Over at fusil of yarn, samuelcanread points out this fox. I say big deal... She has a big triangle shaped head that makes her look like ET. Now what about this fox! OMG it's Betty White!
Estimado Señor Tarantino,
Me llamo Gimpei y quiero que tú filmes mi guión cinematográfico brillante. Creo que tenemos muchas cosas en común: yo soy americano y tú eres americano, mi pelo es marrón y tu pelo es marrón. A veces yo bebo agua y tú bebes agua también. Como a ti, me gusta leer novelas e ir al cine, y como tu yo soy un Aries. ¡Nosotros somos como la misma persona!
Yo soy de “el Guapo”, una villa pequeña en una isla que se llama “el Jefe”. Hay muchos colinas con vistas al mar y a la ciudad. Un parque está en el centro de la villa, rodeado por dos barrios residenciales. El Guapo es una localidad aletargada; el centro está siempre cubierto de un manto grueso de niebla. En las noches el sonido de las sirenas de niebla resuena a través de las colinas, cantando a la gente de la ciudad para que se duerma con un murmullo profundo. Como nosotros somos como la misma persona, naturalmente tú eres mu inteligente y te gustará mi guión cinematográfico.
A la espera de tus prontas noticias, te saluda atentamente,
Gimpei
I'm just writing this post in order to bump my previous post out of the pole position. I looked at it again today and started wondering what the hell I was thinking. Still, the Nabokov clip is cool.
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What what what? How is it possible that slate.com has a french version?
I only have so much hate to give, vas te faire foutre slate.fr!
I was wondering how long Iran could stay in the headlines... Looks like its fifteen minutes have passed. Oh well, I guess I'll go listen to human nature.
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I've heard a lot of terms in my time to describe the US government: bloated, constricting, fat, amoral, etc.
But I've never heard constipated, until now that is...
When will Posner shut up? You'd think such a free market enthusiast would feel just a tad bit chastened after the financial meltdown. But no, he's still yabbering on like a senile old man on the porch of a house in Maine who smokes from a pipe and says ayuh a lot.
Over at Fusil of Yarn, samuelcanread takes on Krugman for tacitly approving of the inflation of a housing bubble back in 2002.
In the comments, samuelcanread adds:“Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.”
True, he was quoting. But he was quoting somewhat approvingly.
I read it as Krugman saying we can’t let the economy deflate — that would suck so massively that it’s worth considering doing anything to get consumer spending going. Escape the liquidity trap!I don't see that in the article. It seems like Krugman's setting up a trade-off between the economy going back into recession and inflating another bubble. He implies that a housing bubble would be good for Bush and Greenspan, but I don't get a sense of how desirable this would be for the US economy. There's no mention of liquidity traps, deflation, or Japan in this article so I'm not sure where samuelcanread is getting that from.
Maybe the problem here is that we're employing an overly structuralist approach to the text. Perhaps we need to employ a more post-structuralist approach, where the text in fact has a plurality of meanings and reverse meanings that are created by the reader. Since Krugman wrote the text, he is ultimately responsible for these meanings. Get out the pitchforks!
P.S. Did I just write that? Maybe I am going insane, or even worse... becoming Deirdre McCloskey. Read more!
If you value your life, you better drink this. I don't care if it isn't being sold anymore, improvise. I've been using dirt from my garden along with an old Wilkins can that I got on ebay. I've been okay thus far...
Don't say you haven't been warned!
A piece in the Times today by Timothy Egan paints a depressing picture of the trial against Amanda Knox in Italy. For the uninitiated, Amanda Knox is an American exchange student who has been accused of murdering her roommate as part of a satanic ritual.
This led me to two conclusion:
1) Italians living in small towns are crazy
2) Scratch that, maybe we're all crazy
As per the first point, at the time of the murder Amanda Knox was living in a small village in central Italy. I know a thing or two about small, insular villages in Italy: it just so happens that my mother, when she was twenty, lived in one as well.
She was young and naive at the time, having moved to Italy for a man, only to have him dump her once she arrived. With no money and nowhere to go, she ended up working for his family as an aupair. Initially, she rented her own room in the village, but this didn't go down too well. A man in the village used binoculars to watch my mother as she walked around her room in her pajamas. When the man's wife found out, she called the police accusing my mother of being a prostitute bent on luring the men of the village to her bordello--a sexual pied piper of hamlin as it were. My mother was almost thrown in jail, but the family of her ex-boyfriend intervened and let her stay with them.
A year later, when my mother had picked up some Italian, she went on a vacation around northern Italy for a few weeks. During this trip, she stayed in many similarly small and insular towns. On one occasion she ended up in a particularly remote village with no hostels or boarding houses. After asking around, a farming family offered to let her stay at their place for the night. Upon entering the gates of the farm, my mother was taken aback by the sheer number of cats wandering about the grounds. There must have been a hundred or more, and when she asked about it, they assured her it was because they just really loved cats. Being very gracious hosts, they prepared a feast for her that night featuring a rich, hearty stew made from "roof rabbits". My mother noticed that they all started looking at her peculiarly when the stew came out. Not wanting to be rude, she finished her bowl and complemented the wife on her cooking. To which she was answered by a roar of laughter. "We fooled you English girl", they said, "You just ate cat. This is a cat farm." My mother--who to this day maintains that the only thing she won't eat is creamed corn--shrugged and asked for a second helping.
