http://www.livejournal.com/users/shmivejournal/110241.html “Supposing you were a supervillain, would you prefer to have minions, or henchmen?” 04:15
Archives
This month: 19 entries.
http://www.izpitera.ru/lj/tetka.swf Bikini-clad doll falls into spheres … mesmerising. 00:55
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050627ta_
talk_remnick David Remnick’s elegant Tyson encomium. 19:46
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200507/hillarypoll “Political insiders”—Democrats and Republicans—on whether Hillary Clinton can win the nomination/Presidency in 2008. 1. “One question: do people trust her? If George Bush can play a shell game with WMDs, rely on faulty intelligence, … [etc.], then it is fair to say that the trust issue is up for grabs and certainly Hillary has a shot.” 2. “Although she is bright, talented and extremely capable of handling the job, Senator Clinton has the burden of being poised to run after John Kerry. Kerry has probably soured many Democrats on Northeastern, elite intellectuals leading our party.” 23:18
http://happypenguin.org/show?bastet Bastard tetris: next brick is the worst brick possible, as computed by a “special algorithm.” 02:40
http://slate.com/id/2121177/ Why there are “American” universities everywhere. 06:58
http://www.americanheritage.com/xml/2005/3/2005_3_feat_1.xml First-hand account of the Yalta conference. Stalin apparently had a lemon tree flown in so that Roosevelt could serve his martinis with a twist. 00:05
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4113474.stm OMG there was a “Cardinal Sin.” 19:35
http://videos.onestopwebhosting.com/Videos/GeneralLee.mpeg Sweet drifting from the Dukes of Hazzard. 05:44
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/3/hst.asp Editing “journalism’s greatest prankster,” Hunter S. Thompson. 05:44
http://slate.com/id/2120494/ About Grant Wood’s American Gothic: the judges weren’t impressed, but a “powerful” museum patron arranged to have the painting awarded third prize in a competition run by the Art Institute of Chicago, and then persuaded the institute to buy it. 09:14
http://j-walk.com/other/conf/ “The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference.” 09:12
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/magazine/12FILTER.html What happens when anti-smoking campaigns meet safer cigarettes? 22:57
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/494040.html Uber-hacker jwz finally … buys a Mac! 02:33
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html “To this end, Chen has taken steps to ensure that future monkey sex at Yale occurs as nature intended it.”—do monkeys understand money? 06:26
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/books/31acad.html French stereotype reinforced: lazy French lexicographers working on the ninth edition of the standard French dictionary meet for three hours every Thursday. It’s been 70 years since the last edition, and, according to this piece, they once spent a year considering a single verb—faire. 06:39
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/arts/02yorker.html Every page of the New Yorker on 8 (!) DVDs. If the search function is good, this might be worth getting. (Seems like the search is not full-text.) There’s at least three Talk of the Town pieces I’ve been trying to track down for years: (1) account of a class of kids who were each given an egg to look after for a week; (2) something on the wild number of area-code changes London has had over recent decades; (3) something about a (Jewish) plan to run wires over and around some big city (London again?) to increase the area of their “homes” so that they can go more places on the Sabbath. (Probably horribly mis-remembered; I think I read all of these 10 or more years ago.) 04:46
http://slate.msn.com/id/1003363/ Timothy Noah’s account of his 1999 conversation with Mark Felt. In answer to Noah’s question about whether being Deep Throat would really be so terrible, Felt said: “It would be terrible. This would completely undermine the reputation that you might have as a loyal, logical employee of the FBI. It just wouldn’t fit at all.” 08:34