from the comments
I’m not a sweets person either. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Turkey at Thanksgiving. Rolls. That’ll work. The secret with the sledgehammer is to let it do the work for you. You hold yourself still and let the hammer go. You guide it, like what do they say about how to hold a bird? Then, once a crack begins to open up, you guide the chisel to the hairline and open it. It splits as effortlessly as butter. Move to a new location. Repeat.
Van Dyke Parks on the life of the artist
I have had VDP on the brain ever since his new 45s arrived from Bananastan. Little vinyl discs with big ol’ holes in the middle. And sleeve art by Ed Ruscha and Art Spiegelman.
Asked in a recent interview about his roles as composer, performer, instrumentalist, arranger, producer, and lyricist, VDP responded to the question, “What do you think is your greatest strength as an artist?”
. . . the tensile strength and the very definition of an artist is something that I would place at the top of a vertical hierarchy. To be an artist is to suffer and to lead a life without shelter. It takes a great amount of derring-do, self-reinvention, imagination, familial loyalty, sacrifice, economic uncertainty, and the right to be wrong, the right to fail in order to achieve something of noticeable value. So I would say of all those categories the way that I would like to view myself is as an artist. And that is in my mere survival as a musician for these last — just a moment here, let me do the mathematics — 58 years I have supported myself by being a musician.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo for the link.)
Tabling and Cutting Broom-Corn
Fig. 3 from Broom-Corn and Brooms. A Treatise on Raising Broom-Corn and Making Brooms, on a Small or Large Scale. Circa 1879.
I expect I will be working on rather a small scale.
headline of the day
Fast-food manager accused of punching mom with service dog
from the comments
The “gentlemen” in the cubicles near me have been talking about how they could beat each other in various sports for the last couple of weeks.
Recently they’ve been talking about running a 40 – throwing around times like 4.8 and 4.6. They’ve decided to have a race next week. One of them has declined because, “do you know how long it takes me to warm up?”
They’re moving to a different part of the building at the end of the day today, so I won’t get the hear about the results of their race.
“It’s all part of life’s rich pageant”
A friend of mine (who eventually became a VP at a Major Philanthropic Foundation) began his (adult) working life as a cross-country trucker. He said that although the so-called “boot-heel” of Missouri scared the bejeesus out of the most seasoned truckers, there was this place where you could go at 7:00 AM and get steak and eggs and bourbon AND watch a live sex show.
Actually, he said, that was also part of the scariness.
He also claimed that he met Patty Hearst when she was on the lam. When pressed, he said, “Well, she said her name was Tanya. And she stole my dope.”
Rememberies of the Star Herald
’76 – ’79-ish.
1) Mrs. Carroll (Editor of the weekly she inherited it from relatives before her, sold it to the the publisher in Corning, a decade before I started working there)l: Rick, you’re fired!
Me: Again! Why this time?
She: You turned the air conditioner thermostat up to 78. (This in the middle of the gas crisis in the late 70′s when we were trying to conserve.) Read more
Thomas J. Wynne advertising his Photographic Studio, Castlebar, County Mayo
Taken circa 1880 and presented by the National Library of Ireland on The Commons.
tweet of the day
By Way of My Translato-Wheel…
I’ll attempt:
Los frijoles se ubican dentro del grupo de las leguminosas, que se caracterizan por crecer en forma de vaina y se caracteriza por ser uno de los alimentos que contienen más proteínas que constituyen hasta el 20% de nuestro peso corporal y sirven para el crecimiento, el proceso del metabolismo, la formación de anticuerpos que protegen de enfermedades y la producción de energía, entre otras funciones.
Morning Wood
I’m rebuilding our deck. I thought it was going to be a simple re-surface job, then saw that the base needs to be redone as well. Yesterday two tons of wood and concrete mix were delivered. I had to bring it all into the back yard from the alley. I haven’t started yet this morning and it is already hot.
tweet of the day
The precepts in this section—many of them written in a digressive, self-serious style that reads as if Ayn Rand and Deepak Chopra had collaborated on a line of fortune cookies—are never about making money, at least not openly
There is nothing to fear from truth.
When a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest, is this good or bad?
Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion.
The pursuit of billions of dollars through aphorisms and “radical transparency.”
(via the browser)
Svpply is Hiring.
