Recently Read

Wow, I should have been celebrating all day. This needs to go on the Odd Holidays Calendar.

"It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t pause for breath in my prose without automatically hitting dot-dot-dot. I was ravenous … a wild animal on the prowl for a pregnant pause, a thoughtful moment or a half-baked idea so I could swoop in and get my fix. I was putting ellipses where commas would suffice … ellipses when em dashes would do the trick … ellipses when a yada-yada-yada would convey the same idea. It was all too much, and I collapsed under the pressure."

Subtitled "A miscellany of Modern Words & Phrases" – Schotts is like snigglets on steriods. It sucks that they truncate the post in RSS feeds (although they do give the definition of the new phrase) because this is one of my favorite new blogs for tapping the zeitgeist of our times.

Analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement. Analyzing and refuting crank ideas. Explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism.

Sample fact: "Hitler actually won World War II. Then Neil Gaiman wrote an alternate-history story in which the allies won, and reality was too intimidated to argue the point."

"But what if you could make climate change edible, not just visible? Could you create a Climate Change Tasting Menu? As a sort of amuse-bouche, the Climate Change Tasting Menu could offer local foods and drink that actually taste worse because of climate change – such as traditional Eastern European pilsners. The starter would feature new products that have only recently been cultivated locally, thanks to climate change – Devon olive oil perhaps, accompanied by a nice glass of Kent rosé. The main course might be controversial: test-tube grown imitation meats and vegetables that recreate the flavour and mouthfeel of species that are already lost or threatened with extinction by climate change."

Tiger Beatdown again with the awesome: "I mean: the thought of Tarantino applying this to World War Fucking Two was really not appealing to me. I’ve heard there’s not even that much violence in the movie, that it’s all talk-talk-talk, that it’s mostly about a girl, and you know what? Super. Great. Did you get the requisite foot fetish scene in, QT? Oh, you totally did? Awesome. But here’s the thing I can’t get around: the feeling that it’s using World War Two as a setting and Nazis as villains, not so that Quentin Tarantino can actually deal with the sobering realities of genocide and the human need for revenge and resistance, but so that literally anything the good guys do will be considered justifiable. Basically, I think he’s using the Holocaust to write himself a blank check."

The only problem? From a purely economic standpoint, insuring illegal immigrants makes a lot of sense—and not just for them, but for everyone.

The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices raise serious concerns over racial profiling, illegal stops and privacy rights. The Department’s own reports on its stop-and-frisk activity confirm what many people in communities of color across the city have long known: The police are stopping hundreds of thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast majority are black and Latino.

Interesting point – it does seem that cops get a bizarre number of shows on TV, and why? "Consider that “put their lives on the line” business. Police work is indeed dangerous — 140 officers died in the line of duty in 2008 — but less so on a per capita basis than logging or fishing or roofing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The municipal employees who do put their lives on the line every day? Sanitation workers — No. 6 on the list of jobs with the highest fatality rates. The police don’t make the Top 10."

Various things that go with my camera.

The conclusion is that exercise makes you crave more calories than you just expended. Better to walk around the block several times per day and garden & play outside to burn calories than to get on the elliptical. Use the stairs instead of the elevator, take a walk at lunch time.