January 7, 2016
Interview With A Toddler
"Why don't toddlers help the family financially?" (SYTL) "The dad discovers why toddlers don’t help the family financially, and the real reason little Amalah can’t sleep through the night." [more inside]
The devil's in the details: handbag cakes
YouTube demos: How To Make A Kate Middleton Handbag Cake With Toffee Vanilla Cake, Buttercream and Fondant! | Louis Vuitton Purse Cake tutorial video | How To Cook That Ann Reardon Louis Vuitton
Apploitation in a city of instaserfs
How the “sharing economy” has turned San Francisco into a dystopia for the working class. Oh, Canada! I’m writing you from Berkeley, California to warn you about this thing called “the sharing economy.” Since no one is really sharing anything, many of us prefer the term “the exploitation economy,” but due to its prevalence many in the Bay Area simply think of it as “the economy.” Whatever you want to call it, the basic idea is that customers can outsource all the work or chores they don’t want to do to somebody else in their area. [more inside]
The Funny Thing About Abusive Relationships
The Funny Thing About Abusive Relationships "Offhand, there are maybe three times in my life I can clearly recall laughing at something really terrible. One: when my mother told me my grandfather had a heart attack. Two: when a friend and I were driving to Cape Cod and a huge bird careened into the windshield, instantly bonking itself dead. Three: when my friends tried to keep me from going home from a party because they thought my boyfriend might kill me." [more inside]
“A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.”
Obama as Literary Critic by Edward Mendelson [The New York Review of Books]
“Recently, while writing an essay on T.S. Eliot for The New York Review, I read or reread the work of many earlier critics, and was impressed most by two of them. One was Frank Kermode, who was ninety when he wrote, in 2010, one of his greatest essays, “Eliot and the Shudder,” [London Review of Books] a breathtakingly wide-ranging and sharply-focused piece about Eliot’s unique response to the common experience of shuddering. The other was a twenty-two-year-old college senior named Barack Obama, who wrote about Eliot in a letter to his girlfriend, Alexandra McNear, when she had been assigned to write a paper on The Waste Land for a college course.”[more inside]
The internet has made defensive writers of us all
“I realize I’ve begun writing defensively on the web, putting in hedges and clarifications that really aren’t necessary for a charitable reader. I’ve also taken to toning down any rhetorical flourishes that could be interpreted uncharitably in a way that annoys some people. The result: boring writing stripped of a lot of my own personal style.” Paul Chiusano discusses how online feedback has affected our writing styles.
“The best pairing American cuisine has to offer”
Keith Pandolfi on potato skins, childhood, emotion, and memory: "Potato skins remind me that I don't need New York. That I'd be perfectly happy back home among the commercial strips and fast-food joints of suburban Cincinnati, where I grew up. I'd be fine hanging out with my old friends each night in the bar at Uno's or Applebee's or Chili's, drinking Michelob Amber Bocks."
Celebrating the Polyester Decade
Space 1970 :: Journey with us back to the days when special effects were created by skillful hands and spaceships were detailed models, when robots were obligatory comedy relief, when square-jawed heroes and cloaked villains battled among the stars -- and the future was fun!
Blood-Bought Sweets
Quakers pioneered social enterprise. They were also the first to fail: How hard was it to opt out of the slave economy in the U.S. before the Civil War? Pretty hard, as the "free produce" movement discovered: In 1829... the members of [the Female Association for Promoting the Manufacture and Use of Free Cotton] reported their contractors had spun 2,515 pounds of cotton. Compared to the approximately 78 million pounds of cotton produced across the country in the year 1800 alone, it was a drop in the bucket. The economics of slavery previously.
You're thinking of water
Periods aren't that gross (SLYT)
I like to think that Family Guy would be The Joker's favorite show.
Jared Leto taking on the mantle of The Joker for the upcoming Suicide Squad Badguy Patrol movie met with a great deal of conversation when it was announced in 2014. Recent leaks from the set indicate that Leto is falling wholeheartedly into the role, taking a method acting approach to getting into the insanely dark and twisted inner life of the character. Twitter reports.
The Surreal Story of StubHub Screwing Over a Kobe Fan
Remember back in late November when Kobe Bryant announced he was planning to retire at the end of the current NBA season? Perhaps not surprisingly, this caused a major spike in ticket prices to Lakers games on the secondary ticket market.
Luckily for Kobe fan Jesse Sandler, he anticipated ahead of time that this might be Kobe's final season, and on November 11th (18 days before the official announcement) purchased (4) tickets for him and some friends to attend the final Lakers home game of the season at a cost of $195 per ticket as opposed to the nearly $1500 per ticket that comparable seats were going for following the announcement. Or so he thought. As it turned out, Sandler was to later learn that "NO TICKETS YOU EVER BUY ON STUBHUB – EVER –ARE ACTUALLY YOUR TICKETS."
Through their twitter account, Stubhub acknowledged, "We shot an air ball on this one."
Nothing's gonna touch you in these golden years
January 8th, 2016 marks David Bowie's 69th birthday. What did he do when he was your age?
Nobody walks in LA, and for fleeting moments, no one drives there either
Some years back, Matt Logue photoshopped cars and people out of Los Angeles street scenes for a photo series titled Empty L.A. (see also, previously). More recently, Alex Scott has been wandering around L.A. freeways in the middle of the night to catch moments where the roadways are empty.
The bean is crushed to make the coffee, as I am made by coffee
According to new US dietary guidelines, you can drink up to 5 cups of coffee per day.
And good riddance
“We’ll never totally eliminate stupidity in this world,” he says.
The train bridge’s underside trimmed a layer off the truck’s top, looking like a grater shaving a layer of cheese.
The world can watch the whole thing, thanks to Jürgen Henn.
Sound construction.
Dear Architects: Sound Matters. Put your headphones on. Why Architects Need to Use their Ears [more inside]
Someone in Montreal is headed to Hogwarts
Pat Harrington Jr., ‘Schneider’ of TV’s ‘One Day at a Time,’ dies at 86
Pat Harrington Jr., ‘Schneider’ of TV’s ‘One Day at a Time,’ dies at 86 : "As the character was conceived, Schneider was a married man and an unrepentant adulterer who used fake maintenance problems to enter women’s apartments. Mr. Harrington, however, doubted that such an unpleasant type would fit in a show filled with far more likeable people. [more inside]
The dark shadow of Mordor creeping into the Ukraine
The occupiers from Mordor and their sad little horse - I mean Russians from the Russian Federation and their Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov - such is Google translate. Probably not an intentional Google bomb, but just how the Ukrainians have actually been describing their occupiers in online documents which feed Google's translation algorithm.
His grotesquely swollen jaw had healed by this point.
Jon Bois (Breaking Madden [previously], The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles [previously], Pretty Good) recounts the oral history of the successful 1996 presidential campaign of Ken Griffey, Jr. [more inside]
Wisdom is as Wisdom Does
The markov wisdom of Deepak Chopra. "It has been said by some that the thoughts and tweets of Deepak Chopra are indistinguishable from a set of profound sounding words put together in a random order, particularly the tweets tagged with "#cosmisconciousness". This site aims to test that claim! Each "quote" is generated from a list of words that can be found in Deepak Chopra's Twitter stream randomly stuck together in a sentence."
"Same-sex" in This Instance Not Entirely Accurate
Pink news reports that a recent episode of "Steven Universe" has been censored in the UK to remove some elements relating to same-sex romance.
When unanimity signals bias
A Victorian booty call: Come see our new Lamp. You can turn it down low.
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