23 July 2008
In the Name of Science
Chocolate 'cake' in a mug in a microwave. Don't forget to scroll down to see all the ... evidence.
One researcher's results:
"I mixed the ingredients exactly as ordered, and put it in the microwave. Over the course of five minutes the scents that came from my microwave were: Cooking chicken, old motor oil, cocoa, and burned coffee.
"It took me two tries to get a fork into my leaning monstrosity, and when I bit into it, it was crunchy. I threw it at a wall as hard as I could and it didn't break at all."
Another intrepid researcher substituted Nestle's Strawberry Quick for cocoa powder: "It tastes a little like strawberries, and a little like failure."
14:55 Posted in food and drink , science and tech , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
21 July 2008
Martha Blogs Her Visit to the NY DMV
One might ask, Why?, but then one may as well ask, Why not?
As Martha would say, Come see!
(Can you believe they sell pens at the DMV for $.25 so you can fill out their forms!?)
06:55 Posted in finance and business , silliness and humour , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
20 July 2008
More Funeral Stuff
A short McSweeney's list: Phrases I'd Rather Not Be Used At My Funeral by Harry Burt, with my anxious additions:
"autoerotic asphyxiation" [likewise: "left 10-inch clawmarks"]
"found by cadaver dogs" ["according to the forensic entomologist"]
"hopped up on goofballs" ["ate her weight in Oreos"]
"minutes from rescue" ["last-second airline flight change"]
"prehensile tail" ["cascading sheets of mucus"]
["salvaged what we could," "leaned over the rim a smidge too far," "must have been in unimaginable pain," "what's that on his forehead? 'syawliarT'?"]
20:45 Posted in death , lists , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Websites with Narrow Focus, X
I've been saving them up for this post.
It's Lovely! I'll Take It!, "a collection of poorly chosen photos from real estate listings. With love." And comments. Don't miss it.
potentially nervous: "The world's going to hell. Here are some bunny photos."
How I Spent My Stimulus. Tell your story.
Kim's Page o' Chopsticks. Chopstick wrappers, actually. (Thanks, Mike.)
06:45 Posted in animals , art and photography , finance and business , food and drink , householding , pop culture , silliness and humour , websites with narrow focus | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
12 July 2008
Video: How to Pretend You Care About the Election
Video at The Onion News Network's "Today Now!" morning show.
Too funny (because it's true) not to post. I actually do care about the 2008 elections and will vote (as always), but I have no interest in talking about it with anyone, ever.
Watch for the text boxes "About the Candidates."
19:50 Posted in holidays and seasons , politics, government and law , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Solutions: Art (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the eighth post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 2 - ART
Literature
The history of art is filled with challenges to the status quo.
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen (1814): The rich and well-mannered are not ipso facto good, and the poor and unschooled are not necessarily bad.
"Almost every great novel of the 19th and 20th centuries stages an assault on, or at the very least harbours scepticism regarding, the accepted social hierarchy, and each offers some sort of redefinition of precedence according to moral worth rather than financial assets or bloodlines."
Examples: Balzac - Le Père Goriot (1834), Hardy - Jude the Obscure (1895), G. Eliot - Middlemarch (1872), Fielding - Joseph Andrews (1742), Thackeray - Vanity Fair (1848), Dickens - Bleak House (1853), Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White (1860), A. Trollope - The Way We Live Now (1875), Zadie Smith - White Teeth (2000).
Painting
(You have to see the book for this, as he reproduces "paintings of the commonplace" -- which elevate the status of the ordinary -- and discusses them)
Tragedy
"Fear of the material consequences of failure is thus compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards those who have failed, exemplified by its haunting proclivity to refer to them as 'losers' - a word callously signifying both that they have lost and that they have, at the same time, forfeited any right to sympathy for losing."
Tragedy helps to re-inject empathy into the equation by showing how like everyone else the tragic figure is. G
Examples: Oedipus, Antigone, Lear, Othello, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Tess, et al.
Tragedy doesn't absolve its subjects of responsibility but does offer and elicit a level of sympathy.
At the center of tragedy is an ordinary human being with a tragic flaw who makes an error in judgment from which flows a terrible reversal of fortune. Tragic flaws are defects common to humans, such as excessive pride, anger, impulsiveness, etc. Errors in judgment occur not from evil motives but from lapses in judgment, slips.
Tragedy reflects:
(1) how apparently small missteps can result in grave consequences
(2) the blindness we suffer with regard to the effects of our actions
(3) a fatuous tendency to presume that we are in conscious command of our destiny
(4) the sped and finality with which all that we cherish can be lost
(5) the mysterious forces against which our powers are pitted
Tragedy apportions blame without denying sympathy. We're appalled yet compassionate as we see the universality of the situation. This form of art seeks to plumb the origins of failure.
Comedy
More specifically, satire.
"Jokes are an enormously effective means of anchoring a criticism. At base, they are another way of complaining: about arrogance, cruelty or pomposity, about departures from virtue or good sense."
"History reveals no shortage of jokes intended to amend the vices of high-status groups and shake the mighty out of their pretensions or dishonesty." [q.v. George Carlin]
Comedy also can be used to make sense of and mitigate status anxiety: "Comedy reassures us that there are others in the world no less envious or socially fragile than ourselves.
06:00 Posted in books and reading , girardian anthropology , other people said it , pop culture , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
05 July 2008
More Current and Passe Bits
I've been away since Sunday. Now I'm back.
