Saturday, August 30, 2008

Does CBS News mean it? 

CBS hired gun 'body language expert' doubted Hilary Clinton's sincerity when she threw her weight behind Obama at the convention the other night. Language Log's expert begs to differ, and has the analysis to back it up.

Labels: Barack Obama, CBS, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Language

8/30/2008 10:11:00 AM   •  

How I Am 

by Jason Shinder

When I talk to my friends I pretend I am standing on the wings

of a flying plane. I cannot be trusted to tell them how I am.
Or if I am falling to earth weighing less

than a dozen roses. Sometimes I dream they have broken up

with their lovers and are carrying food to my house.
When I open the mailbox I hear their voices

like the long upward-winding curve of a train whistle

passing through the tall grasses and ferns
after the train has passed. I never get ahead of their shadows.

I embrace them in front of moving cars. I keep them away

from my miseries because to say I am miserable is to say I am like them.

8/30/2008 09:56:00 AM   •  

Looking Around, Believing 

by Gary Soto:

How strange that we can begin at any time.
With two feet we get down the street.
With a hand we undo the rose.
With an eye we lift up the peach tree
And hold it up to the wind — white blossoms
At our feet. Like today. I started
In the yard with my daughter,
With my wife poking at a potted geranium,
And now I am walking down the street,
Amazed that the sun is only so high,
Just over the roof, and a child
Is singing through a rolled newspaper
And a terrier is leaping like a flea
And at the bakery I pass, a palm,
Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed
To the window. We're keeping busy —
This way, that way, we're making shadows
Where sunlight was, making words
Where there was only noise in the trees.

8/30/2008 09:48:00 AM   •  

Grand Old Book Party 

What to read about John McCain and the future of the GOP: "By the time party conventions roll around, we're told, many Americans are just tuning in to the presidential race. If you're just gearing up for the GOP Convention, here's a rundown of the best literature on John McCain and the future of the Republican Party." (Slate)

Labels: 2008 Elections, John McCain, Politics, Republican

8/30/2008 09:17:00 AM   •  

Friday, August 29, 2008

Americans Show Little Tolerance For Mental Illness 

...Despite Growing Belief In Genetic Cause: (Science Daily)

8/29/2008 11:52:00 PM   •  

WORLD'S FIRST (LIVING) GRASS FLIP FLOPS 

"Here’s some shoes that will (literally) grow on you – the world’s first grass flip flops. Krispy Kreme has created the unique living footwear to help stressed out workers instantly relax by giving people their own mini-park to walk around in wherever they may be." (Response Source via julia)

Labels: Flip-flop, Footwear, Krispy Kreme

8/29/2008 10:55:00 PM   •  

The epitome of tokenism 

Joe COnason: "Suddenly all anyone needs to qualify as a potential commander in chief is to be a religious ideologue with female gender characteristics?" (Salon)

Labels: Joe Conason

8/29/2008 10:24:00 PM   •  

Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia Page Altered One Day Before Nomination 

"Sarah Palin is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for Vice President of the United States in the 2008 presidential election. Yesterday, someone close to Palin made a whole bunch of edits to her Wikipedia entry making it a little more palatable for the centrists. For those who are interested in the old page, check Google’s cached version or download screenshots (might be slow to load due to file size) from August 21st 2008 and August 29th 2008 and compare the notes for yourself." (Headsetoptions)

Labels: Campaigns/Elections, John McCain, Politics, republicans, Sarah Palin, United States, United States presidential election 2008

8/29/2008 09:36:00 PM   •  

Governor Sarah Palin Has What It Takes To Be The Next Dick Cheney 

"With Sen. McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate, the Huffington Post is re-featuring Chris Kelly's May 2008 piece on the Alaska Governor" (thanks to walker)

8/29/2008 09:32:00 PM   •  

Facial Frontier 

The human face can reveal much about a person — whether they like it or not: "In his new book, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head (Yale University Press), [Raymond] Tallis sets out to make his readers into 'astonished tourists of the piece of the world that is closest to them, so they never again take for granted the head that looks at them from the mirror.' He begins his examination with the face." (National Post)

...including what is likely the first analysis of harrumphing.

