Category: Uncategorized

“Black humor” is redundant

  1. Courtney sells some of Kurt’s songs to… wait for it… Oh don’t worry. It’s a good thing. edit:The paper is a tabloid, sometimes makes shit up. Story not yet found elsewhere. Great legend if it’s fake, though!
  2. Movies come to life as giant jellyfish attack Japan. Wearing tights can be an effective defense. Students have succeed in turning them into tofu.
  3. Today’s Woot deal is a really good bread machine for $75, shipped. Go now buy.
  4. Tulane is hacking itself to pieces after Katrina. WSJ story here may require registration. Short version: They’re axing 22 programs of study and firing 53 professors and a third of their medical school faculty. Bye bye university.
  5. The data on Tylenol just gets worse and worse. Now it seems that you can poison yourself with 20 pills a day. I bet a lot of neurotic people do that much Tylenol.

From Spy Magazine, 1992

I grabbed this from an online archive of the magazine. Spy was the Onion and the Daily Show of the 1980s and early 1990s. This was one of my favorite bits and I’m glad to see it again.

Women in Love: Spy’s Pocket Guide to the Best-sellers

Ivana Trump, Woman of Letters – In her novel, For Love Alone, Ivana Trump tells the story of Katrinka Graham, a plucky Czech skiert who emigrates to America and marries the rich and powerful Adam Graham. A roman à clef? No way – Katrinka is beautiful without benefit of plastic surgery, and Adam is not a bullying blowhard. Here’s how Ivana captures Katrinka’s thoughts at certain dramatic moments:

  • On skiing over the Czech border to freedom: “Ayiiiiii!”
  • When consoling a friend on her troublesome love life: “Ay yi yi.”
  • On meeting the long-lost son she gave up at birth: “Ay yi yi yi.”
  • When finally divorced from Adam: “Ay yi yi yi.”
  • On hearing her friend is deserting her husband: “Ay yi yi yi.”
  • When she is offered a rich chocolate dessert: “Ay yi yi yi.”

Enrique, Hans, and Andrew also had little lambs but this was not recorded at the time.

  1. I missed this on Pro-Med, but Aetiology caught it: Starving Miskito natives in Nicaragua are getting an inexplicable psychosis called “Grisis Signis”. From my own point of view, being in a famine-stricken region due to a plague of rats would be enough reason to go nuts with a machete. Fascinating story, though.
  2. The classic Tommy Seebach “Apache” video has at least two remixes
  3. Oops. Just because he’s an environmental activist doesn’t mean he burned all the SUVs.
  4. Shades of the hashishim: Guerillas in Iraq may be hopping themselves up with military hallucinogens. That sure would help if you were a suicide bomber. It’s easier to be an asshole when you’re high, too. Chris Hedges’ account of the Bosnia war shows that hardcore murderers about to commit genocide always got really drunk first.
  5. tuliphead alerts us to important tips on how to be a rock star guitar god. genericus please take note.
  6. trinnit points out your new IM buddy problem: lol its not a virus lol im ur pal lol ur scrood sux 2 be u.
  7. Hey ranai, what do you think of this Celebrity Caricature Finder? Seems like it might piss off you guys by harvesting stuff, but it’s a fun toy.
  8. San Francisco cheese mongers and other cheesy friends, beware of morons who think you have cocaine. (Thanks, vark!)
  9. Let’s deconstruct Christmas music. It’s got to beat listening to the stuff.

a babel into the void

If eye of the list “of the amis,”, that it has this in this service, that is tests smooth-to love. She is people, admits to the year in the person. Others are new the acquaintance 0ccasional or friends, the V in the first place in the Internet, exact of you that the screw gushes on one changed cliff of left of the position. And it has then of you that I probably do not satisfy never, possibly, because it is distant characterizes he saws that therefore or their screw is various, than is not probable we with the part of the same zone. Which entire it in the common distance of the earth must, is clay/tone. The Internet can form a lot, in order to limit the world, but of a specific sense the zones do not become between we. To fine the fifteen years the friends from this new sense have earned the dozen, but too much so that they were only under, than always. Task that is does not originate them. It is of the crystal – to face the density and not of the face. It wants slowly to times that it could give the return to the distraction and to the stay of the better acquaintance and, of the idealizada before this entire communication.

What’s all this about a clam? Oh no…

After today’s phrenology session I had an interesting talk with Brain Lady. I found myself explaining to her why she sounded like a postscientific wacko at first, before I learned more about her. Most of the problem is her language. She speaks Science and has been working at very technical jobs in the mental health field for 20 years, but when she’s explaining things to a client she uses analogies and metaphors that have been totally ruined by New Age bubbleheads.

For example, she will say “I’m doing this site to push the energy back over to the other side of your brain”. On further questioning, she explains that this is a thumbnail description for a poorly understood phenomenon in which treating one site causes the voltages to go down there and up in another part of the brain. She doesn’t literally believe that she is pushing the energy around. She refers to treating multiple injuries as “like peeling off layers of an onion”. This sounds like she believes in concentric spheres of some intangible substance, but again it’s a simile. Her observations show her that multiple injuries often require multiple stages of treatment, but there isn’t any proven one-to-one correspondence between the injuries and the stages of treatment. And when she’s talking about electrical activity and mental acuity increasing after treatment, she calls it “waking up the brain”; another analogy. All of these things sound like something the local Crystal Anus Delver at the Metaphysical Bookhonk would say. In Brain Lady’s case, she’s working off many years of academic study and clinical experience in developmental disability, head injuries, special education, substance abuse treatment, and psychotherapy.

The other bad news I had for her is that her stuff sounds like Scientology. Wires on your head, healing old injuries, increased states of awareness, oh dear. You’re expecting Tom Cruise to appear stage left and congratulate you for choosing the right path. Here’s the hilarious part: she knows nothing about Scientology. As I was explaining how many parallels there are, her eyes got wider and wider. “Oh no, do people think this is like Scientology? That’s just a dumb cult!” Poor thing, she’s spent 20 years in the Science Hole and working with actual patients, and hasn’t noticed some weird cultural trends.

She pointed out that she doesn’t speak in Science much to clients because communicating the statistical links between voltage differentials and affective disorders to people with head injuries can be frustrating to both parties. I think I did manage to get across that she was using language and analogies that had been poisoned, though.

For my own part, I told her I had only really started trusting her judgment the day she went off on a rant about attribution errors and the importance of knowing your independent variables and not trusting your subjective observations, with several anecdotes of failed studies that hadn’t taken these precautions.