My beef with “TiK ToK” is basically this: it is very very easy to hate, but very very hard to hate productively.

The dispiriting realization that arrived hot on the heels of my initial oh-my-god-I-freaking-HATE-this reaction was: oh wait—I’m MEANT to hate this. “TiK ToK” depends for its success on its capacity to polarize, and to polarize instantaneously: I would pretty much bet money that anybody who derives pleasure from this song is going to derive at least part of that pleasure by imagining somebody like me recoiling from it.

Ergo, if I hate “TiK ToK,” “TiK ToK” wins.

On the other hand, if I DON’T hate “TiK ToK,” “TiK ToK” STILL wins—because, accurately or not, its fans will still imagine me and others like me fleeing the premises with noses upturned whenever it hits the PA system, repairing to our gut-rehabbed condos to salve our fragile sensibilities by dimming the lights and putting cucumber slices over our eyes and listening at moderate volumes to something we impulse-bought at Starbucks: Grizzly Bear, maybe, or Feist. Clearly, ignoring “TiK ToK” is not going to make it go away.

So let’s try to hate this thing right, shall we?

 Read more...

What the Heck is "Snorkeling" would someone please tell me!

Rep. Eric Massa stepped down from Congress on Friday but that hasn't stopped new information from coming out about his past behavior. In fact, it seems that his resignation came shortly after the House Ethics Committee were notified of Massa's behavior in the Navy. Massa's behavior in the Navy was not unknown to some in Washington.

An article in The Atlantic details some of this behavior but leaves out one critical piece of information: Would someone please explain to me what "snorkeling" is?

Clarke says that Massa's roommate, Tom Maxfield, was also assaulted. "Tom lived on upper bunk," Clarke say. "When you're on ship, you're almost exhausted 24-7. So a lot of times you sleep with your uniform on. Tom and Massa shared a stateroom together. Massa climbed up on the top of his bunk, which is hard to do--you never crawl up on somebody else's bunk. He wakes up to Massa undoing his pants trying to snorkel him."

Now let's be the first to define (invent) some other obscure and inappropriate naval behavior like:

Brass Monkey

Here's the official definition: A holder or storage rack in which cannon balls were stacked on a ship. Supposedly when the "monkey" with its stack of cannon balls became cold, the contraction of iron cannon balls led to the balls falling through or off the "monkey."

And how about a

Coxswain
Again, official definition here: The swain (boy servant) in charge of the small cock or cockboat that was kept aboard for the ship's captain and which was used to row him to and from the ship.

How we lost the Cure For Scurvy

One of the most striking features of the disease is the disproportion between its severity and the simplicity of the cure. Today we know that scurvy is due solely to a deficiency in vitamin C, a compound essential to metabolism that the human body must obtain from food. Scurvy is rapidly and completely cured by restoring vitamin C into the diet.

Except for the nature of vitamin C, eighteenth century physicians knew this too. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.

An unfortunate series of accidents conspired with advances in technology to discredit the cure for scurvy. What had been a simple dietary deficiency became a subtle and unpredictable disease that could strike without warning. Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes. And it would only be through blind luck that the actual cause of scurvy would be rediscovered, and vitamin C finally isolated, in 1932.

http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

Hipster Puppies!

Ari stayed up all night drinking beer and playing old 7”s, so he’s gonna have to sit out this month’s critical mass...

Charlie Nothing "Was not born. Did not die. Does not, did not, will not exist."

Charlie Nothing invented the Dingulator.

In the mid-1970s he formed The Superfabulous Dingulators, a band consisting of Charlie Nothing (on dingulator), Patrick Bisconti (also on dingulator), John Kertisz (bamboo flute, because what goes better with a dingulator) and Jesse Ward Jr. (percussion)...

Tuning a dingulator is "variable, organic and evolving." According to Nothing, "the ideal would be to never tune them, to just find where they are going and go with it ...

In 2007 he released a new CD of dingulator songs entitled My Cuntree Tits of Me.

Charlie Nothing quit performing in the 1980s, believing he had evolved past the entertaining-monkey-jumping-up-and-down-on-the-stage stage. Charlie Nothing came back to performing in 2004, realizing he was in fact a monkey jumping up and down.

Ever heard of a Juggalo?

