February 2012
1 post
January 2012
10 posts
Tennessee State Sen., sponsor of the Don't-Say-Gay... →
This story is actually kind of a beautiful illustration of what irony looks like. Sen. Stacey Campfield is the champion of a bill to restrict the discussion of sexuality in Tennessee schools. He recently made comments that AIDS was caused by a gay flight attendant having sex with a monkey. An opponent of sex education making such an idiotically uninformed claim is about the equivalent of an...
Craigslist opposes SOPA →
And you should too! Fight for a free internet.
Creating multicellular organisms in a lab →
Well, I guess we win.
Is the Obama Administration actively trying to... →
No. No they’re not.
Read it before a Paulster tries to tell you something about it.
WatchCat bounce!
Bests of 2011
There’s an argument to be made against the end of the year list. It’s a lot like the argument against New Years as a holiday, really: It’s an arbitrary date, a length of time without major cultural significance, etc. But I like the holiday and I like the lists. For one thing, it allows me to catch up on new art and media, which I don’t always have a good opportunity to do...
December 2011
7 posts
Republicans attempting to discourage students,... →
To anyone who has ever claimed that both parties are essentially the same: when is the last time you heard about Democrats trying to discourage religious people from voting? Hell, when’s the last time you heard of the Dems doing anything so brazen, anything at all, to make it less convenient for ANYONE to vote?
Just another thing to remember for the next time any Republican tries to sell...
November 2011
11 posts
Bentley Owen @ Friendly Atheist on Sitcoms and... →
Granted, there are a ton of groups who are basically not represented at all by mainstream TV, this one is of course worth thinking about.
Aki Kaurismäki movies you should probably see:
The Man Without a Past, Hamlet Goes Business, anything about the Leningrad Cowboys, Match Factory Girl, Le Havre (in theaters now! Do it!)
Aki Kaurismäki movies you don’t need to see:
Ariel, Lights in the Dusk.
Everything else, I can’t give you advice on. I’m sorry, I’m only human.
America's greatest threats →
October 2011
2 posts
This just in from the past →
Hatt, baby.
September 2011
5 posts
Professors: Should they be more or less hot? →
Robot language →
Australian robots have invented their own language. Maybe this explains why Aboriginal languages are so weird.
Also, DUDE.
August 2011
3 posts
Life Before Dinosaurs →
Trust the 7-year-old to tell you about precambrian life. Totally my new favorite period of Earth history.
1 tag
July 2011
2 posts
Araby Potter →
A rad little discussion of Arabic varieties and considerations when dubbing western media. Apparently nothing says drama to the Arabic world like Syrian.
June 2011
2 posts
“Hercules Unchained, in its striking fusion of sophisticated contaminatio and...”
– Clauss 2008
Happy Father’s Day. Mine’s the best.
May 2011
3 posts
WatchThe Joy Formidable - Whirring
Note, I don’t like them JUST because they’re North Welsh. They’re also really fantastic. I mean shoots, look at ‘em. Basically, Fuck yeah noisy power pop.
Otomata Generative Sequencer →
This is one of the cleverest and most gorgeous things that the world wide tubes have ever delivered me - and so perfectly allegorical for linguistic theoretical models, too. A little input, tight constraints, and you’ve got fluent, flowing music in no time.
Famously ‘froed painter Bob Ross once said on his show that, if you’ve got the right tools and just start creating,...
April 2011
1 post
"Better Than English" - Untranslatable words! →
Great place to learn about Korean aigoo (roughly ‘FML’) or Rarotongan papakata (‘to have one leg shorter than the other’). New favorite website? Possible.
March 2011
2 posts
"Srimp" →
Heard “Srimp” on a tv show filmed in the South somewhere. Intrigued. Googled. Found this great post.
This is the affected pronunciation of over-refined school girls, who cannot bring themselves to utter the homely English sound of sh when combined with an r, for fear apparently of distorting their faces.
February 2011
5 posts
Dostana: Bollywood on gay people →
In 2008, Bollywood had the brilliant idea of adapting the apparently execrable I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. This review of the film leaves one thinking it was on the one hand a better movie than Chuck and Larry and yet a worse cultural phenomenon. It’s an interesting idea - India has a lot more to lose by producing blithely homophobic than America. The film here was very...