Link Roundup

Photobooth Yearbook Rice 1970 (via Boingboing)

My coworkers couldn't believe that Posh Spice has never read a book. Its like not having sex or never having climbed a tree. One can conceive of it happening in this life--but why?

Malcolm Gladwell's blog.

I am huddled by the computer helplessly consuming the crack sold to me by a cluster of short pushers in khaki sashes with little badges on them. Mmm--minty.

Another Story from the EL

To the guy with the wandering hands standing immediately behind me on the Brown line this morning all the way to the Loop :

Either you developed a spontaneous crush on me, or you're the world's worst pickpocket. Since I've still got my wallet, I'm thinking its the former.

Stories from the EL

I sat next to Santa on the Red Line.

No kidding.

Older guy, in that hard-to-tell-what-age phase. He says, "Did you see that group of people who won the lottery? I think that's great. It's so awful when just one person wins."

"Yeah," I say, "once you've got past the first ten or twenty million, what're you going to spend it on?"

"I could spend it," he says.

"How?"

"Well, first, I'd go into work wearing my dad's coat," he heaves a sigh, "then, I'd buy bicycles for every kid in town, find out if people were in need, send a lawyer over there to make sure they were above board, and get 'em taken care of."

He continues, "I remember there was a guy who did that, you know, gave a bike to every kid in his hometown, rented out the football field, and had a truckload of bikes sent over there for 'em to pick out."

"That's awfully nice," I say.

"Sure, I'd do that all the time...I play Santa Claus every Christmas, why not do it the rest of the year?"

"Well," I say, "this is my stop, but I hope you win."

"And if I don't, I hope you do," he says.

So I bought a ticket, and if I win, it's bikes for everyone.

I've seen things

First run of the season, due to a persistent series of upper respiratory hoohah. Valentine's Day, and a very clear night with a full moon rising out over the lake. Two lines of planes making final approach to O'Hare--one on either side of the moon--hanging against the sky like strands of Christmas lights. It reminds me of my favorite quote from one of the all-time great movies:

Batty: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. -Blade Runner

When I woke up at 5 in the morning, my first coherent thought was, "I miss waking up at 10 in the morning."

In Cold Blood

My friend Joyce is a hard woman in many ways. Her husband, the Platypus, likes to bounce quarters off her abs.

Tonight, she called me and asked, "When are we going to do our dive bar project?"

"It's not our project, Joyce," I said. "It's more something you and Eric want to do. I don't like going to dive bars. I end up getting into fistfights and waking up next to women in Jagermeister hats."

"Yeah, sure. I bet you go to dive bars all the time."

"I'm trying to cut back."

"Have you seen Capote yet?" she asked, "because you remind me of him."

I'm shooting for Viggo Mortensen levels of manliness, but I'm willing to accept that I come off as, say, Matthew Broderick. Truman Capote is not where I'm placing the energy, thank you.

The woman is hard, I tell you.

Groundhog Day

Sixty children on a field trip
Jump out of their skis with excitement
'Cause, Hey, they're on a fieldtrip
Standing outside the Corner Bakery
About to eat lunch out and what's
More there are window washers
Above putting on a show just for them
Business people walking by in formation
Talking into cell phones just for sixty
Kids jumping out of their skins watching
The floor show

The guy outside the Borders looks like Jesus
He's holding breath mints
Not asking for money
Jesus looks tired
Jesus looks tired
(and maybe a little misplaced)
You'd look tired too at two thousand and five
Mother Theresa used to say
Every day I try to see Jesus in everyone
I meet, Jesus in all his uncomfortable disguises
So all the way back from lunch
Even the people who don't look
Like the guy who looks like Jesus
Look like Jesus to me

Except the old woman
Selling papers from a wheelchair
If it were a little warmer
She wouldn't need the jaunty hat with
Many peaks and wouldn't look
So much like the moon wrapped in a patchwork
Rainbow coat
Nor so much like a fairy grandmother

After I get off the train
Because I tripped and slashed
A single fingernail across
The bindi of a kindly Indian lady
The three punk kids
One with prodigious sideburns
Tells stories of nomad classrooms
Our school is too full they say
So whole classes just wander the halls
Following a teacher
The second with a backpack full of
Sketchpads asks If I fell on the tracks
Would you catch me? Would you give your
Life for me? For a stranger? The first one says
No, runs slowly in a circle
We are all running
We are all running to our death
Slowly, slowly
The third points at the incoming train
Asks where do all these businesspeople come from?
From floorshows for schoolchildren.

RIP Nam Jun Paik

"The future is now."
- Nam Jun Paik
(1932-2006)

He made the future with video art before anyone. You couldn't stare at his art too long without vertigo or eyestrain--but you felt compelled to look around it for a very long time indeed.

Mark Rothko's Seagram's Paintings

The story of how nine paintings commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant ended up at the Tate:

The Rothko murals at Tate Modern are lovely in their oppression, erotic in their cruelty. These are paintings that seem to exist on the skin inside an eyelid. They are what you imagine might be the last lights, the final flickers of colour that register in a mind closing down. Or at the end of the world. "Apocalyptic wallpaper" was a phrase thrown at Rothko's kind of painting as an insult.

