May 2013
32 posts
1 tag
Help me out:
Hammer dulcimers, pianos, harpsichords: string instruments or percussion instruments?
3 tags
Thought for this evening, from an interview with Ferron:
If you are not following your dream, you are definitely following someone else’s.
4 tags
http://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/breakdown_advi... →
This is some cool. It’s a library of audio clips of cars with different problems. Much more useful than going in to the mechanic and trying to sound out your brake pads, which I’ve done a few times.
3 tags
I heard that if Yahoo buys Tumblr, they’re gonna ban GIFs of cats. And Cumberbatch.
5 tags
4 tags
3 tags
2 tags
Little girl in the general store wants to buy a bottle of water.
Dad: We have water in the truck.
Girl: But this water is cold.
Dad: Well, it was pretty cold last night. I bet our water is cold, too.
Girl: [very serious] But this water is enhanced.
2 tags
Reading the hater over on Magnus’ tumblr, and it suddenly dawns on me that I’ve had, like, entire conversations with people who weren’t born in the same millenium as me.
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.
5 tags
“kosher insects” gets slightly more Google hits than “vegan roadkill”.
6 tags
Well, that worked.
Feeling overly romantic.
Decide to take preventative measures.
Go see Gatsby.
Start driving home.
See cute bunny rabbit.
Impulsively decide to run over rabbit and eat it.
Immediately recall house rule against running over things in order to eat them.
Stay in lane, bypass rabbit.
Note disturbing similarities between rabbit dilemma and Gatsby plot.
While pondering this,...
8 tags
Yuuuup. S is in Tortonto, and I think I’m gonna go see Gatsby. I’m in a mood. I’ve been listening to Dead Can Dance, Ferron, Talking Heads, and my sister all day long, which constitutes an overdose. Two and half hours of Leonardo DiCaprio will paralyze my irony cortex, a crucial safety measure in dealing with maudlin romanticism.
6 tags
I have this collect-them-all adoration for the apologia that people on Youtube and Tumblr throw down for what is obviously piracy. My absolute favorite, for its succinct not-clear-on-the-concept innocence, is the phrase “no infringement intended” (now kicking 10.6 million Google hits). I want to see that one applied to crimes that involve an actual taking: “sorry about this...
Anonymous asked: Um...who vanished in the OP's story about a dog?
2 tags
Google thinks I’m Latino, Netflix thinks I’m gay, and the VFD thinks I live one town over.
2 tags
blein:
sO my friend’s dog died and she lives in new york city and so she had to take it to the vet by the subway and she put the dead dog in the suitcase on the subway and it was a pretty big dog and some dude saw that she was struggling with the suitcase so he asked if she needed help with it and he said do you mind me asking what’s in it and she didnt want to say a dead dog so shE SAID IT WAS...
5 tags
A belated thought:
The article from the Sedalia Weekly Bazoo that I reproduced back in March is written by “A Wisconsin Female-Husband”, presumably Frank DuBois. Allowing for plenty of definitional latitude, this makes it the first case that I am aware of in which someone who self-identifies (in effect) as trans is publicly writing about another person they identify (in effect) as...
11 tags
Dialect poetry is out of fashion, thank god, except maybe within greater hip-hop. But it has its gems. I’m thinking of Louise Bennett’s Jamaica Labrish:
Me got intelligency, yuh
illiterated fool
Labrish writes (in 1966) about strikes, shortages, Jamaican involvement in the second World War…good stuff. In C.J. Dennis’ 1915 Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, he writes...
15 tags
Three New Articles
On the other blog:
London to Paris in 49 Days - About airline pricing and economics.
Validating Identities - Some Preliminary Notes - About a fake personality test, a serial killer, astrology, Lake Wobegon, and the DSM-5.
Three Apocalypses - About the different ways the world ends, and how they’re cross-marketed.
4 tags
5 tags
4 tags
I’ve been editing part of a paper by someone whose first language is Amharic, which uses a suffix system for the definite article / gender / accusative case of a noun. This doesn’t seem to translate very well into English, and so I’m spending a lot of time thinking about articles. What I keep noticing is that in English, we often use count nouns without an article, and this...
5 tags
Just read part of an interview with a park warden from East Africa, who is basically saying straight up that ethnic violence is good for conservation efforts, because people can’t hunt big game when they are, e.g., afraid of getting raped and killed.
This may be true, but woooooah.
2 tags
Damn, I forgot to brag about getting to fifty chapters. I suck at self-promotion.
7 tags
7 tags
9 tags
Two New Articles Up...
…on the other blog.
Tell the Moon How Beautiful It Is, about the Apollo goodwill plaque.
Ghosts, Vampires, and Cryptography, about Zen, and counting. And stuff.
2 tags
I finally have managed to delete my Facebook account, which used to be this huge ordeal where you had to personally go to Zuckerberg’s house and assure him that you were cool, or something. But they still give you this warning spiel about how you can log in for the next 14 days and change your mind and come back to Jesus or heroin or whatever the hell it is they think they’re...
5 tags
2 tags
nathenlester:
I never screw up when I’m driving. If I did, though, I’d really want a hand signal for “I’m sorry.” There’s the heel-of-the-hand-bounces-off-the-forehead gesture, which means the right thing but is not easily seen by the offended party if they are behind you. It would be nice to have one you could fly out the window like the bird. If I ever screwed up while driving, that is.
I...
2 tags
8 tags
There’s a new article out by Kristen Hawkes, originator of the Grandmother Hypothesis, a popular evolutionary just-so story. (Short version: menopause is adaptive because it allows older women to focus on intergenerational child-rearing). I have a lot of doubts about the GH, since it seems to me that senescence is a perfectly good explanation for menopause, and there are serious questions...
7 tags
Per a discussion with S, I just tried to google “Neti pot deaths”, which are in fact a thing, but I got redirected somehow to Wikipedia’s fairly awesome “List of Premature Obituaries”. Which is even better.
5 tags
April 2013
27 posts
3 tags
2 tags
Just got poison ivy from handling sneakers in the attic that had been exposed to urushiol five years ago. What?
2 tags
This is a PTTOOC machine
I just saw a GIF posted on a Tumblog I follow from a television show that someone obviously hadn’t watched, but had reblogged and responded to anyway. They had taken the dialogue completely out of context, and they were passionately offended by what they thought it was about.
I almost commented. And then it hit me:
That’s what Tumblr is designed for. The whole function of this...
4 tags
When you are taking a nice hot bath…
In an outdoor clawfoot tub…
On an April night…
And you put your head underwater to listen to the amplified glurble noise of the universe…
And the tub falls over……..
It’s really LOUD.
2 tags
5 tags
6 tags
5 tags
6 tags
I don’t really understand the right-wing impulse to throw out the Bill of Rights for terrorists. I mean, forget all the civil liberties arguments. From a strictly military-strategy point of view, it’s pretty clear that Tsarnaev either doesn’t know anything of interest (five gets you six) or else is under such deep cover as an incompetent that he’ll never talk.
So in the...
5 tags
3 tags
4 tags
You know what I can’t wait for? October 21, 2015.
A million people are going to post that damn image of Marty McFly to their MyTumblFacePlaceBlogs, and all their friends will write back: “noooo, assholes, that’s just a meme!”
4 tags
Woah!
Google ads has just decided I speak Spanish (which I guess is true), and now all my ads are in Spanish. There are some messed-up ads in Spanish on Youtube, tho.
5 tags
Strictly speaking, I don’t see how you can be “addicted” to making Greedo shoot first.
2 tags
8 tags
