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The always weird and sometimes wonderful EnglishRussia.com had a post featuring these excellent Ukrainian folk-style playing cards by the Ukrainian artist Vladislav Erko, best known in Russia for his rendition of “The Snow Queen”, and for illustrating the work of writer Paulo Coelho, but not well-known in the West.
That guy at The Oatmeal covers one of my pet writing peeves: the proper and improper uses of i.e. and e.g.
Man, lately you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an article by Johann Hari somewhere. If, by some chance, you have been swinging your dead cat and missing, Hari is a young British journalist, who rose to fame while at Cambridge about 10 years ago, and, like a lot of contemporary journos, is known for his political activism and advocacy as well as his writing. He’s won a bunch of awards including the 2008 George Orwell Prize for political writing and the 2010 Martha Gelhorn Prize for war reporting.
Personally, I rather like his writing. He’s a lot more versatile than some older and well-established political journalists, but a lot less “watch me, I’m amazing” than people like Malcolm Gladwell. Here are thee recent articles in three different publications which give you a sense of his versatility:
This review in the New York Times of a new biography of Winston Churchill looks at the fundamental contradiction of Churchill’s own Victorian/Edwardian worldview versus the repudiation of the very same ideals as re-interpreted by Nazism decades later and Churchill’s seeming embrace of democratic ideals in response.
At his regular gig as a commentator for the British newspaper The Independent, Hari looks back at the Good Old Days of the 1990s and 2000s and the way management consultancy firms basically bullshitted their way to extreme profitability and helped to created the failed corporations that litter the landscape today.
And at The Huffington Post, he has this depressing piece that sort of restates an obvious situation: global warming is getting worse, but nobody is really willing to do a damn thing about it, even if they aren’t busy denying its very existence.
Oh, DWTS, how badly you have disappointed me. Thanks for leaking the story about Bristol Palin being a contestant over the weekend so that I had a few days to wrap my head around that, but the announcement of the rest of the cast last night leaves me weeping and in despair. The fat kid from “That’s So Raven”? Margaret Cho? Is she even ALLOWED on network television? THE SITUATION?!?!?!?!?!?!
And to top it off, Edyta quit! Now who’s going to be all naked ‘n’ stuff? It better not be Florence Henderson!
I’m seriously evaluating whether or not I’m even going to watch this season. At this point, I think I’d rather watch one of those midget/quintuplet/cake decorating shows on TLC.
Here’s a dog dancing the merengue in a clip that is bound to be better than ANYTHING Bristol Palin does:
One of my favorite one-hit-wonder songs from the 1960s is “In The Year 2525″ by Zager and Evans, which takes us on a journey through the centuries as humankind is twisted and tweaked by technology into creatures that no longer resemble us at all. It’s like a nightmare episode of “Star Trek” with a beat you can dance to and a great hook. The music/pop culture blog Dangerous Minds had this post about the song and the artists, and, of course, the requisite YouTube clip:
Another hippie hit that I unashamedly love is the 1973 hit from “Philly Sound” R&B singers The O’Jays, “Love Train”. Here they are performing it on “Soul Train”:
Less hippie-tastic, but no less fantastic, here is voice actor Rob Paulsen, who performed the voice of Yakko Warner on “Animaniacs”, singing Yakko’s famous “Nations of the World” song live at ComicCon last month:
And finally, the Internet hit of the moment, Cee-Lo singing “Fuck You”:
As the Dangerous Minds post points out, “In The Year 2525″ was one of many songs banned from the air by Clear Channel in the aftermath of 9/11, and yet it has survived (and, one might say, even thrived) since. Cee-Lo’s song might never ever get on the airwaves, and yet it’s already a guaranteed hit thanks to YouTube. Funny old world.
Obviously trying to catch some positive attention after being sold for a buck, Newsweek has just released its first ever “Best Countries” index, and coming in at Number One is Finland! They topped the list on education, came in fourth for overall quality of life, fifth on political environment, eighth on economic dynamism, and seventeenth for health. No doubt all that free high-speed broadband doesn’t hurt, either. I wonder if the recent disaster at the World Sauna Championship dinged their health score.
The U.S., by contrast, finished eleventh overall, only beating out Finland on “Economic Dynamism”, where we finished second. Singapore won that category, but finished 20th overall due to the repressive political climate there.
The BBC reports that the British department store Selfridge’s will officially roll out its Christmas shopping season this year on AUGUST 2. But American retail chain Toys R Us has them beat with a “Christmas In July” sale that runs this week. (although, as far as I can tell, that’s just a sale and not [...]
On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am [...]
In my copious spare time, usually whilst sitting in the waiting area at Charlotte’s karate studio, I have been making slow but steady progress toward adding tags to all the posts on this site. As of right now, I have completed tagging all the way back to April 1, 2008. The current archive of this [...]
Just the other day I posted about a young man from Nepal who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. He’s only 22 inches tall, compared to the 29-inch tall He Pingping of China, who is the current record holder. Well, WAS the current [...]
boobcheese tickle fights child actor suicides Betty White Zombie Farrah Fawcett Canadian pissing habits that milkaholic Lindsay ChatRoulette whatever half-assed thing Google did this week out-of-control Toyotas
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of all [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with: Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the [...]
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