Lego Remington .45 Revolver
Click through for more.
The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind’
Short story, if you are not rich or require a living wage, then you’re probably screwed:
The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)
Unless, of course, your reason for studying was for the love of wisdom and not a career, but does anybody do that anymore? (via Austin Kleon)
Patrick Stewart on the internet, iPhone, and games
Glad to see Patrick and I share the same feeling about letters and phone calls.
via waxy
Most of the time
I am confused at why the internet cares about what it cares about.
quote out of context
“Telling trout purists you’re chasing lowly catfish with a fly rod is tantamount to telling Heidi Klum that what you’re really attracted to is bearded women with no teeth.”
ennui and the internet
Why I am so enslaved to the Internet, I do not know. Nor do I care, in the habitual manner of addicts—at least not until the consequences begin to rear their hydra heads, as they are rather doing right now. My first instinct is to say that it’s because learning stuff provides the communion with other minds that is the best defense against existential loneliness and ennui. The more you learn, the less alone you will feel. And by now the Internet must contain knowledge enough to cure all six or seven billion of us of that loneliness.
hat tip to Autumn who said the piece reminded her of me.
Recursive Webcast
via coudal
Existential Dodge
The commercial had me until it proffered blatant consumerism as the answer (not that I really expected otherwise).
“democracy’s next step”
hat tip to Gruber
Heidegger
Heidegger’s works are artifacts of darkness, not paths toward Enlightenment. By design, they perpetuate Nazism long after its battlefield defeat. His effect on philosophy is pernicious.
Slaughterhouse 90210
Quite possibly the best tumblr ever?
Joanna Newsom – Good Intentions Paving Company
For Amanda Mae
Wolves by Phosphorescent
(thanks for the reminder, Autumn)
dear clusterflock
Looks like I will be a free agent at the end of March and my itch to move is great (assuming there was a paycheck at the other end), but I find myself asking the age old question: east or west?
A Criterion Out of Print Sale
Here is the list of movies going out of print:
Alphaville
Carlos Saura’s Flamenco Trilogy (Eclipse Series 6)
Le corbeau
Coup de torchon
Diary of a Country Priest
The Fallen Idol
Forbidden Games (Criterion and Essential Art House editions)
Gervaise (Essential Art House edition)
Grand Illusion (Criterion and Essential Art House editions)
Le jour se lève (Essential Art House edition)
Last Holiday (Essential Art House edition)
Mayerling (Essential Art House edition)
The Orphic Trilogy
Peeping Tom
Pierrot le fou (DVD and Blu-ray editions)
Port of Shadows
Quai des Orfèvres
The Small Back Room
The Tales of Hoffmann (Criterion and Essential Art House editions)
Trafic
Le trou
Variety Lights (Essential Art House edition)
The White Sheik
a kindle of kittens
a shrewdness of apes, a bloat of hippopotamuses, a parliament of owls, a labor of moles, and other collective names for animals.
John Edwards And The Morality Myth
Since I am playing the political game today, here is a great NPR piece.
Can Republicans Govern?
An obviously partisan article with some interesting and, occasionally, true insight about this country and The Narrative:
What if Republicans aimed at a different story altogether? What if the story of America were one in which government imposed ever less control over citizens? What if they considered every policy initiative through this lens: Does it help Americans become less, rather than more, dependent on the government? Their goal would then be to create—as best they can, and over time—a nation of self-reliant citizens, not merely “consumers” and “providers” and “practitioners” and “beneficiaries” and “recipients” and all the other less-than-fully-human descriptors of the left.
What if our national history were recast and understood in this new light? What if we reminded ourselves that it was the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass that ended slavery and the Democratic party that dragged its feet? That it was the Republican party that pushed through women’s suffrage? That Republicans like Senator Everett Dirksen were leaders in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s? The overthrow of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, the end of segregation all empowered people vis à vis their government. And these advances in citizen empowerment were then wrongly put to the service of (seemingly well-intentioned) egalitarian programs that result not in the improvement of America’s citizenry but in their perpetual dependence?
If that were the tale told, then I would be comfortable calling myself Republican again.
Gullshrooms
I feel like you’d have to be on them to come up with this image.
You can buy the original (as well as other art) here. The proceeds go to Haiti. (via)
Creating a Bookfuturist book
You should go take a gander at my call for submissions.
closed platforms versus open platforms
Most people drive automatic cars whereas I prefer a stick. This person is arguing the same damn thing:
I think that it’s a real possibility that in 10 years, general purpose computers will be seen as being strictly for developers and hobbyists. The descendants of the iPhone and iPad and their competitors will rule the consumer market and people will embrace the closed nature of these platforms for the same reason that Steve Levy hyped Palladium almost 10 years ago — because what you get for trading off freedom is reduced risk. There will be few (if any) viruses, and applications will “just work.”
General purpose computing is too complicated for most people anyway, and the iPad’s descendants along with similar competing products from other companies will offer an enticing alternative. So I see the death of the traditional, open personal computer as a likely occurrence.
I never understood arguments about this. Open and closed software platforms are different tools for different situations. If closed platforms mean less phone calls from my mother about her netbook, then I want more of them.
I also don’t understand why geeks demand that everybody needs to care about how to customize their computer.* I don’t expect people to care about Second Temple Judaism or the nuances of Derridean deconstruction (it’s not a method!), so why must people who just want to check their email and surf the web care about open platforms? That sounds pretty stupid to me.
Maybe I am being naive, but I thought we were talking about tools here, not economic policies.
*For the record, I consider myself an intense computer hobbyist. I run Linux (the Mint distro); Windows; and OS X in parallel, muck around with web development, and build my own computers. Mostly, however, I haven’t a clue what I am doing.
Fool’s Errand
Who remembers the game Fool’s Errand? It is one of my all-time favorite puzzle games.
Turns out you can now download the game for free.
Subway Chicken
‘I don’t recommend those old stories to anyone.’
The stories in question have been mentioned here before.
RIP JD
Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author’s son said in a statement from Salinger’s literary representative. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.
One of my favorite authors, he definitely shaped the way I think.