February 2012
77 posts
The next time I wake up feeling like I’ve been run over by the A-Team van, I’m just going to go ahead and cancel my appointment for 2 hours of dental work.
Lesson learned. Lesson. Learned.
3 tags
RadCon's norovirus outbreak not so rad →
Best food safety headline of the week.
Cost Of Living Now Outweighs Benefits →
WASHINGTON, DC—A report released Monday by the Federal Consumer Quality-Of-Life Control Board indicates that the cost of living now outstrips life’s benefits for many Americans.
“This is sobering news,” said study director Jack Farness. “For the first time, we have statistical evidence of what we’ve suspected for the past 40 years: Life really isn’t...
The Star Wars Saga: Suggested Viewing Order →
peterwknox:
thegreg:
A few months back, when this video was making the rounds, I posed the question as to how I should introduce my (yet to be born) kids to Star Wars to try and keep the magic of the original trilogy while still including the back story of the new installments.
This article provides a reasoned and compelling argument for an order that makes so much goddamn sense it’s...
NYT: The Fact-Checker Versus the Fabulist →
benjaminchapman:
Where getting it right is more compelling than the facts.
“The truth is more important than the facts.” — Frank Lloyd Wright
Or, as a wise man is fond of repeating:
“Sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the think of it, but in the feel of it.” — Stanley Kubrick
You Didn’t Thank Me For Punching You in the Face →
When I went to the school to address the incident, the teacher smiled and explained it away to her, in front of me, “he probably has a crush on you”. Okay, the boy walked up to my daughter, grabbed and held her by the arm and forcibly removed her bracelets from her as she struggled, and you want to convince her that she should be flattered? Fuck off.
3 tags
Recipe: Snack Gavage
Listen to three episodes of Mike and Tom Eat Snacks back to back in the late afternoon. This will induce a hunger-induced snack delirium.
Go downstairs and open the pantry. Scramble about until you find some natural peanut butter (creamy) and some full-sized honey graham crackers.
Plop a healthy pile of peanut butter on the crackers and spread evenly. Now, spread 3/4 of a metric fuckton of...
4 tags
King of Pain →
There are many lovely essays about DFW. Here’s another:
David Foster Wallace’s suicide was the greatest literary tragedy since John Berryman flung himself from a Minneapolis bridge in 1972. The pain of mental illness and drug addiction constituted a frightful part of who he was. Out of that pain and his efforts to purify and to heal himself he wrote one of the most remarkable...
Disease outbreaks from raw milk 150x greater than... →
The rate of outbreaks caused by unpasteurized milk (often called raw milk) and products made from it was 150 times greater than outbreaks linked to pasteurized milk, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 13-year review also revealed that the states where the sale of raw milk was legal had more than twice the rate of outbreaks as states where it was illegal....
Jelly-boned swines →
D.H. Lawrence:
Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they can breed. They can but frog-spawn — the gibberers! God,...
1 tag
A Better Brew →
Yet another hagiography about Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head. But at least it’s a good one.
“Anyway, if there really are only five of you reading this, maybe we should rent...”
– Macworld The Macalope Weekly: Can’t we all get along? | Phones
Gruber
Merlin
Batz
Me
And Ben
(via donschaffner)
Will there be karaoke?
Ten Top American Breweries Worth A Visit - Forbes →
benjaminchapman:
I am exactly 0-for-10 on this.
I’m 2-for-10, but any list like this without Anchor is dubious. Did you see that every entry suggests you stay at the nearby Ritz-Carlton? I mean.
A Mobile Device That's Better for a Jotter Than a... →
On the one hand:
You look like you’re talking into a piece of toast.
And:
But, in my limited tests of its Bluetooth voice capabilities, the caller on the other end felt the Note sounded significantly worse than the iPhone or other Android models I’ve tested.
On the other hand
The software allows the stylus to draw in different colors and widths and to emulate a brush...
Soapy milk, toxic apples: India's sour food safety... →
Reuters:
From rat poison found in vegetables and Diwali-festival sweets laced with caustic soda, to batches of moonshine liquor that kill scores of people at a time — adulteration is rife.
A report by the FSSAI in January found that most of the country’s milk was watered down or adulterated with products — including fertiliser, bleach and detergent — used to...
NAS Colloquia: The Science of Science... →
Damn, I wish I could justify this.
Baruch Fischhoff, Daniel Kahneman, Dave Klahr, Dietram Scheufele, David Pogue, many other super-geniuses, and not a single “social media expert.”
I love my wife. My wife is dead. →
Richard Feynman:
You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.
The Morning After
Yesterday I made Coq au Vin, buttered egg noodles, arugula salad with citrus balsamic vinaigrette, a fudge-frosted chocolate cake, and salted almond ice cream.
Today the kitchen drain is clogged so hard, I may need to call a plumber.
This is why I don’t do nice things.
6 tags
Explaining and Proclaiming Uncertainty: Risk... →
Peter Sandman (he of the risk=hazard+outrage school of thought) breaks down communication difficulties during the sprout outbreak last year in an epic poem that will have your Instapaper scrolling for a good long while. I don’t know how I didn’t run across this until now.
There are a lot of lessons, but the main thrust is this:
That’s the focus of this long column – the...