August 27, 2008
a question.
Twice in the past 5 years, I have heard a voice whisper my name in my ear. This happened as I was in bed, waking up. I was awake so it wasn’t a dream. I’m pretty sure the voice was female, and no, I’m not schizophrenic. Anyone else ever experienced anything like this?
Lessing on McCain on Technology
If this video begins to tickle your fancy, I would suggest going to Lessing’s blog for a larger and better quality video.
Guess what somebody has been watching recently
I’m Not Crying - Flight of the Conchords
Dear Clusterflock
Nobody lays it out like Bill Clinton.
Update: Where was this John Kerry four years ago?
Dear Clusterflock
Why do you live where you do?
What brought you there? What holds you?
What’s driving you away, or calling from afar?
Why here, and not there?
Four Score and Seven Rounds
Thinking Ahead
While watching the Olympics I noticed many ads featuring big winners of races–which of course had to have been made, along with others, far ahead of time. So I have decided to make some posts up ahead of time for possible outcomes of the presidential election. Here’s one I’ll run if McCain wins:
Fool me once: shame on you.
Fool me twice: shame on me.
Fool me three times: fuck me with a pile driver and tell me how useful I was.
Waffle Bike
“Waffle Bike is a fully weaponized waffle making device complete with call to prayer public address system.”
Have Some Chicken Fried Bacon, Y’all
That’s right–the State Fair of Texas is gearing up again.
The Fourth Dimension
Étienne Ghys et aluid created a series of videos to help a person conceive of the fourth dimension. It is 117 minutes long, but broken up into edible chapters, and is suppose to be accessible to anyone.
I have not finished the whole series but I suspect is much like what Einstein’s remarks about his infamous book on Relativity:
“The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics…. In the interest of clearness, it appeared to me inevitable that I should repeat myself frequently, without paying the slightest attention to the elegance of the presentation. I adhered scrupulously to the precept of that brilliant theoretical physicist L. Boltzmann, according to whom matters of elegance ought to be left to the tailor and to the cobbler.”
In other words, it will take a little elbow grease at minimum. (via the Lone Gunman)
Dear Clusterflock
Does your first contact with a band or musician tend to remain your favorite? Songs of Love and Hate, my first Leonard Cohen record, is still my favorite. Ditto Life’s Rich Pageant by REM, Bizarro by The Wedding Present and The Yes Album. Read more
Patricia Urquiola, Lazy Night
I do not think it means what you think it means
Republicans have set up a ‘War Room’ at the Democratic convention in Denver they are calling ‘The Ministry of Truth’. Sure would be cool if there were a literary term for that.
By Indians
August 26, 2008
paging Christopher Walken
More specifically, paging the Christopher Walken who posted this delicious polaroid.
Mark Melnick seems interested in using the photo for a book of poems from Penguin. It looks like you can get in touch with Mark on his website.
Please let us know how this turns out.
Very pleasing.
this is what it sounds like
A series of studies finds that animals adapt their calls to fit the social situation.
* Male gray treefrogs (Hyla versicolor) give out longer but fewer calls in reaction to the calls of other males. In other words, when these frogs are chorusing full blast, a male seeking female attention will change the rhythm of his call to break out of the chorus.
* Using an array of microphones to identify individual callers among wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncates), scientists found that although dolphins whistle more in social situations, individuals decrease their vocal output in large groups, when their whistles are more likely to be drowned out.
* Nestling tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) adjust their call output to parents when there’s more noisy competition from the brood.
* Carolina chickadees (Poecile carolinensis) in larger social groups use calls with greater information than do individuals in smaller groups, and female-male interactions in opposite-sex chickadee pairs reflect the rate of male production of that distinctive chick-a-dee call.
* Two different species of North American katydids synchronize calls within species, using somewhat different methods. Whereas the synchrony of N. spiza is a byproduct of signal competition between evenly matched males, that of N. nebrascensis seems to be an adaptation that allows cooperating males to make sure females can pick up critical features of their calls. These different routes to synchrony suggest different evolutionary paths that have led to the way that male katydids acoustically advertise their availability.
because if terrorists can’t buy guns, the terrorists have won
A top McCain adviser lobbied against a bill that would keep people on the terrorist watch list from buying guns.
