July 2010
16 posts
“I gave up my job, my career, my clearance, and I staked my freedom on a gamble:...”
– Daniel Ellsberg, one year after the release of the Pentagon Papers.
And on that note, let’s all proceed to ignore The War Logs.
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So apparently it’s nostalgia week!? Because...
WatchThis is twelve-and-a-half minutes of really, really fucking important television.
And I know it’s 4:50 on the east coast and that roughly 90% of Tumblr’s user base is about ten minutes away from fleeing their desks for the warm nuzzling embrace of the New York City subway system, but seriously, please, Instapaper it, bookmark it, email it to yourself, scrawl it in your goddamned...
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See, here's the thing.
So way the fuck-all long time ago in the 8th century there was this sixteen-year-old kid named Abd al-Rahman who came home one day to his house in Damascus to find that nearly his entire family—the ruling Umayyads of the House of Islam—had been slaughtered by the rival Abbasids. So this young prince did what anyone else in their right mind would do and peaced the fuck out with his few...
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“Why is land use in New York City the business of anyone else but the citizens of...”
– Bingo.
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Irrational Fears Confessed Over Alcoholic...
Myself:
Sleeping naked: afraid of dying in my sleep, nude.
Putting the seat down in bars: afraid of enabling the next guy to just piss all over it.
Sniffling from allergies: afraid of the people around me thinking I’m on blow.
Brainland:
Being the first in the pool: afraid of sharks.
Lying in the grass: afraid of snakes.
Taking the trash out at night: afraid of mountain lions.
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LeBron, the spectacle, and the Real (World)
Katie Baker thinks she’s a fool; Will Leitch feels stupid; and Mike Barthel got his unicorn stolen by LeBron. So many heated reactions! one might think, over some mere athlete. But in all fairness it isn’t LeBron specifically that we’re all (or at least I’m) so upset over, but rather what he symbolizes, what this moment represents—be it in sporting history, in our...
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WORKING FOR THE WEEKEND
So we’ve got this cleaning lady in the office right now and she comes by my desk and points at it and says “clean?” and I kind of panic because my shit is everywhere and I start saying to her “oh god I’m sorry it’s all such a mess, everything, my desk, my life, it’s just, it’s all a mess right now”, and so I clean up the three empty cigarette...
My Conversation With the WORD Brooklyn Saleswoman...
WORD BOOKSTORE FRANKLIN ST, BK THURSDAY AFTER FOURTH OF JULY HE’S WEARING SHORTS, SWEATING 7/8/10
Hello.
You’ve changed things around!
[He’s trying to show he’s a local.]
We have.
Oh I, I guess that explains why you were closed earlier this week. (“See, I’m no tourist.”)
It is. So if you have trouble finding anything just ask.
[He bee-lines it...
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“What was with that dumb ho at the bar being like, ‘nobody ever gets that...”
– Brainland
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So the other night I was enjoying a few (read: a couple dozen) frosty alcoholic beverages with some college friends, and because we’re all insufferable assholes we were sitting in a bar having a loud and probably quite obnoxious argument about philosophy. Now, these guys are both hard-line Straussians, which makes me (as far as they’re concerned) a godless Marxist relativist (not...
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Nostalgery
A lot of people had a lot to say a couple days ago on the subject of nostalgia, and yeah I know I’m late to the party but it was a couple of days ago which is like ten years ago on the internet and I can’t help but feel a little nostalgic for those halcyon days of late June and now enough time has passed that I guess I have an excuse to write about it nostalgically, right?
Anyway,...