Hpecker

A letter from “J. A. McM.,” West Lynn, Mass., to Mark Twain, April 17, 1907:

Dear Sir:–

Apropos of your very entertaining little book on ‘English as she is Taught’ — the following true story fits in well — A teacher asked her class of boys to tell the difference between herself and a clock. A bright little urchin in the rear row raised his hand and said — ‘You have a face and the clock has a face, and you have got hands and the clock has got hands, and — and (reflecting) the clock has got a pendooleum and you aint.’

On the envelope Twain wrote, “Preserve this. Frame it. It is the second time in 40 years that a stranger has done me a courtesy & charged me nothing for it.”

These oreos are “Blizzard Flavored”, but if you note that the Dairy Queen Blizzard on the package is full of ground-up Oreos, it’s a cookies-and-creme flavored Oreo. The Oreo is flavored with itself. It’s an Oreo flavored Oreo. Soylent Oreo is made of Oreos.

Is Rep. Bob Goodlatte asshole of the day for saying that denying women abortions “very much promotes job creation”?

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) suggested that Republicans support restricting access to abortion because it will ultimately benefit the economy if women have more children. Goodlatte noted that carrying pregnancies to term “very much promotes job creation.”

…

Explaining his support for the measure, Goodlatte made both a moral and an economic case for anti-choice laws. “I would suggest that it is very much the case that those of us in the majority support this legislation because it is the morally right thing to do but it is also very very true that having a growing population and having new children brought into the world is not harmful to job creation,” he said. “It very much promotes job creation for all the care and services and so on that need to be provided by a lot of people to raise children.”

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/01/15/3168601/congressman-births-job-creation/

There you go— undeniable proof that oppressing women helps the economy!

Of course if those women forced to carry children are poor, will Rep. Goodlatte make sure that they get help affording all that care and services which will create jobs? Or just let them suffer alone and then none of those jobs ever get created, you know, like the GOP likes to do.

Photo source: http://www.bobgoodlatte.com/

sketchplanations:

The law of diminishing brownies.

You will have observed this most times there is shared food you can cut. I observed it with trays of brownies that we used to make. Slices start big and get progressively smaller. No one wants to eat the last slice.

A previous boss had a simple solution to this with a maxim he had: You think of one, you get two. A bit excessive, and I don’t advocate it, but it really did work.

This may be the most stereotypically American Apparel thing that American Apparel has ever done. A downtown Manhattan outpost now has a trio of mannequins in its window, clad in just translucent white underwear—all of them with a substantial thatch of pubic hair.

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Well, here's a pretty clear way to articulate your disgust with the fashion industry's penchant for cultural appropriation: yesterday, as part of men's fashion week in Paris, Belgian designer Walter van Beirendonck sent two models down the runway in large headdresses that read "STOP RACISM."

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The “FUN LIGHT SWITCH BOX”, which is titled in all-caps by the manufacturer, is a $69.95 kit which, after you drill 17 holes and wire up all of the buttons and lights, allows you to turn on the lights by turning the switches on and off. You can also turn the lights off. “FUN.”

rosalarian:

popculturebrain:

Infographic: Movies that passed the Bechdel Test made more money in 2013 | Vocativ

I like this. The Bechdel Test is really worthwhile for analyzing larger trends rather than individual movies. It’s nice seeing stats like these.

Several years after publishing Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson was abashed to discover that he had drawn much of the story from Washington Irving’s 1824 book Tales of a Traveller, which he had read many years earlier and forgotten.

“I believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther,” he wrote later. “The book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters — all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed the spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning’s work to the family.”

This is an instance of cryptomnesia, the mistaking of a forgotten memory for an original idea. Stevenson charged himself with plagiarism, but he had honestly believed he was writing a new story: “It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye.” In reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Carl Jung was surprised to discover “almost word for word” an incident reported in a ship’s log in 1686. Jung recognized the passage from a book published around 1835, about 50 years before Nietzsche was writing. He contacted the philosopher’s sister, who confirmed that the two of them had read the book when Nietzsche was 11 years old.

“I think, from the context, it is inconceivable that Nietzsche had any idea that he was plagiarizing this story,” Jung wrote. “I believe that fifty years later it had unexpectedly slipped into focus in his conscious mind.”

Angelo Lerro hated the thought of a body mouldering in a traditional casket, so in 1910 he offered this tidy alternative: The body is embalmed and arranged in a natural posture in a hermetically sealed glass bell filled with a preservative gas. This way the survivors can view the deceased without distress, and entire graveyards can be filled with sealed bells to keep soil and watercourses clean. (I suppose it will also keep down the vampire population.)