Newsweek reports that, according to registration documents filed by Scheuenemann’s lobbying firm, Orion Strategies, Scheunemann lobbied on behalf of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) against a bill that aims to close a gun-control loophole that inhibits the government from stopping people on terrorist watch-lists from buying guns. According to Newsweek, “the bill was inspired by an official audit covering a five-month period in 2004 which found that, because of the loophole, the Feds had to greenlight 35 out of 44 cases where a gun buyer was on a terrorist watch list.”
my apologies
One last round.
Zadie Smith on Forster
I have never felt compelled to read any Forster and still wonder, particularly after this review, whether I should:
In the taxonomy of English writing, E.M. Forster is not an exotic creature. We file him under Notable English Novelist, common or garden variety. Still, there is a sense in which Forster was something of a rare bird. He was free of many vices commonly found in novelists of his generation—what’s unusual about Forster is what he didn’t do. He didn’t lean rightward with the years, or allow nostalgia to morph into misanthropy; he never knelt for the Pope or the Queen, nor did he flirt (ideologically speaking) with Hitler, Stalin, or Mao; he never believed the novel was dead or the hills alive, continued to read contemporary fiction after the age of fifty, harbored no special hatred for the generation below or above him, did not come to feel that England had gone to hell in a hand-basket, that its language was doomed, that lunatics were running the asylum, or foreigners swamping the cities.
Radiohead at The Hollywood Bowl
Go see Radiohead? Don’t mind if I do! Last night a friend and I made our way, along with nearly 18,000 other people, to the Hollywood Bowl. I saw them once before at Coachella in 2004 and this experience was far better. The light show that accompanied them was monstrous and strange and wonderful. Huge floor to ceiling columns of light that seemed capable of any combination of color or pattern. That they played even 1/3 of True Love Waits made my evening, and I almost cried.
(via sweetcell’s flickr)
Set List: Reckoner/Optimistic/There There/15 Step/All I Need/Pyramid Song/Weird Fishes/Arpeggi/The Gloaming/Videotape/Talk Show Host/Faust Arp/Tell Me Why (Neil Young Cover) /No Surprises/Jigsaw Falling Into Place/The Bends/The National Anthem/Nude/Bodysnatchers Encore: House of Cards/ Planet Telex/Go Slowly/Fake Plastic Trees/True Love Waits Intro/Everything In Its Right Place Encore 2: Cymbal Rush/Karma Police/Idioteque
(via sweetcell’s flickr)
Opentape
The Muxtape alternative:
Opentape is a free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own mixtapes on the web.
Upload songs (via web or FTP), reorder, rename, customize the style, and share what you like on other sites with an embeddable player.
YouTube Comment Snob
This is the answer to the problem, but I would kind of miss such helpful comments as “y dun’t u suck a bag of dicks,” when trolling the internets.
YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. You can choose to have any of the following rules mark a comment for removal:
- More than # spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox’s built-in spell checker.
- All capital letters
- No capital letters
- Doesn’t start with a capital letter
- Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)
- Excessive capitalization or Profanity
you put your weed in it
Federal agents found pot in a Miami mall.
The Mall of the Americas in Miami was home to a business not usually found among the food courts, retail stores and movie theaters of similar locations: a hydroponic nursery with more than 200 marijuana plants.
Federal agents seized the plants on Friday. The grow operation was found deep in a storeroom at the mall. Authorities say the growers used the mall’s electricity to power their equipment, adding the flimsy wiring could have caused a fire.
the legacy of Athens
Fresh off the splendor of the Beijing Olympics it’s heartening disheartening [editor's note: sorry about that, posted before my first cup of coffee] to see the legacy of Athens’ Olympic games.
Four years since the Athens Games, a Greek tragedy is taking place. Incredibly, many of the 22 Olympic venues now lie abandoned, as a sad and litter-strewn reminder of sport’s greatest festival.
Gypsy camps have sprung up in the shadow of stadiums where the world’s finest athletes once battled for gold. Graffiti is scrawled over the outer walls of many sites, and it has been reported in Greece that upward of $1 billion has been spent simply to maintain these ugly wrecks.
The Games will never return there. They will not be allowed to, if for no other reason than that the level of public outrage at the grotesque waste of money on oversized venues with no future is extreme.
something, 19
The drawings we did were a symbol of her love for us. I know it was hard but we haven’t even got there yet.