“Most of the puzzles in Puzzle World fall into the Put-Together, Take-apart, Interlocking or Impossible Object categories because this is where most of the high-quality handcrafting takes place.” —Puzzle WorldJohn Rausch) Similar:Jane Eyre and the Invention of the SelfThose who remember Jane Eyre solely as r…BooksHappy U.S. citizenship, Dr. Garcia-Quismondo @SHUHumanities @Setonhill AcademiaR.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) Full Play…
(rec.humor.funny) [random joke] “Is this a burger which I see before me, The soft bun in my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I eat thee not, and yet I want thee still.” Gregory Lam —MacDonald’s Soliloquy Similar:Henry Bemis waited his whole life to finally read a book. Listen to Lynn Venable’s story,…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc3DHCiz…BooksGraphic Design Pun…
“The likes of my colleagues no longer thought of this new tongue as an alien one, into which they translated thoughts originally composed in a more familiar idiom. They had become native speakers.” Deborah Cameron —The Tyranny of Nicespeak (New Statesman) Similar:Surprise: Humanities Degrees Provide Great Return On InvestmentCompleting a humanities degree is a good…AcademiaEveryone…
“Under every scenario used in the study, the winning margin remains less than 500 votes out of almost 6 million cast.” —Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush (Washington Post) Similar:The Emma Watson nude pictures hoax shames our ‘news’ cultureDid you hear that a shady group of antis…CultureMoving from Debate to EmpathyIn my freshman writing class,…
“So who is this mysterious kingmaker who changed the world from her shadowy government bureaucracy? Has she seen any good movies lately? Is her marriage happy? America wants to know. America needs to know!” —Official Terry LePore Ballot Designer Fan Page Similar:And Now for This Breaking News Report “Police have cornered the suspect wh…AmusingU.S. Press…
A lake. A salt mine. An oil drilling rig. A lack of communication. You figure it out. —Peaceful Lake Peigneur Turned into Maelstrom Similar:Added a pilot and cockpit details to my flyby of a #steampunk scout ship. Costume is a pr…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyvR90jm…AestheticsThe Man Who Photographed GhostsThis review of a book about early photog…AestheticsBird flight simulator. The…
Coca-Cola spent $750,000 to develop a procedure to serve carbonated beverages in space. Pepsi filmed a $5 million commercial aboard Mir. And then there’s “Final Frontier Beef Jerky.” —A Brief History of Space MarketingSpace.com) Similar:Why teens are leaving Facebook: It’s ‘meaningless’However, there’s a silver lining for Mar…BusinessSwiss cheese metaphor for fighting the pandemic: "Multiple Layers…
Hmm. Jakob Nielsen writes a column with a headline that implies you are being inhumane if you don’t make your web pages accessible to the disabled. Jakob Nielsen‘s company is selling a 148-page report on making web pages accessible to the disabled. Coincidence? (Nielsen is smart. He’s doing good deeds. He’s giving away lots of…
“Everything, everything, everything boils down to the heart, and poetry is a vehicle of clarity, an articulate and strong voice screaming through the static and white noise.” -Frank Matagrano, a poet featured on Jan Carroll’s poetry weblog. —And Now It’s Dark: Three poets talk about poetry after September 11, 2001 Similar:"A Story Before Bed" Publisher Seems…
“Corporate English obscures reality by excluding people.” While this article is marked as “commentary,” I find it ethically unsound for its author to suggest that magazine writers should intentionally insert biased language that promotes a pro-union / anti-business point of view, on the grounds that “corporate English commonly portrays economic processes as if they just…
Novell releases a survey showing that British companies lose billions annually due to spam. Guess who sells a product that helps companies filter out spam? “Surveys are a time-honoured PR tactic for getting coverage in hard-to-reach publications.” —Junk Mail Costs Lives (The Register) Similar:Journalist flexes in story about Trump Media accountant who has spelled his…
“[L]anguage is often under-estimated, under-valued, and under-funded. How many times have we seen companies import bland, cheap information instead of hiring talented, knowledgeable writers to write fresh, original, interesting content?” Julia Hayden —Language: The Ultimate User InterfaceA List Apart) Similar:Life in Code and Software (Open Humanities Press)This book explores the relationship betw…AcademiaHermann Zapf, the font…
Ever been frustrated by a “404: File Not Found” message? Did you ever stop to wonder how the web server feels? —File Not Found! Similar:I have a daughter who does things. If demon curses and buckets of stage blood are your thi…I have a daughter who does things. If de…AmusingThe girl sank her brother's last…
Eugene Schlanger is a corporate lawyer and a respected poet. “Poets today tend to write to audiences of other poets. It’s unfortunate. You have poets celebrating pure emotion, but it’s not grounded in anything.” —Wall Street Poet Takes Stock of LifeSunSpot.net) Similar:Parallel Structure vs. Faulty ParallelismI just touched up a handout on Parallel …HumanitiesWhy Drag…
“[M]ost tragedies are caused not by hate-filled maniacs, but by small, unnoticed failures in complex systems. A badly trained worker makes a tragic error; an oversight by an engineer produces a fatally flawed component.” (Review of Inviting Disaster.) —When Malfunction and Error Meet: a Compendium of Disasters (Boston Globe) Similar:Set design for Acts II and…
Which is real and which is fake? The website behind curtain number one? Or the website behind curtain number two? Read about The Yes Men, who use a fake World Trade Organization website to trick the organizers of an international conference. (See: “Evaluating Online Sources.“)Parody? Activism? Lies? Similar:Doctor Bashir, I Presume #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season…
Digital cameras are great, because you can preview the shots immediately, and delete the ones that aren’t any good. “But if a photographer is focused on getting three, four or five pictures to the news desk as quickly as possible, he is not just getting rid of the rubbish; he’s not entering the alternative viewpoint…
Like the dystopian autocracy depicted in George Orwell’s novel 1984, Microsoft has a policy of eliminating “offensive” words from its official dictionary. (A Slashdot poster asks, “Do we really want to trust Microsoft to make decisions on our behalf regarding our use of language?”) —Bowlderlized by Microsoft (NY Times — registration req’d) Similar:Education: Teaching teachers…
Charging that Microsoft has started hijacking browser users who mistype an address (users are sent to a Microsoft page rather than shown a generic error message), Yahoo! has started doing some hijacking of its own. Microsoft has started excluding non-MS users from parts of its website (which, thanks in part to the hijacking described above,…
“Boilerplate was a mechanical man developed by Professor Archibald Campion during the 1880s and unveiled at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.” A remarkably convincing fake website by Paul Guinan. —Boilerplate: Mechanical Marvel of the Nineteenth Century Similar:Telling Trump’s Story to Children: For Book Publishers, It’s TrickyThis is a challenging writing task. Pres…BooksPick Up Your Smartphone…