MeFi comment:
"In 1610, thinking he had discovered two moons orbiting Saturn, Galileo composed a message: ALTISSIMUM PLANETAM TERGEMINUM OBSERVAVI ("I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form") … and sent it to Kepler as an anagram:..." [
more]
favorited 12 times, recently by generalist, RussHy, crysflame, Challahtronix, aparrish, scrump, the_bone, schyler523, sveskemus, nasreddin, empath, lukemeister
4 days ago
MeFi comment:
"Scholars have avoided the difficult task of linking any blacks to the Southern war effort. One of the main reasons they choose not to attempt this is because they are afraid of confronting the great paradox that exists. Why would any slaves or free..." [
more]
favorited 1 time, recently by etaoin
3 weeks ago
MeFi comment:
"Muddler typed "...but I have to say I'm with the crowd of people that doesn't find the meaning of life in a toilet on a pedastal in the middle of an installation."
"Must you people take over every discussion on MetaFilter?..." [
more]
favorited 10 times, recently by nasreddin, tehloki, suedehead, olya, marble, phrontist, Ritchie, malpractice, jack_mo, stagewhisper
3 weeks ago
MeTa comment:
"And so yet another call-out thread peters out with the called-out earnestly and informatively discussing Revolutionary-era American history with himself...." [
more]
favorited 2 times, recently by Roach, The Bellman
3 weeks ago
MeFi comment:
"and that she doesn't just reprint press release copy but researches and describes everything in fresh prose
This is just plain not true. This listing is cut and pasted from here. This listing is cut and pasted from here. This listing is cut and..." [
more]
favorited 1 time, recently by zpousman
Last month
MeFi comment:
"The Melville caricature is actually George John Whyte-Melville. Calling poor Herman Melville "The novelist of Society" in 1871 would be like calling John Travolta "The King of Hollywood" in 1987...." [
more]
favorited 1 time, recently by bukharin
Last month
Ask comment:
"You will, by allowing yourself to be annoyed by passing aromas, tasteless ring tones, loud phone voices, talk radio, ugly sweaters, cretinous political opinions, weird and reverberating laughs, ill-timed sneezing, enthusiastic sports fandom, the..." [
more]
favorited 68 times, recently by airplain
Last month
MeTa comment:
"I slept right through it; thanks, alcohol!
notsnot's account pretty pithily shows how, at least in my experience, People Who Know It's An Earthquake have wildly different reactions from People Who Don't. I left the geologically underachieving..." [
more]
favorited 9 times, recently by scrump, blender, sebastienbailard
2 months ago
MeFi comment:
"davejay: You're putting words into Breyer's mouth. He didn't say "unimpressive" (as if the melody wasn't *beautiful* or *complex* enough to deserve copyright protection), he simply said "unoriginal".
I just read the opinion,..." [
more]
favorited 3 times, recently by litlnemo, nasreddin, flapjax at midnite
2 months ago
MeFi comment:
"...Natter on to each other you old hens and leave us alone...
...the women quoted in the article, who are quite obviously insufferable hens...
...Which is a pretty fitting epithet for this cow...
...I tried to read that, but it was all like..." [
more]
favorited 1 time, recently by insipidia
2 months ago
MeFi comment:
"Tucker Carlson says Obama... "seems like kind of a wuss"...
Tucker's complete lack of self-awareness is downright endearing. I imagine him standing in front of the mirror, straightening his bow tie, running a hand through his hair,..." [
more]
favorited 54 times, recently by supercrayon, Sys Rq, tehloki, Twicketface, Dreama, blender, streetdreams, P.o.B., desuetude, axon, nasreddin, silas216, sparkletone, kalimac, fleetmouse, smich, BrotherFeldspar, aeschenkarnos, Hot Like Your 12V Wire, dawiz, Poolio, tippiedog, xthlc, MikeKD, jonmc, Smart Dalek, Senor Cardgage, Lentrohamsanin, middleclasstool, myopicman, 40 Watt, lumensimus, spaltavian, gemmy, JHarris, willie11, Hutch, etaoin, Dormant Gorilla, dhammond, lemuria, Mick, Servo5678, Riki tiki, Greg Nog, sotonohito, ceri richard, empath, sillygwailo, FelliniBlank, Brandon Blatcher, stavrogin, Navelgazer, octothorpe
2 months ago
MeFi comment:
"Is there a snappy Dutch phrase for "initial impulses of mockery and pity for another person's exorbitantly artificial fashion choices giving way to reflection that one's own conventional fashion choices are simply normalized artificialities,..." [
more]
favorited 41 times, recently by twins named Lugubrious and Salubrious, tehloki, theredpen, olya, Ritchie, supercrayon, suedehead, turgid dahlia, lekvar, ShawnStruck, papafrita, drjimmy11, subaruwrx, sleep_walker, dirtynumbangelboy, small_ruminant, adamdschneider, zippy, sculpin, six-or-six-thirty, Balna Watya, Faint of Butt, Aleatoire, sebastienbailard, misha, lord_wolf, Pantengliopoli, funkiwan, kosher_jenny, batmonkey, lalochezia, the other side, Standeck
2 months ago
MeFi comment:
"I was just talking to a co-worker of mine about this. "Joe," I said, "Do you not agree that the placement of commercial products in such culturally essential British television programmes as '8 Out of 10 Cats', which airs on Channel 4..." [
more]
favorited 7 times, recently by Wilder, olya, Baldons, b1tr0t, scrump, jb, ceri richard
2 months ago
MeFi comment:
"My opinion is that some of you, have a axe to grind with the police and officials at the school, probably from some encounter other than reading about this one incident.
