Teen sex education class gatecrashed by rogue snake
March 27, 2014 § Leave a comment
“Coffee,” Rossini told me, “is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera.” This is true. But the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended.
For a while – for a week or two at most – you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water.
For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.
When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink – for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thoughthe’d been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mache. There has been, on my part, a failure of observation. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Uta Barth
Strata’s ideal resident is an altogether wealthier breed of pioneering urbanaut
March 21, 2014 § Leave a comment
More than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote it, we can now say that “Romeo and Juliet” has the wrong name. Perhaps the play should be called “Juliet and Her Nurse,” which isn’t nearly as sexy, or “Romeo and Benvolio,” which has a whole different connotation.
I discovered this by writing a computer program to count how many lines each pair of characters in “Romeo and Juliet” spoke to each other, with the expectation that the lovers in the greatest love story of all time would speak more than any other pair. I wanted Romeo and Juliet to end up together — if they couldn’t in the play, at least they could in my analysis — but the math paid no heed to my desires. Juliet speaks more to her nurse than she does to Romeo; Romeo speaks more to Benvolio than he does to Juliet. Romeo gets a larger share of attention from his friends (Benvolio and Mercutio) and even his enemies (Tybalt) than he does from Juliet; Juliet gets a larger share of attention from her nurse and her mother than she does from Romeo. The two appear together in only five scenes out of 25. We all knew that this wasn’t a play predicated on deep interactions between the two protagonists, but still.
I’m blaming Romeo for this lack of communication. Juliet speaks 155 lines to him, and he speaks only 101 to her. His reticence toward Juliet is particularly inexcusable when you consider that Romeo spends more time talking than anyone else in the play. (He spends only one-sixth of his time in conversation with the supposed love of his life.) One might be tempted to blame this on the nature of the plot; of course the lovers have no chance to converse, kept apart as they are by the loathing of their families! But when I analyzed the script of a modern adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” — “West Side Story” — I found that Tony and Maria interacted more in the script than did any other pair.
All this got me thinking: Do any of Shakespeare’s lovers actually, you know, talk to each other? If Romeo and Juliet don’t, what hope do the rest of them have? read more
PHOTOGRAPH: DHA
nor dead nor drunk nor stuck with know-all Fate
March 19, 2014 § Leave a comment
The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless. The 16th-century printer who came up with it got there by mangling Cicero’s ‘De finibus bonorum et malorum’, an exposition of Stoicism, Epicureanism and the Platonism of Antiochus of Ascalon. Though most of the metaphysical subtlety has been wrung out, sense hasn’t completely: the text is haunted, as Derrida might have put it, by the piece of writing it once was.
It begins:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam hendrerit nisi sed sollicitudin pellentesque. Nunc posuere purus rhoncus pulvinar aliquam. Ut aliquet tristique nisl vitae volutpat. Nulla aliquet porttitor venenatis. Donec a dui et dui fringilla consectetur id nec massa. Aliquam erat volutpat. Sed ut dui ut lacus dictum fermentum vel tincidunt neque. Sed sed lacinia lectus. Duis sit amet sodales felis. Duis nunc eros, mattis at dui ac, convallis semper risus. In adipiscing ultrices tellus, in suscipit massa vehicula eu.
Try translating it and you get some striking effects. Of course a straightforward translation isn’t possible – for one thing, ‘lorem’ isn’t a word, it’s a chopped off bit of ‘dolorem’ – but Jaspreet Singh Boparai, a postgraduate at Cambridge, has come up with the following:
Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisitiendum. Because he will ab hold, unless but through concer, and also of those who resist. Now a pure snore disturbeded sum dust. He ejjnoyes, in order that somewon, also with a severe one, unless of life. May a cusstums offficer somewon nothing of a poison-filled. Until, from a twho, twho chaffinch may also pursue it, not even a lump. But as twho, as a tank; a proverb, yeast; or else they tinscribe nor. Yet yet dewlap bed. Twho may be, let him love fellows of a polecat. Now amour, the, twhose being, drunk, yet twhitch and, an enclosed valley’s always a laugh. In acquisitiendum the Furies are Earth; in (he takes up) a lump vehicles bien. read more
ART: [unattributed]
1888? Whitechapel Murders, Nintendo
March 14, 2014 § Leave a comment
The Bank of England’s Quarterly Review contains a detailed description of how money creation works in the UK’s fiat money economy…
And it is controversial. It rejects conventional theories of bank lending and money creation (my emphasis):
“The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks:
• Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.
