July 2009
2 posts
Potato-Faced Youngster Lauded For Memorizing... →
Pretty much everything on the Onion today is amazing.
(As a point of somewhat more serious comparison, I direct you to Stefan Landsberger’s online collection of Chinese propaganda posters. Be warned, though, that once you start it’s easy to spend hours browsing through the content.)
The original VQR post about Chris Anderson's... →
Old news, right? I know. I even heard about this in Montana. However, in case you read this when it first appeared, might I direct you now to the comments? Things got a little batshit up in there.
This is my favorite part: “Perhaps I’m not making myself clear, so here’s another example. Your response to me is hostile and a bit angry. If I were writing an article about ‘hostile and a...
June 2009
5 posts
Childcare →
Short fiction in The New Yorker often gives me brain hives. But not when it’s by Lorrie Moore:
“And her mouth, with its few and crooked teeth, bits of shell awash on a reef of gum, seemed a curious home for her voice, which was slowly surprising, with its intelligence and humor.”
Humbling and lovely.
America's Somali Bantu →
Thank God NPR Now was playing Prairie Home Companion today, because if they’d been airing something listenable-to I might not have browsed through XM’s news channels and stumbled on this segment.
Description as per the BBC:
“Hundreds of thousands of people have fled from Somalia since civil war broke out there in the early 1990s.
Many of them go to refugee camps in Kenya,...
State Cell Phone Driving Laws →
When I’m driving through parts distant and rural, I’m extra-careful about trying to avoid encounters with the police (or what I think of as the My Cousin Vinny Scenario).
Which is how I found this site. I recommend it highly for anyone else road-tripping this summer to parts unknown. Because I like to be servicey like that.
(I have yet to find a similar chart with regard to the...
May 2009
9 posts
Constantine Maroulis Nominated for a Tony. →
My friend’s mother predicted that the world was going to end this spring. We all laughed it off, of course, but now I can’t help but wonder if she was on to something.
My Favorite Relatively New TV Show. →
The first news I ever heard about original programming on Starz related to the television adaptation of Crash, so I can only assume that I subconsciously instructed my brain to ignore any further mentions of Starz, which is why it took me until this weekend to start watching catering comedy Party Down.
It might also have something to do with the fact that this show is getting practically zero...
DFW Praise Compendium. →
An incomplete list of works recommended by David Foster Wallace. (Via The Rumpus, a site whose title actually made me grind my teeth with envy the first time I saw it. This unnerves me because — let’s be honest — there’s something really messed-up about the idea of being jealous over a URL.)
(Another thing that unnerves me? My inability to figure out how to enter an...
April 2009
13 posts
Keeping Up With the Molinas. →
If you don’t love the Molinas, you don’t love baseball. That is all.
WatchSo there are new rules for citizenship in Canada, which means that some people went to bed with one citizenship and woke up with two. This PSA from the Canadian government takes the transformation charmingly literally. (Via, strangely enough, TiFaux)
By the way, if you think you might be Canadian, you can probably find out here. (Although if my own dual-citizened experience is anything to go by,...
WatchI realize that like 90% of the stuff I post is from Videogum, but I will not apologize for this one: a high school freshman French student writes English subtitles for the Coco Avant Chanel trailer. Bilingual wackiness ensues.
