January 2010
52 posts
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Finger Lickin' Good
I did something socially unacceptable today, which was bringing brunch back to my room and eating it alone. Then I did something even more socially unacceptable, which was eating with my hands. Don’t know why. I even had silverware and everything, but civility didn’t seem worth the fuss with no one else around.
A family friend once remarked that after eating dumplings with chopsticks,...
Really really gross
Naked social ambitions. Creepy crawly up the social ladder.
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Insert Coin for Self-Help
After his life fell apart — lost his job, wife left him, the usual elements of a midlife crisis — Greg began to sit in laundromats. He couldn’t afford the cup of coffee that earned him a spot at the cafe, and he preferred the whirring of the machines to chattering couples anyways.
Occasionally, he got up and cleaned the lint left the dryers. The laundromat employees tolerated...
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The Wikipedia Entry for the iPad ... Until Today |... →
(via veraville)
“It seems like a defining characteristic of a lot of modern people to be...”
– re: cliches (via a grammar)
“Textbooks.com guarantees to buy this book back for $0.00 if you buy it from them...”
– Wow, what a promise!
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Agnostic on all of the following
Vikings v. Saints
Scott Brown v. Martha Coakley
Jay Leno v. Conan O’Brien
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Number one skill to learn in next 6 months:
How to talk to adults.
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A question I can pose only to the Internet
When my roommate moved out, she left behind several old bras that she no longer wants. Her taste in lingerie runs fairly upscale, so it seems a waste to chuck them out.
But what else is there to do?
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Gael García Bernal | bernal method | Wunderkammer →
Fact: Gael García Bernal was my first celebrity crush. I could find an old Xanga entry documenting this but to save myself embarrassment, I won’t.
How annoying it must be to write about an actor’s rejection of conventionality and then have him go and star in a movie that features Taylor Swift in the trailer. Is this James Franco-esque performance art or a matter of contractual...
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A Purely Hypothetical List
Have you ever…
contrived to email someone so he or she might show up in your gchat list?
kept your gchat list scrolled down a bit because certain people are always red and never show up in the first screen?
been secretly glad that Facebook changed its privacy settings because omg now you can stalk so many people you couldn’t before?
Nope nope, of course I’ve never done any...
What would you do if you had a day to kill in...
Erh change of plans — looks like I’m not going to make it to New York this weekend after all. But your suggestions are very much appreciated! Given the career path I’m projecting, it’s highly likely I will end up in New York City one day cash poor, time-rich, and unemployed, so those suggestions are tucked away for future reference.
So Boston. Same...
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We're all just DigiBoys and DigiGirls now
One of my greatest social anxieties: I’m on invisible on gchat and the person I want to talk to is also invisible on gchat. Hiding behind digital invisibility clocks, we both want to chat, unbeknownst, with one another. Gchat equivalent of a missed connection.
All right laugh, but this is a legitimate fear!
Especially as gchat lists get crowded with auto-add and work-related contacts, and...
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Lethal Chemistry at Harvard →
About chem grad student Jason Altom’s suicide in 1998. Some of the details are immediately stunning (3rd suicide in Nobel Prize winner’s lab) and others latently so (his suicide note was effectively a policy memo).
What would you do if you had a day to kill in NYC?...
(On limited financial means.)
Winner will have his/her plan implemented in real life. Multiple entries welcome. Eligibility for this contest is unrestricted.
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A few words on dating and relationships in this...
1.
“If, as some researchers suggest, romantic love can be broken down into electrical impulses in the brain, then why not train the mind to simulate those signals while looking at an inanimate character?”
From the NYT Mag article, “Love in 2D,” about the Japanese phenomenon of men (it is always men, it seems) falling in love with anime characters. There exists an industry...
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Nietzche's Angel Food Cake Recipe →
1. Allow the angel to reach room temperature. Then kill it.
2. Kill God. Set Him aside.
3. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
4. Ecstatically whip, as if possessed by a storm-wind of freedom, 1-1/2 cups of excellent egg whites with 1/4 tsp. salt and 1-1/2 tsp. cream of tartar. Continue until peaks are as if raised to their own heights and given wings in a fine air, a robust air.
5. Gradually add...
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“In 2020 the disaffected twentysomethings of the burgeoning middle classes of...”