• In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits.”
To be sure, numerous papers from many eminent researchers and august institutions (including the Fed, the IMF, the ECB and the Bank for International Settlements) have cast doubt upon conventional theory as an adequate explanation of money creation in a modern fiat money system. But to my knowledge this is the first time that a central bank has presented an explanation of money creation that so comprehensively departs from conventional orthodoxy…
It is of course difficult for mainstream economists to accept that the theory they have believed and taught for so many years – and upon which many models of the economy depend – is simply inadequate. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Katie West
Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves
March 6, 2014 § Leave a comment
Leningrad: The 900 Days (Sergio Leone)
Inspired by the “invasion theme” of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony and influenced by Times journalist Harrison Salisbury’s book The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, it was the story of doomed love between a cynical American newsreel cameraman and a young Soviet girl against the epic background of the siege. Leone: “Think of Gone with the Wind.” The director imagined Robert De Niro in the lead, with music by Ennio Morricone, and shooting in the USSR. It was delayed indefinitely by Leone’s inability to commit his many ideas to paper and Soviet producers’ reluctance to grant permission.
Libra (Phil Joanou)
Based on Don DeLillo’s speculative novel about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and the events leading to JFK’s assassination. Gary Oldman was to star.
The Lifted Spear (Akira Kurosawa)
Like Kagemusha, Spear would have climaxed with a grand battle involving the 16th-century warlord Nobunaga Oda. Due to wartime shortages no horses were available for the crucial scene, and the project was subsequently abandoned.
The Lily of the Valley (Max Ophüls)
Adaptation of the 1835 Balzac novel about an intense but chaste love between a man and a woman.
The Living Room (Michael Powell)
Adaptation of Graham Greene’s play set in Fifties London about a mysterious house, its occupants, and a love affair that turns tragic. Rex Harrison was to star.
The Lodger (Lino Brocka)
Written by Nick Joaquin.
The Loves of d’Annunzio and Duse (Orson Welles)
Welles wrote this screenplay for Greta Garbo (to play Eleonora Duse) and Charlie Chaplin (Gabriele d’Annunzio) and described the project as a story about two crazy monsters in a state of degenerate hyper-romanticism, with a ridiculous and theatrical passion. Neither Chaplin nor Garbo wanted to do it. read more
ART: Horyon Lee
US Advises Allies Not to Border Russia
March 4, 2014 § Leave a comment
The first map on the left shows the most common European surnames by country. read more
ART: Kitagawa Utamaro
But one day, chugging along, I noticed an old lady slowly walk toward me. I had plenty of time to stop and swerve around her; instead I ran into her and she fell
February 27, 2014 § Leave a comment
Luke and I were looking at Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights and discovered, much to our amusement, music written upon the posterior of one of the many tortured denizens of the rightmost panel of the painting which is intended to represent Hell. I decided to transcribe it into modern notation, assuming the second line of the staff is C, as is common for chants of this era.
so yes this is LITERALLY the 600-years-old butt song from hell listen
PHOTOGRAPH: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
In what is amounting to a waking nightmare, today I found a 52 page Word document called “Notes to Think About.”
February 25, 2014 § Leave a comment
Crystal Palace fans reacted to Wayne Rooney’s new £300,000 per week contract with chants of “you fat greedy bastard.”
Sadly, Mr Rooney did not respond in the manner of one of his celebrated predecessors. But he should have, because the chant is wrong. Mr Rooney is not getting £300,000 a week because he is unusually greedy: in the improbable event of being offered such money, who among us would turn it down? He is getting it because he is unusually powerful – a power which is not entirely due merely to his exceptional skill.
Palace fans, then, are committing the fundamental attribution error – they are blaming Rooney’s salary upon his personal character rather than upon his situation.