** David Sedaris in The Austin Chronicle on the flap over a year ago about his 'embellished' stories:
"I take a story, put it on a scale, and say, 'OK, if this is 96 percent true, that's an acceptable ratio for ground beef, and it's more than acceptable for heroin and cocaine, so I'm going to call it nonfiction.'"
** In a fascinating article on Jacques Barzun in the 22 Oct. 2007 New Yorker, which I was reading at a friend's while away:
"Barzun wanted to do on the page what he did in the classroom: help the reader 'carry in his head something more than the unexamined history of his own life.' not because knowledge is inherently good or makes one a better person but because it fosters an independence of mind."
Barzun, who is over 100 years old, is quoted as saying: "Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing." He's refering to an irony of aging, that (now in the words of the article's author, Arthur Krystal) "when time is short, old age takes up a lot of time," what with "doctors' visits, tests to be suffered, results to wait for, ailments and medications to be studied."
For some this comes in old age; for some, much earlier (and for some, never).
** From Ruth Rendell's Not of the Flesh (2008), which I'm finishing this weekend, Inspector Wexford says something along the same lines:
"Modern medicine is wonderful. I just wish we didn't have to hear about it day in and day out. In the Middle Ages they say people brought God into the conversation all the time, and with the Victorians it was death. We talk about our insides."
06:00 Posted in books and reading , health and medicine , other people said it , pop culture , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
27 June 2008
Current Events Quote of the Day
"It's so disappointing," Linda Wilmesherr, a local resident, tells the Associated Press. "With all the guns in this county, couldn't we kill a muskrat?"
from Muskrats blamed for levee breach in Missouri, in USA Today
17:10 Posted in animals , gardening and weather , other people said it , politics, government and law , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
25 June 2008
Inside Animals' Heads
DALMATIANS
'Hey, look, the truck's stopping.'
'Did they take us to the park this time?'
'No -- it's a fire. Another horrible fire.'
'What the hell is wrong with these people?'
From 'Animal Tales' by Simon Rich in the 30 June 2008 New Yorker.
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23 June 2008
RIP George Carlin (1937 - 2008)
Comedian, political humourist, anti-censorship crusader and thinker George Carlin died yesterday of a heart attack at age 71. He released his first comedy album, Take-Offs and Put-Ons, in 1967, acted in 'That Girl' and the movie 'With Six You Get Egg-Roll,' and by the end of the 1960s, "he was one of America’s best known comedians." In 1970, feeling he was "living a lie," he ditched his clean-cut, conventional image and material for the long-haired look and seven-words-riddled, edgy patter he's known for. That switch resulted in the cancellation of a 3-year-contract and "he was advised to leave town when an angry mob threatened him at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club"!
Time magazine already has "How George Carlin Changed Comedy" on its website.
Transcript of "The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," from his 1972 album Class Clown. (NSFW)
An editorial cartoon featuring Carlin, printed in today's Chicago Tribune, which went to press before news of Carlin's death.
10:05 Posted in death , media, film, tv, radio , language , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
31 May 2008
What I'm Reading Online: We All Need -- or Don't Need -- to Improve!
>> at Zen Habits, 12 Practical Steps for Learning to Go With the Flow. A simple list. I like the quotes, especially this one: 'Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.' - Chuang Tzu. I wonder whether the idea of accepting whatever I'm doing is consistent with Christianity, with prayers of confession, etc.
>> from Life 2.0, Follow Your Bliss. The central idea, similar to the quote above, is 'no need for self improvement.'
"The central premise behind all the self improvement stuff (although often unseen as it can be oh so subtle) is that there is something wrong with us, something flawed that needs to be improved, something we need to do in order to be happy, healthy, successful and fulfilled. It is this unexamined assumption, that we can be improved and therefore must be less than perfect, that keeps us in chains ... that reinforces this illusion of brokenness, powerlessness and being a victim-of-circumstances-beyond-our-control, which we see reflected back to us in the world we perceive around us."
Instead, this weblog counsels "an alternative to self-improvement, a spiritual path or another kind of seeking.... Vow to do what makes you happy right now and see where that takes you." Ah, but "anything we think we want, we have been conditioned to want," so it's not as easy as it might seem to do what makes us happy.
What I can't help thinking is that this plan to "be happy" is self-improvement by another name, with its implication that we're not happy enough already, and that we need to do something about this lack.
>> "Jesus Made Me Puke" by Matt Tabbi in Rolling Stone, about a 3-day "Encounter Weekend" retreat with John Hagee's Cornerstone Church:
"The program revolved around a theory that [pastor Philip] Fortenberry quickly introduced us to called 'the wound.' The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.
"In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry's tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father's abandonment had crushed his 'normal.'
"'And I was wounded,' he whispered dramatically. 'My dad had ruined my normal!'
"The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal."
>> at Marginal Revolution, How To Choose An Apartment. How much does the actual living space matter, and how much does the location matter? Do we under- or over-invest in one or the other? Interesting anaylsis via comments. I now live in a house I don't really like, in a location I love. Before this, I lived in a house (including extensive grounds) that I loved in a location I didn't like. I still don't know which is better.
>> provacateur PJ O'Rourke's "Fairness, Idealism and Other Atrocities," commencement advice. His advice: make money, don't be an idealist (they're bullies), get politically uninvolved (politics is anathema to truth), forget about fairness, be a religious extremist (that is, realise that "using politics to create fairness is a sin").
About fairness:
"Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, 'That's not fair.' When she says this, I say, 'Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you.'"
>> 25 Things All Women Should Learn to Do Already by the women at Jezebel. Ranges from manual and practical skills like rapid vegetable chopping, masturbation, financial investing, and assembling furniture, to the more abstract realm of truth-telling, and social skills like withholding information, getting angry without being passive-aggressive, and not taking things personally. And of course, there are comments.
