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you gotta keep this one in your rotation.

here’s to pretzels

Posted: April 15th, 2015 | No Comments »

THE WORLD’S DRYEST SNACK

One more good one from

Bao Bao’s first snow day

Insurance:

spaghetti [reblog]

reblog from Bookbinderlocal455.com:

from the essential guide to hysterectomy:

Without a doubt, the most common question about anatomy involves the mystery of the empty space. Women are really concerned about what’s going to happen to the void left by the uterus. Picture this. If you have a bowl of spaghetti with a large meatball in the middle and a few smaller meatballs on the side, and then someone removes the large meatball, the space the meatball formerly occupied is replaced by the spaghetti. No one would know that the meatball was ever there.

a touching farewell

from this Vulture article about the passing of actress Sarah Goldberg:

Barry Watson, who played her boyfriend on 7th Heaven, tweeted his condolences Tuesday, writing: “#RIP Sarah. I will miss you always. Love Ya! B.”

Gingham Style

don’t know why but got to wondering if anyone made a parody called “Gingham Style”

Yes, of course they did.  Not really recommended:

36.262 is somehow the exact saddest number of views this could have.

Time to revisit an old classic.

Gabo

Happened to be in Colombia when I learned Gabriel Garcia Marquez died. I had just finished reading One Hundred Years Of Solitude. It was a bit of a slog to read, I felt, although impressive as a human achievement. Possibly its greatness had already been absorbed into later stuff I’ve consumed; always important to view these things in context. In the supplementary material in my edition there’s a story that GGM sent the first eighty pages to Octavio Paz, who declared (I’m picturing this at a dinner party) “I have just read eighty pages by a master.”

I liked this story, from Wiki:

Since García Márquez was eighteen, he had wanted to write a novel based on his grandparents’ house where he grew up. However, he struggled with finding an appropriate tone and put off the idea until one day the answer hit him while driving his family to Acapulco. He turned the car around and the family returned home so he could begin writing. He sold his car so his family would have money to live on while he wrote, but writing the novel took far longer than he expected, and he wrote every day for eighteen months. His wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and their baker as well as nine months of rent on credit from their landlord. Fortunately, when the book was finally published in 1967 it became his most commercially successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which sold more than 30 million copies.

 

I bet his kids are still pissed about that vacation.

A couple nights later I was drinking with two Colombian university students, and I asked them about Marquez. They both expressed the same opinion. They were disappointed in him. They said that his hometown was one of the poorest places in Colombia. That with all his wealth and success he’s done very little for Colombia, “fucking off to Mexico” as they put it.

My own favorite Marquez short story is called “The Earless One.” It has kind of a Twilight Zone feel.

What happens is a gambler in Mexico City meets an adventurer heading to the Amazon. He offers him a wager of one hundred thousand pesos if he can travel through Latin America overland without once hearing the song “Chan Chan” as recorded by the Buena Vista Social Club. The adventurer accepts.

A week later the gambler received a postcard: “I have not heard it.” He’s surprised: it’s nearly impossible not to hear this song every single day. But he remains calm. A week later another postcard: “Still I have not heard it.” The gambler begins to be concerned. Another week, another card: “I have not heard it still.” The gambler is shocked – how can this be?

Finally, he receives a package. He finds inside a note: “I have not heard it, nor will I.” And inside? The adventurer’s bloody ears.

It turns out he deafened himself – the only way to win this absurd bet.

I’m told this is a metaphor for Colombian politics.

I found the world’s most boring website.

I mean it.

I am proud of this discovery.

In every way: content, style, it is perfectly, wonderfully flavorless.

I think if you pitched on boring websites for a long time you would not do better than this.

I’m building it up like this because I’m confident in it, in its boring beauty.

It keeps giving, all the way to the end, like a well-crafted work of art.

Here it is.

Pretty baller

To have your picture in the dictionary.

I was looking up cloaca:

Bummer Headlines

Racetrack Drugs Put Europe Off U.S. Horse Meat

The picture, by Christinne Muschi, is appropriately grim:

This sounds like a sad story, Slate.

Help! How Can I Tell My Infertile Asian Wife I Want All-White Babies?

Headshot of an opera star I discovered on an Internet ramble which will now haunt my dreams.

“Hello.  I want to be near you.  Forever.”

An alert reader in our LIC office

Points out Tyler Cowen’s review of “Mirror, Mirror,” published here in its entirety.

*Mirror, Mirror* (paging Leo Strauss)

“Amusing Ourselves To Death” by Neil Postman

Reading doomsaying screeds from awhile ago is strangely comforting, because either a) things didn’t happen as the author direly predicted or 2) they DID happen, like 1000x worse than what the author predicted, but I guess we just deal.

File Neil Postman’s 1984 Amusing Ourselves to Death in category 2.

Postman’s book is worried about the rise of TV.  He holds out for special, extended, outraged scorn The Voyage of The Mimi, which is a pretty amazing thing to be mad about.

Towards the end, Postman wonders what we can do about the stupidity of TV:

The nonsensical answer is to create television programs whose intent would be, not to get people to stop watching television but to demonstrate how television ought to be viewed, to show how television recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate, religious thought, etc.  I imagine such demonstrations would of necessity take the form of parodies, along the lines of “Saturday Night Live” and “Monty Python,” the idea being to induce a nationwide horse laugh over television’s control of public discourse.  But, naturally, television would have the last laugh. In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to make the programs vastly amusing, in the television style.  Thus, the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television.  The parodists would become celebrities, would star in movies, and would end up making television commercials.

You called it, buddy.