A Nail’s Life
They get so much better. (thanks, Dale)
Coffee Cups
I just love these (via Monoscope).
Thanks for being alive!
An odd little piece that starts with a hat tip to the German theologian, Karl Barth, and ends with this story (via):
Once a friend and I settled in on a cramped patch of grass to see Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals. While we waited for the act to start, a high-school-age girl leaned across a couple of other people, pointed to her boyfriend, and said to me, “He wants to take your picture. Is that OK?” I am not typically accosted by the paparazzi, and she must have detected my puzzlement. “He wants to be like you when he grows up,” she said.
Then I remembered I was a 50ish guy in a sea of younger people, a gray-haired “aging hipster,” as my daughter calls me, in a Johnny Cash T-shirt amid bronzed prime-of-life kids. It was a rock festival, after all. I awkwardly but happily posed for the commemoration of the moment.
About halfway through the set, Harper and his band were cooking red hot. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the boyfriend. “This is real, man!” he yelled over the pounding music and raucous applause. “We are really here!” I gave him a thumbs-up. The girl beamed.
When the show was over, we gathered our backpacks and water bottles. I told the teenagers, “Thanks for helping to make this a fun evening.”
The girl nodded, but the boy vigorously shook his head and sputtered, “No, man! Thank you for being alive!”
I chose to take it as the compliment it was intended to be. In summer, with good music, good friends and sweet strangers, just being alive is joy enough. And you know what Barth said about that: “Joy is really the simplest form of gratitude.”
For Mary
‘Stoned wallabies make crop circles’
Was a BBC News headline:
“The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,” Lara Giddings told the hearing.
“Then they crash,” she added. “We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”
Dear Clusterflock
Do you still have a land line and, if so, do you party on it?
Supernova
Speaking of youth, a 14-year-old, Caroline Moore, found a supernova that baffles scientists:
Her discovery did indeed turn out to be a supernova, but it goes against all the rules we thought we knew. For example, it’s in a galaxy that’s in the process of “eating itself,” UGC 12682, where supernovas don’t usually occur. It’s also one of the least luminous supernovas ever detected, and scientists haven’t found any evidence of hydrogen, which usually turns up around dimmer supernovas. Now scientists are theorizing that the lack of hydrogen may stem from the fact that this was a massive star that lost mass. Perhaps its core collapsed into a black hole without transferring any energy to the outer layers of the star.
iPod versus the Walkman
13-year-old Scott Campbell swaps an iPod with a Walkman for a week:
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn’t is “shuffle”, where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly – effective, if a little laboured.
I remember the first time I had to use a rotary phone, I was clueless.
Googling with Bing
Arduino the Cat, Breadboard the Mouse, and Cutter the Elephant
A great piece on children as natural interactive designers. (via Dave Smith’s bookmarks)
Scream
Andrew Spitz recorded the screams of bungee jumpers. The result is pretty amusing.
June 26, 1498
The emperor of China patents the toothbrush: hogback bristles set into a piece of bone or bamboo. Dental hygiene takes a step up.
How — or if — you cleaned your teeth before this time depended on culture and class. The chew stick, or chewing stick or toothstick, was a piece of twig. One could chew one end of the stick until it was quite frayed and then use the frayed end to brush and scrape one’s teeth.
If you had a knife handy, you could carve the other end of the stick to a sharp point to pick at the larger specks of oral detritus. And if the twig came from an aromatic tree or shrub, all the better, because you got some breath freshener in the bargain.
You’re cute
Or, alternatively, I love you.
A snippet of Lloyd’s reflections from yesterday evening on the porch.
The blue and the green are the same color
Plus, it is used to illustrate a nifty principle.
Elliot Smith – All Cleaned Out
I saw that Eliott Smith’s old car was for sale which gave me a hankering to listen to his music which, in turn, reintroduced me to this tune. I had forgotten how much I love it.
a must read movie review
On Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen:
Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that’s because people don’t understand that this isn’t a movie, in the conventional sense. It’s an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.
Barry
More. See, also, the info on the exihibition.
Data.gov
Maybe he is a nerd:
The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
Ratatat – Seventeen Years
This band is keeping me sane today.
Atreyu!
via Snarkmartket
Alpha Ball
(thanks, Autumn)
John Hodgman at Radio & TV Correspondents’ Dinner
Self-censorship
There was a time when my sister would mention how much she wants an SUV, and I’d be unable to resist launching into a whole thing about how irresponsible and wasteful they are. But after receiving my thousandth blank, confused stare from everybody at the table, I realized it was futile,” Wilmot said. “Now, I don’t even flinch when my dad mentions he’s reading ‘this amazing book called The Celestine Prophecy.’ That’s how bad it is.”
Y’all
Somehow it makes me happy that two of the top search terms which bring people to clusterflock are “fuck my life” and “fuck life.”
Notice, also, “cake farts” is back. Le sigh.
Every Friday for me is Bowie Friday
It gets pretty freaky in the office on Fridays