Love This Headline: “He took a date to the park where he was gored by a bison, figuring it wouldn’t happen again. He was wrong.”
If You Ever Find a Link to ThoughtCatalog, I’m Begging You Not to Click It
Here’s a thought… nothing you can write can possibly encourage me to click through 40 separate chunks of text. Bye.
A slave who works in a junk shop naturally builds a protocol droid. Right.
He could have built, you know, a junkyard mechanic droid, or a general manual labor droid, or a Bitcoin-mining droid, or a freedom-fighter droid? No, he builds a fussy butler. The silliness of this just hit me.
Friend I hadn’t seen for about 20 years delivers a vintage nerdy gift.
During the original run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, my college roommate and I invited our friends over to our duplex for Star Trek parties. Our local TV station ran the show at midnight Sunday, which was a terrible time, but we sometimes had 30 people over. Though we kept in touch virtually, I…
Five myths about daylight saving time
No, Daylight Saving Time was not created to help farmers (actually, they hate it) and no, it doesn’t save energy (running the air conditioner longer in the evenings costs more than we save by turning on fewer lights in the morning). And why are we on “Daylight Standard Time” just four months out of the…
Legos and M&M’s Bulge Illusion
These are straight vertical and horizontal lines. It’s your mind that’s twisted. Researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute made a Lego checkerboard and placed white and purple M&Ms on the squares in a way that makes the board appear to bulge. Illusion Chasers, Scientific American Blog Network.
About that Cough, Rough, Pony, Bologna Meme
Do the spellings of cough & rough, pony & bologna bug you, too? English evolves organically, without our permission. Words that look similar but are pronounced differently generally came to the language from different sources and/or at different times, by an organic process that is not controlled by people in smoky board rooms. In our day,…
I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax
Hoaxes roam the Information Superhighway, camouflaged as factoids. Consider this one: “Amelia Bedelia was a maid in Cameroon.” The “Amelia Bedelia was a maid in Cameroon” factoid had been cited in a lesson plan by a Taiwanese English professor. It was cited in a book about Jews and Jesus. It was cited in innumerable blog posts and…
Jon Bentley | My Life in Art
Wonderfully weird retro pop art. Jon recalls his first encounter with the iconic Peter and Jane books: ‘Like many people of my generation, I learned to read with Peter, Jane, Mummy, Daddy and Pat the dog. As I struggled with the unfamiliar letters, my eyes where invariably drawn to the picture on the opposite page,…
If You’re Getting Walled in a Cellar I Feel Bad for You Son
Anti-Semitic Times Square Elmo admits to Girl Scout extortion attempt
The headline made me click the link, and the lead made me blog it. (I confess I didn’t actually read the story, because I doubt anything could live up to that kind of an introduction.) A crackpot Times Square performer who was once busted making anti-Semitic slurs while dressed as Elmo admitted Wednesday he tried…
This Is Not a Book: Thomas Jefferson & Apple’s App Store
Humanities professors from the University of Virginia describe their frustrating attempts to give away their innovative textual study tool via Apple’s App Store. The reason the App Review Team gave (again and again) was that our app was “simply” or “just a book” (their words), and that it therefore had to be formatted in Apple’s…
Apparently Facebook Doesn’t Know Me Very Well
I’m actually rather happy at the thought that somewhere in Facebook’s database exists a picture of my personal preferences that is so wildly inaccurate as to suggest this.
Beard Typeface Guide
Christian Goldeman felt compelled to match beard illustrations with their typeface equivalents.
Woman comments on man’s looks. Man FREAKS OUT.
If I ever over-react to a tweet, I hope the tweeter is as understanding as Hilary Sargent. Politico’s Ben White changed his Twitter profile photo yesterday to a new photo, which showed him kind of smirking (or something). A week or two ago I yelled at Business Insider for not including Ben White in some…
The Zombie Argument that Refuses to Die
The idea that generations of Shakespeare scholars got it all wrong appeals to the Saturday morning “kids rule!” ethos, where the kids smirk into the camera, adult authorities are easily duped, and the bad guys foreclosing on the pizza parlor can be thwarted by dumping a bucket of water on their legal documents.
PULP-O-MIZER: the custom pulp magazine cover generator
I don’t know what the text I wrote means, I just like it. Oh, phooey. I tried to save my image with my iPad, but it didn’t work. Well, it was fun anyway. PULP-O-MIZER: the custom pulp magazine cover generator.
Pheromone – A hormonal substance secreted by an individual.
Really helpful definition from a “Pinkalicous” children’s theater study guide. That’ll clear everything right up for the kiddos, won’t it?
Family Questions Boy’s Suspension Over Gun Gesture
A six-year-old who was warned not to pretend to shoot his classmates with scissors later made a shooting gesture with his fingers, and has now been suspended. A parent reacting to the story told a reporter “I wouldn’t expect someone to do that to my child, and if they did, I would expect some type…