One of my favourite startups of the last year, Svpply, is hiring a bunch of web-developer-y type positions, but also:
Community Director
Boston, MAIdeally you’re already one of our most loyal users, your taste is generally admired, and you possess a keen knack for listening. You’ll be responsible for maintaining all forms of outreach to our community (Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, conferences and panels), for encouraging successful use of our product, for gathering feedback, and generally informing our feature development from the perspective of our users.
coming out of sleep
I was drunk on workohol.
The surprising truth about what motivates us.
The other day, I had a job interview with a local manufacturing company. During the interview, I was asked the simple question: “what motivates you?”
Oddly enough, my response was fairly close to what this video illustrates, but I hadn’t seen it yet. What do you guys think?
Inspired
by Amanda Mae’s assertion of her well-attested gift for concocting unrelated alternate realities when under the gun of a deadline,
and by the joy I have this day derived from emailing and Facebook-posting about: Cold War civil defense PSAs featuring clumsy marionettes endeavoring to convey dubious information to America’s farmers; the wonder of wieners: their inclusion in bento boxes and the variety of their presentation to customers of Danish wienie wagons; the oddity of Little Oscar, the world’s smallest chef and spokesman for Oscar-Mayer; and countless other curiosities,
I extend my heartfelt thanks to all the friends who have contributed to my delinquency and enabled my avoidance of work for yet another day.
You know, the mid-twentieth-century American humorist Robert Benchley wrote a delicious essay on this topic. It would appear (at least in his case) that the late-1920s version of fooling around online was apparently leafing through back issues of the National Geographic and clipping odd and arresting images. In the essay he writes about his efforts to avoid tackling a theater review or other assigned piece, saying, “I have a picture of a viper fish I wish you could see. You would die laughing.”
Today at Big Lots
I call in sick Monday. I was coughin and pootin. I call in about 6:20 in the mornin, say You don’t wont me comin in coughin and pootin, do ya. They say no, you stay on home. But that one over there? She get sick, she come into work anyhow. Pootin all over the place! I tell her, Stay the hell on your own damn side! She can’t hear nothin, either.
And, So, Somewhere, There Is This, Also
Thanks, El-tee.
quote out of context
“It shows that there really is no short cut to expertise,” says Bilalic.
Dear Clusterflock…
How’s your weather?
I’m coming off of 14 hours of manning the phones during snow removal. We don’t have nothing like points east in the last week or so. Still I’ve been up since 3:45 this morning. Phones ringing and answering with calls coming in as I talked. I’d like to think it’s under control. Phones are quiet now, but who can say? We might have another 2.5″ by 6:00 in the morning. I imagine the phones will start again about 2:00 am. I’m off to bed now, I’ll let you know how it goes.
Amazing how things that happened this morning seem like two days ago.
Oooo! And windchills here tomorrow are expected to be -25. It will be a bitter day for our workers. But we’ll be in final clean-up. I don’t know what to expect.
quote out of context
The Tribune reports that Malik’s father Rahim says that he likely also picked up some of his legal knowledge from watching television.
from the comments
I remember going to a cocktail party at a person’s home in Highland Park after a big literary reading at SMU (in the late 70s) I was an undergraduate then (at a different university), and was very grateful to hear the likes of Saul Bellow, Jerzy Kosinski, and a number of well-known poets of the day. I was also very happy to go to any event that provided free food and drink. The house was one of those small ones of only seven or eight thousand square feet, not counting guest quarters and pool cabanas littered about. The main crowd had Kosinski cornered in the living room, asking him questions about Hollywood debaucheries; Bellow didn’t attend. Among the featured poets was none other than Alan Dugan. People smiled at him and then quickly turned away, probably because of his average working class middle-aged-guy looks. My friend Sparky nudged me and we got Dugan by the elbow and took him to a little table in the smaller kitchen at the back of the house, where there was a fridge full of beer, and the three of us drank freely and talked late into the night. Sparky and I heard wonderful stories of such things as how Dugan had been supporting himself (when he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award at the age of 39) by working for a planned parenthood-funded factory that made plastic models of male and female genitalia for sex education demonstrations. I can’t speak for the well-dressed ones in the front room, but I had a great time. And that experience definitely shaped my perception of what is good and what is bad about cocktail parties.
I Will ALWAYS Love You
You have to wait for it, but that helps it. And then, you might get scared.
Thanks, Bootknocky.
Father Christmas fucked my pussy (Christmas pussy song)
(thanks, Aaron)