I think Apocalyptic Wallpaper would be a great name for a band.

Snapshots II

• An elderly black man sits in a wheelchair, propelling himself backwards along the street with his feet. On the back of the chair, a tuba, stuffed with plastic and flowers--to protect the instrument from the rain, or to use it as a planter?
• Along the lakeshore, the trunk and branches of a tree support a fine frosting of snow. During the day's thaw, a three inch gap has melted between branches and trunk, turning the snow into a holder of negative space, an exoskeleton.
• The sign in the picture says: "If you see something suspicious, that's how New York got started."

Snapshots

• New job kicking my ass as expected.
• On the EL two young women serenade the crowd with Imogen Heap's Hide & Seek.
• The woman threw her arm in the air to wave goodbye, flinging her engagement ring into the space behind a row of file cabinets. When we came across them, a crowd of ten of her coworkers were trying to retrieve it using coathangers. Two or three of the women were perched on top of the cabinets. Others stood around, laughing and chattering. If it had gone on much longer, I suspect that they'd have ordered pizza and canapes. As it was, a guy with a dolly inched the cabinet out, and a piece of gum on the end of a wire hanger did the trick, to the sound of a standing ovation.

We live in a Twisty World

This video has been around the net a couple of times but it's still worth checking out (broadband recommended). Russian teens running Le Parkour.

These guys verge on the unbelievable.

Thai Surprise

The fortune cookie reads: "The smart thing to do is not be yourself."

Is this Engrish? A bad fortune? Or maybe good advice?

Are the people at the Thai restaurant trying to tell me something?

Last words of the year on the War on Christmas

Using my advanced knowledge of molecular biology and grammar I have converted ifs and buts to candy and nuts.

So now every day is Christmas.

US Teen Does "Immersion Journalism" in Iraq

Whoo. This kid has guts. You've got to give him that.

All Star Superman

Beautiful critque of All Star Superman #1. All That and a Bag of Bradbury.

I must have a Quintum jacket.

Christmas with the Wilsons

Cintra Wilson preaches the gospel on Christmas:

We are, to put it mildly, an ecumenical group. My mother, a jazz pianist who calls herself "The Duchess," was raised by Christian Scientists but now subscribes to a self-invented theology she calls "Ishta Devata," an unformed, New Age, quasi-Buddhist mysticism involving psychic visions from an inner network she calls "Channel 12." My father was raised by members of the Anthroposophical Society and is believed to be telekinetic. My aunt on my mother's side is a hardcore Scientologist, who until recently was exiled from Christmas for her tendency to hard-sell the guests on the divinity of L. Ron Hubbard. My sister, whose husband is Moroccan, recently converted to Islam. My mother complains bitterly that she's no longer allowed to call my sister during the five times a day she is praying toward
Mecca, which, considering how often Mom likes to phone, has inspired me to the revelation that Allah is most kind. I am a Santeria initiate, which means I endure jokes every year about sacrificing chickens. If I happen to be at the buffet table, I usually smile, grab the electric carving knife and walk toward the cat. But most of our extended family is Jewish, apart from my best friend Mark and his boyfriend, the Episcopal priest.

We all come together for Christmas under our one unifying conviction that Christmas is less a religious holiday than the one day a year we all start drinking before noon.

Yark!

For the second time while visiting a particular set of friends I have fallen prey to the strange microbes of the foreign country of "Cleve-land".

As a result I spent every half hour between midnight and 6AM involved in a version of bulemia without the guilt.

The term "technicolor yawn" has taken on increased significance because for some reason all of the emissions from my body have taken on a full spectrum of vivid colors--and never the ones you'd quite expect. (I'm only waiting for, say, blue earwax or bioluminescent spittle to appear so that I can complete the set. It's feeling very Harry Potter.)

More scenes from the "War on Christmas"

I.


Last December, a group called Public Advocate for the United States (which claims to defend America's traditional family values) sent some Christmas carolers over to sing in front of the ACLU offices in Washington.

Carrying signs reading "Merry Christmas" and "Please Don't Sue Us!" - they also seem to have carried with them some rather strange imaginings about an assault on Christmas. I don't know what the carolers thought might happen.

To tell the truth, the ACLU is not often serenaded by Christmas carolers. So it was with some excitement that the staff went outside and joined in the singing. They brought with them cookies and warm drinks to share. One staff member, who is an ordained Baptist minister, did a little witnessing about his faith to some astonished proponents of family values.

Fox News did broadcast the event (as a part of its "war against Christmas" campaign). Although the visiting singers were shown, the cameras failed to include any footage showing that everyone had participated in the caroling. Rather than reporting the facts, the anchor preferred the propaganda: "We believe the ACLU heard the message loud and clear, but they don't care."
...
(By T. Jeremy Gunn USAToday)

II.

The other day Giblets was shopping for presents for his closest friends and vassals when an elderly mall greeter said "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" forcing Giblets to beat him insensate with a vanilla-scented gift candle. Why must our relentlessly secular society attempt to obscure The Reason For The Season! Yes there are non-Christmas holidays but those are the sissy holidays. Christmas can beat up Hanukkah, Eid and Kwanzaa without breaking a sweat.

(Brad deLong Fafblog)