December 2007
How to make machaca →
I completed reading 104 books in 2007 →
Matt Webb reads more than anyone I know. If he weren’t my friend, I would actually be suspicious that a person could read so much. And yes, I am jealous.
More reading
The New Yorker, July 14, 1951
The most encouraging word we have so far had about television came from a grade-school principal we encountered the other afternoon. “They say it’s going to bring back vaudeville,” he said, “but I think it’s going to bring back the book.” Before television, he told us, his pupils never read; that is, they knew how to read and...
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something,...”
– Buckminster Fuller
NY Times: For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be... →
“While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.”
“A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate because...”
– Bertrand Russell
Just thinking...
I suspect my defense would be far more entertaining if I could speak like Lucille Bluth: “I don’t understand the question and I refuse to respond to it.”
1 tag
The temptation to perceive certain living things... →
“To those with ears to hear, libraries are really very noisy places. On their...”
– Timothy Healy
“Why do some graduate students take so long to finish what they have started? Are...”
– Chris M. Golde, an associate vice provost for graduate education at Stanford University
Who says young people today lack passion?
I’m happily surprised to learn that Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!) is the current American university campus best-seller, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. And I’m just happy to see García Màrquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera at number three and Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War at number five.
Metaphor to Action Muriel Rukeyser Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform, who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words, whether it is the crash of lips on lips after absence and wanting : we must close the circuits of ideas, now generate, that leap in the body’s action or the mind’s repose. Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky,...
My business card is a ball of putty →
Ahahahahahahahahahaha.
KnitML →
“to develop and promote adoption of a standard content model for knitting patterns”
4bn euros for frontier research →
“This high-profile Europe-wide programme is designed to bring forward the most ambitious, far-reaching research projects… and to support the most talented established investigators.”
Breeding hegemony.
“The ability to throw out ideas that aren’t productive is, to me, what...”
– Lawrence Krauss (who has not, apparently, read Feyerabend)
Natalie Jeremijenko + Lawrence Krauss →
The artist and the physicist meet up to discuss science as a public enterprise.
It’s a mug’s game
“The curious thing about the cappuccino, I observed, is what a remarkably complicated product it is. The milk came from a methane-producing dairy herd, probably somewhere in the UK but perhaps further afield. Behind the scenes stood the farmers, the cattle breeders, the manufacturers of refrigerated tanker trucks and countless unknown others. The coffee was steamed out of...
The Proposition →
Screenplay by Nick Cave.
Female circumcision
“The best evidence available at the moment suggests to me that the anthropologist Robert Edgerton basically had it right when he wrote about the Kenyan practice in the 1920s and 1930s as a crucible in which it is not just the courage of males but also the courage of females that gets tested:
‘…most girls bore it bravely and few suffered serious infection or injury as a result....
“[Our Western] feminist sisters insist on denying us this critical aspect of...”
– Fuambai Ahmadu, on female circumcision
Consider yourself lucky if you don’t remember Warrant’s Sweet Cherry Pie, but checking out the comments reminded me that all this hoopla about user-generated content really needs to take the plunge into evaluating actual content, and matters of taste.
“The engineering sensibility, which so often seeks to breed out the unusual and...”
– Rick Prelinger
“We still aren’t mature enough to adopt an openly socialist project.”
– Hugo Chávez
Sufism may be powerful antidote to Islamic... →
“Bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite...”
– Slavoj Žižek
PopMatters review of Adrian Tomine's... →
The Grindhouse’s Greatest Hits →
Exploitation movies Top 10 songs
“Rob Brezsny holds his own place next to other cultural shamans such as Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Reverend Ivan Stang, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey.” - Pop Matters
Flensted Mobile Five Viking Ships →
#23 on the “Mobiles I Covet” list
“We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is...”
– John Cage
November 2007
The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses →
That’s good stuff.