An even more permanent solution.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote this mnemonic poem for his son Derwent in 1807 — each line is written in the foot it describes:

Trōchĕe trīps frŏm lōng tŏ shōrt;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slōw Spōndēe stālks, strōng fōot!, yet ill able
Ēvĕr tŏ cōme ŭp wĭth Dācty̆l trĭsȳllăblĕ.
Ĭāmbĭcs mārch frŏm shōrt tŏ lōng.
Wĭth ă lēap ănd ă bōund thĕ swĭft Ānăpĕsts thrōng.
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Ămphībrăchy̆s hāstes wĭth ă stātely̆ stride –
Fīrst ănd lāst bēĭng lōng, mīddlĕ shōrt, Amphĭmācer
Strīkes hĭs thūndērĭng hōofs līke ă prōud hīgh-brĕd Rācer.

If Derwent be innocent, steady, and wise,
And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies;
Tender warmth at his heart, with these meters to show it,
With sound sense in his brains, may make Derwent a poet –
May crown him with fame, and must win him the love
Of his father on earth and his father above.
My dear, dear child!
Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole ridge
See a man who so loves you as your fond S.T. Coleridge.

Lake Superior contains a phantom island. After the American Revolution, the Treaty of Paris established the boundary between the United States and Canada as running “through Lake Superior northward of the Isles Royal and Phelipeaux to the Long Lake,” following an inaccurate map created by John Mitchell. In the 1820s surveyors discovered that Phelipeaux does not exist, and the boundary had to be negotiated anew.

Around the same time, the dramatically named Mountains of Kong appeared on maps of West Africa, apparently placed there originally by English cartographer James Rennell. It wasn’t until the 1880s that French explorer Louis Gustave Binger discovered that they don’t exist either. They persisted in Goode’s World Atlas until 1995.

“All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.” — Woody Allen

Swiss artist Markus Raetz created this innovative portrait of Piero della Francesca. Two mobiles are fitted with aluminum plates that are juxtaposed successively as the mobiles rotate. Piero appears between them.

Raetz’s kinetic sculpture of Kiki de Montparnasse, below, uses a similar idea:

music:

YOUR TOP ALBUMS OF 2013

Our monkeys worked long hours through the weekend to tally your votes, and the results show that Beyoncé’s album came out just in time. Here are the top 50 albums of 2013, as selected by you.

Graphic courtesy of ilovecharts.
GIFs by Matthias Brown, wtf-albumcover, kinobeans, rxvi, palmplazathelover, hkcovers, beautifulalbumcovers, thesockcovers, pitchfork and shinmens.

1. Arctic Monkeys – AM

2. Beyoncé – Beyoncé

3. Lorde – Pure Heroine

4. Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City

5. Fall Out Boy – Save Rock & Roll

6. HAIM – Days Are Gone

7. One Direction – Midnight Memories

8. Arcade Fire – Reflektor

9. Paramore – Paramore

10. Daft Punk – Random Access Memories

11. Kanye West – Yeezus

12. Lady Gaga –  Artpop

13. Justin Timberlake – The 20/20 Experience

14. Drake – Nothing Was The Same

15. Miley Cyrus – Bangerz

16. Phoenix – Bankrupt!

17. Disclosure – Settle

18. Tyler, The Creator – Wolf

19. Childish Gambino – Because the Internet

20. The National – Trouble Will Find Me

21. Queens of the Stone Age – …Like Clockwork

22. Foals – Holy Fire

23. Tegan & Sara – Heartthrob

24. Chance The Rapper – Acid Rap

25. Earl Sweatshirt – Doris

26. A$AP Rocky – LONG.LIVE.A$AP

27. The Story So Far – What You Don’t See

28. Jay-Z – Magna Carta…Holy Grail

29. J. Cole – Born Sinner

30. The Wonder Years – The Greatest Generation

31. Janelle Monáe – The Electric Lady

32. James Blake – Retrograde

33. Local Natives – Hummingbird

34. Laura Marling – Once I Was an Eagle

35. Charli XCX – True Romance

36. The Knife – Shaking the Habitual

37. The Lone Bellow – The Lone Bellow

38. Atoms For Peace – Amok

39. Bob Dylan – Another self portrait

40. AlunaGeorge – Body Music

41. Blood Orange – Cupid Deluxe

42. Robin Thicke – Blurred Lines

43. Run The Jewels – Run The Jewels

44. Deafheaven – Sunbather

45. CHVRCHES - The Bones of What You Believe

46. Panic! At The Disco - Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die

47. Savages – Silence Yourself

48. My Bloody Valentine – m b v

49. Peace – In Love

50. Major Lazer – Free the Universe

Racists, this is exactly how you sound when you defend the Confederate Flag. Fuck you.

New York Film Academy’s study of gender inequality in the film industry.

wendymacnaughton:

On Resolve and New Year’s Resolution, accompanying a piece by Caroline Paul here.

I cannot stress enough that this is Merlin, a beloved character in the public domain.