>> "Total Recall … Or At Least the Gist" at Miller-McCune, on the differences between gist and verbatim memory. What interests me here is the hypothesis called 'fuzzy trace theory,' which "explains how we can 'remember' things that never really happened:"
"When an event occurs, verbatim memory records an accurate representation. But even as it is doing so, gist memory begins processing the information and determining how it fits into our existing storehouse of knowledge. Verbatim memories generally die away within a day or two, leaving only the gist memory, which records the event as we interpreted it. Under certain circumstances, this can produce a phenomenon Reyna and her colleagues refer to as 'phantom recollection.' She calls this 'a powerful form of false alarm' in which gist memory -- designed to look for patterns and fill in perceived gaps -- creates a vivid but illusory image in our mind." ...
"Gist memory allows us to make snap decisions. But life does not always follow familiar patterns, and harm can result when we discard evidence that doesn't fit our assumptions."
They note that this 'misremembering' is a very common, ordinary occurence.
>> "The Candidate, the Preacher and the Unconscious Mind" by Shankar Vedantam in the WaPo. Central idea: We are biased against people who are in proximity to people we are already biased against. Second idea: We believe that people "from other ethnic, cultural and political groups are quite similar to one another, whereas they know that people from [our] own groups are quite varied."
The study he cites is fascinating:
Volunteers in a research experiment see an applicant sitting in a waiting room next to an overweight person, while others see the applicant sitting next to someone of average weight. ... "A variety of experiments have shown that overweight people suffer from discrimination; what [researcher Michelle] Hebl wanted to find out was whether strangers in the vicinity of overweight people would share in such approbation.
"Remarkably, Hebl found that volunteers rated job applicants more negatively when they had been seen seated next to an overweight person than when they were seen seated next to an average weight person. The volunteers had no idea that they were showing not only a prejudice against fat people but also a bias against people who were merely in proximity to overweight people."The experiment tells us something about the Obama-Wright controversy. The presidential candidate may have made it clear that the minister does not speak for him, but every time Wright's words are replayed on talk radio and cable TV, they automatically retrieve mental associations in many voters' minds with Obama. Hebl similarly found her volunteers unconsciously made associations even after being explicitly told there was no connection between the job applicants in the waiting room."
Similarly, "men and women seen in the company of beautiful partners are perceived as being more attractive than when they are seen in plainer company." But -- "there is some evidence our minds are especially attuned to negative associations."
>> "The Gospel of Consumption And the better future we left behind" by Jeffrey Kaplan in Orion. The article, with a focused accounting of Kellogg company work-hour policy over the years, is primarily a vision of Americans working and spending less while living comfortably.
"Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but 'higher productivity' -- and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce. ...
"By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produ€ced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day -- or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level.
"But we cannot do it as individuals." The marketplace doesn't offer "a choice to work less and consume less. The reason is simple: that choice is at odds with the foundations of the marketplace itself -- at least as it is currently constructed. The men and women who masterminded the creation of the consumerist society understood that theirs was a political undertaking, and it will take a powerful political movement to change course today."
In a sort of rebuttal to PJ O'Rourke's suggestion (above) that democracy might mean having our clothing choices, e.g., determined by the majority (of shoppers, i.e., teen girls), Kaplan notes that Edward Bernays, "one of the founders of the field of public relations and a principal architect of the American Way," decreed that "the choices available in the polling booth are akin to those at the department store; both should consist of a limited set of offerings that are carefully determined by what Bernays called an 'invisible government' of public-relations experts and advertisers working on behalf of business leaders. Bernays claimed that in a 'democratic society' we are and should be 'governed, our minds ... molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.'"
>> "Engines of Emotional Pollution" (continues here) by Steven Stosny, Ph.D., in Psychology Today, posits four mechanisms that "govern most human interactions:" contagion, attunement, negative bias, and reactivity.
Contagion for Stosny is "what makes you feel what the rest of the group feels."
Attunement is a type of contagion, or a response to it; it's when we match "the intensity and tone of [our] emotions with those of someone else." It's honouring the boundaries of social convention. Interestingly, "[a]lthough our unconscious sensitivity to others is almost always active when we're not alone, it is not always accurate, i.e., we sometimes misconstrue what other people are feeling. However, we are far more accurate in sensing what others feel than in knowing what they think. This disproportionate accuracy between sensing another's feelings and judging their thinking leads to most of our misunderstandings of one another." We're pretty accurate in knowing another person's feelings but in trying to account for what's behind them, we make wrong assumptions.
Negative bias is related to attunement: Our 'negative' emotions influence us more than our positive ones, and we 'tune in' to negative emotions more than we do to positive ones: "So if you come home from work in a fairly good mood and find that your spouse is brooding or upset, attunement will bring him or her up a little and you down a lot. To keep from being 'brought down' by the other's negative mood, many couples attempt to dull their sensitivity to the other's emotional world."
Reactivity: is "learned resistance to the unconscious pull of contagion and attunement." It can be obvious -- 'I'm not putting up with your attitude!' or passive, ignoring another's bad mood.
From a Girardian perspective, I found this paragraph, which speaks of interdividualism (as opposed to individualism) without naming it, enlightening:
"The aspect of reactivity that makes it difficult to see, let alone change, is its illusion of free will and ego independence, even 'authenticity.' You think that you are acting of your own volition and in your best interest, when you are merely reacting to someone else. We've all uttered (or at least thought) the most ironic of all statements, 'You're not going to bring me down!' As long as you're in this reactive mode, you are down -- reacting to negativity with negativity."
