Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Male
Sasha Baron Cohen was escorted from a fashion show in Milan on Friday.
After a few minutes of darkness while Baron Cohen, or Bruno, was escorted off the catwalk, the show started again. Models had kept their cool but the designer was visibly upset when she appeared at the end of the show.
Sage advice on public speaking
A recent conversation with a coworker reminded me of the classic advice on how to structure an articulate, clear speech:
- Say what you are going to say.
- Say it.
- Say what you said.
Simple web search techniques for your mom.
You know this, your mom probably doesn’t (via).
How much money can you make if you REALLY fuck up?
CEO pay: What those involved in the financial meltdown made
As Congress considers a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street and the banking sector, there are calls to restrict the pay and severance packages for CEOs at investment houses, banks and mortgage lenders poised to be benefit from the plan put forward by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.
Executives from some of the major investment and commercial banks involved in the financial upheaval and bailout earned hefty paychecks last year, according to proxy statements outlining their salaries, bonuses and stock options:
looking for ugly
Kevin Kelly has a great post that brought to mind the quick shutdown of the Hadron Collider. The observation that jumped out at me was:
How do you prevent major errors in a system built to successfully keep major errors to a minimum? You look for the ugly.
In these large systems — he gives aviation as another example — where the the propensity for error has been minimized to almost zero, looking for the ugly becomes a way to recognize failure before it happens.
Which reminds me of my system for deciding whether to read a book.
It also reminds me of a realization I had studying the Holocaust: a simple bad idea, a simple wrong idea, carried to its logical conclusion, results in catastrophe. The banality of evil lies in the effortless path. The unexamined life. Etc.
Of course we can draw obvious political conclusions. And we can and should find the spaces in our lives where the ugly lives. I guess the question is, based on the first sentence of your life, would you read the book?
keyboard update
I washed my keyboard (in the dishwasher). It’s clean. And it works.
is it wood?
(via)
fyi
I’m washing my keyboard.
Lookin’ Swell
Yes, this is my thigh. I also have a crater in my head, where I hit it on the stairs. All because I tripped over the treadmill in the dark while trying to retrieve my bra from the floor.
The moral to this story: Don’t buy a treadmill.
An Act of God
In the mailbox today was a magazine addressed to one of our neighbors over on the ridge. Ordinarily I’d leave it for the mailman with a note about redelivery, but Insiders Betting Digest insisted on following me home.
The instant I handed it to Jon, he cried out, “Jesus! Thank you, Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus has entered my life! He wants me to be a gambler! Jesus has . . . touched me . . . and put his hand on my wallet!
“This is an act of God!”
We’d been talking for a good long while about how we were ever going to achieve our goal of amassing wealth without working (”making money in the kitchen in our underwear,” as a friend puts it), and online sportsbooks figured prominently in a vision that shimmered before us as a kind of Promised Land.
Truly this postal misdelivery was providential.
Erotic Magic Workshop
There’ll be workshops, after a fashion, at clusterflockstock, and this is by way of “drumming up” interest in a “workshop” I plan to offer.
“Content” is still “in development”, but I have privately shared with a couple of my fellow ‘flockers a description of my newly invented “Gettin’ It On Ritual” (the core of my Erotic Magic Workshop), and responses have been positive. To share the details in a public forum would only cheapen and coarsen something already crude and vulgar, so I invite those of you planning to attend clusterflockstock to “pencil in” my Erotic Magic Workshop.
Exact time and location will be announced at the event itself when I holler, “Hey, y’all, I’m fixin’ to show my Gettin’ It On Ritual! . . . (Yeah, that’s okay. If you’re still workin’ on your barbecue, just bring it with you.)”
Treat them like they took your wallet
How to Tell People They Sound Racist:
Just so. It’s hard to remember, though, when you just want to lay somebody out.
From Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine via Laughing Squid, via our own Elizabeth Perry.
How to pwn the iPhone.
Lifehacker has a great how-to on the iPhone pwnage 2.0.1 tool for jailbreaking the new 3g. Jailbreaking, for those not in the know, allows for third party apps not approved by Apple to be used. It does not unlock the phone for other carriers.
Don’t Fuck With the Little Guy
- A network administrator has locked up a multimillion dollar computer system for San Francisco that handles sensitive data and is refusing to give police the password, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.
The employee, 43-year-old Terry Childs, was arrested Sunday. He gave some passwords to police, which did not work, and refused to reveal the real code, the paper reported.
I think this guy saw Live Free or Die Hard. Hope they don’t shoot him in the leg to get the code! See story here.
How to win the New Yorker Caption Contest
As funny as it is interesting:
Humor and victory are different matters entirely. To understand what makes the perfect caption, you must start with the readership. Paging through The New Yorker is a lonesome withdrawal, not a group activity. The reader is isolated and introspective, probably on the train commuting to work. He suffers from urban ennui. He does not make eye contact. Laughing out loud is, in this context, an unseemly act sure to draw unwanted attention. To avoid this, your caption should elicit, at best, a mild chuckle. The first filter for your caption should be: Is it too funny? Will it make anyone laugh out loud? If so, throw it out and work on a less funny one.
Twenty-First Century Locket
She . . . wears her grandfather’s photo in a portable computer drive around her neck. “I have him close to my heart.”
The Chicago Tribune article had nothing of special note to contribute to discussions of the ‘digital divide’ between “them that’s got” and “them that’s not”; still, I enjoyed reading about the woman whose family photos had been destroyed by flooding but used her new-found Internet skills to locate an image of her grandfather, a Bronzeville neighborhood dentist. And now wears his image on a flash drive suspended from a necklace.
David Lynch Puts Fan’s Panties In His Mouth
Elephant Sits on Man’s Head
it’s only — a year — a-way!
Y’all. We’re a year away from clusterflockstock.
moonshine is a reflection
A potential hobby for Andrew I hope sticks. Making moonshine is making a come back, practiced by “whiskey geeks with a taste for top-shelf hooch”. Sounds good. Although:
Besides being illicit, white lightning has earned a reputation for blinding and killing people who drink it. Many sources attribute these effects to methanol (the heads), which boils off naturally during an early stage of the distillation process.
After all, he says, “This ain’t stamp collecting.”
Acting…
You know … acting is not very difficult, once you know how to do it…. And that’s … so beautiful, because you can say that about anything: It’s not difficult, once you know how.
sex skills for christian husbands
Barry’s praise of Lawrence Weschler’s book prompted a google search which led to this.
This is the same Robert Irwin, right Barry?
online fraction calculator
I’m sure a lot of middle school kids use this to cheat on their homework validate their homework, but I’m here to say it’s made renovating the kitchen much less stressful.
Dear Joe
When I get to a new chapter in a book, and I’m not ready to read on, should I place the bookmark at the chapter heading, or on the next first page of text? Please advise.
How to fix an old NES
I just wish I knew about this about a year ago when I got rid of mine.