“[S]hort and pithy, bumper stickers are a literary genre ideally suited to hurried Americans who may nevertheless feel morally obligated to express opinions… They allow us to state the thesis without the supporting paragraphs…” Tina Bennett-Kastor —Bumper Bites (Vocabula Review) Similar:The girl sank her brother's last ship with the homophonous cry "I-1."AmusingThe Coronavirus Is Rewriting…
“Under the guise of protecting private property, a series of new laws and regulations are dismantling the very architecture that made the Internet a framework for global innovation.” Lawrence Lessig —The Internet Under Siege (Foreign Policy Magazine) Similar:Magnetic Scrolls Original Games Source Code Recovered!Here we have possibly the only surviving…CybercultureMisleading Publisher Email Promises Paid Stipend,…
“Seldom mentioned, hardly ever seen, exactly the kind of movie that, yes, a fertilizer salesman named Hal P. Warren would decide to make, one fine summer in 1966.” (Manos available on DVD!) —Manos: The Hands of FateReviewed by Mimosa) Similar:Scholars' unconvincing case about the value of the humanities (essay)A literary work is a powerful tool…
“Before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, anxiety-related disorders cost the U.S. $42 billion a year in medical and work-related losses. Now mental health professionals can only make educated estimates of how many more of us will be affected in the near future…” —9/11: The Psychological Aftermath (Scientific American) Similar:Physician:…
“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:Modern Masterpieces of Comedic Genius: The Art of the Humorous Amazon Review, Part DeuxI love me a good Amazon mock review. Her…AestheticsBe Kind, for…
(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:A Merry Look at Journalism in "The Year Without a Santa Claus"In the classic stop-action TV special “T…AestheticsTrees…
“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:Carolyn performed as Ariel yesterday in the New Renaissance Theatre Company's production o… Carolyn…
“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:Spring 2023 Grades: Submitted! (I only had 3 last-minute submissions to mark today.)AcademiaEdgar Allan Poe Was a Broke-Ass Freelancer – The MillionsHis despair is only part…
“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:I'm nerdy enough to give my 15yo a used copy of "The Hero with…
A lake. A salt mine. An oil drilling rig. A lack of communication. You figure it out. —Peaceful Lake Peigneur Turned into Maelstrom Similar:I just dusted off a #textadventure project I started in Inform6 around 1999.I just dusted off a #textadventure proje…CybercultureBetween static hand-coded HTML pages and modern content-management systems, there used to …When I…
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:Mask-wearing cuts Covid incidence by 53%, says global study Globally, Covid cases exceeded 250 mil…CultureHow 15 minutes I spent with a…
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:Novel defined: a term used by…
“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:Facebook just dealt another potentially lethal blow to local journalismFacebook will pay…
“[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:Journalists dream of puns like this.AmusingHorrifying deepfake tricks employee into giving away $25 millionNo names in…
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:Game Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren't ItGreg Costikyan on Play This Thing! A re…AcademiaThe Hut Where the Internet Began – Atlantic MobileLet’s start at the end point:…
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:Is Google Making Us Stupid?Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic: As the …BooksAdaobi Tricia Nwaubani:…
“[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:How to lie with charts, by…
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:Oh the Overthinks You Can Overthink: Horton the…