Insane Clown Posse and Psychopathic Records have stated that there is no true definition of a Juggalo. In a press release from Insane Clown Posse, they say "there are no requirements to being a Juggalo. We don't care if you spend a dime on merch, or if you know the words to every song. If this music touches you, and you get some positive experience from it, we would be honored to have you consider yourself a Juggalo.

Common characteristics include drinking the inexpensive soft drink Faygo and wearing face paint.

In a 2005 interview, Joseph Utsler explained, "you could be a Juggalo and not even listen to ICP. A Juggalo is a frame of mind and what not. And I was a Juggalo before we started with ICP. You don't even have to fuckin' necessarily listen to Psychopathic Records to be a Juggalo. Juggalos are Juggalos."

They also have a festival: The Gathering of the Juggalos is an annual event for the Juggalo Family put on by Psychopathic Records first staged in July 2000. Described by Bruce as a "Juggalo Woodstock", the Gathering of the Juggalos spans four days, and includes concerts, wrestling, games, contests, autograph sessions, and seminars with artists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggalo

"It just doesn't matter!": The philosophy of Bill Murray

He’s done everything from dropping Dalai Lama riffs in the middle of Caddyshack to scaling a mountain to seek enlightenment in The Razor’s Edge, while even taking a few years off from acting to study philosophy at the Sorbonne.

It’s no accident, then, that so many of his films—beneath Murray’s veneer of world-weariness and sarcastic asides—recall the same existential questions that have been posed by sages since the dawn of the word “why.” Starting with the Buddhism of Groundhog's Day, here are some of Murray’s deepest thoughts, couched in some of his funniest movies...

Famous bigots get counter-protested!

Fred Phelps Band-of-Bigots from the Westboro Baptist Church (known to show up at soldiers funerals) showed up to protest outside Twitter's San Francisco offices...their hate-promoting signs were answered by multiple counter-signs of randomness, nonsensical yelling, and even a unicorn. A portable stereo blared Lady GaGa, while press and people passing by ignored the WBC signs and took pictures and videos of the more entertaining signs.

...a small crowd gave rise to an elegantly dadaist protest in which accordions, random signs of love and hate, and rick rolls abounded.

http://laughingsquid.com/san-franciscos-answer-to-westboro-baptist-church/

Tributes to David Foster Wallace

If you are not adverse to quietly blubbering while sitting at your computer, Five Dials magazine has published the tributes to David Foster Wallace made by his sister Amy, agent Bonnie Nadell, authors Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen and others at his memorial service on 23 October, 2008 at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York University.

PDF Format: http://fivedials.com/files/fivedials_no10.pdf

David Byrne on: The Limits of Multiculturalism

A thoughtful and well-written journal post: From vigilante hipsters vs. Williamsburg Hasidim, to smuggled monkeys, Byrne asks: how much do we allow ethnic and religious groups to not blend in and to not become part of the general social fabric, especially in a major metropolis?

...Multiculturalism, I gather, is the idea that we shouldn’t force outside cultures and immigrants to conform to the culture of the dominant ethnic group — we should respect the integrity of their beliefs and customs. More than just allowing halal or kosher butchers to move in, this idea implies that we might start to see things from the other’s point of view — and sometimes accommodate their wishes, even if they don’t conform to those of the majority. This idea has met its match since 9/11 — Europe, previously a bastion of Muslim enclaves and ghettos of various types and ethnicities, has in recent years pushed back against multiculturalism, and a more nuanced idea is taking hold — sometimes. Other times intolerance rears its ugly head.

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

In 1949, New Statesman challenged its readers to parody the style of any novelist named Green or Greene. Under a pseudonym, Graham Greene submitted a parody of himself:

The child had an air of taking everything in and giving nothing away. At the Rome airport he was led across the tarmac by his aunt, but he seemed to hear nothing of her advice to himself or of the information she produced for the air hostess. He was too busy with his eyes: the hangars had his attention, every lane on the field except his own — that could wait.

‘My nephew,’ she said, ‘yes, that’s him on the list. Roger Court. You will look after him, won’t you? He’s never been quite on his own before,’ but when she made that statement the child’s eyes moved back plane by plane with what looked like contempt, back to the large breasts and the fat legs and the over-responsible mouth: how could she have known, he might have been thinking, how often I am alone?

He came in second.

Steampunk NYC!

Who would think that the oldest continuously-operating, privately owned steam-powered electrical generating plant in the United States sits in a quiet Victorian section of Brooklyn, New York?

