June 2009
English Language Irregularities
Three distinctly different transformations from present to past-tense:
Slide -> Slid
Glide -> Glided
Ride -> Rode
What the heck?
Bonus homework: figure out all the words that end in “-id”. It seems like a pretty finite number at first thought.
So far, I’ve come up with the following: id, slid, bid, hid, lid, arachnid, fetid. Any others?
WatchEyes on the Prize episode 1 - “Awakenings”
Originally broadcast in 1987 and 1990, Eyes on the Prize is one of the most important records we have of the American civil rights movement. It’s an epic 14-hour miniseries chronicling the years 1954-1985 and featuring testimony from the major (and less major) players in the fight - many of whom have died since the documentary was...
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“Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we...”
– Lewis H. Lapham, in the inaugural issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
Earlier in that essay on the importance of historical perspectives and voices, he also remarks:
We have nothing else with which to build the future except the lumber of the past - history exploited as natural resource and...
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My Son's Gamble →
From the NY Times Magazine, a surprisingly understanding look at poker addiction vs. poker as a career. The narrator’s son gets involved in online poker during college, and it quickly subsumes all his other interests until he eventually decides to quit college and go pro.
One interesting avenue not explored here is examining how risk-taking addiction is actually encouraged in other...
The best banner ad ever? →
Just keep clicking…
Infrastructure for Souls: a comparison of... →
A wonderful essay in Third Canopy on the development of megachurch and corporate aesthetic, complete with great photos. Some of the connections are strained, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Another attribute of note is the way the essay is laid out, trying to capture some of the discrete advancement of page-turns in an online environment. Each spread is carefully laid out like a print...
95 Percent Of Opinions Withheld On Visit To Family →
This is basically how I get along with my parents, complete with embarassing internal condescension. :(
“All that a music review does now is reinforce the opinion that somebody already...”
– Christopher Weingarten, talking about the death of music criticism.
I’m beginning to wonder if this is starting to be true of movie reviews as well. One of the downsides of being able to aggregate dozens of reviews is that you can always find a review that backs up your opinion. (Well, maybe...
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of...”
– Say what you will about his inconsistent movie ratings, but Roger Ebert is one of the funniest writers out there when he’s irked at having sat through a bad film. Most of the time, his one-star reviews end up being more hilarious than the actual films being reviewed.
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“The Internet isn’t a text we can all read and interpret differently. It’s not...”
– Emily Gould, in “Why I write for free.”
She writes in response to Benjamin Kunkel’s “Lingering” essay for n+1, which praised some of the joys of the web while still putting it down as unsuited for “more serious writing.”
Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome →
Probably the most frightening disease I’ve ever heard of, mainly due to this description from a New Yorker profile by Richard Preston:
A child born with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome seems normal at first, but by the age of three months he has become a so-called floppy baby, and can’t hold up his head or sit up. His diapers may have orange sand in them. When the boy cuts his first teeth, he...
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WatchDancing Stephen Colbert!
“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke (via psychotherapy and robot-heart)
One of my best friends is currently struggling with the (regional) expectations people have about getting married to your significant other. Amongst her peer group, most are either engaged or getting engaged soon. She isn’t and feels...
WatchFootage of the God of War III demo at E3 (HD version)
Ridiculously violent, and just as crazy-epic as the previous two installments. It’s one of the handful of games that really captures a sense of scale in the architecture, making the environments one of the most enjoyable parts of playing.
“Aby Warburg’s library opened in Hamburg in 1926. In Manguel’s telling, Warburg...”
– Mandy Brown, relating an anecdote from The Library at Night.
This, I think, is the finest vision of reading: an adventure that sends you spinning through the annals of history through other minds and places, picking out a theme to view kaleidoscopically from the vantage of many others. It’s...
“Conversation, as the late philosopher Richard Rorty liked to say, is the name of...”
– Mark Edmunson, in the closing money-shot of an essay on why bores are so annoying.
I found myself torn between nodding in agreement and wincing at the anecdotes that reminded me too much of personal experience. I find the bores I know to be more terrifying than anything; I recognize parts of myself...
David Bordwell explaining cognitive film studies →
He makes a sideways jog in connecting it to evolutionary biology, but his post still stands as the best explanation I’ve seen of the field and how it differs from traditional film theory. Yet another example of the hard sciences augmenting the social sciences in a complementary fashion.
Watchimperialwizard:
People invade Hipster store wearing Hammer pants
For Zoe, who is currently rocking the woods of northern Michigan with shiny gold pants.
