Similar to the much-loved Facebook post here on Absurd Intellectual, Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty composes a semi-regular “Facebook” page for international news.
What’s really cool about it is that each status update and comment links to the actual news story being referenced.
It may not be new, but it’s an interesting and entertaining way to wade through the weeks’ headlines.
What, you’re already all grown-up, and you don’t have a profitable patent yet? What are you waiting for?
Women’s Day has a nice list of seven things that were invented by kids — and these are serious inventions, from toy trucks to trampolines to television. Seriously.
Okay, sometimes the definition of “kid” is a little stretched — maybe you have the idea for a Popsicle when you’re 11, but if you don’t actually do anything until you’re 24, does that count?
Imagine the scene: A remote northern community. A beautiful lake. Two nurses walking their dog. Suddenly, one of them spots something — something strange.
Sounds like the start to a movie pitch, doesn’t it? Except it’s the story that’s being told about some photos circulating on the Internet. Photos like this:
(Image courtesy of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug's website (I hope that's spelled correctly!) via The Globe and Mail)
The creature is about 30 centimeters long and has a tail similar to that of a rat. It is covered with hair, except for its bald, white face. Ugly, no?
Perhaps that’s what it’s name — omajinaakoos — translates approximately to “the ugly one.” The interesting thing about this ugly little creature is that the elders of the community don’t seem surprised about it’s existence. According to this article at the Globe and Mail:
Band councillor Darryl Sainnawap said his great uncle spotted one about 50 years ago.“He says in his younger days he was with his grandfather … and he did see this same creature and that’s the last time he saw it,” he said. “His grandfather called him omajinaakoos.”
Whether it is a real animal in its own right or not, the pictures are on the Internet, so there is now no end of speculation as to what this corpse could be.
Some say the animal, which is covered in brown fur everywhere but its face and at least one of its paws, is a water-logged muskrat, otter, possum, mink, beaver or bear cub whose facial fur wore off as its corpse drifted in the lake.
Other commentators, however, believe it is a rare beast, perhaps a version of the Montauk monster, an unidentified animal that washed ashore in Montauk, New York in 2008. Some think it is a type of chupacabra, or goatsucker, a legendary creature that is rumoured to inhabit parts of the Americas.
In any case, all that is left of the creature is the photos. The nurses that discovered the little body took the pictures and left. Who can blame them? I’m not in the habit of picking up every unidentifiable bit of roadkill I see, either. And now, the body is gone — eaten by something or washed away or retrieved by the Mothership — and any hope of positive identification has been lost.
Although I think it is probably a weasel or something that was facedown in a puddle of water too long, I desperately hope that it is some unknown mystery animal. There needs to be more wonder in the world.
If it wasn’t a quarter past seven in the morning, I’d be making this chocolate cake RIGHT NOW:
I love her solution for if the cake spills over the top of the mug: “Next time, get a bigger mug.”
(via BB)
The good folks at Information is Beautiful have a nice infographic on time travel in popular fiction. In it, they’ve plotted the back-and-forth time jumps of people like Marty McFly, the crew of the starship Enterprise, and Bill and Ted (on their excellent adventure).
Here’s a snippet:
See the whole timeline here. The infographic is included in their book. There’s a post about the infographic, too, which reveals that it took three designers 34 drafts to get it all right.
So that’s why I liked it even better when they did a subsequent post, looking back at the process of creating the infographic.
I love behind-the-scenes stuff like this — I love to have the curtain pulled back so I can see the process behind the creativity. There’s tons of creativity in there, but seeing how professionals zero in on the good ideas and weed out the bad is instructive.
As they point out, the hardest part is the “temporal bias” — that fictional time travel tends to either start or finish somewhere near the 20th century.
I’ve just finished reading a wonderful essay that I think you should all go and check out here.
Half book review, half something more, Mark Dery riffs on a book by Gordon Grice, “Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals”. It’s an entertaining and thoughtful essay on its own, but it also makes me really want to read the book, too.
Dery starts with a hint at the animal nature of mankind:
Do you, like me, rejoice in the knowledge that you could eat an adult mouse whole, if you wanted to? …. The rodent’s bones are “no more troublesome than those of a catfish.” In medieval England … “a mouse on toast was thought to cure colds.”
But he quickly segues into the corrolary: if humans are animals, then animals are not human — and investing animals with anthropomorphic desires and motivations doesn’t help anyone.
