Whoa.

Apparently 75% of Americans aged 17-24 are ineligible for military service because they’re too fat/too unfit, too stoned, too stupid, have too many kids or have spent too much time in jail.

The Harvest

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

“The world began without the human race and will certainly end without it. What else has man done except blithely break down billions of structures and reduce them to a state in which they are no longer capable of integration?”

- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (1955)

“Hardly a month passes in France without a major article in some serious literary journal, or an important public lecture, extolling or attacking the ideas and influence of Lévi-Strauss.”

- Susan Sontag (1963)

Tristes tropiques

“While the work’s opening sentence — ‘I hate voyages and explorers’ — was hardly designed to win the approval of his scientific peers, lovers of literature considered it a triumph…” (Reuters)

One of anthropology’s great masterpieces.

“He was down to earth. A skilled handyman who believed in the virtues of manual labor and outdoor life, he was also an ardent music-lover who once said he would have liked to have been a composer had he not become an ethnologist.”

Another icon lost.

Richter City Roller Derby

w00t! My new home team!

More on their website and an interview with Ginger Tonyx on PPP.

Thx for the pointer Matt! I’ll post my thoughts to my blog.

LMAO. Well done Molly!

“You can roar two or three times.”

“Henry Ford’s miniature America in the jungle attracted a slew of workers. Local laborers were offered a wage of thirty-seven cents a day to work on the fields of Fordlândia, which was about double the normal rate for that line of work. But Ford’s effort to transplant America– what he called “the healthy lifestyle”– was not limited to American buildings, but also included mandatory “American” lifestyle and values. The plantation’s cafeterias were self-serve, which was not the local custom, and they provided only American fare such as hamburgers. Workers had to live in American-style houses, and they were each assigned a number which they had to wear on a badge– the cost of which was deducted from their first paycheck. Brazilian laborers were also required to attend squeaky-clean American festivities on weekends, such as poetry readings, square-dancing, and English-language sing-alongs. One of the more jarring cultural differences was Henry Ford’s mini-prohibition. Alcohol was strictly forbidden inside Fordlândia, even within the workers’ homes, on pain of immediate termination. This led some industrious locals to establish businesses-of-ill-repute beyond the outskirts of town, allowing workers to exchange their generous pay for the comforts of rum and women.”

Ford was such a freak.

Also: “Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City”