12:05 Posted in books and reading , community , consumption , finance and business , girardian anthropology , householding , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , silliness and humour , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
29 April 2008
I said I was an addict -- I didn't say I had a problem
Watched most of the first season of House MD in the past two days:
Cameron: Is that rhetorical?
House: No, it just seems that way because you can't think of an answer. (Pilot)
"I'm bad at search parties and I'm bad at sitting around looking nervous doing nothing." (Paternity)
Wilson: You want to come over for Christmas dinner?
House: You're Jewish.
Wilson: Hanukkah dinner. What do you care? It's food, it's people.
House: No thanks.
Wilson: Maybe I'll come to your place.
House: Your wife doesn't mind being alone at Christmas?
Wilson: I'm a doctor, she's used to being alone. [House raises his eyebrows] I don't want to talk about it.
House [quickly]: Neither do I. (Damned if you Do)
Wilson: "I'm not gonna date a patient's daughter."
House: "Very ethical. Of course, most married men would say they don't date at all." (Fidelity)
"Life sucks. Your life sucks more than most. It's not as bad as some, which is depressing all by itself." (DNR)
Wilson to House: "You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the Rubik's complex; you need to solve the puzzle" (DNR)
House: How do I abuse you?
Foreman: How do you not? If I make a mistake...
House: I hold you accountable, so what?
Foreman: Dr. Hamilton forgives, he's capable of moving on.
House: That is not what he does.
Foreman: I screwed up his case. He told me...
House: He never said you were forgiven. I was there -- he said it was not your fault.
Foreman: So?
House: So, it was. You took a chance. You did something great. You were wrong, but it was still great. You should feel great that it was great. You should feel like crap that it was wrong. That's the difference between him and me. He thinks that you do your job, and what will be will be. I think that what I do and what you do matters. He sleeps better at night. He shouldn't. (DNR)
Wilson: "Did your pager really just go off, or are you ditching the conversation?"
House: "Why can't both be true?" (Histories)
"I take risks, sometimes patients die. But not taking risks causes more patients to die, so I guess my biggest problem is I've been cursed with the ability to do the math." (Detox)
"Very noble gesture. My favorite kind - dramatic, yet completely empty." (Sports Medicine)
House to Wilson: "I'm not the cancer doctor who's lying about the cancer dinner." (Sports Medicine)
House to Cameron: "I'm twice your age, I'm not great looking, I'm not charming, I'm not even nice. What I am is what you need. I'm damaged." (Love Hurts)
House (talking about himself and visions he had): "The patient was technically dead for over a minute...."
Wilson: "Do you think he was dead? Do you think those experiences were real?"
House: "Define real. They were real experiences. What they meant, personally, I choose to believe that the white light people sometimes see, visions, this patient saw: they're all just chemical reactions that take place when the brain shuts down."
Foreman: "You choose to believe that?"
House: "There's no conclusive science. My choice has no practical relevance to my life, I choose the outcome I find more comforting."
Cameron: "You find it more comforting to believe that this is it?"
House: "I find it more comforting to believe that this isn't simply a test." (Three Stories)
If you can fake sincerity, you can fake pretty much anything. (Honeymoon)
Wilson to House: "Be yourself. Cold, uncaring, distant."
House to Wilson: "Please, don't put me on a pedestal." (Honeymoon)
15:00 Posted in media, film, tv, radio , health and medicine , other people said it , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
01 April 2008
Happy 1 April !
Make sure to celebrate by using Google's Custom Time. (And check out their past innovations.)
Also, How Stuff Works: How the Air Force One Hybrid Works
08:57 Posted in science and tech , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
2 L8 Txt Msgs
Text Messages That Would Have Been Helpful by Jen Statsky at McSweeney's.
Includes:
"hey just wnted 2 give the heads up,
CC on way w 3 shps, want 2 colonize u.
dont giv n unless u think casinos r gr8.
txt me back"
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26 March 2008
Crafting Luminous Reviews
Fun essay in the NYT's Papercuts by Bob Harris, listing his choices for the seven worst words frequently used in book reviews. The comments are even funnier, by which I of course mean compelling, nuanced, readable and haunting.
14:00 Posted in books and reading , language , lists , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
13 March 2008
Oh Onion
DOT Creates New Lane For Reckless Drivers:
"'We made sure to interview a broad spectrum of dangerously incompetent and inconsiderate pricks,' said [Secretary of Transportation Mary] Peters, who stressed that the DOT sent questionnaires exclusively to drivers who have had five or more accidents in as many years or have been issued at least three 100-mph-plus speeding tickets in the last six months, as well as all members of the Corvette Club of America. 'Their feedback was invaluable -- so much so that we hired many to drive test sections of the highway. Several of those drivers will have sections of the new lanes named after them in memoriam.'"
Report: 6 Out Of 10 Americans Cannot Locate Payless Shoes On A Mall Map :
"'In a modern, mall-going society, these important life skills should be second nature to citizens of all ages,' [Secretary of Education Margaret] Spellings said. 'No schoolchild should be allowed to grow up ignorant of the varied chain stores around him.' Despite her frustration, Spellings said she wasn't surprised by the poor test results, and claimed that they signaled a larger cultural illiteracy trend. According to Spellings, over the last decade Americans have fallen off in almost every field of study and endeavor, from mall geography to television history to basic text-message reading and writing."
