November 2008
61 posts
WatchNorio Takasugi, keirin champion. By Danny Baarz.
Holidays are the time of year when I sit at a table of people with whom I have an ever-fleeting acquaintance and express myself exclusively in synonyms—moderate, inoffensive, and meticulously chosen synonyms.
Math humor
Hilarious—today’s top story on Y Combinator News uncovered the following job on getacoder.com posted by user “AlanT” (read: Alan Turing):
The purpose of this project is to create a debugger program. This program will take as input the source code another program, and will analyze that other program and determine if it will run to completion, or have an error, or go into...
John Gruber heralded yesterday the disappearance of ‘http://’ from the latest Mobile Safari update, saying “it’s always struck me as somewhat ungraceful that we spend all day staring at dozens of URLs that all start with the same repetitive prefix.” This bothers me.
Perhaps I’m guilty of some bizarre breed of hi-tech parochial traditionalism or something, but the...
Pretty in Mink 2009 Calendar →
Cue up your gag reflex:
Following in the tradition of past calendars from the Luce Policy Institute, Pretty in Mink celebrates smart, conservative women role models… with flair. We took some of your favorite leaders of today’s conservative movement on a journey back in time, and made them up into glamorous movie stars of classic Hollywood. Back when the big screen was a little more...
“Holy fucking shit! Langer’s mind, like a god’s, fears no human...”
– Mills, in a haiku-form comment re: Britney.
Britney Spears — Shattered Glass
Yeah so I...
$7.3 trillion is a lot of money
The credit bailout is reaching such ridiculous proportions that I have trouble wrapping my head around its largesse. I’m reminded of Eddie Izzard’s commentary on genocide:
Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people. We can’t even deal with that! You know, we think if somebody kills someone, that’s murder, you go to prison. You kill 10 people, you go to Texas, they hit you with a...
John Williams — Theme from “Jurassic...
A few things that have happened in the month of November the gravity of which I’ve yet to fully grasp:
we elected a half-black dude named Barack Hussein Obama to be the president of the United States
I’ve only got 352 days left in my twenties
if my iTunes play count can be believed I’ve purportedly listened to Katy Perry’s “Hot ‘n’ Cold” a...
Matt Sharp — Visions of Anna
The ruthless...
dow:
The Dow tumbled 444.99 points today.
Yikes. One of these days The Dow Jones Tumblelog isn’t going to seem all that funny anymore.
“Acting on behalf of the Almighty Eternal Creator, who is holding sole ownership...”
– An amicus brief (pdf) filed on behalf of God in the California Supreme Court’s upcoming hearing on Prop 8.
WatchMy Day in Ninety Seconds
This meme went around a while back, and I figured I’d jump in since I’ve been looking for a reason to try out the D-90’s HD recording. It’s no RED DSMC, but it’ll do for the amateur budget.
Jason Fried, founder of 37Signals, weighed in today on “why the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web.” It’s an interesting read, considering how successful the 37Signals mantra has proven to be and how generally insightful their design principles have been over the years. But on this point, I believe, Fried is dreadfully mistaken.
It’s really not...
Out of Town News to close
Spotted by amorousmusings in the Cambridge Chronicle:
Out of Town News, the iconic kiosk located outside the Harvard Square T station in Cambridge selling newspapers and magazines from around the world, has declined to renew its lease for another five years due to a major downturn in sales, according to City Manager Bob Healy.
My #1 pet peeve
Rhetorical questions opening with the phrase “you haven’t,” “you’ve never,” or “you didn’t,” usually delivered in a shocked, mocking, or derisive tone.
Common usage: “You’ve never [(seen/heard/read) some (film/song/book) that functions as a shibboleth for whichever group the interlocutor deems him- or herself a member]?”
Thomas Kinkade's 16 Guidelines for Making Stuff... →
This aggravates my aesthetic sensibilities in every possible way.
“We like to see ourselves as being completely conscious of our thought processes,...”
– - via Discover (via unburyingthelead)
Oh, cute: an article in which Freudian terminology is repeatedly employed en route to making the assertion that there was no “evidence” of multiple forms of consciousness until decades after Freud. Joke’s on me, I guess, for wasting so much...
“You don’t get to heaven above by trampling someone else’s heaven on...”
– TBogg
From unburyingthelead and vruz, an exchange on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” which occasions one of the few times I’m not only willing to publicly admit my New Jersey heritage, but to do so with pride:
Mika Brzezinski: Here with us now is New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Jon Corzine. Governor, thanks for joining us. Did you read David Brooks’ article this...
“The wholesomeness and dreary rectitude of American life were no more than a...”
– Paul Auster, Hand to Mouth.
Four Tet — Unspoken
Get out your...
robot-heart:
That being said, please refrain from trying to impose your religious views and laws on the rest of the country. I know you may think I’m a godless heathen with no morals, but in America, as long as I’m not breaking any laws, that’s perfectly okay. And yes, we do live in a democracy, but that doesn’t mean you can vote people’s Constitutional rights out of existence. In fact, the...
Katy Perry — Hot ‘n’ Cold
Yes.
Rolling Stones — Far Away Eyes
… well...
“I like Mills. I’d hang out with him. I’d use him to pick up girls.”
– Aaron White, two margaritas deep.
Live Your Life — T.I. feat. Rihanna
Aaron...
The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace: What... →
For the love of all that’s holy: click through and read this link. I promise it will have you OMGLOLing from now until January 20th.
Camelot 2.0
I forgot all about this — I got quoted in the Politico way back when:
And if the enthusiastic crowd that came out to see Obama speak at American University on Monday morning is any indication, the phenomenon was not unique to South Carolina. Among the overflowing mass of students was a contingent from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md. Matt Langer, 28, a senior from St. John’s,...
Broken Social Scene — Anthems for a...
“Oh, I don’t believe in hypothetical scenarios, Mr....”
– Kenneth Parcell, “30 Rock.”
AP: Obama takes North Carolina
Make that eight pick-ups for the Democratic party. Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy has officially been vindicated.
“With 4.5 million members, MoveOn is now bigger than the NRA. Maybe our leaders...”
– Jane Hamsher, via digby.