Archive for the ‘wtf’ Category
jenga, but bigger
Alright, I know I’ve been remiss in not writing about Vilna/Lithuania/abode/project/women/flatmate/food/work/everything, but fear not, that’s coming and soon. For now, look at this jenga game below. I snapped these photos of our neighbors — who might very well be the coolest middle-aged folk — playing the game of their own design. The pieces are to scale, cut from two-by-fours. The numbers on the side aren’t there for any organizational reason; it’s just that all players (out of turn) and onlookers tend to volunteer forceful tips and warnings, and the numbers allow them to be coherent. Enjoy. Photos are my own. Can be used with permission.
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awesome web forage
- Eli Sanders chronicles the newspaper war in SF
Looked at one way, the jab was just another example of the profound dislike these two alt-weekly chieftains have developed for each other. The record has grown quite thick. Brugmann has denounced the “leering neoconism” that he sees at the heart of Lacey’s politics, which he derides as “frat-boy libertarian.” Lacey has called Brugmann a “bull-goose loony” and likened talking to him to engaging “a homeless paranoid in conversation about the contents of his shopping cart.” (That was from a more-than-4,000-word screed—Lacey’s word—that he published in 2005.) Brugmann has printed bumper stickers that say “Corporate Weeklies Still Suck,” and to this day hands them out to visitors. Lacey has noted that Brugmann, for all his independent talk, once had among the investors in his paper Donald Werby, a billionaire real-estate mogul who bankrolled the Church of Satan (“No, really,” Lacey wrote) and was indicted for paying off underage prostitutes with cocaine before dying in 2002. (“I missed the Bay Guardian‘s coverage of their investor’s indictment on child prostitution charges,” Lacey added.) This January, when the SF Weekly accused Brugmann of “celling out” his anticorporate principles by preparing to rent space on the roof of his paper’s building to some T-Mobile cellular towers, Brugmann retorted that the story’s reporter was simply “a Mike Lacey protégé.” The feud goes on and on, leading even Lacey’s and Brugmann’s respective underlings to detest each other. Not long ago, Van De Voorde, who works under Lacey, expressed the desire to strangle Brugmann’s number two, Redmond, with Redmond’s ponytail.
- David Shiga on new possible evidence for life on Mars
No mission to Mars has ever found complex carbon-based molecules, from which life as we know it is built. But sulphur is everywhere on Mars – it is more abundant there than on Earth – and it could contain one of the signatures of life. On Earth, the activity of some microbes converts one class of sulphur-containing compounds, the sulphates, into another, the sulphides. The microbes prefer to work with the lighter sulphur-32 isotope, so the sulphides they produce are relatively deficient in the heavier isotope, sulphur-34. Planetary scientists have long wondered whether we could use this pattern to discern signs of life on Mars. Now the prospects for this technique look better than ever. Read the rest of this entry »
stuff from around
All I do is cull the web for others, so might as well post what I find. Today wasn’t a particularly rich day, but I started late.
- One seriously brave zebra cleans hippo’s teeth
- Photography of Nick Brandt (via Rumpus)
- Terminator asteroids that reassemble themselves.
- Art of chess sets (via Rumpus)
- Tony Judt on girls in the sixties. (An excerpt, but read the whole thing.)
The life of an early-’60s adolescent male was curiously confined. We still inhabited our parents’ moral universe. Dating was difficult—no one had cars; our homes were too small for privacy; contraception was available but only if you were willing to confront a disapproving pharmacist. There was a well-founded presumption of innocence and ignorance, for boys and girls alike. Most boys I knew attended single-sex schools and we rarely encountered women. A friend and I paid hard-earned money for Saturday morning dance classes at the Locarno Ballroom in Streatham; but when it came time for the annual social, the girls from Godolphin & Latymer School laughed at us all the same. We cut the experiment short
Even if you got a date, it was like courting your grandmother. Girls in those days came buttressed in an impenetrable Maginot Line of hooks, belts, girdles, nylons, roll-ons, suspenders, slips, and petticoats. Older boys assured me that these were mere erotic impedimenta, easily circumnavigated. I found them terrifying. And I was not alone, as any number of films and novels from that era can illustrate. Back then we all lived on Chesil Beach.
And then, to our surprise, we learned that we were part of the “sexual revolution.” Within a matter of months, a generation of young women abandoned a century of lingerie and adopted the miniskirt with (or without) tights. Few men of my acquaintance born later than 1952 have even heard of—much less encountered—most of the undergarments listed above. The French pop star Antoine sang optimistically of buying contraceptive pills in the Monoprix (approximately France’s K-Mart). At Cambridge, cool and worldly, I helped a friend arrange an abortion for his girl. Everyone was “playing with fire.”
- Linguist David Crystal on Twitter’s influence
What has replaced it is something far more fluid – descriptive rather than prescriptive, as the terminology goes. In schools, appropriateness has replaced the principle of correctness. “Now, one looks at all varieties of language and asks why they are used, says Crystal. “We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is there.”
mummy, for my b-day?
It turns out Amazon does sell worthwhile items aside from books and uranium ore. What must be the most bad-ass Amazon item ever: the JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank. The reviews are informative, e.g.:
I’ll admit it. Shopping for a personal tank can be a bit daunting. Many times in the past I’ve purchased overpriced, so-called “battle tanks”, then driven them into battle only to be wrecked in ten minutes by the first blow off of some insurgents home-made morter.
But not this baby, no way.
