Courtesy of R Stevens, the final Polack joke of all time:
“How many Polocks does it take to put on an opera?”
“One to construct the stages, one to direct it, one to sell tickets, fifty to be the orchestra, eight to sing and a thousand to appreciate the sublime beauty of the high arts.”
Now, if only the forces of bigotry would leave the robots alone…
I keep meaning to write something original for this site, but I keep getting distracted by shiny things.
Speaking of which: Super Information Hijinks: Reality Check is now online, having foolishly been let go out of print by a couple different publishers. So cute.
The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF. Introduction to an issue of The Journal of Science Fiction Studies, which has been around longer than I’ve been alive.
Synopsis: American SF has long been a bastion of white nerds, devoted to a future in which everyone has the freedom to think and act just like white nerds. Which means that black inroads into SF more often happened sideways through music and comics, rather than through the front door. Sun Ra as well as Samuel Delany, Luke Cage: Powerman! as well as Octavia Butler.
Zen Parable, or Just Someone Being Cruel?
Chinese Gold Farmers: the Documentary
Nosefrida is a doctor recommended nasal aspirator that removes mucous from your child’s nose. If you’ve read Angela’s Ashes, you know exactly what I’m thinking of.
Adorably kawaii (and explicit) AIDS ads from France. Featuring sappy British punk as the soundtrack, for some reason.
The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. Sweet Jesus.
Steampunk has a new gold standard, my friends.
The promo site for miranda july’s new book is implemented in dry-erase marker on whitebox appliance.
See also (for a very different take on it): chocolatey shatner. Didn’t scale well, which was a shame. Ambitious style.
A libertarian, free-market analysis of Mr. Rogers’ 1969 appeal to Congress.
Appropriately enough, some quite un-Objectivist souls have altruistically attempted to more fully inform the rest of their fellow consumers about some fabulous mobile phone opportunities. All hail the Market!
14″ Mini Bike Used in Lord of the Rings, $1200, and much much more.
A seemingly pointless and strangely compelling craigslist parody.
telephone-pole flyers. Not the kind about bands.
Excerpt: Did you enjoy Mongo Santamaria’s music? …the bandages on his fingers do not imply a gentle man.
the revolution will not be televised, but silly interviews always have a market
Gil Scott Heron
the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of the Year. Of them, I’ve heard of maybe a third, read maybe two and a half. The ones I read were good, though.
Heat: the ultimate food porn. Bill Buford masochistically apprentices at a restaurant and a butcher shop, and learns fabulous things about food. Pretty much the paradigm of “if you like to cook, maybe you should REALLY NEVER work at a restaurant.”
Consider the Lobster: David Foster Wallace DFWs on and on about various subjects. Most people either love him or hate him, and this collection contains lots of both. There were a bunch of the essays in here that I just skipped over, and then hit (of all things) Big Red Son, about porn and the AVN awards, which is brilliant and funny and human and a train wreck, all at the same time.
Suite Francaise also snuck up on me. It’s only 2 of a projected 5 parts, left unfinished when the Nazis arrested its author, Irene Nemirovsky. This is incredibly eerie, because the book itself is about the German invasion of France, and the initial occupation; the entire 1st part is composed of the book’s various heroes and villains fleeing Paris just ahead of the retreating French troops. So much of it is so calm, and precise, that I didn’t really have time to realize that she was really writing journalism, not fiction, until I hit the endnotes. So good, so damn good, and nearly lost forever.
nerdy religious propaganda:
first, for reference, chick tracts. Little cartoony pieces of evangelical Christian propaganda.
Now, feast your eyes on these:
Who Will be Eaten First? Chick meets Cthulhu.
GALACTUS IS COMING. Chick meets Marvel comics.
new books for children:
a horse named paul revere, by Adam Horowitz, Adam Yauch and Michael Diamond
and of course, that classic, My Little Golden Book About ZOGG
though I am failing admirably this week: In Praise of Idleness
…It is difficult to see how the authorities can aim at a paradise in which there will be much leisure and little work. It seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity…This sort of thing, if it happens, will be the result of regarding the virtue of hard work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a state of affairs in which it is no longer needed.
Ha! Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table beats the likes of Darwin and Stoppard (???) to be named best science book. The Grauniad article is a little vague on the criteria, and as usual has to bring up the whole “memoir of life as a Jew in Mussolini’s Italy” thing again. God forbid anyone actually read Levi’s work except through the Auschwitz filter.
Well worth reading. I have a spare copy if anyone wants to borrow it.
xkcd: from romance to rap to the torture of electric fans: everything you hold dear can be geeked.
how not to fix a liquid nitrogen tank
Kiwi geneticist Rod Lea claims that the Maori people have a “warrior” gene which makes them more prone to violent and criminal behaviour - specifically, an elevated amount of monoamine oxidase There is some dissent to this hypothesis…
Google proposes that soon the cost of running a server will mostly be electric bills, and that’s not a good thing
Grauniad review of Harry Potter academic conference
The most religiously conservative part of Turkey is the most successfully entrepreneurial
American Idol Kelly Clarkson rocks out old-school with Metal Skool
have a dip in the shark tank, filled with clueless bosses and colleagues
or
manufacture their incompetence, as the Bastard Operator from Hell does
Computers help us get things done.