And, related:
Victim Of Mall Shooting Determined Not To Die In Yankee Candle:
"'I remember thinking "This is it, I'm going to die,"' the 34-year-old contractor said from his bed at Buffalo General Hospital, where he is still under observation after sustaining three gunshot wounds, including one that left a bullet lodged in his spine. Then I looked around at where I was and told myself there was no way in hell I was going to let them find me curled up behind a floor display of Midnight Jasmine Housewarmer jar candles.'
"'How could this happen to me?' Mull added. 'I'm never anywhere near Yankee Candle.'
"Much of Mull's desperate plight was captured on mall security cameras. In the grainy footage, he can be seen inching his way slowly over the blood-slicked floors and past the contorted bodies of other victims before collapsing unconscious in the entrance of The Sharper Image."
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12 March 2008
I'm obviously the intended viewer
(Go to the site within the next 30 days to actually see the strip.)
21:13 Posted in animals , silliness and humour , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
23 February 2008
Avoiding Things
Like being hit by a big ship ("The book is 112 pages full of great information on how to avoid huge ships. You’d think you could summarize it in one sentence: 'Don't get in front of a huge ship,' but it's not quite that easy, apparently.")
And more things to avoid, and how. At gthing.
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14 February 2008
Happy V-Day
(click on image for readable view)
From Indexed
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12 February 2008
Rarely Available Real Estate
Lenten / Recession / Foreclosure / Winter comedic relief.
"Dramatic floor-to-ceiling walls. Breathtaking, massively proportioned mortgage. This one won’t last. ... Original mold throughout. Architect-designed, carpenter-built, and painter-painted. ... Sun-drenched living room, sun-scorched master suite, and sun-ravaged kitchen will have you checking yourself for moles. ... Recently indicted seller highly motivated...."
Check out the Tabula Rasa, too, "Manhattan's most hypothetical luxury building. ... Theoretical lobby with putative elevator leads to five notional floor-thru lofts. Or not!"
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31 January 2008
Preserving This Climate Of Fear
"Today, people are making eye contact with strangers on the street. They are whistling on subway platforms, strolling down sidewalks, and generally behaving as if they do not feel they could be killed at any moment. Children can be seen running playfully in public parks, their parents smiling and watching idly from afar when they should be obsessing over an unseen child abductor who will snatch and rape their babies first chance they get. It breaks my heart to see the land I love fall into such a state of non-panic.
"My God, what have we become?
"We can no longer rely solely on our enemies to menace the populace -- we must find that horror within ourselves."
They even provide the remedy, something each of us can do to preserve the fear:
"Twice a week, for at least 15 minutes, take the time to worry about any Muslims who may live in your area; lose sleep each night thinking about our thousands of miles of unguarded borders; stock up on water bottles and canned goods for no discernible reason other than that vague sense that civilization will collapse any second; as the election heats up, be sure to support candidates whose rhetoric appeals to your base survival instincts and fight-or-flight reflexes rather than to your hopes and dreams.
"And remember: Each and every one of us, no matter how big or small, possesses the ability to jump to conclusions."
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14 January 2008
What I'm Reading
Reading lots of disparate-seeming articles lately, such as:
>> A Dark Addiction: Miners Caught in Western Va.'s Spiraling Rates of Painkiller Abuse by Nick Miroff in the 13 Jan. 2008 WaPo. A long, disturbing, perhaps eye-opening article about the clustering of prescription drug and methadone addiction and abuse in western Virginia mining country, and its rapid and fatal increase in the last few years: "With disability rates as high as 37 percent in coal-mining areas such as Buchanan County, the region has many people with long-term pain management needs. As is the case with lots of aging miners, Trapp's addiction to pills began in a doctor's office, not a back-alley drug deal." Mini-profiles of a few folks' addictions and their ongoing struggles out of it.
>> Writing a novel just encourages distractions, per Guardian writer Tim Dowling's "How to write a novel," with "tips on resisting the allure of banjos, toast and YouTube." Toast is very distracting at times. As is everything-that's-not-writing: "In many novels you will find an Acknowledgments page in which friends are thanked for the use of cottages, beach houses or flats in exotic locations, where the author at last found the necessary isolation to complete his masterwork. Most of us, however, will not have such options: we have to write even while we continue parenting, walking the dog and executing urgent DIY projects in a distracted and half-assed manner."
>> A few articles about a recent study on 'signalling' -- i.e., how we humans make sure others know our value by flaunting it about via consumer products. Sometimes we flaunt very discreetly, though that seems oxymoronic on the face of it.
"Cos and Effect: Bill Cosby may be right about African-Americans spending a lot on expensive sneakers -- but he's wrong about why" by Ray Fisman in Slate, 11 Jan. 2008, argues that the study's emphasis on race as a determinant in visible consumption is misplaced: "It's not that black Americans are more inclined to signal wealth; rather, poor blacks are more likely than poor whites to be a part of communities where they are relatively rich enough to participate in the signaling game" and that "when black incomes catch up to white incomes ... the apparent black-white gap in spending on visible goods [will] disappear." Be sure to read the reader comments (i.e., "the fray").
In Sept. 2007, Alex Tabbarok at Marginal Revolution blogged about the same study, suggesting that paying big bucks for a private education, for instance, could be seen as another form of signalling, just like buying specific brands of shoes or cars is. [This is also addressed in a commenter's reply to the Slate article: "First, if you have ever read Veblin you would know that he viewed spending money on your child's education as a form of conspicuous consumption. I know a lot of people who send their kids to private schools and for the most part spending seems to be motivated by as much by showing status as a desire to provide children with a good education. From my perspective this is cultural. Where I grew up which was rural, people did not send their kids to private schools. Now I live in a metropolitan area and sending kids to private schools is more common. The difference is that kids benefit from the keeping up with the Jones when it involves their parents spending money on education." ] Many good comments on the Marginal Revolution post, too.
