November 26, 2014
How likely is it that birth control could let you down?
The NYT calculates the probability of pregnancy using 15 common birth control methods, for up to 10 years of both "typical" and "perfect" use. Protip: the graphs do slidey comparison things on mouseover!
Munchkin the Teddy Bear gets her exercise
Here is a video you might want to watch. It is a video of a Shih Tzu in a teddy bear costume walking on a treadmill. Which is why you might want to watch it. (SLYT)
Her fortress of shit makes sense
Gulls are assholes
Whales Aren't Keen on Being Flayed Alive By Gulls by Ed Yong (National Geographic Phenomena). [more inside]
Y'all just had to get one last shot in, didn't you?
A eulogy for RadioShack. With hopes for a turnaround plan fading, RadioShack will now join other stores in opening on Thanksgiving. Jon Bois (previously) looks back on his time working for "strange, craven, five thousand-fingered strip-mall monster from a forgotten age."
some kind of unholy alt-lit creep triumvirate
My Salami Heart: Reflections on the Convergence of Art, Generosity, Success, Sex, and Law by Nick Kocz.
"The sister is in space"
Black to the future: science fiction writer Tananarive Due talks about afrofuturism and why it's important. [more inside]
For John Dillinger
William S. Burroughs’ “The Thanksgiving Prayer,” Shot by Gus Van Sant [YouTube]
“Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” first appeared in print in Tornado Alley, a chapbook published by William S. Burroughs in 1989. Two years later, Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Milk) shot a montage that brought the poem to film, making it at least the second time the director adapted the beat writer to film.[more inside]
The Middle Man - or, A Manual Of Treason
Hindu ki bas eik khasusiat: Baghl mein churi, moen par Ram Ram. My Urdu, at the time, was idiomatically sub-par. I had recently moved from Doha, Qatar, to General Zia ul Haq’s Lahore and his 9th grade Social Sciences textbook was nearly incomprehensible. The teacher read the line with a sneer. I intuited from his body language, and from the twitter that ran through the class, that this was a derisive remark, but I couldn’t quite follow: If someone had just been stabbed in the side with a knife wouldn’t he be crying to the gods in pain? What’s the shame here? I went home and asked my mother. She explained the idiom: Baghl mein churi does not mean a knife in the side but a knife concealed in the armpit of a garment. Moen pay Ram Ram is not a gesture towards pious invocation (like my grandmother’s recitation of Ya Rahman Ya Rahim)—it is meant to stand as insincere. The Hindu has only one characteristic: He conceals a knife, ready to strike, even as his lips intone Ram. I remember wanting to see or speak to a Hindu, to corroborate or defy this assessment, but Lahore in the mid-1980s held only bare traces—a place name, the legends of a boarded-up building, a strange spiral shape buried in the horizon—of its Hindu past. The city of Madho Lal or Chandarbhan had disappeared even from memories. Our teacher was a history enthusiast and he quickly warmed up to my hesitant question: Sir, why are Hindus never to be trusted?Also in Urdu [PDF]. Manan Ahmed writes at Chapati Mystery [more inside]
The Voyage of the 'Resplendent'
For golden centuries, the clone empresses of the Second Zenith Empire have ruled the galaxy. The source and expression of their power is the Zenith Fleet: a hundred ancient starships, the only vessels in existence capable of exceeding light speed. One of them has somehow disappeared—and you, Astronaut-Superintendent Waechter, must assemble a crew and find it.
You must know thrilling things before you can write about them
I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used "terrible" six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. A year before his death, James Bond author Ian Fleming explained how to write a thriller.
Eminem at 42
“im bored of the old men threatening young women as entertainment trend and much more interested in the young women getting $ trend. zzzz”
Jazzing up Thanksgiving
Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas gets a whole lot of love, but for sheer musical enjoyment it shouldn't overshadow his work on A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Here for your cooking-soundtrack pleasure are Thanksgiving Theme, Play it Again Charlie Brown (aka Charlie Brown Blues), Peppermint Patty, and Little Birdie (incidentally, Guaraldi's own vocal, and the first time any adult voice appeared on a Charlie Brown show). [more inside]
Step #4: Hope it doesn't seek revenge.
Worried that your feline house-mates will ruin Thanksgiving with their evil kitty machinations? Fear not! Once you learn How To Trap A Cat In 3 Easy Steps, you can feel safe in the knowledge that your furry ball of mischief is safely jailed by cat psychology!
