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"Good thing Indiana Jones stopped after the third film! I hear there was a script for another, but..."

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:33:05 +0100

““Good thing Indiana Jones stopped after the third film! I hear there was a script for another, but that it was hidden in a refrigerator on a nuclear test sight, and there is no way that anyone anywhere could even imagine a scenario in which is survived that blast, so nobody even checked to see if it was still there.””

- (via: reddit)

"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:00:00 +0100

“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
If at this moment, you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude — but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.”

- David Foster Wallace

"Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:30:00 +0100

“Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could flee easy categorisation by your education, your work, your class, your family, your accent, your politics. You could reinvent yourself, if only in your own mind. You were not caught up in the mundanities of the place you inhabited, any more than you wanted to be. You did not vote for the government, its problems were not your problems. You were irresponsible. Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief.”

- Being foreign: The others (via marco)

Meanwhile in Sweden

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:00:00 +0100

Meanwhile in Sweden

New Yorker: Edgar Allan Poe and the Economy of Horror

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:00:00 +0100

New Yorker: Edgar Allan Poe and the Economy of Horror:

![]

A fascinating look at the life of Edgar Allan Poe

“My whole existence has been the merest Romance,” Poe wrote, the year before his death, “in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.” This is Byronic bunk. Poe’s life was tragic, but he was about as unworldly as a bale of cotton. Poe’s world was Andrew Jackson’s America, a world of banking collapse, financial panic, and grinding depression that had a particularly devastating effect on the publishing industry, where Poe sought a perch. His biography really is a series of unfortunate events.

[…]

Poe Invented the detective story!

If Dupin sounds uncannily familiar, that’s because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, like every other author of detective fiction, not to mention the creators of a thousand TV crime shows, is incalculably in Poe’s debt. “The children of Poe” is what Stephen King calls the members of his guild, and with good reason. But horror stories predate Poe, and have many other sources. Not so the literary sleuth. All detective stories and police procedurals begin with the intellectually imperious C. Auguste Dupin: methodical, eccentric, calculating—and insulting. We, mere readers, are so many Watsons, Hastingses, and Goodwins. Poe is the only Holmes.

Vatican hit by gay sex scandal Vatican chorister sacked...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:30:00 +0100

Vatican hit by gay sex scandal

Vatican chorister sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for papal gentleman-in-waiting

Love the choice of photograph accompanying the image!

(source)

"A lot of people have misinterpreted David Foster Wallace as a kind of postmodern ironist, which is..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:00:00 +0100

“A lot of people have misinterpreted David Foster Wallace as a kind of postmodern ironist, which is the last thing he was. His work is deeply sincere and concerned with human values; searching for them. The thing that makes it seem like it is postmodern or ironic is because he never sees things as being quite that simple. There’s always this kind of doubling-back, always a reexamination of his position, but he’s always trying—not as an attempt to undercut anything, so much as it really is a search, a quest.”

- Glenn Kenny, Slant Magazine

Dub FX. Amazing performance.

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:55:10 +0100

Dub FX. Amazing performance.

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that..."

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:19:33 +0100

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

- Ellen Goodman

The Video The USA Army Doesn’t Want You To See

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:24:54 +0100

The Video The USA Army Doesn’t Want You To See

Five Dials: David Foster Wallace Tributes (pdf)

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:19:00 +0100

Five Dials: David Foster Wallace Tributes (pdf):

For the fans of the writings of the late David Foster Wallace, the online literary magazine Five Dials collected a number of tributes written by those close to him. Here are some bits I particularly liked:

“He was the most idealistic of ironists, and his vision of the world was fuelled by deep wells of sincerity and a dogged quest for authenticity.” - Gerry Howard

[…]

“Even if I’d never known him I’d be mourning the loss of a writer who took in the fire-hose blast of our world in all its voices and forms and varieties and gave it back to us in these gargantuan, howl- ingly funny, nakedly sad, philosophically probing novels, stories, and essays. He delineated the inside of the skull, the convoluted self-talk we all carry on constantly, in a way that no writer ever has. And at the same time that he could capture the tiniest granularities of self-consciousness, he also saw and could draw the broadest outlines of the big-picture world.” - Michael Pietsch

[…]

“David loved encountering new words. In one letter he wrote of ‘the last sludgelets of adolescent self- consciousness being borne away on the horological tide.’ And added in parentheses, ‘I just learned the word “horology” and was determined to use it at least once.’ No mention of the fact that he had just invented the word ‘sludgelets’. I think he wanted to use every word in the language before he was done.” - Michael Pietsch

Be sure to download the whole thing, and sign up for their newsletter!

