Latest on twitter:
"But the main problem with cultural differences is that you don’t really know where cultural difference ends and individual weirdness starts. Is this guy just being strange/creepy/nosy or it’s a cultural thing? I’m never quite sure were I stand."
Daniel Duclos, on his experiences in Holland. I can confirm that it’s true both ways.
(via Clogs and Tulips)
Fortune Teller Is Right
A man was jailed by a Kemerovo region court on Thursday for assaulting a Gypsy fortune teller who predicted that he would be jailed, the Investigative Committee said. The rest is kind of sad, but this part is kind of funny.
What It's Really Like To Be A Copy Editor
Not that pop culture didn’t try again and again to subvert me. My head still hurts a little when I think back to an article I edited about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The writer was trying to describe the combination of physical appearance and actual age of Brad Pitt’s character at various points in the movie. It took possibly as long as the movie itself to determine that the just-born Benjamin would be an old-man baby (that is, a baby who is like an old man) and the almost-dead Benjamin would be an old-baby man. I think? Honestly, I’m still not sure if this is right.
"No one has to be afraid of the Best Party, because it is the best party. If it wasn’t, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that."
Jon Gnarr, comedian, founder of “The Best Party”, and now mayor of Reykjavik
How to Lose Time and Money
And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day—days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I’d feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I’d feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work. […] With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies. So nature and nurture combine to make us avoid self-indulgence. But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they’re not even fun. Great stuff
"The more I believe in something, and the more I take something other than me seriously, the less bored I am, the less self-hating. I get less scared."
David Foster Wallace
World War II was full of plot-holes
I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called “World War II”.
Let’s start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn’t look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn’t get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.
Hilarious!
Temper (via xkcd)
