels at all; others are circular but contain two spokes forming a bar often aligned in the same direction that the sun rises and sets in the Middle East.
The ones in Jordan and Syria, on the other hand, have numerous spokes and do not seem to be aligned with any astronomical phenomena. “On looking at large numbers of these, over a number of years, I wasn’t struck by any pattern in the way in which the spokes were laid out,” Kennedy said.
A gallery of ten more images here.
it needs to stop
Click to enlarge. (thanks, Rich)
I don’t get football, but I get this.
Doubt is our product
How climate change denial equates to the tobacco industry.
tweet of the day
What he said.
Clint Eastwood: ‘I don’t give a fuck who wants to get married to anybody else’.
The I don’t give a fuck slide show.
CATS
I’ve been recently considering a cat. I know I won’t get one, but it doesn’t stop me from considering.
Incidentally, the fellow who did this writes/draws pictures for sad children.
I do not fear death
I found Roger Ebert’s essay on mortality (excerpted from his new book) to be quite a lovely catalyst for reflection.
Ginger Seal
Barbara Hammer: “Sanctus”
If you don’t beat me to it, I’ll probably post it.
I discovered that I’d drafted a post of Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus a couple of years ago, and it has languished ever since in clusterflock limbo.
Well, no time like the present, as they say.
from the comments
SC:
Well, it seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information — how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it — is what distinguishes my writing from yours.
quote out of context
Cornhole, a simple yet addictive pastime with Midwestern origins, is sweeping the Northeast.
(via @dansinker)
Kevin Sampsell in Conversation with Gary Lutz
The Rumpus did a short interview with Gary Lutz about his new collection Divorcer:
Kevin: Do you drive? What kinds of cars do you like?
Gary: I hate all cars, but I drive a black Chevrolet Cavalier filled with trash. The driver’s side of the body has been keyed so intricately, so all-over-ishly (though perhaps keying isn’t quite the word; there might have been ice picks and chisels involved as well), that the vandal (should she ever get caught) might benefit as much from a gallerist as from a social worker.
(thanks, Derek)
Nope. They’re not. They’re dead.
If you watch one local cable television taxidermy commercial today, let it be this one.
(via @jasonfried, via @coudal)
A Fudgesicle is a frozen, ice cream-like snack
“It was two in the morning. I was living in Orange County at the time and was asleep with my wife. My two-year old at the time was in another room. I opened my eyes and there was a naked man wearing my leather jacket eating a Fudgesicle in front of my bed,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
This would have been yesterday’s headline of the day, II: Nicolas Cage awoken by naked man with Fudgesicle
(thanks, Tim)