The original study, Conspicuous Consumption and Race (Aug. 2007), is a 64-page PDF file.
>> "A Helpful, Ego-Dissolving Mantra" from Everyday Wonderland a while back: "I Want Nothing for Myself.
Helgi comments: "Now, it is important to know that the pointer, or mantra, is not saying that you should give away all your belongings and never acquire anything ever again. It's fine to prefer red apples to green ones, or whatever, and it's also fine to want this sweater or that book, etc. The function of it is to break the habitual pattern of thinking by reducing your self-importance so to speak. If I recall correctly, Jesus is to have said 'deny thyself.' And what I take it to mean is basically the same as 'want nothing for yourself,' namely to starve the ego of importance, not give it any reality and simply allow it to fade away."
Helgi doesn't have the quote quite right but I think the sense is the same. Jesus said, in Matthew 16:24-25, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."
22:12 Posted in books and reading , community , consumption , girardian anthropology , health and medicine , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , silliness and humour , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this
03 January 2008
Fun Read: Being a Writer
I'm recommending "HOW TO WRITE STORIES... and lose weight, clean up the environment, and make a million dollars," by George Singleton in the current issue of the Oxford American.
As Emily Fisher summarised it at Brijit, "A hysterically deadpan treatise on all the reasons not to be a fiction writer." Hysterically (or rather, hilariously) deadpan, yes, but for me it made writing seem like a more viable task! I live in a state with bottle laws, though, so I'd have to find another money-making, environment-beautifying form of daily exercise.
Favourite lines -- you really have to read the article to appreciate them, though:
^ "Always be optimistic, like I am."
^ "Take the money and invest it in either a CD getting five percent interest, or in a mutual fund that’s not Putnam Voyager B." [Scroll down link. Love Fund Alarm.]
^ "You still live in a trailer, but the countryside is spectacular."
^ "... notice how you don’t have kids with which to bother, or a spouse, seeing as you've been slightly focused on your work..."
18:00 Posted in books and reading , finance and business , silliness and humour , simple living , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
17 November 2007
Crime Novel Quotes: Underworld by Reginald Hill
Just finished Hill's Underworld (1988), in the Dalziel/Pascoe police procedural series set in the Mid-Yorks.
"'How'd it go, then?' asked Pascoe wih a casualness she mistook for indifference.
"'Fine,' [Ellie] grunted with a laconicism he mistook for exclusion."
"[Pascoe] too looked around the room. Saw the mouthing faces, ghastly in the smoke-fogged strip-lighting. Heard the raucous laughter, the bellowed conversations, the eardrum-striating music. He felt a deep revulsion against it all. But he knew he was not applying a fair test. He was not a very clubbable person. His loyalties were individual rather than institutional. He distrusted the exclusivity of esprit de corps. Not that there was anything sinister here. This scene was the commonplace of ten thousand clubs and pubs the length and breadth of the island. Here was the companionship of the ale-house, nothing more."
"[Dalziel] knew he couldn't win this present argument but he also believed there was nowt like a few teeth marks in the ankle to make a postman tread carefully next time he came bearing bad news."
"Pascoe smiled wanly and left. Behind him Dalziel and Wield exchanged glances which to the casual eye might have looked like a freeze-frame from Frankenstein Meets Godzilla but in which they registered their mutual concern."
"'So Mr. Dalziel is in charge? Well, well. He's by way of being a friend of yours, I believe?'
"He couldn't keep the note of interrogation, or perhaps rather of incredulity out of his voice.
"'Yes, sir,' said Pascoe simply, not having the two or three hours necessary for an in-depth analysis of the relationship.'"
"'For I'm to be the Queen of the May, mother, I'm to be the Queen of the May,' [Wield] murmured to himself with a flash of that self-mocking humour which all men need who are to walk near dark edges without tumbling off."
"The two women exchanged glances, then Marion said, 'If I knew, I'd not tell you, but as I don't there's no harm in telling you the different stories.'
"This interesting distinction between confidence and commonality being approved by Wendy, Marion began. She was not long allowed sole occupancy of the stage as Wendy kept chipping in with addenda and corrections of details of date, time, meteorology, dress, disposition and genealogy, and soon it became an oratorio for two voices."
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05 November 2007
La-de-dah, hoity-toity, prissy, dandy tea drinker
Fancy Man Enjoys Tea
"On this occasion, Baumer removed the tea bag from the dainty brew and added one dollop of honey made by his friends the honeybees and a splash of milk straight from his mama's precious teat. But even with these additions, the tea was still too hot for Princess Jason's sensitive mouth, causing him to softly blow on the beverage with his lips pursed together like a little rosebud.
"'I like to do the crossword puzzle while I have my tea,' said Baumer, making it easy to imagine him wearing a bonnet and a frilly pink dress."
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29 October 2007
Midnight at the Oasis
You Are Midnight
You are more than a little eccentric, and you're apt to keep very unusual habits.
Whether you're a nightowl, living in a commune, or taking a vow of silence -- you like to experiment with your lifestyle.
Expressing your individuality is important to you, and you often lie awake in bed thinking about the world and your place in it.
You enjoy staying home, but that doesn't mean you're a hermit. You also appreciate quality time with family and close friends.
