“Crank Resolutions” — Mersault, on All Creatures Will Make Merry.
I want my life to be the way this song sounds. (Maybe not so much the lyrics, but.)
(from Thought Catalog)
“Somehow always be in a relationship. Fact: Boring people always get laid. It’s like they spot each other across the room at Kohls and they’re just like, “Do you like the color blue, In N’ Out, and Napoleon Dynamite? Let’s like be together forever in boring bliss. Let’s talk about the weather or reenact that “Van down by the river” joke 10,000 times and wear sweater vests and have no political opinions and be utterly bland like a scoop of vanilla ice cream on a 68 degree day.” Meanwhile, the people with a biting edge can’t connect with 80% of the population so they end up alone in bed with their opinions.”
I’m a little late with this, but it’s pretty timeless. And pretty awesome. Check your pretensions about not being pretentious at the door.
Absolutely mortifies me whenever I think about it long enough.
Here’s a snippet from Patrick Haggard’s review article published in Nature, December 2008:
Nevertheless, the experience of making a voluntary action is clearly different from that of an equivalent passive movement that is applied to the body: as Wittgenstein asked, “What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” More importantly, the conscious intention to make an action seems to cause the action itself: we feel we have ‘free will.’ Most neuroscientists are suspicious of this idea, because it implies a “ghost in the machine.” Rather, both conscious intention and physical movement might be consequences of brain activity. Wegner, for example, has proposed that the human mind assumes a causal path from conscious intention to action in order to explain the correlation between them… . A more radical view suggests that conscious intention is not a bona fide mental state at all, but rather an inference that is retrospectively inserted into the stream of consciousness as the hypothetical cause of the physical movement of our bodies. This view receives support from studies of psychosis, in which experiences of intention are associated with unusual causal explanations of connections between events. (Emphasis added)
Life as one huge confabulation?
“Lemonade” — Braids, on Native Speaker.
Bring on the summer! — eventually?
In a majorly procrastinatory mood — just saw this!
In answer, I go to Duke, but I’m not sure if I thrive at Duke, per se. It’s a strange school and a toxic environment for the students who haven’t yet learned how to navigate the culture here. (Lots and lots of bad press in the recent past; it’s not all true, but it’s not all false either.)
(from Techdirt)
“For starters, the plan is confusing. You get 20 page views for free. You can also get around the paywall five times per day if you come via a search engine. Or are reading one of their blogs. Or come via a link from another site, which might mean I can link to NYT stories, but why risk it? Top news is sorta free and certain stories might be free. Maybe. Then, if you’re a paper subscriber you get the website for free. Okay, so what’s the paywall. For $15 for every four weeks (not every month), you get access to everything on a laptop/desktop or a smartphone. But not an iPad (um, unless you use a browser, I guess). For $5 more you lose the smartphone access, but gain iPad/tablet access. Huh? Exactly. For $35 every four weeks you can get the NY Times on both a smartphone and the iPad. Oh, and if you pay, you still see all the ads. And, finally, this is the introductory pricing. Who the hell knows what the final pricing is. So sign up and expect to have to pay more later. Isn’t that appealing?”
(from Thought Catalog)
“One of the largest, softest, most complex areas of the human body is the ass. That asses are both sexual and fecal seems vaguely confusing. One considers the dual nature of asses and thinks “Freud, did Freud write about this, seems like he didn’t, seems like maybe he didn’t.” Asses are actually pretty rare. They seem to manifest mostly on mammals with 4 limbs of a certain length. Studies have shown that the ass evolved from the tail.”
Don’t know why my 12 a.m. self still find this funny. Will never outgrow silliness.
(from Thought Catalog)
“Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.”
(from Slate, again, only because the quip at the end of the paragraph here killed me.)
“In another case, an epileptic woman underwent an unsuccessful left temporal lobectomy to help stop debilitating seizures. Klüver-Bucy symptoms, including hypersexuality, emerged following the surgery. She began masturbating in public and aggressively soliciting her family members and neighbors for sex. After having another seizure, she was brought to the emergency room, where, after a half hour in the waiting area, she began performing fellatio on an elderly cardiac patient. (This may or may not be one of the few examples where one person’s syndrome is another’s lucky day; it’s also unclear if this was a display of hypersexuality or hyperorality, but it’s inevitable, perhaps, that the twain should occasionally meet.)”
(from Slate)
“For proof that NPR letter-writers are the stodgiest, whiniest, most self-importantly insufferable snobs of all time, just search through the network’s archives, which records the letters that All Things Considered and other NPR shows read on-air once or twice a week. Among the many, many topics that listeners have deemed off-limits for NPR, you’ll find blogging (“another example of the slow decline of our once-educated society”); Tiger Woods (“what a waste of my time”); the National Enquirer (NPR’s citing it as a source “shook me to the core”); adulterous Gov. Mark Sanford (“Can’t NPR reporters find more important events going on in the world?”); comedians Adam Carolla and Mo Rocca; the rapper Waka Flocka Flame (“For this, I donate part of my precious pension?”); Twitter (“the CB radio of our era—just as much hype, just as much lasting impact”); Bristol Palin (“The only thing this story provoked me to do was change the station”); Levi Johnston (“We do not care about this subject”); Mel Gibson (“Shame on the producers of ATC for allowing such a scrape at the very bottom of the barrel”); heavy metal legend Dio (“You didn’t have to do it just because he died recently”); e-books (they can’t compare to “the smell of new paper”); the iPad (“a foolish waste of time”); the thought of children using the iPad (“Hopefully, this will be followed up by an uplifting story about the great things that are happening to children in the realm of outdoor play and unhooking from screen time”); and, perennially, sports. “You can’t mention sports without someone saying, ‘Why are you covering sports—it’s just a bunch of Neanderthals, it’s just a bunch of fascists!’ ” says NPR sports correspondent (and Slate sports podcast “Hang Up and Listen” panelist) Mike Pesca.”
Hahaha. Snobbery at its finest.