Pratt University still has its original steam-powered engine room. Chandelier included!

And every year on New Year's Eve the caretaker sets up all of the large steam whistles outside. Where passersby get to pull the ropes and create a cacophony to ring in the new year!

For this and more steampunk goodness visit the Steampunk Workshop here...

ExtInked: Tattoos to save the world

How far would you go to help save an endangered animal? How about allowing someone to jab ink into your skin with tiny needles, 150 times a second?

That's exactly what hundreds of volunteers signed up for last weekend at ExtInked, where people came from far and wide to have one of Britain's most endangered species permanently tattooed on their body, making them a life long ambassador for that species.

ExtInked is the brainchild of the Ultimate Holding Company, a Manchester-based arts collective. Each volunteer filled out an application explaining why they deserved to be the canvas for their chosen flora or fauna. Of the hundreds that turned up, 100 were chosen and, over the course of the weekend, 100 original tattoos were carefully inked onto shoulders, calves, backs and hip bones by artists from the local studio Ink vs Steel.

Read more here

'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die'

SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco, Italian novelist and semiotician, who is curating a new exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. Eco talks to SPIEGEL about the place that lists hold in the history of culture, the ways we try to avoid thinking about death and why Google is dangerous for young people.

Eco: Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail.

SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can't be realistically completed?

Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No

In 1970, Pittsburgh Pirates Pitcher Dock Ellis pitched a legendary no-hitter against the San Diego Padres under the influence of LSD.  This animated short tells the story in the best way possible...

Ellis, now co-ordinator of an anti drug program in Los Angeles, said he didn't know until six hours before his June 12, 1970 no hitter that he was going to pitch.

"I was in Los Angeles, and the team was playing in San Diego , but I didn't know it. I had taken LSD..... I thought it was an off-day, that's how come I had it in me. I took the LSD at noon.

At 1pm, his girlfriend and trip partner looked at the paper and said, "Dock, you're pitching today!"

It was the highpoint in the baseball career of one of the finer pitchers of his time, and arguably,one of the greatest achievements in the history of sports.

See it here...

Nomenclature for Lego Families

“Can you see any clippy bits?” my son asked his friend. The friend was flummoxed. “Do you mean handy bits?” he asked, pointing.

“Yes,” replied my boy. “Clippy bits.”

Of course! This language of Lego isn’t just something our family has invented; every Lego-building family must have its own vocabulary. And the words they use (mostly invented by the children, not the adults) are likely to be different every time. But how different? And what sort of words?

Hence, a survey. I asked fellow parents to donate their children for a few minutes, and name a selection of Lego pieces culled from the Lego parts store. Read more...

Sesame Street Trashes Pox News

PBS Ombudsman Responds to 'Pox News' Parody on Sesame Street

At the end of the segment on Grouchy News Network, one of Oscar's viewers calls to tell him she's changing the channel, "From now on I am watching 'Pox' News. Now there is a trashy news show."

Michael Getler, the PBS ombudsman, writes that it was a parody too good to resist that should have been resisted.

Read more here...

Run-DMC the Musical

why are YOU buggin?

They helped bring hip-hop to the mainstream, revitalized the career of Aerosmith and now, Run-DMC could be headed to Broadway.

Paula Wagner, the veteran Hollywood producer, said that her Chestnut Ridge Productions company was working with the rappers Joseph Simmons (known as Run) and Darryl McDaniels (DMC) as well as the estate of Jason Mizell (Jam Master Jay) to produce a stage musical about Run-DMC, the seminal hip-hop group.

“Their work speaks to everybody,” Ms. Wagner said in a telephone interview, “and the story of their rise to fame is innately theatrical.”

Remember Krush Groove?:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjImcCetzFo

and who else could get away with rhyming "why you buggin'" with "I need your hugging"

IT'S CAPSLOCK DAY EVERYONE!

cappy, cappy, cappy!!!!! every year we get together and make salmon for toast
every year we get a crockety bloat
every year we get drunk on the docks
and every year we have sex with our caps locks!!!!!!




bLACK sANTA

(I HAVE NO IDEA WHY, SO DON'T ASK...AND STOP YELLING!)

Gmail Users Have Better Credit Scores

 Online credit-checking service Credit Karma displays what average credit scores look like by email domain. Yahoo is the worst, Gmail is one of the best, and Hotmail falls somewhere in between.