Mood music for movie viewing, from Cinespia's cemetery film viewings
If you're looking for a little mood music before and/or after watching a movie, you might enjoy the Cinespia experience at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery (Wikipedia). But if you're not likely to join the crowd in Los Angeles, you can recreate a part of that movie warm-up/cool-down experience with Cinespia's archive of mixes from various notable musicians. Their site currently lists 11 mixes from the likes of Cut Chemist, The Gaslamp Killer (previously), David Holmes and Carlos Niño, but if you dig into the Internet Archive, you can find 38 more mixes (including a good number of paired before-and-after mixes) from even more artists, set to a range of movies, classics both older (North by Northwest, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and newer (Bladerunner, The Big Lebowski).
Bob's your uncle and Bertha's your aunt
Aunt Bertha is a web-based platform that connects Americans in need to locally available government programs, non-profit organizations, and community-based resources that offer free or low-cost assistance with health and dental care, job placement, emergency and long-term shelter, clothing and household goods, child and elder care, legal aid, assistance with navigating the social safety net, and much more. All programs are searchable and sortable by ZIP code, city, or eligibility. Find food, health, housing, job training programs and more, anywhere. [more inside]
Snow glows white on the mountain tonight, not a footprint to be seen
Rule-by-princess is the predominant form of government
Adventure Time Forum, The Leading Journal of Adventure Time Research, Commentary, and Analysis released its first issue. [more inside]
Louder Than Bombs
"A few months earlier, an archivist friend had mentioned over lunch that she had a connection to my hometown—in fact her first job as an archivist was in St. Louis, organizing the papers from a midcentury study of radioactivity in children’s teeth. I had been unable to shake the story, and found myself up late at night reading about nuclear weapons testing, or daydreaming during work about purity and milk, innocence and poison, the movement of invisible contamination. A follow-up with my archivist friend revealed that the archive contained letters from children—to scientists, and to the tooth fairy." From The Appendix: "Atomic Anxiety and the Tooth Fairy: Citizen Science in the Midcentury Midwest."
Cat Owners In Japan Are Giving Their Cats Funny Anime Eyes
Detroit masters at work...
You are perhaps aware that The Funk Brothers is the name given to the masterful session players behind more 60s and 70s Motown hits than you can shake a tambourine at. You probably know they were great. But when you take away the lead vocal tracks by Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson and other singing icons of the era, and hear the purely instrumental versions of those familiar tunes, it becomes all the more apparent, or rather, absolutely undeniable just how brilliantly talented these musicians and arrangers were. Absolute monsters, as we say. Let's start things off with the backing track for the Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrel hit Ain't No Mountain High Enough, and after that, there's... [more inside]
Approaching shadow
With a knife in his hand, a pig butcher said he would chop me. He wanted his spirit back.
Fan Ho's black and white street photography of 1950s Hong Kong
Fan Ho's black and white street photography of 1950s Hong Kong
Bouncing Here and There and Everywhere
TFL Future Streets Incubator is like the Cult of Skaro for transport planning, creating innovative ways to improve London's transport infrastructure. These include such things as turning parking spots into tiny parks and cycle scramble green lights, but the Jewel in the crown of these schemes is The Bounceway , the world's longest commuter trampoline.
Rainy Day
Pencil and Paper Games is devoted to games you can play with nothing more than a pencil and a piece of paper (some of which can be played on the site, for those who do not have access to a pencil and paper, or remember what those are.) [more inside]
All the feels.
A long-form essay from The Toast (of which you may have read) about life and grieving and gentleness and joy and ... look, just read it: No Matter How Your Heart Is Grieving: Disney for the Sad
The greatest story Reddit ever told
The first communication I ever received from Dante Orpilla landed in my mailbox one morning in the summer of 2011. The handwritten letter, filling up six pages of legal-sized paper, arrived in an envelope stamped with a return address to the Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan, Ore.
The reviewers reviewed
Paul Rose, late of surreal teletext magazine Digitiser, writes about scripting the Pudsey The Dog movie, a film about a dancing dog with the dubious honor of retaining a 0% rating on RottenTomatoes.
How to Defeat the Islamic State
How to Defeat the Islamic State. "Over the last thirteen years, America’s foreign policy has consisted mostly of defining what we don’t want: Saddam, Al-Qaida, Qaddafi, Boko Haram, the Islamic State. But we have failed to define what we do want. Rather than pausing to define the ultimate aim of our involvement – the very point of war for military action is just a means to a political end – we have rushed ahead anyway: Ready, Shoot, Aim. Unfortunately, we now have quite the track record of removing one monster only to find a more brutal monster in his place.
This global war will never end without a coherent American strategy and we don’t have one for Iraq and Syria at the time of this writing.
[...]
To defeat the Islamic State and to further American interests, the United States must create a legitimate secular, political alternative for Iraq’s Sunnis."
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