How can an online quiz peg me so well with 5 silly questions? :-)
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22 October 2007
RIP Peg Bracken, 25 Feb. 1918 - 20 Oct. 2007
"Whaaa!" I cried out when I saw the news that Peg Bracken has died. My current housekeeping practices, and outlook on life in general, are a natural outgrowth of reading and internalizing her The I Hate to Cook Book (1960; like her others, illustrated by Hilary Knight of Eloise fame), The I Hate to Housekeep Book (1962), and The Appendix to the I Hate to Cook Book (1966) as an impressionable twelve-year-old. (I also imbibed her travel book, But I Wouldn't Have Missed It for the World!: The Pleasures and Perils of an Unseasoned Traveler, 1973.)
Her influence on me was only compounded by living in the shadow of my mother's parallel adherence to Bracken's cooking practices, and, to a lesser extent, her cleaning mores -- not to mention my mother's equally acerbic and irreverant wit.
This excerpt from the I Hate to Cook Book, a recipe for Skid Road Stroganoff, conjures my mother to perfection:
"Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink."
You might think Bracken's books are much like Erma Bombeck's, but believe me, they're not.
Brackenisms
Serve veggies to guests with coarse-ground pepper, "because a lot of people feel that anything peppered should look as though it had been fished out of a gravel pit."
"You watch your friends redoing their kitchens and hoarding their pennies for glamorous cooking equipment and new cookbooks called Eggplant Comes to the Party or Let's Waltz Into the Kitchen, and presently you begin to feel un-American."
She recommends freezing maraschino cherries in ice cubes for lemonade at a children's party, noting that "If there are some left over, they're good in Old Fashioneds, too."
Bracken Resources
Bracken’s banter is still cooking, in the Portland (OR) Tribune, 13 May 2003
Guilty Pleasure #1: Peg Bracken at Horrifying Foodstuffs, 27 July 2005
On Peg Bracken at Apartment Therapy, 4 June 2005
Recipe for Overnight Macaroons
remembering The I Hate to Cook Book, John Kessler in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, 27 Sept. 2007, with recipe for Peg Bracken's Pots de Chocolate
remembering The I Hate To Cook Book at Slashfood, 31 Jan. 2006
remembering The I Hate to Cook Book at Errant Dreams Reviews, 6 Sept. 2006
remembering American cooking in the 1960s, in "Modernism, Sur La Table" by Sandy McLendon at JetSet
Bonus Feature
Peg's Recipe for Aggression Cookies, from The I Hate To Cook Almanack
Aggression Cookies
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup butter
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon soda
2 cups oatmeal
Mix like pie crust until soft...Beat it...hit it... pound it... pinch it...squish and squash it. Don't quit until
you've worked all those nasty aggressive feelings out of your system.
Now flatten one-inch balls of dough on ungreased cookie sheets. Use the bottom of a glass dipped in
sugar to flatten. Bake at 350 for about ten minutes.
13:10 Posted in books and reading , food and drink , householding , pop culture , silliness and humour , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
15 October 2007
Trickle-Down
Reaganomics Finally Trickles Down To Area Man.
One of the better Onion efforts in a while. Very snide, very cynical, very ... detailed.
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13 September 2007
The Problem is You
From Scott Adams at The Dilbert Blog:
"This is one of those 'everything you need to know about human beings' situations. Any incompatibility between a human and the world is seen as proof that the world is screwed up."
His examples are Justin Timberlake, who is very successful commercially but whom Scott Adams hears as a 'shockingly untalented guy,' and his own Dilbert cartoon strip, which is also commercially successful and about which, everyday, 'people e-mail or leave comments in various blogs telling me that Dilbert sucks.' Those people 'look at the incompatibility between my commercially successful art and their sense of humor and conclude there's something terribly wrong with me. The e-mail I have NEVER received goes like this: "I do not enjoy Dilbert, but since many people do, I assume the problem is on my end. Something is wrong with me and I am just writing to let you know I am defective."'
He invites readers to 'describe the last time you disagreed with a popular opinion, about anything, and concluded that the problem is with you?'
Update, 15 Sept. 2007: The more I think about this, the more I wonder how it accords with the studies showing that people have a strong tendency to comform, which would lead one to believe that if my view differs from others, I will change my view, not assume others are wrong. People (like me) seem to exhibit both behaviours from time to time: sometimes we think we're right and will defend our opinion beyond reason, while other times we see everyone else acting in some way that indicates they all have the same view, so we do the same thing, even if our view is different. I wonder if there is one underlying basis for both kinds of action -- conforming to others' opinions or rejecting others' opinons -- and if so, how it operates.
My initial thoughts are that it seems to me that a Girardian might suggest that which action is chosen would depend on which action seems to confer to us more sense of being, more positive identity; and a Buddhist might suggest something similar, that the selected action is the one that seems to give us more ground rather than pull ground out from under us. In either case, we'd chose the action that makes us feel more solid.
When we conform, we choose to belong, and that's one way of experiencing identity, ground, and solidity. When we rebel, on the other hand, we choose to reject belonging, and that could bring us ground, solidity, and identity in at least two ways: we reject belonging to one group but perhaps imagine that we belong to another (absent) group, one that's 'the opposite' of the one we reject, and so we still have the experience of belonging, even if it's imagined and not immediate; or, we gain identity, ground and solidity from not belonging, from seeming to reject the group, from seeming to have our own original thoughts, which we feel are ours alone and not derived from others.
This seems reasonable to me, but maybe I'm over thinking it. :-)
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26 July 2007
Arranging Action Figures At Work
More news you can use: Arrange Your Action Figures. Six tips, including:
"Spread out the toys so that if one does fall, it won't start a domino effect. You don't want to return from lunch to find Robin's face in Batman's crotch."
