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.
Devil Take the Hindmost
Done made that last payment on the 2005 Honda Element. Ain’t no repo man can toss me off’n my tailgate now. Finance company done sent me the title and everything.
Still a lien on my soul but I got me a man working on a real sweet deal.
It occurs to me . . .
. . . that I may have been in one of them hypnagogic states you hear tell of.
Up, Up and Away
“This is the strangest thing I’ve seen since I’ve been on the
force,” said Paul Madison, first officer on the scene. Madison
questioned the man who looked like Jesus and discovered that he was
dressed up as Jesus and was on his way to a toga costume party when
the tarp covering the bed of his pickup truck came loose and released
twelve blow up sex dolls filled with helium which floated up into the
air.
Can’t vouch for the source, but a good story any way you look at it.
Oh Heavens
(This is a kind of companion piece to an earlier one — A Few Important Religious Ideas — that appeared in elimae.)
I don’t know much about it, but it’s going to be great!!
I don’t like family visits that last more than a couple of days, but in heaven something will make me like that for eons.
I guess I’ll like the new body they give me. I’m betting they will have food that tastes great but only puts “spiritual” weight on you.
I’m sure I’ll still be “me” and I’ll still know it, since I’m the one who did all the work of arranging to end up there in the first place. I mean, if I turned out to be some other totally different kind of being, why would I give a shit if I saw grandma again—which is a big part of the pitch for going.
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Everything That Rises Must Converge
okay, the coincidences on the site are starting to freak me out. yesterday I posted about the Temecula chicken right after Sheila posted about Renner driving through Temecula and last night, as I was falling asleep, I was thinking about how Trojan refers to themselves as Trojan Brand, and how odd that was, thinking “can you imagine if it was Coca Cola Brand, or Toyota Brand” and they put it on the packaging? (Deron Bauman)
Okay, and I thought that Deron had posted the Temecula chicken story in response to my own post about being stopped by a trooper in Temecula!
This is yet another example of what Alek Lindus and I term ‘convergences’. And there are an awful lot of them going around lately.
Speaking of which, just after I’d posted the Temecula ‘aliens’ anecdote, I read Jack Lindus’s comment on Alek’s recently posted portrait of him over at enigma janitor.
‘Scuse me while I resume work on my universal field theory. It all fits together.
I think that maybe Alek is orchestrating this from that island of hers. Like Prospero.
Scenes from an Imaginary Vampire Film Set at a Series of Conferences on Design, Entrepreneurship and Inspiration
Take a look at this Polaroid taken at Friday’s SEED conference by Phineas and featured by the Coudal folks, then this camera-phone snap taken at the SEED conference back in January.
It all fits together. You know it does.
President Faust
Whoa, have I been out of it. Just noted a Coudal link to J. K. Rowling’s Harvard commencement address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination“. Went to check it out and read the opening line.
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
President Faust. I did not know that. Whoa, have I been out of it.
The Goat and Compasses (God encompasseth us)*
Derek White and his wife, Jess, are having them a Goat Rodeo Kick-off Sale.
If you make a significant purchase, we will give you updates on the goat you helped to finance, though we actually can’t promise we will have a physical goat. It’s more the idea of a goat that drives us.
As it does so many of us.
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Little Known Verse from Leviticus
Oh, that Pinky and his Scripture learning.
objective participation in the world of light
I know some of y’all done seen this before, but come take one more look. Just had to show you. Couldn’t help it. Born that way and had a relapse. Shoot the curator. Not the photographer. Nor the subject.
‘and in this endeavor light is the binder’ (Rothko)
TTV | NikonD80/YashicaD
enigma janitor | Alek Lindus
Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train,
Til Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again.
In the winter of ’65, we were hungry, just barely alive.
By May the tenth, Richmond had fell — it’s a time I remember, oh so well –
The night they drove old Dixie down . . .
Did Unitarianism become too dogmatic for someone?
