Visible Tom Waits
By Jim Lockey.
this is a metaphor for something
Wastelander Panda
A prologue for a developing TV series. I would totally watch this.
dear clusterflock
Here’s the thing. Pronouncing “Gyro” like it’s spelled makes you sound like a rube, & pronouncing it the right way makes you sound pedantic.
— @joeks (@joeks) January 25, 2012
What are other words like this?
The face behind the honey badger
Embedding the video requires a mess of code I don’t want to propagate, so just go watch it here and, on the off chance you haven’t seen the video in question, you should probably go do that now.
Dear Esther
The illustration in Dear Esther, a remake of a Half Life 2 mod, is incredible.
I’ll definitely be purchasing the game, if only to gawp.
(via)
What are the best photos taken from an airplane?
I don’t know about best, but some of these images on Quora ain’t bad. For instance:
photo out of context
wait for it
90s Dance A Capella
I am not sure how I missed this back in March, but there it is.
(thanks, Rich)
nobody understands debt
This has been passed around for a few days, but here is Krugman on the American deficit:
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.
Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
for the Texans, specifically
Dallas teen missing since 2010 was mistakenly deported:
There are still many unanswered questions about how an African-American girl who speaks no Spanish is mistaken for a foreign national.
Christianity and the Future of the Book
Alan Jacobs writes a beautiful exposition on the importance of understanding technology and theology, underscoring what makes books so incredible:
Consider the moment in the Confessions when, after hearing and obeying the voice telling him to “take it and read,” Augustine sees the words in what he calls “the book of the apostle” that changed his life. Note first that he can open the book to a random place, something that would have been difficult with a scroll; then, after reading the momentous passage, he closes the book, with his finger inserted to mark the place. He goes, “with a face now at peace,” to tell his friend Alypius what has happened, bringing the book with him, and when Alypius asks to see the passage, Augustine simply opens the book to the place marked by his finger and shows it to his friend. To us such a set of movements is absolutely natural — and yet not so many generations before Augustine the incident could not have played out in anything remotely resembling this famous scene. Nor, to anticipate a later stage in this exposition, would it have played out in the same way had Augustine been using a Kindle.
(thanks, Josh)
Recession Christmas
via ★gruber
Fictionaut: Cooper Renner
I am almost envious of the simplicity of living that long time flocker, Cooper Renner, describes:
What is it like living sparely and simply, something you have mentioned to me, having a simple life as a creative person in all the ways that you do…
I wish I could live even more simply. I guess it all started twenty years ago when I started getting geographically restless. Moving lots of things around gets really boring (not to mention heavy and time-consuming), so I started divesting. About five years later I bought and moved into a travel trailer for the first time and started living in RV parks. One simply can’t pile up a lot of stuff if one has only 200 square feet to live in. And then several years after that I switched to a trailer with less than 100 square feet, so… Having a Nook helps in the book area, and using an iPod helps musically. I’ve long since gotten to the point that things feel like a terrible burden to me, something to care for and worry about. If a university somewhere would give me an office to work out of, then I would almost certainly let books start piling up again, even against my own will, in that office, and still keep my living space light. I tend toward the thought, though I haven’t quite attained the reality of it, that I don’t want to own anything that anybody would want to steal from me.
Cooper, however, mostly talks about his writing with a rather nice hat tip to clusterflock’s creator, Deron Bauman:
Because I didn’t go through the MFA (or any comparable) system, most of my learning about writing has come through reading (mostly older) writers and from contacts with editors (generally writers themselves) who published my poems, notably Gordon Lish and Deron Bauman. I also had long and encouraging correspondences with Donald Hall and Guy Davenport, though we didn’t necessarily discuss my work all that much. We wrote about books, writers, all sorts of things.
you are going to need this eventually…
for that email or IM conversation, I just know it.
Lewis Hine’s teen bike messengers
A fun collection of photographs and descriptions of teen bike messengers from the early 1900s.
The Difference Between A Men’s Magazine And A Rapist?
Researchers gave a group of men and women quotes from the British lad mags FHM, Loaded, Nuts and Zoo, as well as excerpts from interviews with actual convicted rapists originally published in the book The Rapist Files. The participants couldn’t reliably identify which statements came from magazines and which from rapists — what’s more, they rated the magazine quotes as slightly more derogatory than the statements made by men serving time for raping women. The researchers also showed both sets of quotes to a separate group of men — the men were more likely to identify with the rapists’ statements than the lad mag excerpts. The only slightly bright spot in the study: when researchers randomly (and sometimes incorrectly) labelled the quotes as coming from either rapists or magazines, the men were more likely to identify with the ones allegedly drawn from mags. At least they didn’t want to agree with rapists.
New Christmas Catalog Price List
There are a bunch of good’uns.
Best Blogs of 2011
I was very privileged to be asked to contribute to this year’s Bygone Bureau list alongside some very fine bloggers. Worth a read, even if I cheated.
Best Talk Show Ever?
I don’t really know where to begin with this.
headline of the day
Chicago universities preemptively buying up porn domains
the impracticality of a cheeseburger
Sounds like a fellow who is not seriously committed to the slow food movement (I kid, I kid):
Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.
A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.
via The Morning News
quote out of context
coming out of sleep
I like my sentences like my women: with colons.
