August 2009
1 post
I think I may start a new thing.
A blog thing…
May 2009
34 posts
Willie Williams, “Armagideon Time.”
“Nobody at the office seems very happy. The atmosphere is vastly strained.”
– Dan Baum’s weird Twitter-delivered New Yorker firing story confirms the one thing that everyone I know who has worked at the New Yorker (that’s about one and a half people) has told me: everybody is super-freaked about losing their jobs all the time.
Man, that would suck.
I guess...
Some brief thoughts on beer. →
absalomabsalom:
memesetc:
strub:
Several points:
1. Sad that no major brewery is based in Milwaukee anymore. Even Pabst?
2. Interesting and almost obvious that the craft breweries are predominantly in a specific type of place: Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, New England, on a smaller scale the Upper Midwest. In Northern California, at least, part of this is UC Davis seeding...
Some brief thoughts on beer. →
Several points:
1. Sad that no major brewery is based in Milwaukee anymore. Even Pabst?
2. Interesting and almost obvious that the craft breweries are predominantly in a specific type of place: Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, New England, on a smaller scale the Upper Midwest. In Northern California, at least, part of this is UC Davis seeding brewers and a long history of craft...
Costco kind of sucks. →
Kind of sad that they inexplicably suck this way, especially given that they’re pretty okay with workers, relatively. Still non-union mostly, though. (Except in the Northeast US and California, according to Wikipedia; those are the two places I’ve been to Costco, so… whatever. In fact, I guess I’ve only been to Costco in California.) Anyway, the notion that “people...
“Beds are Burning,” Midnight Oil. For...
Re: what I just posted.
Looks like JFruh was on the Barstow case before I showed up, as usual.
She does some other stuff. That one was pretty funny, so I tried to copy the photo’s URL in order to link to it. I strongly recommended that everyone else tries to as well. It’s a fun experience.
Lucy Caldwell comes as close as she ever has to... →
It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
Hating on the countryside. →
Reminds me of how angry I used to get that so much contemporary poetry seems to be set on farms. Since then, I’ve realized that it’s hard to break out of the Romantic connection-with-the-land paradigm, so whatever. Still: Owen Hatherley, being cranky. That guy!
Times Style section: what are we going to do with... →
This article is actually quite sad, since it’s about the long slow death of an important part of the country (Detroit used to be the fourth-biggest city in the country, and now it’s given us this term!). But by lavishing all this attention on one group of people, the Style section basically says that the only important people are the rich people, again. I mean, how is this even Style?...
Like most things on Slate--
I’m not sure I buy this. But it’s still interesting:
More often, though, as in the Rosemary episode, we seem meant to accept Liz’s Jack-ward drift, if not cheer it on outright, as part of her maturation. Jack is a target of the show’s ridicule, but even as his worldview is satirized, it’s often presented as inevitable. Yes, he’s an unfeeling, creatively inept...
An unsourced claim.
Reading things on the internet — and not just YouTube comments — makes me realize just how stupid and crazy people are. We’re all so fucked.
“Waitress in the Sky,” The...
This isn't funny, regardless of whether the... →
But this comment is:
The only things that are missing is the breaker-inners didn’t say “praise Allah! We shall gay marry you all!”
Things we've learned in the past 12 hours
1) I am tired.
2) I am very tired.
3) I am, to my great chagrin, no longer capable of getting less than 4 hours of sleep a night and functioning.
4) Dorothy Wordsworth is afraid of horned cows. I already knew that, but I relearned it.
5) Dorothy Wordsworth is very afraid of horned cows: she mentions it 4 times in the Grasmere Journal. That I didn’t know.
6) Three to four years of my...
"Proficient in Webdings"
almostepistles:
New York City
A Microsoft spokesperson explained that “typographers took pains to ensure that the image corresponding with the capital letters NYC was a pleasant one”.[1] This occurred after Wingdings accidentally associated “NYC” with a poison (death) symbol, a Jewish Star of David, and a thumbs-up, creating what appeared to some people as an endorsement of anti-Semitism.[1]
The...
WTF?
One audio upload a day!?
Well, tomorrow the Klezmatics, the day after the Minutemen (yes, I’ll explain the thinking when I get to it), at some point John Doe (but not Exene Cervenka), eventually Gift of Gab, Billy Bragg, Curtis Mayfield (yes how ‘bout that), whoever else. I guess I won’t end up laying all this shit out beforehand — fuck it, we’ll do it live.
...
“Body of an American,” the Pogues.
...
Aw, man. →
I am intensely unhappy with my life right now. I also realized that my dad keeps track of my life via facebook. Both of these things are unpleasant.
A thing that happened:
Yesterday, I bought a bottle of two-buck Chuck at the Brookline Trader Joe’s in order to ease my troubled mind. When I came to the checkout, I pulled out my ID, expecting to be carded. The checker looked at it and scoffed slightly. I waved it around a little bit, shifting my weight from one foot to the other and generally doing the kind of dance people do when they’re in an awkward...
leoncrawl:
So is everyone in NY just waiting for other people to start wearing the masks before doing it themselves? If so we should all just do it I guess. Like everyone who wants to and is shy should just decide to start doing it one day, and then it won’t be as humiliating.
My sister has reiterated that I am not to give my masks away to others so please don’t ask.
I saw a dude wearing a...
April 2009
25 posts
I don't mean to be anti-intellectual.
But something about The Crimson’s house style puts me off even when I agree with what they’re saying:
The protests’ muddled message diluted their efficacy and enhanced the perception that the movement was more a tantrum thrown by a disgruntled conservative base than a national uprising against federal excess. The confusion was further exacerbated by the ubiquity of hyperbole and...
I'm sorry, what?
Like any institution, Harvard provides low-level jobs, but they arise as a secondary benefit to individuals and the community. To argue that exemption from taxes implies some obligation to provide “secure” jobs would be to argue that other institutions, such as churches, must also hire a certain number of people. This claim is ridiculous, just as is SLAM’s belief that Harvard has a...
“Without a draft to oppose or a president to elect, students search for some...”
– UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKERS
(ALSO YOU MOTHERFUCKERS TOO)
A quick protocol question:
If you’re posting or reblogging something and find a spelling or grammar error, is it dishonest or disingenuous to correct that error? I know that Real Bloggers intentionally put typos into quotations in order to catch unattributed copy-pasting, but I’m talking about the Tumblr/Twitter/blog comment demimonde here, not Real Blogs. Is it rude to turn “existance” into...
NATURE: WHY
The Ikea chair on which I sit in order to blog has begun to excrete sap. I find this vestigial tree-ness in my post-industrial consumer product deeply disturbing and hard to wash off of my hands.
Get yr epic lulz here! →
Jesus fucking Christ, I’ve never read anything as insane as the shit that’s going on in the right-wing “resistance.” I guess all those Palin people just got crazier after the inauguration. Seriously though, I would post individual ridiculous things, but everything is ridiculous.
On the subject of urban design. →
This is frustrating.
(Photo from here.)
I just discovered a rather annoying article in The Crimson. (That’s pretty much the only reason I read The Crimson, to be honest.) I don’t know how I got to it, since it’s ancient, but whatever, here goes.
What’s annoying about it? For one thing, there’s the general presumption that the abstract precepts of urban design — density is good,...
