“Self Improve: Bigfoot got get more perfect. Refine Bigfootocity. Pull together. Think outside box. Lose ten pound. Learn speak the French. Ballroom dance. Demonstrate superior knowledge of fine wine at dinner party in charming non-pretentious manner. Be Oscar Wilde of woods. It so hard. Brain size of apricot. So, so hard think good. Maybe if eat Kelsey Grammer of Frasier fame, will absorb him soul and all attribute like McDonald’s combo meal.” Graham Roumieu at Powells.com
“Flower discarded, valuables restored with a zip to their lodging, the boy stood motionless. He held out to the old man a face as wan and empty as the bottom of a beggar’s tin cup. The old man could hear the flatted chiming of milk cans at Satterlee’s farm a quarter mile off, the agitated rustle of the housemartins under his own eaves, and, as always, the ceaseless machination of the hives. The boy shifted from one foot to the other, as if searching for an appropriate response. He opened his mouth, and closed it again. It was the parrot who finally spoke.” Michael Chabon at Powells.com
Wonderful story in the NY Times about an architect who built secret messages and hidden things into a Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. It’s my dream home, and I predict that the children growing up in this home are going to have brilliant imaginations. I hope to read the books they someday write, or admire the elegance of their mathematical equations.
But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.
[...]
What Ms. Sherry didn’t realize until much later was that Mr. Clough had a number of other ideas about her apartment that he didn’t share with her. It began when Mr. Klinsky threw in his two cents, a vague request that a poem he had written for and about his family be lodged in a wall somewhere, Ms. Sherry said, “put in a bottle and hidden away as if it were a time capsule.” (Ms. Sherry said that her husband is both dogged and romantic, a guy singularly focused on the welfare of children, not just his own. Mr. Klinsky runs Victory Schools, a charter school company that seeds schools in neighborhoods around the country, as well as an after-school program in East New York that his own children help out with regularly.)That got Mr. Clough, who is the sort of person who has a brainstorm on a daily basis, thinking about children and inspiration and how the latter strikes the former. “I’d just read something about Einstein being inspired by a compass he’d been given as a child,” he said. The Einstein story set Mr. Clough off, and he began to ponder ways to spark a child’s mind. “I was thinking that maybe there could be a game or a scavenger hunt embedded in the apartment — that was the beginning,” he said.
Amazing. The phrase “heart-warming” was invented for things like this, but in a non-cliche way. Link to NY Times article. (thanks, Joshua!)
“Back in the day – you know, when presidential candidates were respectably white – news organizations called potential First Ladies “wives.” But now that black folks are running, we can get all funky fresh with the lingo, yo. So it’s basically fine for Fox News to use “Baby Mama” for Michelle Obama, slang that implies a married 44-year-old Princeton-educated lawyer is, to use an Urban Dictionary definition of the term, “some chick you knocked up on accident during a fling who you can’t stand but you have to tolerate cuz she got your baby now.” Because the Obamas are black! And the blacks, they’re all relaxed about that shit, yo. Word up.” … John Scalzi on Fox News and racism.
“You find people like that on the fringes of scholarship – genuinely brilliant, sometimes – but cracked, you know, possessed by some crazy idea that has no basis in reality, but which seems to them to hold the key to understanding the whole cosmos. I’ve seen it more than once – tragic, really.” … Philip Pullman at Powells.com
Oh yes, I’m still alive. And I’m still writing.
This is a YouTube link to possibly the best speech I’ve ever heard from Obama. I highly recommend you go watch it.
This is a link to an article about the wife McCain divorced after she was disfigured in an accident, to marry his current (20 years his junior, multi-millionaire) wife a month later. Nice to see some character assessments from people who have known him for 40 years.
The former is via Pharyngula, and the latter is via Ben Templesmith, professional troublemaker.
Yes, I missed May. And I don’t like June’s masthead nearly as much as April’s! Maybe I’ll bring the violin back for good at some point. Anyway, June’s masthead was taken from this photograph I took at the Black Hole in Los Alamos. I could write a book on that place. Amazing.
I usually tend to agree with Art Caplan of the Center for Bioethics at UPenn when he blogs at the American Journal of Bioethics, but I think he’s obscenely far off the mark on this one.
I am not sure Oscar Pistorius should compete.
He may not have a marked advantage, but his artificial limbs make him too different from those he competes against, and too unlike those who have raced before. It’s not about giving him an opportunity. The issue is that Pistorius risks destroying exactly what he wants to do — compete in a sport.
His argument is coherent, but just plain bad. It’s an appeal to tradition and small-minded – the sort of thing one expects from an older white guy. I’ve never seen him make claims so shallow before. VERY disappointing.
Slavery or somesuch?
Blogged about this last year too, but this year’s estimate is even higher.
Mother’s Love Worth $117,000 per year.
If a stay-at-home mom could be compensated in dollars rather than personal satisfaction and unconditional love, she’d rake in a nifty sum of nearly $117,000 a year.
Is it June? I never even made a May masthead. I’m still working like a complete lunatic so I can get everything written, revised, and defended before I move to Wisconsin. It hasn’t left much time for blogging (or any other leisure activities). I’ve managed to squeeze in 1 night of knitting every week or two, and my cello and violin lessons, but other than that it’s me and my dissertation, getting too close for comfort.
Here’s the best link I’ve seen in awhile: What does it mean to be human?
All the usual suspects respond (Dennett, Minsky, Damasio, Churchland). And there’s bound to be some interesting comments to the post, although I haven’t made it through them. In a parallel universe, parallel me is writing a VERY LONG blog post to respond to this question about what it means to be human, as it’s one of the motivating questions of my entire life. However, this me – the non-parallel one – doesn’t have time to write that post. If any of you address this question for yourselves, please please (please) post a link in my comments so I can read what you’ve written. It really is one of the fundamental questions in my life.