Never Mind the Pity: How a dying teenager’s dream turned into the making of a miraculous album.

During the two weeks Killian spends in the hospital recovering, he meanders around the corridors in his scrubs playing his uke for other patients. At one point he finds himself thinking back to the moment during his uke lesson with Ralph, just two days earlier, now seemingly a lifetime away. He has an idea. “I want to record with Ralph,” he tells his mother, “but I don’t want to do it with friends.” Smiling, but serious, he adds, “I want to play with famous people.”

“I thought I was on a kind of playdate, right? Then Killian starts playing, and I was like, Oh, really? The kid was totally schooling me.” “The fact that he was a kid, the fact that he was sick—I forgot about that in two minutes,” Sebastian says. “He was a pro, someone who knew how to express himself fully with an instrument.”

Read More...

The AV Club Interviews Alton Brown

Chef:  it’s not a title, it’s a job. It’s a position in a kitchen. It comes from an old German word that means “boss” or “head of the shop.” In which case I am the chef of my operation, but it’s a production company. It’s not a kitchen, even though we do have a kitchen. That’s the closest thing to chef I am. All the good chefs that I know say that they are cooks employed as chef. All the people that say, “I’m a chef,” generally aren’t. The good ones will say, “I’m a cook.”

Once people start saying, “I’m Chef Bob!”—yeah, whatever. I’m Captain Kangaroo. Have a nice day...

...they’re not gonna let me do a show about rabbit, because they don’t want to think about killing the little bunnies. There probably won’t be a Good Eats episode on, you know, anything glandular. We’ve always kept the show very much about what people can get at a regular grocery store...

Read More...

Goofus, Galant, Rashomon

Shawn, high-school classmate of Goofus:
Goofus—my God, what a bad-boy poseur. I could tell he had picked up his Nietzscheism from a comic book. He would talk about the "Will to Power." But there was also some G. Gordon Liddy mixed in there. He loved doing the candle trick, moving his hand through the flame and pretending he didn't mind the pain. Then I did the same thing with my finger, showing him how full of shit he was.
 
Natalie, Gallant's high-school friend:
Gallant was one of the few mature guys in our high school. Sensitive. We used to talk about James Taylor during lunch. I thought him the perfect gentleman, and of course my parents loved him. But when someone is polite to the point of having that Moonie quality, it gets to you. Finally it dawned on me that he used that politeness as a way of controlling me. That was what it was all about—he followed the rules because it gave him the advantage.  


Continue Reading...

Sabotaged From the Future: The Large Hadron Collider and a Fantastic Theory.

This December, The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva will once again be revved up by CERN and start smashing atoms together in the search for the forces and particles that participated in first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. 

No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

 This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

Seriously?!  Wow.

"Picture a child walking alone in the world" that is Hen kerlien

The Chinese expression that means...not just sad, not exactly pathetic...Always with a bowl haircut: Hen kerlien!

From the LiveJournal Zarinov:

All it means literally is 'very (hen) sad (kerlien),' but it also has connotations of 'pathetic' without any of the judgment or scorn. I don't think there is an English equivalent, so at this juncture I will ask you to picture a child walking alone in the world. Hen kerlien!

Here are some examples of hen kerlien in action:

1. One time as a kid, I asked my dad if he wanted to play catch, and he said he was feeling too lazy at the moment; I said this was okay. I had a bowl haircut.

We had this plastic elephant that lobbed baseballs at you with its trunk, so minutes later I was seen carrying the elephant and a TV tray into the backyard. I guess at this point I became visible in the window of the living room, where my dad sat reclining on the couch. Thus framed, I proceeded to arrange the elephant on the TV tray, turn it on, and run away to hit the first ball with my whiffle bat. I repeated this process every fourth ball, because that is how many balls I had. I was not too far into it when my dad appeared in the backyard with my baseball glove, citing that the spectacle was too kerlien to bear. Hen kerlien!

Continue Reading...

30 Years Ago Today: The birth of hip-hop in NYC

Rapper's Delight, by the Sugarhill Gang, the first hit rap song entered the US Billboard charts in October of 1979.

Here, photographer and paramedic Joe Conzo - who took pictures of the early hip-hop scene in the Bronx - takes us on a tour of the New York borough, recalling the early days and explaining how the area has changed.

See the video here...

