Concerning events in and around Anoka, MN
This is so depressing/infuriating that I actually recommend putting off reading until you have time to decompress afterward. I took it in two chunks.
“This isn’t something you kid about, Brittany,” her mom scolded, snatching the kitchen cordless and taking it down the hall to call the Johnsons. A minute later she returned, her face a mask of shock and terror. “Honey, I’m so sorry. We’re too late,” she said tonelessly as Brittany’s knees buckled; 13-year-old Sam had climbed into the bathtub after school and shot herself in the mouth with her own hunting rifle. No one at school had seen her suicide coming.
headline of the day
Should a Life Coach Have a Life First?
tweet of the day
I have mixed feelings about exclamation points!
— Rob Baedeker (@robbaedeker) January 26, 2012
“It’s killing that is very distant but also very personal,” says anthropologist Neta Bar. “I would even say intimate.”
Chris Kyle is the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. He was deployed to Iraq in 2003, and killed 255 people in six years.
A crowd had come out to greet them. Through the scope he saw a woman, with a child close by, approaching his troops. She had a grenade ready to detonate in her hand.
“This was the first time I was going to have to kill someone. I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to do it, man, woman or whatever,” he says.
“You’re running everything through your mind. This is a woman, first of all. Second of all, am I clear to do this, is this right, is it justified? And after I do this, am I going to be fried back home? Are the lawyers going to come after me saying, ‘You killed a woman, you’re going to prison’?”
But he didn’t have much time to debate these questions.
“She made the decision for me, it was either my fellow Americans die or I take her out.”
He pulled the trigger.
(via the browser)
The Unsayable
Last week I picked up The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma when I heard it was written by a disciple of Jacques Lacan. I’m not even halfway through this book, by Annie Rogers, PhD, and I cannot recommend it enough. Here are a couple snippets from the New York Times review:
Before they protect their predators, victims of trauma (defined as any experience “which by its nature is an excess of what we can manage or bear”) protect themselves by not consciously expressing what happened to them. To articulate, or to say, is to put together, to draw fragments of an experience into a coherent narrative, a potentially devastating process if the experience was so overwhelming as to have been, like the author’s own past, “shattering.” Before a thing is consciously (if not audibly) voiced, it has yet to be acknowledged or owned; it has yet to be believed.
Warning: Grenade Splasherz
This from my friend TigErrrrrrrr:
It’s funny how when you buy these 2-packs of Grenade Splasherz @ Von’s Grocery Stores (impulse items next to the GIANT $4.49 each size of Red Bull!!!) they carry this warning across the top label: “Do not aim or throw at anyone’s face.”
Much more fun is what it says across the bottom of the label: “Squeeze’em, Soak ‘em, & Throw ‘em!” :^) YAY !!!!!
Not my super-heroine persona,
but I am thinking that somebody should assume the mantle of The Sanitizer.
coming out of sleep
You live in Canada? Want to try something awful?
Bonus: Teat for tête.
from the comments
People are always nicer someplace else. The rotten little shits.
You can’t just toss an old surplus turbojet engine into a homemade chassis anymore and go for it
Waldo Stakes wants to build a rocket car to beat the current land-speed-record of 763.035 by 1273 mph.
Moving his family to Southern California in 1984 to be closer to the aerospace industry, Stakes was soon scouring scrapyards for parts he could use to build a rocket car. His most impressive find is a set of XLR99 rocket engines designed for NASA’s legendary X-15, the stub-winged experimental plane that grabbed the flight speed record of 4520 mph in 1967 and has never let go. “Back in the ’80s this stuff was considered scrap metal, and everyone was melting it down to recover the silver and gold from the brazed tubing,” Stakes says. “But these engines weren’t built that way. They’re made from Inconel-X [an exotic alloy] and virtually indestructible. I think they cost $1500 each for four. I have two left. One for the car and a spare.”
There’s no law that says you can’t ask anything you want
Yesterday I posted Errol Morris talking about Believing Is Seeing. Here’s Miranda July talking about It Chooses You.
from the comments
I love it when a garden plant takes off like that, although sometimes it makes me worry that the soil has some kind of errant isotope in it (50s giant ant movies). I had a banana pepper plant like that a couple of years ago that must have crossed with an anaheim pepper plant because it had the cool sweetness of a banana pepper and a bite, too. That one plant produced like the one Derek mentions here.
Also, isn’t there a dish served in Mexico called Pulpo in su Tincto? Octopus cooked in its own ink. Why is there so much gastronomic technique that heads straight for morbid irony? Lark tongues in honey, porcupine-kabobs…. Maybe it’s because tired minds (mine) register form even in a daze.
12 Indicted On Hate Crimes Charges For Hair Cutting Assaults Led By Break-Off Amish Group
I think this is my favorite story of 2011.
dueling banjos
Every time a bell rings, an angel trained by Pavlov starts to drool.