Grice does an end run around the Free Willy/Jaws binary, the culture/nature version of the virgin/whore dualism. “I often read accounts that point out what the human victim did ‘wrong’ before she was attacked by a bear or a shark,” he writes. “Many writers depict virtually all animal attacks as ‘provoked’ by the victim.” (The blame-the-victim rape narrative, transposed into the key of When Animals Attack.) “On the other side, some writers are at pains to paint dangerous animals as monsters of cruelty.”
In truth, he suggests, nature isn’t so much malevolent as indifferent.
The indifference often lends itself to misinterpretation, but any “meaning” comes straight from human perception, both Dery and Grice suggest.
The essay is nice — but it’s filled with so many grace notes that are lifted straight from Grice’s book, that I’m desperate to read it, too. Dery seems in love with Grice’s writing, as well, saying it’s as if “Cormac McCarthy turned his hand to nature writing.” High praise, but it seems appropriate, with passages like these:
With grim relish, Grice tells of a toddler “whose mother smeared his hand with honey so that she could shoot video of him playing with a black bear. It ate his hand.” (That’s a Grice signature: the devastating punchline, a short, sharp , declarative sentence that serves as a kind of a black-comedy rimshot.)
We learn that a grizzly can fit a human head into its mouth: “If the person is lucky, the skull slides out like a pinched marble.” (Like his noir forebear, Raymond Chandler, Grice has a nice way with the simile.)
Sure, books like these can seem somewhat voyeuristic — mainly, we’re reading for the frisson of the macabre — but this one seems particularly well-done. And Dery’s essay is nicely done as well.
I particularly enjoyed the clever touch of ending with a mirror image of the beginning. Sure, it’s no trouble for a human to eat a mouse. So what kind of trouble does a human pose to a grizzly?
Because ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ just turned 30 (I have extremely fuzzy memories of seeing it in the drive-in … I think), and because it has been universally agreed to be the best of the two trilogies, there have been a ton of retrospectives written about its impact in the past few days.
See, for example, here, here and especially here.
But I think I prefer this, uncovered by the LA Times. It’s Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, on the Today Show in 1980. Now that’s the flavour of the time:
There are a lot of websites out there that try and help you pick the best hotel or resort for your vacation. They have pictures and reviews that are, let’s say, a little more honest than the sites hotels have.
Oyster.com, which reviews hotels for you, probably has the best feature I’ve seen so far. They call it Photo Fakeouts. They show a promotional photo for the hotel and then the (sometimes harsh) reality.
Like this room from a Jamaican hotel.
The ad:
The truth:
A lot of the marketing photos use clever cropping to hide the surrounding unpleasantries (like a hotel in Los Angeles conveniently leaving out the huge Macy’s right beside the pool area) but the above photo, apparently using photoshop to hide the fact that the king bed is really just two beds, is just a blatant lie.
Check it out the next time you plan a trip, so you don’t get screwed into thinking you’ve landed a jackpot room.
(via)
Not only to these guys have pretty swell tricks, I like that they are trying to be creative, and not just trying to do things faster or higher or spinnier than other people have before.
I also appreciate the music — not every skateboard video needs a handcore punk soundtrack.
(via Coudal)
I really enjoyed this behind-the-scenes essay by a copywriter — albeit, an unusual one.
Jason Toon works at Woot, a company that sells only one thing (a different thing) every day, and usually at a pretty good price. He writes the ad copy that appears with each of these products, and they are usually funny, isightful, and, well, different.
Today, for example, Woot is selling a pair of mice, once white, one pink. Instead of just giving the specs for the mice, though, Toon has written a little story about his-and-her mice, atop a wedding cake. It goes from endearing to odd and then all the way to pathos.
He does that every day. Except, of course, when the site has what it calls Woot-offs: a time when they sell maybe a dozen or two products, one after the other, in a single day. Those require a little more than the usual amount of work, and Toon didn’t think he could do it.
Turns out, he can:
That morning would have looked like any other to you. Me, at my desk, pondering the minutiae of some hard drive or LCD monitor or robotic vacuum cleaner. You wouldn’t have seen the crushing weight of the 25 product descriptions I had to write before I could claim my next sleep. I felt like I could barely breathe. I tried to commit every detail of my comfortable desk to memory, to savor during the unbearable hours at whatever my next job would be. I started typing, a doomed man, my doomed fingers dancing a macabre funeral march on the keyboard.