Schrödinger’s Rapist: A Helpful Guide to Approaching Women Without Getting Maced

This is great:

...you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted....

if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights.
 
For women, who are watching you very closely to determine how much of a threat you are, this is an important piece of data...

Read More...

Family Guy Corn Maze

Bob Connors, owner of Connors Farm in Danvers, is a big fan of “Family Guy.’’ How big? He mowed his corn maze into the shape of “Family Guy’’ characters Stewie and Brian. 

I love this country.

Read the Full Article...

View 902 Letters From and To Vincent Van Gogh

View lall of his surviving letters by period, by correspondent (i.e.: Theo, his Parents, Gauguin, etc.), by place (i.e.: Amsterdam, Arles, The Hague, etc.) with sketches...

Ever since Vincent van Gogh’s letters became widely known with their first publication almost a century ago they have garnered the interest and admiration they deserve. They were eagerly seized on as a rich source of information about Van Gogh’s gripping life story and exceptional work, and there was broad recognition of the intrinsic qualities of his writing: the personal tone, evocative style and lively language. The combination of these factors prompted some people who were in a position to know to accord the correspondence the status of literature. The poet W.H. Auden, who published an anthology with a brief introduction, wrote: ‘there is scarcely one letter by Van Gogh which I, who am certainly no expert, do not find fascinating’...

Visit the Archive...

Jamie Oliver: Putting America’s Diet on a Diet

We sat at the dining-room table. “The key to life is to know what you’re good at and stay away from what you’re bad at,” he said. Well, the pasta was certainly delicious. As for the bad part, we talked about school. He said he recently ran into his “special needs” teacher, Mrs. Murphy, and actually blushed as he told me, “I gave her a big hug and kiss, and she said she was really proud of me.” 

Oliver has often recounted the story of being one of five children out of 150 pulled from regular classes each week to learn how to read and write, as the other kids taunted them, singing the phrase “special needs” to the tune of “Let It Be.

I love Jamie Oliver.

Homeless Man Leaves Behind Surprise: $4 Million

Every day on NPR, listeners hear funding credits — or, in other words, very short, simple commercials.

A few weeks ago, a new one made it to air: "Support for NPR comes from the estate of Richard Leroy Walters, whose life was enriched by NPR, and whose bequest seeks to encourage others to discover public radio."

NPR's Robert Siegel wondered who Walters was. So Siegel Googled him.

An article in the online newsletter of a Catholic mission in Phoenix revealed that Walters died two years ago at the age of 76. He left an estate worth about $4 million. Along with the money he left for NPR, Walters also left money for the mission.

But something distinguished Walters from any number of solvent, well-to-do Americans with seven-figure estates: He was homeless.

End of The World: Financial Crisis Hits Dubai’s multi-billion dollar property deal

England is deserted, Australia and New Zealand have merged, and the man who bought Ireland has killed himself.

They were designed to make Dubai the envy of the world: a series of paradise islands inhabited by celebrities and the super-rich reclaimed from the azure waters of the Arabian Gulf and shaped like a map of the Earth. It was called The World.

As millions of tonnes of rock were dumped into the sea for the foundations, timely leaks suggested that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were to buy Ethiopia, Sir Richard Branson was tipped to occupy England, while Rod Stewart would border him in Scotland.

U.S. Government Gold Manipulation Document Declassified

Not sure what it means but in the 1970's, granted it was during a period of high inflation,the Federal Reserve, had a secret agreement with the German government whereby the German government agreed not to buy gold in the open market, or from other governments, at a price above the then-official U.S. government price of $42.22 per ounce, despite the fact that the open market price for gold was then trading between $160 to $175 per ounce.

Why? Why don't I understand the monetary system? And is gold something that we shoulld still be talking about? It's a common metal right?

Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty

Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty is a Dad's blog that features drawings made by his three kids: Isaac age 10; Grace age 9; and Lily age 6. Recently, to celebrate the 3 year anniversary of the blog, their Dad asked his readers to submit 'fan art' using past CNLT drawings as inspiration. Here are the AMAZING submitted art works, accompanied by the original drawings that inspired them.

(Illustration: Matt Mangus)

The Doers Club

How a teenager from Malawi built his first of several windmills to provide his family with electricity and irrigation and how he plans to help transform Africa.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind 

Using Ping.fm to update all of her social networks at the same time. miraculous.