Dudeism.com: The Church of the Latter-Day Dude
(via Winston of Nobody Asked . . .)
Sunday Senryu
Hanna-Barbera
taught me all I need to know
mice are immortal
Dream Song 50
Tim Keller, at Google, on the topic of “The Reason for God.”
It’s an hour long and the questions by the Google staff are the best part.
See also, Hitchens at Google.
Level 9
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Snap by Blaine Dunlap. Circa 1979. Dallas, Texas.
Wilkie Collins
“Having only undertaken in the present narrative to lead the way along a succession of events, the writer declines to follow modern examples by thrusting himself and his opinions on the public view. He returns to the shadow from which he has emerged, and leaves the opposing forces of incredulity and belief to fight the old battle over again, on the old ground.” (”Mrs Zant and the Ghost”, 1885)
In a riddle whose answer is “categorical imperative,” what are the only prohibited words?
Over at Crooked Timber, John Holbo counters that nasty hit-job on Kant with this stirring defense of Kantian ethics:
Kant Attack-ad
Nietzsche approves the ad, but I bet some operative in South Carolina is responsible for it . . .
I spotted the (Myspace) video here; the Youtube is from here.
Come hither . . .
. . . to participate in something I’ll presumptuously dub a Flocker Forum.
I’ve recently become interested in something called “The Venus Effect,” named for this painting by Velázquez, and its implications for how we understand such paintings. I have a post about this here; below the fold are some specific issues that I’m wondering about:
oh God
What doesn’t occur to adherents of either orthodoxy is that the world is neither a puzzle to be solved, nor a secret to be uncovered, but rather a mystery to be endured and enjoyed.
read the rest on modal minority
In which a Flocker plays Urban Naturalist
“Adam names the animals,” from The Aberdeen Bestiary
Given its solitude and the fact that, from a distance (I didn’t want to approach out of fear of startling it) it appeared to be completely empty, I don’t think what I saw was a stray. I think it was a feral shopping cart. It’s gone wild.
Just read again my description of the cart above and see if it doesn’t eerily echo this, the penultimate paragraph of Jack London’s wonderful novel, The Call of the Wild:
It is a great, gloriously glittering shopping cart, like, and yet unlike, all other shopping carts. He rolls in alone from the neighborhood and comes down into an open space among the trees in the park. Here a stream of refuse flows from torn plastic shopping bags and sinks into the ground, with long grasses growing through it and flies swarming it and hiding it from the sun; and here he muses for a time on those shopping bags, wheels squeaking once, long and mournfully, ere he departs.
(So I, um, photoshopped it a bit. Big wup.)
(Inspired by this; the whole post is here)
Rewriting “The Road Not Taken”
Obviously every moment of one’s life one is doing something and not doing many other possible things and thereby living one path into the future instead of many alternative paths toward an indefinite number of alternative futures. Still, it is scary to send e-mails regarding a major fork in one’s biographical road–there, that future, the one some very smart and lovely people have made some very compelling arguments for how it would be absolutely wonderful, that future is not going to happen after all, and it is not going to happen because you have chosen it not to happen.
What’s Tom Cruise’s line from Magnolia? . . .
I make a strict point of never blogging anything in the nature of a student-teacher or colleague-colleague interaction, but when a civilian knocks on my office door, comes in and says something funny, it’s fair game boyo.
So this kid comes in the door. (And he’s not a student at my institution but he’s home for the summer.) And he wants to ask me about Wittgenstein and philosophy of language and ‘reclaiming Kant’. And so I ask him a bit about what he means by that (sounds reasonable.) And, well, there is a bit of confusion. And it turns out he said ‘reclaiming cunt’. That is, he is working on some sort of project about the Vagina Monologues, etc. I ended up telling him I didn’t think Wittgenstein was quite what he was looking for. Still, these sorts of linguistic questions are quite interesting. Anyhoo. There was a moment there.
I want to laugh at this. I really do.
But when I see things like this, I can’t help but feel a bewildered despair, at least for a little while.