the house of Ruben Bustes (picture edition), plus cactus
Sheila and I returned to the scene of the crime. Behold! The house of Ruben Bustes!
And for those for whom a photograph of the cactus house will not disrupt the museum of the mind, a picture below the fold.
I’m going back
to Texas tomorrow, y’all. For a week, anyways.
Big party on Dutton Drive. The last waltz. The final hurrah.
“Hey, my mom’s not at home. You wanna come over?”
Chatroulette, Texas
Other hotbeds of connectivity can be espied here.
Hey bitches
From here.
In the Boom Boom Room
In order to pierce the crust of Dallas, Texas subcultures, it helps to know someone who grew up here.
from the comments
I heard Obama-care will pay for welfare moms to get clit piercings.
this just in
Egypt’s famed King Tutankhamun suffered from a cleft palate and club foot, likely forcing him to walk with a cane, and died from complications from a broken leg exacerbated by malaria, according to the most extensive study ever of his more than 3,300-year-old mummy.
this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements
From a Wired article on how to ace a TED Talk:
“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.
Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.
If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.
Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”
“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
Dear Clusterflock
Today I quit on an online survey concerning a “buying experience”; the only reason I was doing it was because it kept popping up in my mail and taking it seemed the quickest way to make it go away. But I came to a question that pissed me off and made me delete the whole thing. It asked me to indicate my “position” in my household: was I the Head of household? The spouse of the Head of household? A dependent of the Head of household? and so on. Do you find yourself thinking as I do that the whole notion of there necessarily being A head of household is archaic? In my view, the whole thing smacks of that Southern Baptist insistence that women “submit” to the will of their husbands, which I find to be one of many reprehensible notions they espouse. Can’t we get past the whole Command Structure thing? Is this just me going off, or do you have feeling about this?
from the comments
One morning, over at Elizabeth’s beach house, she asked me if I’d rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realized that not only did I not want to answer THAT question, but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question — or see any of these people again — for the rest of my life.
Trailer for El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky. 1970)
The strangest movie I’d recommend?
Allen Klein presents an ABKCO Film.
seriously
It’s really a renaissance, said Davis
“It would be like discovering that Buddha, unbeknownst to anybody, had sat down and wrote down the entirety of his discoveries and it could be verified that he wrote it,” said Tommy Davis, the church’s top spokesman.
Twelve Meditations on a Dollhouse | I. Meditation on the Kitchen
The Kitchen. Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle. (Museum of Science and Industry. Chicago.)
“The copper stove in the back of the room is the stove in which the wicked witch locked Hansel and Gretel.”
Long Horn Meat
Scenes from a Christmas Story
4. On Christmas Morn. I stood for a time in the shower stall and contemplated the passing of years.
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a history of crop circles
Paradoxically, and unlike almost all other modern forms of art, a crop circle’s potential to enchant is animated and energized by the anonymity of its author(s). Doug Bower now tells friends that he wishes he had kept quiet and continued his nocturnal jaunts in secret. Both circle-makers and croppies are really engaged in a kind of game, whose whole purpose is to keep the game going, to prolong the mystery. After all, who would travel thousands of miles and trek through a muddy field to see flattened wheat if it were not imbued with otherworldly mystique?
The World of Ivor Cutler
Toilet rolls. Ivor Cutler.
The World of Ivor Cutler features photographs of Ivor Cutler’s flat, taken by Ivor Cutler. Captions by Ivor Cutler. These were originally sent by Ivor to his friend John Knutas, with whom Ivor had a correspondence over many years.
You can find the series at ivorcutler.org.
I’ll be away a few days
I wanted to leave you with this:
First Thought
Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday, Mr. Peppermint.
Arcade
A digital salon created by Stanford for literature and the humanities:
Under our three rubrics—Conversations, Transactions, and Publications—we offer an array of blogs, journals that seek to redefine their genre, forums for the exchange of ideas and observations, videocasts and podcasts, and other features for scholars, students, and the public. Our international, multilingual community is committed to redrawing, and sometimes erasing, the lines between contributors and readers.
All of our features are intended to be the best of their kind: curated but participatory, technologically rich in the service of intellectual exchange, and open to multiple modalities. Arcade belongs to the Open Access movement in scholarly publishing.
For example, Alec Hanley Bemis’ Brief thoughts about length:
I floated this by another acquaintance recently, a slightly younger individual with a background similar to my own. Why aren’t kids these days aspiring to create literature? Will music claim them all?
“I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by organic farming,” he said.
Claude Levi-Strauss
Born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Brussels, Belgium, Levi-Strauss was the son of French parents of Jewish origin. He studied in Paris and went on to teach in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and conduct much of the research that led to his breakthrough books in the South American giant.
Levi-Strauss also won worldwide acclaim and was awarded honorary doctorates at universities, including Harvard, Yale and Oxford, as well as universities in Sweden, Mexico and Canada.
He was down to earth.
A skilled handyman who believed in the virtues of manual labor and outdoor life, he was also an ardent music-lover who once said he would have liked to have been a composer had he not become an ethnologist.
He is survived by his sons Roman and Laurent.
Bride of the Corn | The Bridal Tiara
An electric fence is a barrier that uses electric shocks to deter animals or people from crossing a boundary. The voltage of the shock may have effects ranging from uncomfortable to painful or even lethal. Most electric fencing is used today for agricultural fencing and other forms of animal control purposes, though it is frequently used to enhance security of sensitive areas, and there exist places where lethal voltages are used.
Bride of the Corn | The Maize Room
Located at the very end of a long corridor within a high-security wing of the Corn Asylum.
Bride of the Corn | Let’s get lost
Today I tried but failed to get lost in the corn maze. I was not ravaged in the corn. That comes later in the story.
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