Although Palace fans are – with the odd exception – not famous for their powers of thought, this error is a common one: “greedy bankers” is a cliche, “overly powerful bankers”, whilst true, is not. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Anita Sto
M&A that drives an industry toward oligopoly is the good kind
February 20, 2014 § 1 Comment
Just as playing a lot of chess can prompt one to start seeing the world in terms of reciprocal moves, or long sessions of Photoshop can make one see reality as so many adjustable layers, cumulative Facebook use habituates users to view social reality as a “browseable archive” organized in terms of discrete yet infinitely connectable individual profiles. The “ontological assumptions about the informational character of the world” built into Facebook — the assumption that experience can be readily translated into sortable data with no meaningful loss of integrity — gradually become, Mitchell argues, the ontological assumptions of its users, producing what he calls “archival subjectivity.”
Part of this subjectivity is a preference for “convenience and automaticity” rather than “use or control”: that is, for Facebook users, what can easily be added to the archive seems more real than that which resists it. Having an automatically archived self promises ontological security, Mitchell suggests, to compensate for the “disposability of the digital world” and the erosion of traditional supports for stable identity. Also, since your identity is being built in Facebook as data without your active participation, it can be processed in various ways (laid out in a Timeline, say, or in a short clip about your year’s Facebook activity), allowing you to consume your own identity as a fascinating, perfectly targeted cultural good…
But it’s just as likely that users invert the “browsing” subjectivity rather than inhabit it unreflexively. The idea that we want sociality to be convenient and efficient is built into Facebook as a platform, but that doesn’t mean we necessarily have to inhabit that value system in using it. The idea that convenience is so irresistible that people’s yearnings are immediately and automatically reshaped in its image is itself part of capitalism’s ideology of individualism and “rational” maximization. Consumerism is anchored in the idea that people can be atomized and controlled by their desire for hyperpersonalized pleasures that other people only interfere with. But often pleasure is a matter of inconvenience, particularly when it involves social interaction. The inconvenience of other people, the circuitous routes we must take to communicate and establish shared bases for experience — these are inefficient but also so pleasurable that we often claim this pursuit of intimacy is the only “real” pleasure. Habituation to Facebook’s ontological assumptions, which reject such a view of intimacy, may have the effect of foregrounding the tension between the platforms value system and our own, rather than allowing Facebook to function hegemonically as a kind of “pre-understanding.” We can end up embracing simultaneously the browseable reality Facebook provides and the unbrowseable reality that it frames and valorizes despite itself. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Bart Ramakers
“My favorite sort of parade,” observed Washington Heights resident Galvane Hendsberg, struggling for adequate words. “Not too much fuss and bother, easy to miss. I myself didn’t notice a thing.”
February 18, 2014 § Leave a comment
On its face, flipping on white noise before hitting the sack must be the most counterintuitive idea out there. Want to sleep better? Simple solution: make a bunch of noise. Sweet dreams ahoy.
And yet, not only do some people swear they can’t get to sleep without a fan running, there are even companies that will sell you optimized noise-makers for helping you get the best of your bed rest. What is up with our brains and our ears?
The short answer: white noise is better noise. At least for (some) sleepers.
White noise, if you’re using the technical definition, is a consistent noise that comes out evenly across all hearable frequencies. Say you’re a musician. To play a middle C note, you play something that’s about 261.6 hertz, the unit of frequency. White noise is just an equal amount at every frequency, from low to high, that a human being can hear. To keep the music analogy going, it’s a gigantic band all playing a slightly different note. (Machines pushed to the limit, like fans, are especially good at hitting these notes.)
When a noise wakes you up in the night, it’s not the noise itself that wakes you up, per se, but the sudden change or inconsistencies in noise that jar you. White noise creates a masking effect, blocking out those sudden changes that frustrate light sleepers, or people trying to fall asleep. “The simple version is that hearing still works while you’re asleep,” says Seth S. Horowitz, a neuroscientist and author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind.
“This is why the majority of bedpartners prefer the constant white noise of a CPAP machine rather than their spouse’s crescendo-decrescendo snoring sounds,” Clete A. Kushida, director of the Stanford Center for Human Sleep Research, writes in an email to Popular Science.
Makes sense, right? read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Hagiwara Yoshihiro
my nerves are bad to-night 