New Yorker: The Formula

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:48:05 +0100

New Yorker: The Formula:

What if you built a machine to predict hit movies?

The strength of McCready’s analysis is its precision. This past spring, for instance, he analyzed “Crazy,” by Gnarls Barkley. The computer calculated, first of all, the song’s Hit Grade—that is, how close it was to the center of any of those sixty hit clusters. Its Hit Grade was 755, on a scale where anything above 700 is exceptional. The computer also found that “Crazy” belonged to the same hit cluster as Dido’s “Thank You,” James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful,” and Ashanti’s “Baby,” as well as older hits like “Let Me Be There,” by Olivia Newton-John, and “One Sweet Day,” by Mariah Carey, so that listeners who liked any of those songs would probably like “Crazy,” too. Finally, the computer gave “Crazy” a Periodicity Grade—which refers to the fact that, at any given time, only twelve to fifteen hit clusters are “active,” because from month to month the particular mathematical patterns that excite music listeners will shift around. “Crazy” ’s periodicity score was 658—which suggested a very good fit with current tastes. The data said, in other words, that “Crazy” was almost certainly going to be huge—and, sure enough, it was

Say what you will about Gladwell, he sure can tell a story.

"If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and..."

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:26:38 +0100

“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.”

- David Foster Wallace (via thisislobster)

"We thought we knew everything about everything, and it turned out that there were unknown unknowns."

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:00:00 +0100

“We thought we knew everything about everything, and it turned out that there were unknown unknowns.”

- Richard Fisher

China Lifts Twitter Ban (sort of)

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:00:00 +0100

China Lifts Twitter Ban (sort of):

“The best part is, we stuck a black guy with the...

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:30:54 +0100

“The best part is, we stuck a black guy with the bill!”

(via: reddit.com)

"It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this..."

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:51:26 +0100

“It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like “It’s really important not to lie.” OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can’t trust you. I feel that I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why. Then I realize, “Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie.” The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting — which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff — can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.”

- David Foster Wallace

(via: (Salon.com)[http://www.salon.com/09/features/wallace1.html])

"Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people."

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:43:47 +0100

“Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people.”

- Edward R. Harrison

Heads in Freezers In the category ‘strange internet...

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:31:58 +0100

Heads in Freezers

In the category ‘strange internet memes’, a some artist uploaded a picture of himself putting his head in the freezer, and tagged the picture with a nonsensical number (241543903). He then asked others to do the same.

They did, and now the internet is full with pictures of people putting their heads in freezers. Don’t believe me?

Find out for yourself.

Oh internets.

Meet the Man Who Lives on Zero Dollars

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:56:00 +0100

Meet the Man Who Lives on Zero Dollars:

Daniel Suelo lives in a cave. Unlike the average American—wallowing in credit-card debt, clinging to a mortgage, terrified of the next downsizing at the office—he isn’t worried about the economic crisis. That’s because he figured out that the best way to stay solvent is to never be solvent in the first place. Nine years ago, in the autumn of 2000, Suelo decided to stop using money. He just quit it, like a bad drug habit.

[…]

The answer lay, in part, in the Christianity of his childhood. In Suelo’s nascent philosophy, following Jesus meant adopting the hard life prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount. “Giving up possessions, living beyond credit and debt,” Suelo explains on his blog, “freely giving and freely taking, forgiving all debts, owing nobody a thing, living and walking without guilt … grudge [or] judgment.” If grace was the goal, Suelo told himself, then it had to be grace in the classical sense, from the Latin gratia, meaning favor—and also, free.