…
Along the way, I’d gained an enormous respect for hacks and hackery (in the old sense of cranking out anonymous creative work by rote, not in the computer-age sense). I’d always flattered myself with the self-designation of an “idea man”, a superior intellect whose brilliant visions were too valuable to waste his time actually carrying them out. But as I pounded out those two dozen joked-up pieces of marketing ephemera, my awe only grew at the comic-book illustrators and pulp novella writers and dance-craze tunesmiths who just got the job done, in the days when their professions earned them no respect and not much more money.
In a sense, although he doesn’t say so explicitly, he’s also describing journalists, or even bloggers. Not every word I write is golden — far from it — but there is a certain sense of accomplishment in just sitting down, banging something out, and Getting It Done. And then looking back over what you have written and noticing, with a professional’s eye, that maybe you did happen to turn a nice phrase here and there.
It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s something.
Read “The Hack Hustle: The Inspiring Story of the Slacker Behind the Woot-off“
This scientific development has me simultaneously creeped out and excited. Scientists in the U.S. have created “artificial life.” And, yes, it is jsut what it sounds like:
Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA.
The researchers constructed a bacterium’s “genetic software” and transplanted it into a host cell.
The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species “dictated” by the synthetic DNA. (BBC)
Some individuals are being careful to underscore the fact that this advancement is not an actual creation of life, but more of a “rewriting the software” of existing life.
Dr Venter told BBC News: “We’ve now been able to take our synthetic chromosome and transplant it into a recipient cell – a different organism.
“As soon as this new software goes into the cell, the cell reads [it] and converts into the species specified in that genetic code.”
Even if it isn’t the creation of life in the strictest sense of the phrase, this development amazes me. If I understand correctly, and I think I do, what has happened is that life has been hacked.
These hacker scientists have been able to pry open the code of life (DNA) and change it to suit their needs. Tell me this doesn’t scream “BAD IDEA!”
In the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
At the same time, every time I read about an advancement I was sure could only exist in the pages of science fiction novels, I can’t help but be a bit excited.
Even if it means there’s now just one more way humans can eventually destroy the world…
Flowcharts are kind of a tired old meme, these days, but a well-done-one can still bring a smile to my face.
This is one:
(From Espiral Destructiva, via @Coudal)
Actually, to be honest, I kind of like the 70s — that’s when I was born, the music was epic and not quite as self-consciously serious as the stuff the decade before, and I just love mid-70s design.
But, the decade’s not perfect. And two recent op-eds in the New York Times offer interesting perspectives on how ripples from the late 60s and early 1970s are still wrecking things today.
First — Vietnam protesters? Thought you had morality on your side? Well Larry Pressler says you were a bunch of rich brats getting off on a technicality — a lesson you’ve carried over into business and politics today:
Too many in my generation did a deeply insidious thing. And they got away with it. Big time. Poorer people went to war. The men who didn’t were able to get their head start to power.
Now that flawed thinking has been carried forward. Many of these men who evaded service but claimed idealism lead our elite institutions. The concept of using legal technicalities to evade responsibility has been carried over to playing with derivatives, or to short-changing shareholders. Once my generation got in the habit of saying one thing and believing another, it couldn’t stop.
Now, Pressler writes, those who opposed one war are in charge of another — sending other peoples’ children into harm’s way to assuage their guilt for ducking responsibility.
Slightly too young to protest the draft? You’re no better. David Brooks sees a link between the sky-high crimes rates of the 60s and 1970s and today’s helicopter over-parents:
if you grew up in or near an American city in the 1970s, you grew up with crime (and divorce), and this disorder was bound to leave a permanent mark. It was bound to shape the people, now in their 40s and early-50s, reaching the pinnacles of power.
It has clearly influenced parenting. The people who grew up afraid to go in parks at night now supervise their own children with fanatical attention, even though crime rates have plummeted. It’s as if they’re responding to the sense of menace they felt while young, not the actual conditions of today.
He sees a few more links too — some good, I’ll admit — but his descriptions of New York crimes back then are terrifying: “A serial killer nicknamed Charlie Chop-Off menaced the Upper West Side, emasculating little boys and then killing them, and such was the general disorder that his crimes were barely mentioned in the city’s newspapers.”
I’m very curious to see what will happen in 30 or so years, when the kids of the over-scheduled, over-parented generation grow up and take charge.
