composites
Brian Joseph Davis uses police composite sketch software to draw characters from books. This one is Judge Holden from Blood Meridian (or “middle-age Billy Corgan” as it is tagged).
humans having fun
via Colossal
plagiarism 101
If you’re ripping off someone else’s talk and forget to mention that your whole act is borrowed material, you should probably do it at a conference where that person is not the keynote speaker. Dan Meyer attended a session this morning that sounded very, very familiar…
Metta World Peace thanks Jesus Christ that he still has his teeth
So not only did he build the world in seven days and seven nights, but he also said, “OK, let them lose their teeth early, rather than late.”
don’t smile
According to new research on body language out of the University of British Columbia, women find happy men—in this study, men who were smiling in photos—significantly less attractive than men portraying other emotions.
headline of the day
Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses
At the height of the Battle of Alcaniz on May 23, 1809, as he was about to give the order for a desperate charge by French troops into the center of the Spanish line, Col. P.F.M.A. Dejean happened to glance down.
The air around him was thick with gunpowder and blood, but on a flower beside a stream, he saw something unusual. A beetle. Species unknown. He immediately dismounted, collected it, and pinned the specimen to the cork he had glued inside his helmet.
The first lines of The Species Seekers by Richard Conniff, which came out yesterday.
quote out of context
Off the field, I’m all hers. But on the field, I’m a monster. And I don’t want my queen to be associated with a monster.
whoa
I just had a miniature explosion – the good kind – inside my head. I don’t quite know how to tell the story, but I’ll try to do it linearly. That’s usually a good strategy.
1st: I become an English teacher and rely almost completely on a book by Jim Burke to figure out what I’m doing. I think it’s a great book. I read every word, including the eloquent epigraph from one of Burke’s students:
Without companions, the world is a sea of stories with no one to listen.
2nd: I join Clusterflock.
3rd: I find that a certain Clusterflocker – Kelsey Parker – was the author of that epigraph.
4th: I hum “It’s a small world” to myself incessantly.
photo out of context
headline of the day
Teacher Sets Herself on Fire in Front of Students
one more thing to watch out for when riding a bike
I just hope that there’s someone right behind me with a video camera when something like this happens to me. (via)
kill comic sans
I
a dull yet cathartic first-person shooter for the casual type geek
writing prompts
Deron asked if I’d be willing to do a weekly update highlighting some of the stuff from the other places I post things. I said yes, especially because it sounded like a few others might be doing the same thing, which I know I would really enjoy. So, here goes. I’ll show you mine if… you know.
The main thing I’ve been throwing internet time at is a Tumblr where I post writing prompts.
slow breaking news
Emily Roose’s thesis project, via Public School
boxercising earthquake
A friend called a few weeks ago to tell me about a skyscraper that had to be evacuated after an earthquake in Seoul. For ten minutes the building made wide metronomic swings. Thing was, there had been no earthquake registered in the area. It was a mysteriously super local event. After a two-week investigation, the epicenter had been narrowed down to the building’s twelfth floor gym where the side kicking, upper-cutting, and fist-jabbing of seventeen middle-aged Korean women boxercising to Snap’s 1990s hit “I’ve got the Power” seemed somehow to have hit the building’s resonant frequency, sending the whole structure into convulsions.
(thanks, David)
tweet of the day
a library for extroverts: check out a person, not a book
At a library in Canada, you can check out experts, not just books:
The library has assembled a group of volunteers with particularly interesting skills or histories, and has a system in place to put these people in touch with knowledge seekers. If you’re looking for someone to practice your German with, or to ask about their experiences during the Great Depression, or their struggle with illness, the library will put you in touch with an appropriate individual. Once in touch, you can meet in the library’s cafe, keeping the entire operation under one roof.
the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton winner
Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
(via Coudal)
music to be ashamed of
Last.fm publishes a list of most deleted tracks. Their whole playground of projects is pretty interesting.
Bon Iver covers Bonnie Raitt
human pedigree
Ta-Nehisi Coates has been reading through The Federalist Papers, which, as way leads to way, led him to this thought:
When you are a young intellectual black kid, you often find yourself in this desperate search for some sort of anti-Western tradition. That Saul Bellow quote–”Who is the Tolstoy of the Zululs”–really captures a lot of the dilemma for those of us looking for a “native” tradition. That search ends all kinds of ways for different people. But for us, I think it ended in the rejection of the premise, in the great Ralph Wiley riposte that “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.”
That line was sorcery for me. It found me a black pathologist, and set me free by revealing that my own search for something “native” was an implicit acceptance of the very racism that I sought to counter. The way out was not to find my own, but to reject the notion of anyone’s “own.” If you reject the very premise of racism–the idea skin color directly contributes to genius or sloth–then all of humanity becomes “native” to you. And so empowered, I could–out of my own individual identity–create my own intellectual and artistic pedigree, and I was free to have it extend from Biggie to to Wharton to Melville to Hayden.
(Thanks, Noah.)
Grantland
Bill Simmons welcomes people to Grantland, which launched today:
Life will deliver a few moments when something substantial is about to happen, when you know it’s substantial, when you’ve done everything you could to prepare for the moment, but still, you just don’t know. And it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. I felt that way when I was getting married, when both of my kids were being born, when I graduated college, and incredibly, when I was standing in front of that stupid Carl’s Jr. Oh my God. There is no stopping this now. Please tell me this will turn out all right. You take a leap of faith with life. You inhale and exhale. You hope.
“it’s like a nutshell towing a mountain”
Since he was hired in the ’70s by Saudi prince Mohammad al-Faisal, French engineer Georges Mougin has tried to figure out a way to tow freshwater icebergs across the Arctic. Now, with 3-D tech, declassified satellite data, and tugboats, he might have cracked the way to quench the world’s thirst.
clotheslined