– Richard Nash: Book Publishing 10 Years in the Future
When, in our literary history, did the writing of contemporary fiction become linked to the bourgeois? It seems to me that this shift is one of the most significant of the, oh-I-dunno, last century.
“The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large...”
– The New Cavemen Lifestyle Has Found a Home in the City - NYTimes.com (via miraonthewall)
If NYT didn’t appear in the link, I would have sworn this was excerpted from the Onion.
Une femme est une femme. Un homme est un homme. A...
Nowhere is the double standard on women as apparent as in comedy. There are no female equivalents to Michael Cera, Zach Galifiankis or Seth Rogen (circa Knocked Up, pre-weight loss). The archetype of the lovable loser is only funny when the loser is male, pathetic when female.
Men can joke about not getting any girls, and by golly it can be funny. Even funnier if they’re being ironic. (This...
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I see what you did there James Cameron
What bothered me most about Avatar, icky issues of race and colonialism aside, was the poverty of imagination in creating the alien world of Pandora. It betrayed the degree to which our conceptions of outer space are restricted by anthropo- and geocentricism. What are the chances that the primordial soup in another planet would have given birth to a genetic code identical to our deoxyribose...
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Arcade Fire - Une année sans lumière
Problem: The relived experience has become more...
Too often, I find myself doing things or desiring to do things because they would make a good story. This is just as bad as thinking “this would make a good entry in my resume.” A narrative will begin shaping itself before anything even takes place. The experience itself may be enjoyable, but true pleasure lies in the rumination and retelling of it.
Solution: I don’t know. Is...
Things I'd rather not hear my dentist say when her...
“Wow hmm, this is going to be a lot harder than I expected.”
After cutting open my gums: “We might not be able to get this tooth out today.”
“Remember the time that guy sued us because I sewed the wound too tight and it got infected?”
After pulling out my last tooth: ”I had to do more surgery than expected. Does your insurance cover it?”
Mouthful of Rust
Went through the late adolescence/young adulthood rite of passage and had four teeth wrenched from my jaw. The saliva-and-blood-soaked gauze keeps my mouth metallic and dry, the exact sensation I imagine to be evoked by licking a rusty pole. I am now convinced that this whole pulling out perfectly healthy wisdom teeth is a ADA profit-making scheme, but I may just be embittered because my mouth has...
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Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps (acoustics/strings...
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“Please write a letter of introduction explaining who you are as writer at the...”
– Part of an application to this class I definitely won’t get into if I don’t get the writing sample written and probably won’t get into even if I do.
Ah and this letter of introduction — at once so easy and so hard. Easy because I know the answers to all these questions. They...
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Vampire Weekend and the making of “Contra” : The... →
I hope the New Yorker puts this article online soon or that you have paper issue you can grab and read right now because this article contains the phrase “the semiotics of preppy clothes” and it even comes from Ezra Koenig’s mouth.
(Though I should add one of the smartest things said about Vampire Weekend is this essay by agrammar.)
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What does the voice inside your head sound like?
You should know – it’s the voice you hear the most. It narrates your thoughts. It narrates the books, newspapers, greeting cards, emails that you read. It dictates what you write.
Is it the same as your voice, the one you speak with?
And can it sing?
A sobering thought: I will never know the sound of the voice I speak with. I can only hear it encoded in bytes and mimicked by an electronic machine....
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Once Upon a Summer Day
I conjecture there are two types of people thinking about summer right now: 1. people who truly detest the winter cold, 2. students enrolled in competitive colleges looking to build up their resumes. The former can look forward to warm summer days, but the latter can only conceptualize summer swallowed up by a big ball of anxiety. It’s times like these that I realize how much I’ve...
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A FORMER INVESTMENT BANKER ANALYST FALLS BACK ON...
Helen Foster for McSweeney’s
1. Explain why you want to attend law school.
I want to attend law school because I want to make a difference in the world. My desire to attend law school has nothing to do with the fact that I was recently fired from my job as an analyst at an investment bank, where I worked in the mergers and acquisitions group. Since January, I’ve worked on...
nostalgie de la boue
yearning for the mud; attraction to what is unworthy, crude, or degrading
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The Physics of Space Battles →
Must read for aspiring rulers of the galaxy.
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Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the... →
Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the...