Found this in Villennes.
posted by Kai Carver 6:23 AM
Found this in Villennes.
posted by Kai Carver 6:23 AM
"Sexy Java"? I think I need a re-booting: RA:S/L,WM:S/L, lyrics.
posted by Kai Carver 12:05 PM
Quit misunderestimatin': I get a little tired of trying to talk people into considering that Bush might not be a total idiot. Apparently, if one thing is certain in this uncertain world, it's that George W. Bush is a spoiled rich kid, a quasi-illiterate Texan, and a big oil puppet who can barely read his handlers' cue-cards. Outside America, this fits in with that other too-obvious-to-question belief that Americans themselves are spoiled, illiterate, etc. idiots (who nevertheless mysteriously succeed in ruling the world and micro-managing every evil occurrence within it). Don't get me started on that near-universal pearl of wisdom or its relation to the common belief that Westerners are godless devils who force their women to pose naked in magazines when they're not helping Jews drink babies' blood... Stop!
Anyway, on the narrower subject of W., here's a good review by Andrew Sullivan (an admitted Bush fan for some time) of an intimate account of Bush's presidential campaign by a New York Times reporter ("Panchito"). It might help someone out there leave open the possibility that the guy could be usefully distinguished from a talking cucumber.
Then again, here's some more evidence for the idiot theory. Bush caught himself waving hello at Stevie Wonder at a concert. Austin Powers is one of his favorite movies. He likes to imitate Dr. Evil (another idiot). As (dare I admit it?) an occasional (if not full time) idiot, I have sympathy for this. So it all makes sense! I, as an idiot, think Bush, an idiot idiotically elected by an entire idiot people, isn't so dumb. Quid Error Demonstrandibum!
posted by Kai Carver 6:39 AM
OK. This is one of those scare the heck out of you thingies. Don't click if you have a weak heart. I'm warning you because it still scares me every time I see it.
posted by Kai Carver 5:27 AM
Well, I took the "Matrix" questionnaire, and I turned out to be Neo (how original). But now it looks like it's off-line.
posted by Kai Carver 8:45 AM
Erik's post on quasi-European coinage left me wondering what the coins look like, how they compare with other Euro coins, and what the difference is between San Marino and the Vatican (foolishly I thought they were the same).
In my free time (and prey to a slight fever), I was able to answer these essential questions. My favorite coin designs are from the extremes of Europe: Portugal and Finland. Netherlands did the best job of hiding the obligatory 12 stars, and Greece deserves the chutzpah award for a design which probably won't go over real well in Brittany.
I also made some "interesting" side trips in the weird world of
vexillology in search of nice flag images. Some people love flags. I used to be into them, but some day decided they were just so much pre-globalization kitsch. I nevertheless enjoyed verifying my ignorance with this European flag test. And I was surprised to find that flags, in sufficient quantities and with the proper perspective, could make me laugh uncontrollably ("Do not attempt to disprove the four-colour theorem on your flag!" Start on the A-grade flags and move down from there). Found in MeFi here and here.
posted by Kai Carver 7:24 AM
I often use bookmarklets to get rid of annoying ads.
posted by Kai Carver 5:42 AM
Religious constraints: much to the delight of members of the Oulipo list, religious teachers in Malaysia are attempting to limit the use of the letter "t" due to its resemblance to the Christian cross.
In related news, a Polish archbishop liked to express forbidden love by giving a young man a shirt labeled "ROMA" and asking him to read it backwards. An inversion if not a perversion. Surely there's a limerick lurking here.
posted by Kai Carver 3:18 PM
Scary movie.
posted by Kai Carver 2:24 PM
Télérama découvre à son tour les blogs. L'article n'est pas mal et on y trouve notamment des adresses de blogs tenus par des journalistes de Libé. Est également citée une journaliste free-lance française basée à L.A. qui se trouve être l'épouse d'un des bloggueurs américains les plus en vue dans le petit monde des blogs américains. Elle mentionne sur son blog un autre site, consacré exclusivement à la France mais, comme son nom l'indique, pas exactement francophile.
posted by Kai Carver 6:54 PM
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.
I like reading John Derbyshire, a cranky conservative critic, for the incidentals: he's a good story-teller, likes poetry, history and China, made me read Dorothy Parker and taught me the word uxorious.
posted by Kai Carver 1:29 PM
Scary words: New Jersey, Wisconsin, Snickers, Mars.
posted by Kai Carver 6:15 AM
Childhood Pet May Be World's Oldest Turtle
posted by Kai Carver 5:36 PM
Puff away, Tracy : Vigo should be safe from asthma. Clean living may be tied to asthma.
And... "another study shows kids with dogs in the house get less asthma".
posted by Kai Carver 4:41 PM
In one of the recently most linked pages in blogdom, a famous North Dakotan blogger humorously performs a public service of sorts: taking on, paragraph by paragraph, a typical sample of unreflective European condescension towards the U.S., in this case the inane scribblings of a British snob-in-residence employed by the Guardian.
posted by Kai Carver 2:42 PM
Le Monde découvre les blogs. L'article est un peu nul, mais bon, c'est Le Monde ! Andrew Sullivan a récemment écrit un bien meilleur article, mais la version française laisse à désirer...
posted by Kai Carver 8:51 AM
Interesting one-hour talk (summary) at Harvard Business School by Dean Kamen about the Segway (and literally on it). He also talks about pollution-free Stirling engines, why the dot-com bust is a good thing, his attempt to make science hotter than sports, and how to save the world and make lots of money at the same time (from MeFi). Segway fanatics can also check out a Segway blog (in the future, everything will have a blog).
posted by Kai Carver 6:13 PM
Arts & Letters Daily, edited by Denis Dutton, controversial creator of the annual Bad Writing contest, often has good on-the-intellectual-side-but-not-too-much articles, a kind of replacement for the late lamented Lingua Franca web site.
