Jonah Weiner interviews Louis C.K.
From The Write Around: A Series of Conversations with Writers
I worked [at KFC] for a year or something, and that was really hard work. I was a cook, and you had to do everything. I’d always figured it was some kind of frozen thing, but it’s serious chicken cooking. You get a big box of whole Perdue chickens in the morning, not frozen, but cold as hell, and you have to break them up into pieces. Some of them you break, and the little bones rip your hands up, it’s so hard, and then you marinate the chicken in this big metal drum. It’s a process, it starts early in the morning. The marinade is water and… it’s all MSG, that’s all it is, MSG and salt and some other stuff, and it gets turned in this drum to soften and marinate it, and there’s these packets that don’t say what they are, and a breading, and you throw it all in this breading, and there’s this basket you shake out until it’s just coated with the breading, and you put it in these cages, this cylinder, then you close the cage up, and there’s a drum-like deep-fry cooker, hot, hot, hot grease, and you drop it in there. When you drop it in, the grease burbles up, and there was a fucking thing where in order to lock it into place, after you dropped it, three-quarters of the way down, you had to turn it and then it goes in, so you couldn’t let go of the thing. They made these hooks that you’re supposed to use to do the turn with, but they just didn’t work. You had to just do it with your hands.
dear clusterflock
Today is better than yesterday.
Tomorrow will be better than today.
2CELLOS: Welcome to the Jungle
I’m sure these guys could’ve pulled this off without the excellent headbanging hair, but it certainly helps.
Don’t Forget Your Umbrella.
I really struggled trying to pick which images to post from this collection of vintage Tokyo subway manner posters. I feel remiss not including the Santa Says You’re Probably Drunk poster. Or the Hitler Is Inconsiderate of Others’ Personal Space poster. Or the These Sumo Wrestlers Are Basically Just Fucking poster.
There’s a real obsession with left-behind umbrellas here. And chewing gum, which can apparently fell even the superest of superheroes.
(via)
I’m dope enough to assrape the dude who made nicotine.
And, by the way, if you don’t already know these guys, BADBADNOTGOOD, you need to.
Watch this too, then. If you find yourself, though, terrified by the drummer, the thing to do is focus on the piano player. He is a beautiful flower of everything that’s right with the world. Or something.
from my voicemail
Uh, yes, my name is ————. My telephone number is ————. The purpose of my call is I’m listening to public radio, and, uh, they’re talking about, uh, viral, uh, strains of, uh, birds. Uhhh, I was parked at Walmart, and a woman was feeding birds, and I said, “Ma’am, don’t do that,” I says, “Ya know, they they they know how to live on their own.” And, uh, the guy from Walmart came out, the manager of the store, and says, “Oh, you’re gonna have to leave here because, uh, the, uh, asphalt’s too weak for an RV.” And he was, it was pouring rain out; he was really acting like an idiot. I did call for the Centers for Disease Control, and they don’t seem to care what one way or another that people feed birds. And I just can’t imagine why, since birds spread diseases more than anything else, uh, why, uh, these people just aren’t taking it seriously. But. I’m sixty-six years old; I’ll be dead in a few years. So what difference does it make to me, ya know? It just it irritates me how ignorant we are, ya know? Umm, just don’t feed the birds, ya know? It’s crazy. They can fend, they know how to forage for themselves. And I love birds. I learned how to fly. I’ve been a pilot all my life. And, uh, airlines and corporate. And, uh, but, uh, you just don’t feed birds. That’s that’s craziness. Ya know, and I, but, uh, if more people, if they, uh, really know about it, then, uh, maybe they might do something about it. But, uh, there’s the other people that’s just gonna say, “Oh, hooey, I’ll feed birds whenever I feel like. It’s my right to do whatever I want to do, so.” Well. I guess that’s the case, ya know? Anyways. Take care. Bye.
Also: The related episode of WHYY’s Fresh Air.
quote out of context
One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole.
And I Quote, “Gazing at breasts makes men healthy.”
Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female, is roughly equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out.
(Via @wilshipley.)
Video of That Weirdest Thing Thing
That thing from Norway from before:
They Get Like Little Cookies
Steps for Attaining Baseball Happiness
Josh Wilker over at Rob Neyer’s blog on the never-ending pursuit of happiness:
1. Buy a pack of baseball cards. For best results, pay no more than a quarter and make sure the pack has a hard stick of gum sliding around loose inside. If packs long ago stopped costing a quarter or less and no longer include flour-flecked sticks of hard gum sliding around loose inside, the attainment of happiness may be impossible.
When I was ten or eleven, my parents and I went to Woods Hole for a vacation, and once or twice a day my dad would give me a buck or two to get me out of their hair. It was supposed to be to play video games or get a MAD magazine or some taffy or, ya know, a super ball to break someone’s window with or something like that. But I just kept taking those dollar bills and going down to the drugstore and getting individual packs of TOPPS baseball cards.
I came home from that vacation with something like seven hundred new baseball cards and an awful lot of very pink gum stuck in the treads of my sneakers. I don’t remember Woods Hole very well. Great vacation, though.
from the comments
That is all. Carry on.
Who Pooped Dot Org.
Quite literally, my new favorite website:
One way scientists learn about animals is by studying their poop—also called “skat” or “dung.” Let’s look at some animal poop and see if you can guess who left it behind.