Yes, such unusual and disreputable encounters as a) attending high school;..." [
more]
favorited 5 times, recently by nasreddin, Pope Guilty, showbiz_liz, peacheater, rokusan
2 months ago
MeFi comment:
"So, let me ask you if it's OK to generalize about police, or just criticise the individuals responsible for this fiasco.
I'm glad that you've had good experiences with the police, but a lot of people haven't, and some of them see this incident as..." [
more]
favorited 1 time, recently by lupus_yonderboy
2 months ago
MeTa comment:
"Some kids are just different, and there is no quick fix. Nurture them, care for them, and they'll probably be the next Einstein or Newton.
And some kids are so deeply sad, twenty-four hours a day, that they think of little besides their desire to..." [
more]
favorited 26 times, recently by Deathalicious, dosterm, marble, cjets, turaho, monocyte, lester's sock puppet, misha, iknowizbirfmark, sixcolors, Iamtherealme, Pope Guilty, ClaudiaCenter, rodgerd, penduluum, drjimmy11, bettafish, Countess Elena, GuyZero, whoaali, CitrusFreak12, box, The corpse in the library, davejay, The Bellman, Gucky
2 months ago
Ask comment:
"This appears to be pretty doable for most three-letter words, although it gets a hell of a lot harder at four letters. I say if you're going to do a sestina, which is a half-insane festival of compositional masochism to begin with, you might as well..." [
more]
favorited 2 times, recently by nasreddin, sondrialiac
2 months ago
MeFi comment:
"It's not exactly diplomatic. I told it I had rice vinegar, three pomegranates, chocolate chips, sriracha, oyster crackers, half a tub of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, and a case of beer, and it told me to get a girlfriend already...." [
more]
favorited 11 times, recently by giraffe, etaoin, owhydididoit, WolfDaddy, mek, hal9k, turgid dahlia, yhbc, DU, flapjax at midnite, jacobian
3 months ago
MeFi comment:
""you don't really have any idea of Proust unless you've read the whole thing."
I was thinking of his writing style, which you more or less get after a point (with the exception of certain scenes like the description of Venice in The..." [
more]
favorited 1 time, recently by nasreddin
3 months ago
Ask comment:
"I think aught and Kattullus have come closest to what you're looking for. Erickson, Wright, and Bolano are great suggestions (as are Gombrowicz, Cortazar, Calvino, Pynchon, Dick, Wallace, Danielewski, and Mitchell).
Other contemporary..." [
more]
favorited 2 times, recently by steadystate, vers
3 months ago
MeFi comment:
"This has to be better than the unbelievably shitty Waiting for Godot with werewolves I once sat through:
A country road. A tree.
Evening.
Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to chew off his foot. He pulls at it with his teeth,..." [
more]
favorited 16 times, recently by Acetylene
3 months ago
MeFi comment:
"It's this kind of tone that has disappointed me about the modern American left. This sense of looking down one's nose at the rest of the world and how insufficient it is. The left used to have principles and goals. It was wonderful; it was real..." [
more]
favorited 5 times, recently by echolalia67, rokusan, Blazecock Pileon, rtha, Armitage Shanks
3 months ago
MeFi comment:
"the academic chicness of a philosopher is often in inverse proportion to his or her lasting philosophical merit
You're hurting Zombie Sartre's feelings...." [
more]
favorited 1 time, recently by Popular Ethics
3 months ago
Ask comment:
""Rent a tiny battery-powered blimp and set it hovering next to the sink. Program the blimp to display the message GOOGLE CLEAN DISHES."" [
more]
favorited 1 time
3 months ago
MeFi comment:
"Fodor's academic preening is ghastly and only serves to provide creationists with greater fodder in their endeavors to discredit modern evolutionary theory.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Darwin provides creationists with fodder in their endeavors to..." [
more]
favorited 5 times
3 months ago
MeFi comment:
""He's a philosopher; why should a biologist (or anyone else, really) care what he has to say about evolution?"
I think this is a bad way to talk. Some of the most interesting ideas of the twentieth century were produced by cross-field..." [
more]
favorited 3 times
3 months ago
MeFi comment:
"Uh, folks? Why so surprised at the philosopher-hate from science people? By definition Philosophy doesn't produce falsifiable hypotheses. And is therefore useless. Considering how much time working scientists must waste fighting to exclude untestable,..." [
more]
favorited 2 times
3 months ago
MeFi comment:
"MIA. From Amsterdam Marsellus says you sailed.
