quote out of context
Behind its flower box framed windows, hidden away from mourners, is an automated storage system. It stores and chills encoffined corpses, delivering them through hatches and into a viewing room, day or night, whenever friends and family come to pay their respects.
(via marginal revolution)
Clerks
at a gas station convenience store. Near Madison, Wisconsin.
“What is the difference between the Dutch and the Germans?”
[Gesturing.] “A boundary — which the Germans have breached on many an occasion.”
“Do they speak the same language?”
“Dutch and German are very close.”
“Because, you see, between Kenya and Tanzania, there is a boundary, but we speak the same language.”
“That — is colonialism, my friend!”
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)
The story of Gadafy’s invisible daughter
Yesterday in the terracotta-coloured section of Bab al-Azizia where the Gadafy family lived, I came across a room which seemed to be part-study, part-lounge. Its contents – including a Sex and the City DVD box set; CDs of the Backstreet Boys; cellulite treatments; WellWoman vitamin supplements and stuffed toys – hinted that it belonged to a young woman.
Amid the bookshelves lined with medical textbooks and copies of Col Gadafy’s Green Book, I found passport photographs of a woman, dressed in medical garb, who appeared to be in her mid- 20s.
Some of the rebels sifting through the room’s contents shouted excitedly: “It’s Hana, it’s Hana, the daughter Gadafy lied about. This was her room.”
(via @tcarmody)
tweet of the day
How long do countries have until their populations disappear?
It never really occurred to me, until just now, that this could actually happen.
Moammar Gadhafi has been overthrown
“It’s over, frizz-head,” chanted hundreds of jubilant men and women massed in Green Square, using a mocking nickname of the curly-haired Gadhafi.
from the spam
Lord Glasman lives the dream. Before our interview, he sends word that I am to expect some “debris”. His doll’s house-sized, two-bedroom flat above a Hackney clothing shop is, it turns out, being torn apart to provide some extra space for a family with four children. Even with an added storey, the Glasman home will be a modest abode, befitting those who, in his definition of Labour people, “work by their hands and brain to feed their families and pay their mortgages”. The apartment, with sweet peas growing up an urban balcony, is the perfect showcase for Blue Labour’s philosophy.
‘Neither account of the acrimonious relationship could be independently confirmed’
Dany Larivière, the mayor of Saint-Théodore-d’Acton and the owner of an excavation company, says he placed the giant rock in his ex-wife’s driveway to try to get her to stop harassing him.
The Somerton Beach Mystery (or the enigma of the “Unknown Man”)
Let’s start by sketching out the little that is known for certain. At 7 o’clock on the warm evening of Tuesday, November 30, 1948, jeweler John Bain Lyons and his wife went for a stroll on Somerton Beach, a seaside resort a few miles south of Adelaide. As they walked toward Glenelg, they noticed a smartly dressed man lying on the sand, his head propped against a sea wall. He was lolling about 20 yards from them, legs outstretched, feet crossed. As the couple watched, the man extended his right arm upward, then let it fall back to the ground. Lyons thought he might be making a drunken attempt to smoke a cigarette.
Half an hour later, another couple noticed the same man lying in the same position. Looking on him from above, the woman could see that he was immaculately dressed in a suit, with smart new shoes polished to a mirror shine—odd clothing for the beach. He was motionless, his left arm splayed out on the sand. The couple decided that he was simply asleep, his face surrounded by mosquitoes. “He must be dead to the world not to notice them,” the boyfriend joked.
The journalistic equivalent of The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World.
(via the browser)
a history of Canadian English
The OED put together an overview of the history and differences of Canadian English. I think either Lex or Tim linked to it on Twitter. I kept waiting for huge morphological differences, but our friends to the North are subtle.
We can find the linguistic expression of the Canadian east-west connection at all linguistic levels. Vowels, for instance, love to change but when they change in Canada they have been shown to rarely – for some changes never—to cross the Canada-US border. For example, the ‘Canadian shift’, first detected in the mid 1990s, affects the ‘short front vowels’, i.e. the three vowels exemplified in black, pen or tin. In Canada these vowels move in the opposite direction to the well-established ‘Northern Cities Shift’ in parts of the United States. So in Canada, the vowel in black, for instance, is pronounced farther back in the mouth. Canadian dialects are actually diverging from the American dialects that have experienced the shift, and this despite the high levels of interaction between the two countries.
Darcus Howe on the London Riots
It’s true, they’ll never replay this.
photo out of context
pregnancy tourism for a master race
In the film, the lady tells us how she isn’t the first, and “definitely not the last” to travel this far to have an Aryan child, one who, she imagined, would grow up grateful for the gift of racially superior intelligence. She speaks of an organised system behind such pregnancy tourism, but refuses to elaborate. “It’s not wrong, what I’m doing,” she says, “I’m paying for what I want.”
The movie is called Achtung Baby: In Search of Purity, and is about German women travelling to Indian villages to get knocked up by men they believe are the last of the pure Aryans.
(via the browser)
Did you see what he had on?
This guy is really good at standing on a speeding motorcycle and firing his gun.
headline of the day
Dutch rethink Christianity for a doubtful world
Natsumi Hayashi’s levitation photos
These photos of Japanese photographer Natsumi Hayashi have made the rounds, but if you haven’t seen them, they are a lot of fun to look at.
From her bio:
Lives in Tokyo with two cats.
Photographs mainly levitating self-portraits (and cats not levitating).
(thanks, Andrew)
quote out of context
The reason for Caan’s departure from the show is unconfirmed but it may have something to do with his attempt to buy a Pakistani flood victim’s baby for £725 while making a charity film.
headline of the day, IV
South African man wakes after 21 hours in morgue fridge
catch of the year
Watch this catch of the year in Australian rules football. It would be offensive pass interference in the NFL, but it would still be the catch of the year.
an interesting subplot to the horror in Norway
Norwegians tend to see “acts of extreme violence … as aberrant events, not symptoms of national decay,” Time Magazine’s William Lee Adams reported last year. Norwegian prison guards undergo two years of training, “don’t carry guns … and call prisoners by their first names and play sports and eat meals with them,” Adams reported.
That approach — and its underlying premise that people who commit crimes are troubled who should be given a second chance and prepared to live again amongst society — can perhaps be credited with Norway’s extremely low prison-recidivism rate — only about 20 percent of those imprisoned in Norway commit a repeat crime that sends them back to prison. Recidivism figures in the United States and the United Kingdom, by contrast, are much higher — 50 to 60 percent.
This in the context of the maximum prison sentence being 21 years in Norway, especially in light of the recent atrocity.
‘Leopards are protected in India, though more are straying into villages for food’
Eleven people were injured in an attempt to drive a male leopard back into a wildlife sanctuary in India. The report is skimpy on details, but the incident didn’t end well. I make the post primarily out of respect for the animal.
fake Apple stores
Being the curious types that we are, we struck up some conversation with these salespeople who, hand to God, all genuinely think they work for Apple. I tried to imagine the training that they went to when they were hired, in which they were pitched some big speech about how they were working for this innovative, global company – when really they’re just filling the pockets of some shyster living in a prefab mansion outside the city by standing around a fake store disinterestedly selling what may or may not be actual Apple products that fell off the back of a truck somewhere.
Clearly, they had also been told that above all, they must protect the brand. As I took these photos I was quickly accosted by two salespeople inside, and three plain clothes security guys outside, putting their hands in my face and telling me to stop taking photographs – that it wasn’t allowed. And why wasn’t it allowed? Because their boss told them so.
photo out of context