8/29/2008 08:02:00 PM   •  

God and Jerk at Yale 

Getting over it: "The difference between having a college degree and not having one is far greater than where you go to college. But where you go can determine, to a large extent, who you become. Some of us become jerks. And others spend our lives trying to figure out what it meant to have been there — and how to get over it." (Chronicle of Higher Education)

8/29/2008 07:00:00 PM   •  

Childhood’s End 

Inestimable curmudgeon Theordore Dalrymple comments on the recent UNESCO report on childhood:

"...[T]he childhood that many British parents give to their offspring is so awful that it is hard to conceive of worse, at least on a mass scale. The two poles of contemporary British child rearing are neglect and overindulgence." (City Journal)

8/29/2008 06:53:00 PM   •  

In Praise of Melancholy 

Eric G, Wilson: "We are eradicating a major cultural force, the muse behind much art and poetry and music. We are annihilating melancholia." (Chronicle of Higher Education)

8/29/2008 06:49:00 PM   •  

In Defense of the Beta Blocker 

A performance-enhancing drug that is fair to use? "From a competitive standpoint, this is what makes beta blockers so interesting : they seem to level the playing field for anxious and non-anxious performers, helping nervous performers much more than they help performers who are naturally relaxed. In the British study, for example, the musician who experienced the greatest benefit was the one with the worst nervous tremor. This player's score increased by a whopping 73%, whereas the musicians who were not nervous saw hardly any effect at all.

One of the most compelling arguments against performance enhancing drugs is that they produce an arms race among competitors, who feel compelled to use the drugs even when they would prefer not to, simply to stay competitive. But this argument falls away if the effects of the drug are distributed so unequally. If it's only the nervous performers who are helped by beta blockers, there's no reason for anyone other than nervous performers to use them." — Carl Elliott, University of Minnesota bioethicist (Atlantic)

Labels: Beta blocker, Doping

8/29/2008 06:47:00 PM   •  

Sukiyaki Western Django 

"English-language Western by Japanese director Takashi Miike. The all-Japanese cast, augmented by Quentin Tarantino in two cameo roles, learned their English dialogue phonetically and attack their lines as if the words were small furry animals that need to be beaten into submission. The dialogue is crammed with weird, Christopher Walken-esque line readings and bizarre placement of emphases—phrases like "You old biddy," "Dang!" and "You reckon?" become hilariously divorced from meaning. But, like an alcoholic reduced to drinking sterno, the more you drink, the more brain cells you fry, and the better it tastes. Before long you not only start to understand Miike's "through the looking glass" English but also to appreciate the cadences. It's something like the dialogue in Deadwood or Cormac McCarthy's writing: stiff, alien, occasionally silly but not without a hypnotic elegance all its own.

But why? The answer is simple: It's a Takashi Miike film. The hardest-working man in showbiz, he's made close to 80 movies, ranging from the good to the bad to the ugly, and if he's going to make a Western, then it's going to pay tribute to the truth that Westerns have never been solely an American undertaking—they're an international language. With a title that's one part Japanese (sukiyaki: the everything-in-a-bowl beef dish) and one part Italian (Django: the title character of Sergio Corbucci's 1966 spaghetti-Western classic), Miike offers up an explosion of influences that mocks the idea of a monoculture that's immune to foreign influence. Sukiyaki Western Django is a blend of Buddhist philosophy, film noir fatalism, Shakespeare's Henry VI, and Japan's very own 12th-century Genpei War. It's a Wild West pageant of American history seen through Japanese eyes, reducing our entire frontier mythology to an ultraviolent grab for gold." (Slate)

Labels: Spaghetti Western, Takashi Miike

8/29/2008 08:40:00 AM   •  

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

End of the line? 

Jon Henley on the fate of the semicolon: "An unlikely row has erupted in France over suggestions that the semicolon's days are numbered; worse, the growing influence of English is apparently to blame. Jon Henley reports on the uncertain fate of this most subtle and misused of punctuation marks. Aida Edemariam discovers which writers love it - and which would be glad to see it disappear..." (Guardian.UK)

8/27/2008 09:43:00 PM   •  

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The Smell of Cancer 

"People who are prone to developing skin cancer have to undergo frequent exams and biopsies of suspicious moles in order to catch tumors at an early stage. But a new finding suggests a quicker, noninvasive method for detectionScientists have identified a characteristic odor profile given off by skin-cancer tumors, which might one day allow diagnosis by a wave of a detector across the skin." (Technology Review)

Labels: Cancer, Odor, Skin cancer

8/26/2008 11:37:00 PM   •  

Road Tolls Hacked 

"Despite previous reassurances about the security of the system, Nate Lawson of Root Labs claims that the unique identity numbers used to identify the FasTrak wireless transponders carried in cars can be copied or overwritten with relative ease.