VINCENT. 'Tis true. And thou hast taken to the stage?
MIA. My one brief moment in the sun.
VINCENT. What play?
MIA. A farce on spies, and women, "Fox Force..." [
more]
favorited 32 times
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"I have the inescapable feeling that Ezra Pound and his inscrutable missives would most likely be communicated today on the intertubes with pages in flashing 72 point text.
Nah. He'd end up where his kind always does.
John Maynard Keynes..." [
more]
favorited 9 times
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"Jason Molina is a sweetheart who makes good music, but that's not how Jason Molina taught me the True Meaning of Rock and Roll.
Jason Molina is a friend of a friend, and I once ended up in charge of the table at the back of the room on which his..." [
more]
favorited 3 times
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"The weird attempt here to smear the vaseline of equivalence over our lens on history has nothing to do with Jews slashing at fascists - who but a bleeding fascist would object? - and everything to do with preserving a contemporary rhetorical ground..." [
more]
favorited 2 times
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"Oh, great. If Amazon can accurately gauge how desperately I want the Hannah Montana Ultimate Pop-Star Sticker Book, I'm going to have to sell a kidney...." [
more]
favorited 3 times
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"There's a weirdly extratextual declarative sentence in one of Kathy Acker's smuttier novels that goes something like: "I want to fuck one of The Gang of Four or The Fall." I didn't know much about music when I read that, and somehow became..." [
more]
favorited 3 times
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"As a multi-billionaire playboy who regularly flies my own personal 787 to Kauai to pick up the diamond-encrusted pineapples that make such fetching centerpieces at my monthly "Fuck It, We're Rich" theme parties, this thread makes me very,..." [
more]
favorited 1 time
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"I'm always surprised that there aren't thousands upon thousands of happy and thriving places like this, until I remember that we've all been taught that life in a community like this consists of brown rice and sexual jealousy and dirt-smeared..." [
more]
favorited 2 times
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"I thought it was kind of shitty that the artists each got paid a penny, and the result is selling for $100 a pop, but then I read this: All procedes from the sales of bill prints will go to the One Laptop Per Child project, to "empower the..." [
more]
favorited 1 time
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"This story is, largely, a description of American society writ small. The bullies, be it physical or otherwise, are generally rewarded, promoted, worshipped and generally seen as "ah he's a good ol boy, sometimes he's just a little...edgy......" [
more]
favorited 13 times
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"If he was just some random guy I might agree with you. But he's the son of Oswald Mosley, Britain's most famous nazi. That's not cool!
On the other hand, Steve Petain, Hank Franco, and Chad Mussolini kind of see some PR possibilities opening up..." [
more]
favorited 2 times
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"dyoneo read nasreddin's comment and heartily seconded the recommendation, even if he was disappointed by nasreddin's failure to avail himself of the opportunity to instigate a purely academic discussion of giant electrified Virgins. dyoneo then..." [
more]
favorited 1 time
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"What about Glenn Gould or Claudio Arrau?
Coincidentally, Gould hosted a political talk show on the CBC for two months in the summer of 1977. Viewers were confused, if somewhat charmed by the host's insistence on wearing an Arctic parka and..." [
more]
favorited 4 times
4 months ago
MeFi comment:
"When I first got Google Earth, I zoomed in as far as I could, tilted the horizon so that it approximated the perspective from the ground, or maybe from a mid-rise building, and surveyed my pixelated kingdom: Chicago, City of Big Shoulders! What great..." [
more]
favorited 10 times
5 months ago
MeFi comment:
"When I was seventeen, I worked as a lifeguard at a summer camp with a guy who claimed to have this ability. I don't remember believing him for a second. He'd sit on his bunk in the corner of our deeply shadowed cabin down by the lake, his shoulders..." [
more]
favorited 4 times
5 months ago
MeFi comment:
"The writer really and truly screws himself by hanging his argument from the wobbly nail of "plagiarism," because this slightly more subtle accounting of Fairey's thefts is dead-on:
"Perhaps the most important falsehood concerning..." [
more]
favorited 2 times
5 months ago
MeFi comment:
"Yes, jonson. The single intellectually conceivable alternative to our current economic system is a pie-in-the-sky glorified kindergarten where hugs are legal tender and kittens are part of the entitlement package.
I'm glad someone can think..." [
more]
favorited 2 times
5 months ago
MeFi comment:
"About buggering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along......" [
more]
favorited 2 times
5 months ago
MeFi comment:
"p.s. to nasreddin and languagehat: after review on the field, infinitewindow beat you both." [
more]
favorited 1 time
5 months ago
MeTa comment:
"When I recently discovered that nasreddin is, in fact, 20 years old, my bewildered middle-aged mind was forced into a series of increasingly preposterous conjectures about how he's maybe a feral child who found shelter in the bowels of the British..." [
more]
favorited 10 times
5 months ago