(And, by the way: Make sure you have your sound on…)
dear clusterflock
At Rick Neece’s behest (though, I obviously should’ve thought of this myself), we’ve got business to attend to:
What should Phil Bebbington’s one-eyed wonder worm be called? We need good names here, people. And, in case it makes a difference name-wise, said member is fully intact.
An Elephant Makes a Big Poop
I would imagine that we’re all pretty excited about the upcoming Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, but news has just broken that work has already begun on Jonze’s next big-screen version of a classic children’s book:
dear clusterflock
This is a pretty good conversation, but it would seem to me that this one would be more fun:
What did your parents deny you?
Elizabeth Alexander and a (Very) Brief History of Inaugural Poetry
Elizabeth Alexander, who teaches at Yale, was plucked last week from the relatively obscure recesses of contemporary poetry for a moment on the world stage. President-elect Barack Obama has commissioned her to compose and read a poem for his inauguration, making her only the fourth poet in American history to read at one and elevating the art to unaccustomed prominence in the national psyche, at least for a day.
I heard an interesting piece about Ms. Alexander on NPR the other day, and then The New York Times ran the above-quoted article about her on Saturday, and she seems like an interesting person entirely deserving of this honor, but the thing that has jumped out at me from both of these sources is that there’ve only been three inaugural poems before. Ever. In American history: Robert Frost in 1961 (Kennedy’s inauguration), Maya Angelou in 1993, and Miller Williams in 1997 (both of Clinton’s inaugurations).
Some of this makes sense. Kennedy was the first one to think of it, or at least put it in place. And then maybe it seemed to LBJ and the next president or two like bad hoodoo to emulate Kennedy’s inaugural and then the idea sort of faded away. Until Clinton—always trying to emulate Kennedy—resurrected it in 1993 and continued it through his second inauguration.
But here’s the thing: When President W took office in 2001, the last two inaugurations had included a poem. Not including one, then, would have to be a purposeful, calculated choice. And then an epiphany struck me:
The Curious App of Benjamin Button*
Shameless self-promotion alert:
As some of you may sort of vaguely recall, I achieved a small amount of Internet acclaim a few months ago with a serialized (and hopefully handsomely typeset) version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (upon which the new David Fincher/Brad Pitt/et al. movie is loosely based) that I designed and ran on my dumb little website.
Well, a month or two ago, Magnetism Studios in New York City approached me about licensing my design for an iPhone/iPod touch app. I’m here to announce that the resultant app (which also includes another of Fitzgerald’s fantasies, “Tarquin of Cheapside,” as a bonus story) is currently available.
I can tell you that we really spent a lot of time on getting the text to look as good as is possible on a screen that size, and the app (and my work on it specifically, thank you very much) is already receiving good notices. If you’re familiar with the Classics app, ours is similar but with an emphasis on the text and its readability, which will hopefully make for a nice reading experience.
So, if you’ve got an iPhone or a touch, check it out.
Shameless self-promotion ends here.
*I tried every combination of Curious Case and Benjamin Button and App that I could think of for the title of this post, and I’m afraid that I still failed to come up with anything even the least bit clever. For this I apologize.
dear clusterflock
I just realized that Sarah Palin’s existence has made me not really interested in seeing Alaska anymore¹².
Am I the only one that’s happened to?
¹I used to be very interested in seeing Alaska.
²I find this to be a very strange—and obviously totally irrational—instance of some sort of weird transference on the part of my id or something.
November 5, 2008.
Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago, IL, USA
I’m just such a sucker for newspaper design. Some more of my favorites from today after the jump.
Plague Town
My sister-in-law (Alisia’s sister), Josslyn, is a budding actress living out in LA doing the whole, ya know, budding actress thing. She’s done some extra work. She’s gotten some small parts in some small and medium-sized productions. She was the lead in an independent horror film. She’s got an IMDb page. We all hear little snippets of what’s going on with her on the left coast and the work she’s getting and such, and we file it away in our brains under Tales of Jossie: Maybe She Can Really Do This Thing.
And then today I’m in Google Reader looking through the Latest Movie Trailers feed from Apple’s trailers page, and BLAM!, there’s Plague Town, starring Josslyn DeCrosta (it’s the independent horror flick I mentioned). Right there on the Apple site. And it hits me like so many proverbial tons of so many proverbial bricks: My dorky little sister-in-law is an effing, GD movie star.
Just So You Know
When you define a word, the word being defined is the definiendum.
Just thought you should know that.
Carry on.
Regular Folk
Okay, so, I watched the Obamamerical in its entirety last night, and I thought it was generally very well done (though, unlike the punditry, I thought the hand off to the live broadcast was clumsily handled and that establishing shot of the arena in Florida showed way more empty space than we should’ve seen and don’t even get me started about the fact that it was in standard definition…), and I really like Senator Obama quite a bit, but here’s my question:
Are you like me? Do you just not even give half a shit about all the real-life stories of real-life people that are always profiled in political ads and speeches and what not? I mean, I really just tune it out. Who. Cares.
Is that just me?
(Watch the Obamamercial in its entirety, after the jump…)
Twitterflockers?
A comment of Cindy’s just made me realize: I should follow all of you clusterflockers on Twitter. So who’s using it, and what’re your screenname dealies?
Mine’s greybean, f’anyone’s interested.
W. T. F.
Okay, no, seriously: What the fuck is he saying?
(via John Gruber on Twitter)
