May 2011
47 posts
Oliver Objects →
‘For your twin brother to be inventing any sort of joke at this age is lovely to see, whether his stumbling into post-modernist territory is accidental or not.’
Nanolaw with Daughter →
She squinted at the screen. “I can do this now,” she said. “I can do it on my own.”
“You have to check it every day,” I said. “Time, tide, and law wait for no man.”
“Everybody you admire, everybody you respect, everybody you like…...”
– Merlin Mann - Scared Shitless: How I Learned to Love Being Afraid of Pretty Much Everything
Bill Callahan: “Riding for the...
“He is a human being utterly at ease with himself, and we get to see what he does...”
– Mike Barthel on Justin Bieber
The Moral Superiority of the Streetcar →
When I was 14 I would ride the trolley from Philadelphia to Media, Pennsylvania, to my dad’s. And I loved it. But then again I took the M15 select bus today and loved it, too. It is a long, fast bus that shoots up Manhattan like an arrow. In truth, I love all wheeled forms of public transit. (Even jeepneys? ask the people who hate jeepneys. And I look them right in their cruel eyes and...
Happy Bucks →
“Can happy bucks buy happiness?” “I’ve never heard a truism saying they can’t.”
“In court, Robinson cut a respectable figure. His children and members of his...”
– The Lazarus File - Magazine - The Atlantic
A Veteran of Bin Laden Assault Unit SEAL Team Six... →
“If we’d wanted you to have a wife, we would’ve issued you one,” he explained. “Go over there and ring that damn bell. Get this over. I’ll let you drink that hot chocolate. Put you in this warm ambulance. Wrap you up in a thick blanket. And you don’t have to put up with this anymore.”
I looked over at the bell. It would be that easy. All I have to do is pull that mother three times. I thought...
“His wife, Johanna Johannsdottir, a massage therapist, is Bjork’s best friend.”
– Icelander’s Campaign Is a Joke, Until He’s Elected - NYTimes.com
“All the pieces matter”: Monopoly and The Wire →
Like chess, Monopoly is about controlling territory. Unlike chess, it’s not neofeudal combat, with handed-down traditions and ideologies of strategy and honor — the illusion that everything is perfectly under the player’s control, that all the pieces in the game are visible.
Monopoly is transparently about money and greed. It lays bare the multiple, adjacent worlds and the interlocking systems...
What Do People Do All Day? →
Some of the jobs the author describes have evolved, very few of them have all but disappeared (you can’t easily bump into a blacksmith, much less one who sells tractors); the texture of our cities has changed and those little shops have given way to larger chain stores; but by and large we still do the things that occupy Scarry’s anthropomorphic menagerie[.]
Fighting the Mississippi River →
In addition to all the things the Corps actually does and does not do, there are infinite actions it is imagined to do, infinite actions it is imagined not to do, and infinite actions it is imagined to be capable of doing, because the Corps has been conceded the almighty role of God.
A very long, very good 1987 article on the history of the Mississippi River and the Army Corps of...
“It’s as if the great advances of human civilization, in everything from animal...”
– Taco Bell and the Golden Age of Drive-Thru - BusinessWeek
I’ve read some good stuff this weekend but when it comes down to it, nothing beats this sentence. This article is recommended if you have any curiosity about the inner workings of the fast food industry.
The Weakerthans: “Civil Twilight”...
Said the Gramophone: I'll Go Without →
Always an avid promoter of health, it was not widely known that he smoked for the entire last half of his short life. He had an intense vanity and wanted to keep his weight down at any cost, and smoking seemed to him the most effective. But to make matters worse, he always hand-painted his cigarettes gold. He used to love smoking while making love and to him a piece of smoking gold between his...
"Let's get this party started!" My evening talking... →
It’s interesting how a credit card has become the Turing test of modern life… if you possess one, you must be human.
Forthcoming Offerings from K.B. Cockfoster's Toy... →
Tomma-gotch-ee
• Pocket Slave from the Orient!
• For teaching children lessons of Patience and the Proprietorship of another Soul
• Attend to its hygiene. Feed it a Daily morsel. Fashionable egg shape!
• Upon Death it spoils not!
Walking the Border →
There’s a sign on the other side of the road. It’s bright yellow and busy with pictographs: A sun, some mountains, a rattlesnake, a cactus, and a little drowning man, one arm raised, sinking into a pool of water. CUIDADO! the sign reads. NO VALE LA PENA!
It’s not worth the trouble!
But of course it is. The returns are as stark and clear as those pictures on the sign. By the...
If you don’t build it, they won’t come →
Glaeser argues that if a city stops building new housing, as Greater Boston more or less has done, and if demand for housing remains strong, the result will be rising prices. The city will become unaffordable to exactly the kind of young, creative people it needs for its future greatness.
Glaeser praises the long frontage of glass towers that face out to Lake Michigan in Chicago, arguing that...
Slam and Jam →
This is the sort of intense activity cited in cases of controller burnout, and it obscures the actual functioning of air-traffic control, making it difficult to penetrate. As a pilot, I had the advantage of speaking the language: I spent days there following the technical details, and came away feeling that the intensity was mostly self-induced, and was in fact what the controllers thrived on....
Is the FBI Up to the Job 10 Years After 9/11? →
He is not a man who suffers attempts to chauffeur him around a briefing. “He’s a perpetual-motion machine,” says Thomas J. Harrington, who holds the FBI’s third highest post, associate deputy director. “He likes to drive the thing the whole time.” Among Mueller’s disconcerting habits is a gesture with a cupped right hand that beckons a briefer to quit...
The Great Ephemeralization →
Suppose we lived in the world of Harry Potter, and one day in the late 1950s RCA hired a wizard to wave his magic wand and transform all of the world’s black and white sets into color sets. This would clearly represent a large increase in the standard of living—a larger increase, in fact, than the non-magical process whereby people have to buy new, more expensive, televisions. Yet the government...
“Seriously, how long do you expect a group of people to listen to one man talk...”
– Obama Finally Tells Rambling Tom Vilsack To Shut The Fuck Up During Cabinet Meeting
Come Up To The Lair Sometime Day! →
“You haven’t come up to the lair,” he’ll say. “Tell me why. Now.”
You’ll stammer an apology and you’ll tell him you assumed—
“No one should make assumptions about what I say. I only speak information that I want the listener to process and act upon. You received information that I wanted your company in my lair. You processed this and decided I didn’t want the company I requested. Shall I kill...
Apple TV set →
Oh, you want to play your little games? Maybe you’ve heard of something called the App Store, the single biggest distributor of games on the planet. Built into the set. Oh, you want to play your collector’s edition Blu-ray discs? Play them on your Vizio, Derek. You disgust me.
Why Amazon Charged $23,698,655.93 for a Genetics... →
As it happened, profnath and bordeebook were both using pricing algorithms to determine the optimum prices for their books. Profnath’s algorithm was designed to have the lowest price possible—but only by a small amount, hence 0.9983—while bordeebook’s was designed to set the highest price—presumably, Eisen writes, because they don’t actually have a copy of the book and would...
xkcd: Craigslist Apartments →
1550 / 2BR (one inside the other). Has running water, in a sense. Free heat in short, intense bursts.
Daring Fireball Linked List: Harry McCracken: 'The... →
The mass market doesn’t buy, and doesn’t want to buy, products based on what they might become months from now if these companies somehow dramatically improve the software. They buy products for what they are today, out of the box. Motorola and RIM and Samsung are Apple’s industry peers. These are the big leagues, this is The Show. They’re charging customers real money to buy these things. They...
Bad Books: “You’re a Mirror I Cannot...