— Megan Amram (@meganamram) December 20, 2011
Franklin, our ancient, probably senile dog sometimes walks around the houseand drops what I’m calling turdpedoes.
— Amy Mabli (@amymia) December 20, 2011
from the comments
Future Joel gets the tiny piece.
dear clusterflock
In what contexts, if any, are sanctity or the idea or possibility of sanctity valuable?
The Art of Not Drowning
We see a beautiful woman, with lush red hair, floating effortlessly, gazing ahead in an attitude of easeful melancholy. The airline artist has recruited Dante Rossetti’s 1877 Mary Magdalene, with perhaps an ironic nod to Botticelli’s Venus, as the heroine of our worst-case scenario. Thus the “fallen woman” motif is reimagined in the most urgent terms: this airline Magdalene is a woman who has quite literally fallen. And this is where we find her, floating in limbo, clutching a lily-white life preserver to her breast (instead of a vase, as in the 1877 portrait). Like Rossetti’s romantic Pre-Raphaelite Magdalene, this woman’s lowly state serves only to magnify her elemental beauty. Here she is, Our Lady of the Plane Crash. “I will make you fishers of men,” says the Christ. “We will rescue you in any corner of the globe,” says a Pan Am safety card. The fallen woman will not remain cast away forever—and, if we follow her lead, the artist assures us, neither will we. It is a pretty vision of earthly salvation.
(via The Hairpin)
image out of context
dear clusterflock
Voyeur or Exhibitionist?
Test Your Morality
That autism quiz seemed to go over like gangbusters so here’s another quiz for a lazy pre-holiday afternoon.
This is a scientific test sponsored by the BBC to help scientists with their science. It’s all highly scientific and not at all a dumb personality test that you take to see how you stack up against friends.
(Takes about a half an hour. Sign up for a throwaway log-in [BBC iD] required.)
I scored pretty middle of the road except for my below average sense of wrongness & disgust and my above average sense of avoidance. AKA I don’t think what you did is wrong, but I don’t want to associate with you either.
The wording of the results is a bit odd…
[Your low sense of wrongness] suggests that you are not very sensitive to actions that break your moral code, and you are quite tolerant things you don’t agree with.
I agree with the latter but can’t I be sensitive to others’ actions while having a broader moral code? If I don’t consider those actions wrong then, almost by definition, they don’t break my moral code.
Different factors such as religious belief and personal wealth can influence our attitudes to the action and behaviour of others.
Yeesh. That’s a loaded statement.
So! Who’s the best Flocker? Scientifically speaking.
Take The AQ Test
Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger’s report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives.
I scored 26.
tweet of the day
Putting the caped crusader on the couch
From a New York Times Op-Ed published several weeks ago:
Comic books have long relied on mental disorders to drive their most memorable villains. Consider the Batman line, in which the Joker, Harley Quinn and other “criminally insane” rogues are residents of Gotham City’s forensic psychiatric hospital, Arkham Asylum.
Introduced in 1974, Arkham grossly confuses the concepts of psychiatric hospital and prison. Patients are called “inmates,” decked out in shackles and orange jumpsuits, while a mental health professional doubles as the “warden.” Even the antiquated word “asylum” implies that the patients are locked away with no treatment and little hope of rejoining society. [...]
Of course, DC Comics, and comic books in general, are hardly the only source of these stereotypes or the only contributors to discrimination. At the same time, they are widely consumed, whether in the original form or as story lines for movies, TV shows and video games. Modernized mental health depictions in the Batman titles alone would reach millions of people worldwide through its billion-dollar-grossing films and blockbuster video games.
That’s why DC Comics should seize the opportunity with The New 52 to move to the forefront in transforming mental health depictions in comics. To start, writers should stop overemphasizing a link between violence and mental disorders to explain criminal behavior.
dear clustrflock
S or M?
from the comments
One of my favorite books, Kiln People, is about a society where you can create clay copies of yourself to do various tasks (menial, dangerous) while you do something else, then at the end of the day you download their memories back into you. This got me into a really creepy conversation with a friend about the difference between experiencing something first hand and remembering something. If the memory is yours (these clay copies have your personality, tactile sensations, everything) what are you losing by not experiencing it? Each moment is fleeting, at what point does something become memory instead of experience? Your senses take a measurable amount of time to transmit information and your body to physically react to things. Something 1/100 of a second ago, something 1/10 of a second ago, something 1/2 a second ago, something 5 seconds ago?
I think a harder question might be: would you rather travel the entire world asynchronously by surrogate and inload the memories, or travel 1/100th or 1/1000th as much but experience it all first hand in real synchronous time? I’m not sure which I’d pick.