This means that fraudsters could clone transponders, says Lawson, by copying the ID of another driver onto their device. As a result, they could travel for free while others unwittingly foot the bill. 'It's trivial to clone a device,' Lawson says. 'In fact, I have several clones with my own ID already.'

Lawson says that this also raises the possibility of using the FasTrak system to create false alibis, by overwriting one's own ID onto another driver's device before committing a crime. The toll system's logs would appear to show the perpetrator driving at another location when the crime was being committed, he says." (Technology Review)

8/26/2008 02:53:00 PM   •  

Ants bite, phones fly 

Finland, home of weird world championships: "Normally reserved Finns say there is no better way to celebrate the short summer months than with contests that add a jolt of adrenaline and silliness to bright summer nights." (Reuters Oddly Enough)

8/26/2008 02:51:00 PM   •  

Shut Up And Eat Your Toad 

A poem by James Tate:

The disorganization to which I currently belong
has skipped several meetings in a row
which is a pattern I find almost fatally attractive.
Down at headquarters there's a secretary
and a janitor who I shall call Suzie
and boy can she ever shoot straight.
She'll shoot you straight in the eye if you ask her to.
I mow the grass every other Saturday
and that's the day she polishes the trivets
whether they need it or not, I don't know
if there is a name for this kind of behavior,
hers or mine, but somebody once said something or another.
That's why I joined up in the first place,
so somebody could teach me a few useful phrases,
such as, "Good afternoon, my dear anal-retentive Doctor,"
and "My, that is a lovely dictionary you have on, Mrs. Smith."
Still, I hardly feel like functioning even on a brute
or loutish level. My plants think I'm one of them,
and they don't look so good themselves, or so
I tell them. I like to give them at least several
reasons to be annoyed with me, it's how they exercise
their skinny spectrum of emotions. Because.
That and cribbage. Often when I return from the club
late at night, weary-laden, weary-winged, washed out,
I can actually hear the nematodes working, sucking
the juices from the living cells of my narcissus.
I have mentioned this to Suzie on several occasions.
Each time she has backed away from me, panic-stricken
when really I was just making a stab at conversation.
It is not my intention to alarm anyone, but dear Lord
if I find a dead man in the road and his eyes
are crawling with maggots, I refuse to say
have a nice day Suzie just because she's desperate
and her life is a runaway carriage rushing toward a cliff
now can I? Would you let her get away with that kind of crap?
Who are you anyway? And what kind of disorganization is this?
Baron of the Holy Grail? Well it's about time you got here.
I was worried, I was starting to fret.

Related

• Poet of Possibilities: James Tate

Labels: James Tate

8/26/2008 12:53:00 PM   •  

Monday, August 25, 2008

Spider Webs Glamour & Architecture 

A beautiful collection of astounding works of nature, wonderfully photographed, from Dark Roasted Blend, to which readers of FmH will notice I have linked more and more frequently.

8/25/2008 09:37:00 AM   •  

35 Greatest Works of Reverse Graffiti 

"Welcome to the world of reverse graffiti, where the artist’s weapons are cleaning materials and where the enemy is the elements: wind, rain, pollution and decay. It’s an art form that removes dust or dirt rather than adding paint. Some find it intriguing, beguiling, beautiful and imaginative, whereas others look upon it in much the same way as traditional graffiti – a complete lack of respect for the law. Reverse graffiti challenges ideals and perceptions while at the same time shapes and changes the environment in which we live, whether people think for the better, or not." (Environmental Graffiti)

8/25/2008 09:33:00 AM   •  

Confidence game 

"How impostors like Clark Rockefeller capture our trust instantly - and why we're so eager to give it to them." (Boston Globe)

8/25/2008 09:16:00 AM   •  

'You Probably Knew This but Just In Case' Dept. 

Get Your War On, the movie: "You've read the Get Your War On comic strips by David Rees. They've probably caused you to puke on yourself once or twice due to involuntary laughter. Now Get Your War On is an animated video..." (23/6)

8/25/2008 09:15:00 AM   •