So what's the point? The point is that rural Italians were crazy forty years ago and they're still crazy today.
As per my second conclusion, you'll have to wait until tomorrow...
I was skeptical at first, but this is actually funny.
Over at Fusil of Yarn, there seems to be a bit of inner conflict stirred up by the kind of things that people do to animals in the name of science. As usual we have my arch nemesis, Slate, to blame for this foolishness. From Fusil of Yarn:
Wanted: a neuroscientist who can bear to do this without skipping a beat to write up the same experiments. And I don’t want straight-forward argument of sadly hurting one animal to save one thousand humans. I’d like to hear from the people who do all this, look into the monkey’s apparently sad eyes, and see nothing there. Will they stand up?
At the end of six weeks we killed the mice. There were two techniques for this: either you stuck them in a little guillotine type device that broke their little mouse necks or you put them in a beaker and gassed them to death with CO2. The gassing turned out to be much more efficient as you could do several at a time.
After that, I spent about a week dissecting the dead mice, removing the brain, lungs, spleen, and femur. This was pretty cool at first, but got a bit tedious as time went by, although I have to say I did get pretty damn good at it. The hardest part was cracking open the skull without turning the mouse brain into goo.
The last thing I had to do was freeze each of these organs with liquid nitrogen and then mash them into a pulp so that they could be tested for cancer cell count.
Did I feel anything for the mice? I remember the gassing being mildly disturbing at first--I had pet mice as a child--but I soon became desensitized.
While I was working at the lab, I also saw someone else experimenting on a rabbit. That was harder to take because rabbits are really cute.,So I propose the following: maybe we should breed test animals that are ugly like cockroaches, H.R. Geiger's aliens, or the baby from Eraserhead.
P.S. This is not to say that I approve of using animals for, say, testing make-up. But when it comes to critical research that could save millions of human lives... too bad for the animals. Contrary to what some animal rights activists, you can't conduct all your research in a vial.
P.P.S. I don't think it's possible to separate animal testing by medical researchers from the greater good argument. Most people that I met went into this line of work precisely because it could save millions of lives. That was certainly my motivation: my father had died of lung cancer a year earlier. And I think at first almost all of them felt bad for the animals that they were using for tests. However, after spending years and years at the job the animal becomes just another tool in the lab, much in the same way that cows become nothing more than monetary assets to farmers. Read more!
Why isn't this being covered in the mainstream news? It's not even undernews!
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It probably comes as a great surprise to you dear reader, but I hate advertisements of all kinds. They're distracting, they slow down my computer, and they fill my head with insufferable jingles.
So I found myself agreeing with Farhad Manjoo of slate:
Google's success seems to bear out Palant's idea that users will tolerate and even click on ads that don't bug them, lending credence to his theory that the way to reverse the mass adoption of ad blocking is for publishers to run ads that people don't want to block. That's why his new proposal makes sense. Ad blocking may not be ethical, but there's nothing illegal about it, and there are few technical ways for publishers to limit its effects. Ad blocking is here to stay. But that doesn't have to be the end of the Web—just the end of terrible ads.
Indeed, if all adds were like google's adwords, I wouldn't block a thing: adwords are useful and unobtrusive.
It always seemed to me that internet ads were engaged in an arms race, where companies produced ever more intrusive ads in order to gain an advantage over their competitors. If we leveled, the playing field by forcing all companies to comply to an intrusion threshhold, this incentive would be eliminated.
Granted, this would effectively kill the advertisement production business, but who needs them? Thanks to admen we pay $1 for 5 cent sugar water.Thanks to admen we drink beer that bears a family resemblance to urine. Thanks to admen I feel like chicken every night! Read more!
I've had the idea for at least three years that there should be a site where you can rate anything: doctors, architects, plumbers, schools, etc. Too bad these bastards stole my idea two years before I thought it up.
It's okay though, since they're pure evil: not only do they torture babies, but apparently they're also responsible for killing newspapers. But I have no scruples so I'll use them to get back at all the people who ever wronged me! That's right Malaysia and Slate, I'm talking to you!
I always heard that the neocons over at commentary were crazy, but I didn't realize how much. Apparently now would be a great time to secure or destroy Pakistan's nukes!
The argument has two prongs
1. Securing Pakistan's nukes would help India, which is a good thing because India is not muslim and is not China.Obviously this argument is insane, we should be attacking India instead!
2. It would also scare Iran, making them more likely to give up on their nuclear program.
1) Attacking India would not only scare the crap out of Iran, but China as well. Especially since it's entirely unprovoked. People would start to think of the USA like one of those drunken soccer hooligans who break car windows for no reason and give you a "Manchester Kiss" (a head-but) if you look them in the eye.
2) Commentary claims that by securing Pakistan's nukes, we would make it much harder for Kashmiri terrorists to create a safe haven in Pakistan. Again, this argument is complete nonsense. If we remove their safehaven in Pakistan, they'll simply run off to Kashmir and then we're left looking like morons. But, if we take over Kashmir, they can't just run away, because we hold the territory that they want to liberate. So we can set a trap for them, like in Iraq, and they'll all coming running to their deaths. I suggest a pit trap with spikes in it. I know there's a lobby out there pushing for acid traps instead, but that's just prohibitively expensive. We're going to need two, maybe three of these traps to catch all the terrorists; that's a lot of acid! Read more!
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