Anyway, reading an article criticizing the "new Communist Manifesto", I had the following, probably obvious but new for me, thought: in some circles, and especially after 9/11, religion is called the source of much that is bad in the world. However, the two obvious candidates for worst evils of the last century, Nazism and communism (OK, OK, Stalinism), were notably atheistic and anti-clerical. Hmm...
(it would be nice to have comments... maybe I'll have to install Movable Type soon)
posted by Kai Carver 6:22 AM
America
the
beautiful.
Is back!
posted by Kai Carver 1:21 AM
Record battu :
posted by Kai Carver 5:42 PM
I'm very disappointed by Frédéric Beigbeder, who I've enjoyed watching on Paris Première, after reading 99F. This autobiographical novel, about an advertising executive who tries to get fired by writing a tell-all story based on his job, starts promisingly and has some clever quotes, but it's soon apparent that it's a pale imitation of Michel Houellebecq. The book is unfortunately the best illustration of its subject, that advertising irremediably taints anything it touches. Putassier.
posted by Kai Carver 3:04 PM
I like reading fellow failed Parisian nanovelist Stuart Mudie's web log. He mentions a great example of how good digital photography on-the-cheap can be, if you have a good eye and a light touch on PhotoShop. I want one too! Stuart's still writing, by the way. I also, ahem, ran across some of his, well, deeply mind-numbing early work. Tee-hee.
posted by Kai Carver 6:16 PM
Tracy's link to my Pages Jaunes-based movie went bad, so here it is again, resizable or TV-style (Alt-F4 to close). It's snowing pixels! It's raining men!
posted by Kai Carver 4:25 PM
Slate mentions this unusual memorial proposal.
Though I'm not sure there should even be a big memorial (it's OK for Germans to remember their defeats, but should Americans?), I like the transpositions of this design: vertical to horizontal, 3D to 2D, sky to water.
posted by Kai Carver 4:01 PM
posted by Kai Carver 8:08 PM
posted by Kai Carver 5:05 PM
Everyone in Chicago is going to read the same book.
UPDATE: New York too.
posted by Kai Carver 7:33 AM
posted by Kai Carver 11:01 AM
Filling in on Tracy's TV-addled banana post, the United Fruit Historical Society has a 100-year chronology of United Fruit which lists in passing over 20 cases of US invasions in Central America (more commie propaganda here).
The company is now called Chiquita Brands International and though the history page on its Disney-like ("Hello amigo!") web site doesn't mention anything nasty, its annual report acknowledges its "complex history" in some detail and says "Today, we are a different Company". So go ahead and eat a banana every day.
posted by Kai Carver 5:16 PM
The ISP doesn't like me to steal images, which is why it displays "image hosted by...". Maybe I'll put them on my site, then refer to them. What a drag.
(I updated your post: don't forget to close the font tags with </font>, otherwise everything gets the font...)
posted by Kai Carver 4:35 AM
twink
has
music
and
good
links
The site is so cute it almost makes me want to use that cool tiny sans serif font and stuff all the time.
posted by Kai Carver 5:46 PM
Mark Dunn is the author of Ella Minnow Pea: a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable.
Each letter must navigate off page by jinxing quick zippy words.
How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!
posted by Kai Carver 1:43 PM
Strange love: bombing Afghanistan saves lives. So when do we start on Korea and finish in Irak? Hum.
posted by Kai Carver 7:09 AM
Is Bill Gates a saint? Why is he interested in poor people? He clearly doesn't want to sell them software. Maybe it's his truly nerdy fixation on changing the world through technology: "Like a great piece of software, a vaccine can have an enormous impact on the world". Or maybe he's just a good guy after all? Nah.
In more sensational "Believe It Or Not" news, the United States is by far the world's largest donor of humanitarian assistance (30%) (page 9) and of relief food aid (40%) (page 99). Oh and private donors give away 2.1 percent of the U.S. GNP each year.
posted by Kai Carver 7:49 AM
Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens are also interesting and entertaining together on TV (2 hours!). If only Noam Chomsky had joined them it would have been perfect. And here's a gratuitous George Orwell book cover.
posted by Kai Carver 7:28 AM
A conservative/libertarian twofer: defending globalization (long) and defending the veil. The National Review no less! I'm evil.
posted by Kai Carver 11:49 PM
State of the Blogger in the Guardian.
posted by Kai Carver 3:57 AM
"Women are losers. They are beggars, in spite of women's lib."
Fear is the main theme of her work, but anger is a close second. "I have fantastic pleasure in breaking everything." Louise Bourgeois
posted by Kai Carver 7:42 PM
Mmmm... Smarties and Smartfood. Any other brainy fare?
posted by Kai Carver 10:09 AM
(posting against all hope)
From the often-interesting MetaFilter, this awesome "bootleg" collection, a bootleg being defined as "two or more famous records mixed together with little much else".
Featuring (with a twist) Christina! Whitney! George! Everybody! Can you handle this?
posted by Kai Carver 9:26 AM
