Kitty has been posting some disjointedly beautiful stuff recently. I always feel guilty, reading beautiful writing and knowing it’s coming from someone’s life falling apart in slow motion, watching someone suffer and knowing that it’s a major force behind their creative efforts.
Month: June 2004
My friends need a punch line
My buddy Duncan just got a new URL, and now he and Erik make a good intro to a joke: A Chinaman and a French guy walk into a bar…
Do, Don’t
I got hold of a galley of the Vice Magazine compendium of all their Fashion Dos and Don’ts. Funny funny funny, especially assuming the final version has better print quality.
Mottoes
An entrepreneur says “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” A bureaucrat says “Nothing ventured, nothing lost.”
Which are you? What risks are you willing to take, and what risks are you not willing to take?
It is said that happy children, beause they are optimistic about their abilities and the risks that they take, climb too high in trees, swim out too far, run too soon into streets, and therefore die more often than the scared and unhappy little ones, who tend to stay at home hiding under the blankets crying.
Which child were you, and which child would you like to have been? As an adult, do you overestimate your capabilities, and does that get you into similar, if not as life-threatening, trouble?
Alternate Reality
I think that I live in a reality which is totally distinct from that of Bill O’Reilly. Primary distinctions include his conviction that black is white and night is day, but there are other, more subtle disagreements as well.
Winning Argument
Brilliant new blog: Winning Argument. It’s like a cocktail-party political cheat sheet, or maybe a set of talking points for reasonable people. Each day they explain, in simple terms that you can remember and discuss with others, why we’re being ruled by, as Brad DeLong says, “these imbeciles,” or as I would say, fucktard wing-nuts. It reminds me, for some reason, of D-Squared’s challenge to the general world: show me one thing those nutscrapes have done right.
Subjectively Funny
Bookdwarf’s officemate has, as her ringtone, the first few bars of Debaser. Just that shrill opening guitar line. I think this is hilarious. Bookdwarf, because she has to hear it, does not. But MIDI is inherently funny. Just look at Steve’s Punk MIDI Page. Laff riot.
Almost as funny as Nut Poppers. Because, you know, owie.
Aesthetic
The skater/slacker aesthetic relies on appropriation of blue-collar trappings, but it can go too far: on the way to work today I saw a skinny skater boy in paint-spattered workpants, cut off at the knee, and an oversized work shirt like those worn by contractors, gas-station attendants, and their emulators. He was carrying a fold-up toolkit and a 10-gallon bucket of tools. And riding a skateboard. And stuff kept falling out of the bucket.
Other strangeness: race bicycle, clipless pedals and shoes, messenger bag, and sundress.
…
Ken MacLoed has posted a short elegy for the better days of our nation, and the Gadflyer is writing about Moonies and their theocratic billiionaire leader hanging out with senate types.
Maybe Fafblog! really is the only one that can explain how this world works.
Debt, Again
Neither a borrower nor a lender be, at least, not in a market like this.
Secretly Ironic 