May 2009
Matthew's non theme based fancy dress party →
The problem I have with the note is not that he was having a party and didn’t invite me, it was that he selected a vibrant background of balloons, effectively stating that his party was going to be vibrant and possibly have balloons and that I couldn’t come.
If I was writing a note to my neighbours saying that I was going to have a party but none of them could come, I would not add...
Hate
Do you hate anyone? Is there anyone you truly hate? I realized today that I hate no one. That word is vastly overused. I’m hardly the archetype of universal love, but I don’t hate.
I was planning to post a link and write, “I could write a treatise about how much I hate this guy, but this piece is really brilliant.” That would have been tongue in cheek, of course, since I...
“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”
– Roald Dahl.
Realizing that I don’t have a monopoly on interpreting works of art, I still feel a little cheated every time I see someone start a blog, or a book, or whatever with references to authors, books, songs, artists, or whatever that I really like, and I think, Hey, Here’s Someone Like Me, Here’s Someone Who Gets It — whatever It is — and then discover that in fact the...
Easy Solutions #1 →
So, you’re in love with one of your friends, but she has a boyfriend and probably wouldn’t have sex with you anyway.
Christian Neukirchen (& me): Epic.
“Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them,...”
– Virginia Woolf. (via Tomorrow Museum)
Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm... →
Surely everyone has a quarter of an hour of their lives to watch a fun talk about one of the awesomest things around, orgasm. Some fun facts from this video:
Fetuses can masturbate. (She has ultrasound pictures!)
You can stimulate orgasm in brain dead people. Also, some people can get orgasms by rubbing their knees, brushing their teeth, or simply thinking.
A once-prominent medical theory said...
Mojibake →
I wasn’t aware that this had a name until I happened upon this wiki page, but it strikes me as the kind of annoyance that deserves a name of its own. Mojibake is “the happenstance of incorrect, unreadable characters shown when computer software fails to render text correctly according to its associated character encoding.” Often, it manifests as square boxes in place of unicode...
Intellectual Property Asshole Competition
→
Evan Roth painted Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster and the the photo it was based on:
Who is the bigger intellectual property asshole? Is it the artist who has amassed a small fortune based on “appropriation” yet still sends cease and desist letters to other artists for appropriating his work? Or is it the largest (and only) US based nationally-oriented news service which fails to...
No flimping →
But certain other structures are not transportable. For example, in “Bill left all his money to Fred and someone”, one can reach down as far as “Fred and someone” and ask “What did Bill leave to Fred and someone?” but one cannot reach all the way down to “someone” and ask “Who did Bill leave all his money to Fred and”?
...
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells... →
“You can bet I’m going. A hydra flew in last night and ran off Rolf Hierdal’s sheep. We can’t be putting up with this shit. It comes down to pride, is what it comes down to.”
“Hell, Gnut, when’d you get to be such a gung-ho motherfucker? I don’t recall you being so proud and thin-skinned before Astrud went off to her good place. Anyhow, Lindisfarne is probably sacked-out already. If you don’t...
Moments that people are in
When something becomes a theme, that suggests I ought to write about it. Not every writer gets to have a theme. Writing is hard at its most paradoxical, though. I’m trying to figure out the solution to a problem whose root is the search for solutions.
I’m tightly wound — cogs are always churning along, grinding every moment into sour theory. Put the average person in a...
“Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and...”
– Aristotle.
An, auf, hinter, in, neben, über, unter, vor und...
I just finished my German exam. In two years, my classmates and I have learned depressingly little German, yet somehow enough to make good grades anyhow. Now, I, not being a fucking Hemingway, can’t express myself in sentences of a complexity a two-year-old could produce, and consequently ventured into a bunch of uncharted territory outside of the curriculum for beginner’s German....
“I demand that the human race
ceases multiplying its kind and bow out
I advise...”
– Jack Kerouac.
TIME FOR SOME STORIES →
These are great. (via nostrich)
Outdoing Infinity (or: epenis = aleph one)
Is it possible to outdo this? Can you beat infinity? Can your score be higher than toldorknown’s? Yes, it can.
One of the most beautiful pieces of logic (that can be understood by most people) I know of is Cantor’s Diagonal Proof of the uncountability of the real numbers. My first paragraph here was a shameless attempt to get you to read on long enough for me to explain, without...
“I spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown while living in Norway
I...”
– Of Montreal, A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger.
Oh, those black metal bands.
