Quick (page 2)
I’m lazy, so instead of writing long, introspective posts about my feelings, I prefer to just link to funny video clips of kittens or people falling off things, and other such worthwhile entertainments. This is them.
9AM Thu
hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com (LHC. via Waffle) 3 Comments
8AM Fri
Oh Christ, when you’re ready to come back
I think I’m ready for you to come back
But if you want to stay wherever exactly it is you are
That’s okay too –
It’s really none of my business
And if I didn’t have you as my guide
I’d still be wandering lost in Sinai
Or down by the tracks
Watching trains go by to remind me:
There are places that aren’t here
I had a well but all the water left
So I’ll ask for your forgiveness
With every breath
If there was no way into God
I would never have laid in this grave of a body
So long, dear.
— mewithoutYou, ‘Carousels’
10PM Thu
If it ain’t fixed it’s broken. (My new, incredibly fun, bike. Which now has pedals. And yes, I know it has one brake too many for a fixie, and two too many for a purist.) 2 Comments
10AM Tue
“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”
10AM Tue
istheinternetfuckingawesome.com (via Tim) 0 Comments
1PM Mon
… small aircraft a few inches across had already been built in America and flown, but these could only stay airborne for a few minutes. His team’s work will allow them to stay in flight for longer, but more work is needed to find ways to power them more efficiently.
I’m not sure what impresses me more – that nature is so infinitely far ahead of us in certain respects, or that in a scant few centuries we’ve caught up so much. We can’t get close to duplicating the efficiency of nature’s machines, but we can get pretty close to duplicating many of their abilities. 0 Comments
12PM Sat
Batman is a mighty power,
a great and complete good.
Batman alone lightens every burden, and makes rough places smooth.
The Love Poem Project, in which we take love poems and swap out any mention of the word love: Love = Batman, Love = MTV, and Love = Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Catcher Carlton Fisk. (via kottke) 0 Comments
2PM Thu
Ultralight Backpacking: The “Why” and the “How”. ‘Exploring the wilderness with an extreme minimum of equipment.’ This makes me want to go walkabout. 3 Comments
4PM Wed
If you need to appear on an internet list to know whether you’re someone’s friend, you may have problems a computer can’t solve.
12PM Tue
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
— Banksy, Brandalism
(from Brehaut) 0 Comments
11AM Mon
There is something about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy - smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a surefire ticket to writhe.
But - and this is the thing - success does not work both ways. Gold-medal winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round. It is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female success is sexually ambiguous
6PM Thu Food + Photography = Food Porn Daily (SFW) 0 Comments
12PM Thu
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What is not part of ourselves does not bother us.
10AM Thu
After reading the passages, all participants completed a survey on their belief in free will. Then comes the inspired part of the experiment. Participants were told to complete 20 arithmetic problems that would appear on the computer screen. But they were also told that when the question appeared, they needed to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen, too. The participants were told that no one would know whether they pushed the space bar, but they were asked not to cheat.
The results were clear: those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often! (That is, they pressed the space bar less often than the other participants.) Moreover, the researchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses.
— Scientific American, Free Will vs. the Programmed Brain (via Mind Hacks)
12PM Mon
Me as I would have appeared in yearbooks of (L–R) 1974, ‘76, ‘80, and ‘94. David Grohl on the left, David Schwimmer on the right. Make your own at yearbookyourself.com (via Kottke.) 1 Comment
1AM Sat
Wondermark Lite.: #434; In which there is Taunting of Larry the Language Nerd. 1 Comment
10PM Thu My colleagues Tim and Matt rabbit on about modern Christchurch architecture. Lots of concrete squares and triangles. 10 Comments
4PM Thu After the death of Nurit Peled-Elhanan‘s 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, in a Palestinian suicide bomber’s attack in 1997, she became an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza:
My little girl was murdered because she was an Israeli by a young man who was humiliated, oppressed and desperate to the point of suicide and murder, just because he was a Palestinian. Now their blood is mixed on the stones of Jerusalem that have long been indifferent to children’s blood. We, who were not wise enough to free our children from the grip of hate and racism before they found their final rest, need to look at their mutilated bodies and innocent faces, and ask ourselves, with the poetesse Anna Akhmatova, Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of their cheek?
12PM Wed
Last Sunday, pastor Irwin Alton, 62, preached against several specific sins during his sermon. Some people in the audience gasped with recognition.
“When he talked about skipping mid-week service to go to the lake, and buying a new boat when you haven’t tithed, I felt nailed to my pew,” said one man. “It was like the Holy Spirit was speaking right to me.”
But it wasn’t the Holy Spirit — it was the man’s own blog where he had posted photos of himself and his buddies on his new boat on a Wednesday evening.
Pastor Alton, who cultivates a reputation as a computer illiterate techno-phobe, is actually an avid reader of MySpace pages, blogs and personal websites of the people in his congregation.
“I appear, shall we say, un-hip,” he says. “Therein lies my advantage.”