(via Morning News headlines for today)
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19 June 2007
Current Reading
A smattering of online ideas, opinions, images that are intriquing, amusing, perplexing, and inspiring me right now:
1. America Assimilates Terrorists. Source: Onion: "After 5 Years In U.S., Terrorist Cell Too Complacent To Carry Out Attack." TV addiction, weight gain, and debt has done 'em in.
2. Sorted Books Project. (via Blog on a Toothpick.) Fabulous. Books and journals shelved to tell a story. Example: A Day at the Beach. The Bathers. Shark 1. Shark 2. Shark 3. Sudden Violence. Silence. Also: Genealogy of the Supermarket.
3. Eye contact and shame as invitation to violence at Preaching Peace: "Using shame to keep order will ultimately result in violent chaos and death as the citizens and community become each others' police. While there are laws and agencies to prevent this, the fact that the leadership has resorted to invoking shame suggests that they're not working..."
4. Sex and death, reminders of mortality, from Experimental Theology: "[I]t appears that there are good theoretical, observational, and scientific reasons to believe that religious faith is operating as an existential buffer, as a defense-mechanism to repress death anxiety. This will not prove to be the final story about faith. But it is the beginning of all faith." Believers who remain in "this 'defensive stage' of faith ... never fully confront the anxiety that necessarily accompanies an existential sifting of faith. This adventure is, simply, too scary a prospect. Thus, most retreat from this work and remain, keeping with Freud's metaphor, intoxicated." Hence, bodily sins (sex and drug use) are most shameful in American society and in Christian (among other faiths) culture. Hence, our 'animal-reminder disgust' triggers: Body products (e.g., feces, vomit), Animals (e.g., insects, rats), Sexual behaviors (e.g., incest, homosexuality), Contact with the dead or corpses, Violations of the exterior envelope of the body (e.g., gore, deformity), and poor hygiene.
5. Photo of a Royal Poinciana in bloom in Miami in June. Mmmm.
6. How to keep lettuce and other greens 'bright, firm and flavorful' for a week.
7. In Seattle, 31 church-goers report their experiences at (or almost at) 31 faith community worship services, including the Seventh-day Adventists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, Episcopals, a mosque, a synagogue, Sea-Tac's (airport) meditation room. church on TV, and 'the Jesus freaks at Mars Hill.' (The prospective attender couldn't find the Baha'i worship space and no one would answer the phone.) They weren't that chuffed with what they found. (If you're skimming, read #10, #13, #15, #18, #19.)
16:20 Posted in books and reading , gardening and weather , lists , politics, government and law , pop culture , sex , silliness and humour , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
15 June 2007
Copycat
I am such a copycat. But, like the famous Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, I am surprisingly often asked what I do all day, since I don't have a job or kids. As Scott said, every day is different. Fridays and Mondays are pretty similar, usually, unless I am travelling. Tues, Wed., and Thurs. I'm out and about more. Weekends could be anything. This is one day:
5:30 Awaken when spouse gets out of bed. Lay in bed thinking and going over dreams. Had a faintly disturbing one about being a murderer and hoping no one would find out, but people were suspicious and I was having to lie smoothly. When I wake up I wonder if I have murdered someone in my past and forgot about it. It seems like something I would do, not so much the murder but then forgetting about it. Not sure if I am really awake while musing on this or if it is another dream. Remember things I need to remind spouse about (not murder-related). Get up and go find and tell him. Get back in bed. Lie awake and listen to BBC News and worry about Hamas taking over Gaza. Fall asleep. Dream.
6:30 Wake up when spouse is getting ready to leave. Have short discussion with him about plans for later today. Consider getting out of bed. Check to see if arms feel any better; right one still hurting, can't tell about left one. Birds are insanely loud and chirpy outside. Fall asleep.
8:30 Wake up again. Write down notes on scrap pulled from last night's crossword puzzle paper about things I need to do today. Get up. Do usual morning stuff. Toss out an old naproxen from my pocket and put in a new Excedrin for mid-cycle pain. Take down mildewed shower curtain and add it to wine-stained white tablecloth in a bleach wash. Strip bed off sheets and line them up for next wash, then whites, then darks. Very busy laundry day, mainly so I don't forget and accidentally wash darks or anything I care about too soon after using bleach in the machine, so am washing a small load of whites and the sheets as a buffer. Arms hurt doing bed-stripping, but I think the left one hurts less than it has.
9:15 Feed dog, go out with dog to check on garden, give dog vitamins and treats, fresh water. Take my own vitamins, eat 1/2 cup cottage cheese, drink OJ. Eat three chocolate mints. Kill some little ants on counter (second day of mini-infestation). Unload dishwasher. Re-load dishwasher with items in the sink. Put recycling in recycling bin. Turn on computer and check mail. Reading mail evokes a variety of emotional response. Feelings run gamut of despair, sadness and resentment about what I perceive as alienation, exclusion, diminishment to happiness and warm fuzzies about what I perceive as inclusion, connection, loving-kindness, being seen as special.
9:30 Respond to email. Water some plants in garden. Check groundhog damage. Breathe in tropical yet fresh-feeling air. 63F degrees outside, a big improvement on 48F degrees at 6:30 a.m. Switch out laundry -- bleach wash out, whites in. Check hours of a local eating establishment online and leave voicemail for friend to re-arrange meeting time next week.
10:00 Start reading RSS feeds via Bloglines and catching up on news and opinion. Eat a banana, because Scott mentioned that he did and that reminded me that a banana would t