May 2009
54 posts
But it would make a lovely coaster.
A Kindle goes for $359.00 and plugs into a collection of 285,000 available titles, so out of curiosity I searched Amazon for the availability of the last $359.00 of books I’ve purchased to see if my obscure tastes could justify an investment in THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK AKA MANKIND’S BIGGEST LEAP FORWARD IN LIBERAL ENLIGHTENMENT SINCE THE PRINTING PRESS (or however the fuck they’re...
Reblog this if you hate looking for interesting...
No, don’t.
“Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.”
– Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, speaking yesterday at Amazon’s 2009 annual shareholders meeting.
I do an abnormal amount of hating on “social media experts” and other breeds of marketing stooge, and while it’s mostly just playful ribbing of all those who are peeing in the pool, a...
Each morning, while riding the ordinarily empty elevator in my apartment building, I’m reminded of Al Pacino in “Scent of a Woman”: I step in on the seventh floor and always notice the smell of whoever last rode the car. Today it was a woman who’d left lingering evidence of some hair product hinted with floral bouquets. Yesterday it was a man, likely doused in Axe Body Wash...
“But srsly yall… nip slips might still be better than ’seeing a whole tit’...”
– Hipster Runoff, noted without further comment as I’m still laughing too hard to type.
In which I rant after seeing a colleague quote...
I love startups, but I hate the knee-jerk hero worship of successful entrepreneurs that pervades the culture.
Business is no place to go looking for heroes, but there are a few diamonds in the rough. Personally, despite how distasteful I may find his product line, I call Bill Gates a hero. He had a dream to put a PC in every home and he delivered, forever altering the social landscape—for...
Selected sentences from the Times' latest... →
In which katiebakes goes all fabulously class warfare on the Times:
“Still, even as consumers cut back on everything from taxis to Tiffany, families like the Barnetts are scraping together steep fees to keep their children challenged this summer.”
“She and her husband have canceled a family trip and their own summer vacation to free up $5,000 for their son’s Caribbean scuba...
J.J. Cale, “Call Me the Breeze”
Mind your spelling, please.
A public service announcement for all the cultural illiterates out there:
Rhianna: a second-rate British R&B singer
Rihanna: the second coming
So, you're in love with one of your friends, but... →
Step Fifteen: There is now no possible way that you aren’t about to have sex with her. You’re naked, kissing her, in her bedroom, agreeing to erase a version of yourself from history to make her happy. And as far as she knows you’ve had sex many times in a future that will no longer happen, so she thinks to herself that maybe she should have one memory of...
Animal Collective, “Infant Dressing...
Jesse James Hollywood On Trial →
by natashavc
It’s oddly comforting to know that, wherever you are in the world, if you’re at an Au Bon Pain you’re in the middle of the most stifling mediocrity that contemporary civilization has to offer.
If matter were finite and time were infinite then every conceivable sequence of events would occur and be repeated an infinite number of times in an infinite variety of causal circumstances.
In such a world Israel and Palestine make peace, the Cubs win the World Series, and I get laid—and since each of these happens once it happens to infinity.
“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at...”
– Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Darkness has always been a lure for the human imagination. Imagine how dark the globe must have been in the time of Odysseus compared to that of Marlow. Compare Montaigne’s Brazil to Kipling’s jungles to Faulkner’s forests to McCarthy’s...
On a dark and rainy December afternoon of my sophomore year in high school I was running the last quarter-mile of a sixteen-mile leg at a winter track practice when a late-80s Honda Accord going about 45mph and piloted by the first chair violinist in my high school orchestra mowed me down in a crosswalk. I got pitched up on the hood and face-planted into the windshield, thinking “holy fuck I...
There’s nothing worse than when your iPhone receives new mail before the Gmail Notifier does and you think you have a new text so you stand up because that’s the only way to get your phone out of the pocket of your tight pants and then you’re standing there at your desk checking your phone when you realize it’s just a Facebook notification email that was waiting for you in...
Brainland: plus infinity. Spacetime pedants: minus negative absolute zero.
brainland:
Just a Little Public Service Announcement For You
One great thing about having no friends as a kid was reading every Star Wars novelization I could get my hands on. In Star Wars lore, the Kessel Run was a route that intergalactic smugglers would use to move illegal spice without getting caught by Imperial...
I was about to start hating social media experts so much more after reading this—
Three weeks ago Murphy-Goode began a search for a “social media whiz,” a wine enthusiast interested in moving to Healdsburg, Calif., for six months to promote the vineyard’s malbec and chardonnay on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. The job — which comes with the official title “lifestyle correspondent” — pays...
President Barack Obama will give a speech on national security at 10:10 am. Former vice president Dick Cheney will deliver his response at 10:45 am.
Somebody please stop this train.
The Cure, “Just Like Heaven (Live in...
Every time you quote some academic or literary hotshot without citing the original work I assume you were just trolling brainyquote.com looking for shit to post to Tumblr to make you look smarter.
Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14, “Episode de...
Mills & friends →
Alex Payne, in a now rather well-circulated treatise, laid out almost all of the reasons why comments are bad for the internet. He missed one, though: by detaching content-specific dialogue from the traditional point of consumption, we inevitably miss the delightfully unhinged madness that ensues over in the threads on Mills’ blog.
(via beautifulordinaire)
Aristotle assumed all bodies to naturally be at rest. Aristotle also never rode the New York City subway.
In Boston the subways are like some awkward, post-surgical graft on the city that never quite took. Travelers assume an entirely different posture once boarded: conversation halts, and every passenger—even when in the company of friends—assumes a state of isolation. It’s as...
“Seventy-five per cent of your material is new. A successful book cannot venture...”
– an unnamed editor to Marshall McLuhan in 1964 on the subject of the latter’s forthcoming Understanding Media.
Bookstore cashier: Answer me this.
Me: Shoot.
Him: These blurbs on the back of books are supposed to help sell the book, right?
Me: Sure.
Him: Then why'd they bother putting this on the back cover of a book? It has to be the most confusing sentence I've ever read.
Me: I can see that.
Him: "In this robust critique of the nominalist-historicist materialism of our day, Badiou carefully constructs a phenomenology as groundbreaking as the mathematical ontology of Being and Event."
Me: It's just one of those things that makes more sense if you've read part one.
Him: I don't see how that could ever make sense to anyone.
Me: Some might say the same about football.
Him: Wrong. Any idiot can figure out football.
Me: Yeah but does every idiot care to figure out football?
Him: Only girls don't care about football.
Regarding the torture of others →
The late Susan Sontag penned this nearly five years ago on the occasion of our last encounter with photographs of detainee abuse. It’s worth revisiting again now that the Obama administration has backpedaled on its planned release of detainee photos. As she wrote in her introduction,
For a long time — at least six decades — photographs have laid down the tracks of how important...
A discourse of identity is by its very nature exclusionary.
From the very first moment that man nodded in the general direction of an object—an act we would later attach to the word “this”—he was erecting a pattern of exclusion: this object, by way of my verbal nomination of its artificial singularity, is distinct. And the exclusion is reflexive: the multiplicity from...
Grown siblings at family gatherings have something in common with aging soldiers from the same platoon at a Veteran’s Day parade: their friendships may have grown distant, but even after all these years there remains that unique bond of having survived something traumatic, and having survived it together.
Some of my clearest childhood memories of my father are not actually of him but instead of his “personal digital assistant”. He was an early adopter when it came to technology and got the first Sharp Wizard sometime in the late-eighties, and it quickly became his auxiliary brain. Now when I recall memories from two decades ago they usually involve this device.
Many years later he grew...