January 31st, 2018 7:18am
posts from 2018 / 01
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January 30th, 2018 5:56pm
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January 30th, 2018 7:39am
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January 30th, 2018 7:39am
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January 29th, 2018 6:30pm
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January 29th, 2018 6:29pm
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Game of Death Japanese program (Bruce Lee & Robert Clouse, 1978)
January 29th, 2018 7:59am
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January 28th, 2018 8:54pm
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True love never goes extinct. Illustration by Ron Embleton for Omni magazine (February 1988).
January 28th, 2018 3:29pm
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January 27th, 2018 9:04am
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January 26th, 2018 8:02pm
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January 26th, 2018 8:01pm
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January 26th, 2018 8:00pm
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January 26th, 2018 8:00pm
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well i’m impressed
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Throughout Caribbean, Central America, the northern edges of South America, and even in south Florida, there can be found a pleasant-looking beachy sort of tree, often laden with small greenish-yellow fruits that look not unlike apples.
This is the manchineel, known sometimes as the beach apple, or more accurately in Spanish-speaking countries as la manzanilla de la muerte, which translates to “the little apple of death,” or as arbol de la muerte, “tree of death.”
“Warning: all parts of manchineel are extremely poisonous. The content in this document is strictly informational. Interaction with and ingestion of any part of this tree may be lethal,” write Michael G. Andreu and Melissa H. Friedman of the University of Florida in a brief guide to the tree.
This is not an exaggeration. The fruits, though described as sweet and tasty, are extraordinarily toxic. Fatalities are not known in modern literature, though it’s certainly possible that people have died from eating the fruit of the manchineel. “Shipwrecked sailors have been reported to have eaten manchineel fruits and, rather than dying a violent death, they had inflammations and blistering around the mouth. Other people have been diagnosed with severe stomach and intestinal issues,” says Roger Hammer, a naturalist and botanist who has written many books about the flora of Florida. (Source)
January 24th, 2018 9:42pm
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This makes me laugh so much
“Yeah I’m in a bouncy house, but will this country ever bounce back from our current administration?”
January 24th, 2018 7:55am
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January 24th, 2018 7:38am
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January 22nd, 2018 11:02pm
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“Wizard vs. the Wizards” competition, 1982, hosted by Catherine Mary Stewart. It was arguably the first “e-sports” competition, with video gamers going head to head.
Randy Meisner performed live. He heard it was a convention for burgundy velour tracksuit swingers only.
January 21st, 2018 9:53pm
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January 21st, 2018 9:52pm
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In 1670, Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, ordered the planting of the Forest of Tronçais to provide masts for the French navy 200 years hence. His order established one of the principal stands of oaks in Europe, carefully interplanted with beeches and larches to encourage them to grow straight, tall, and free of knots. By the time they matured, in the 19th century, they were no longer necessary. Historian Fernand Braudel wrote, “Colbert had thought of everything except the steamship.”
January 21st, 2018 11:57am
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Down to the last three chapters of Ulysses. I cannot wait to be done with this book.
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January 20th, 2018 6:59pm
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I was in orbit during a US Govt shutdown. The Cdn Prime Minister tried to call, but no one was at NASA HQ to answer. I did talk to several nice people on the ham radio, though.
January 20th, 2018 6:58pm
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January 20th, 2018 11:38am
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January 19th, 2018 8:57pm
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January 19th, 2018 8:54pm
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The sign you always want to see when you’re already late for work in the morning
January 18th, 2018 6:47pm
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Rest in peace, Dean Allen
I heard a couple of days ago that Dean Allen died last weekend. His friend Om Malik has a fine remembrance of him here.
Who was Dean? There are so many ways to answer that question. You could call him a text designer, who loved the web and wanted to make it beautiful, long before others thought of making typography an essential part of the online reading experience. You could call him a Canadian, even though he spent a large part of his life in Avignon, South of France, with his partner. A writer whose prose could make your soul ache who stopped writing, because, it didn’t matter. Or you could think of him as like an old-fashioned: sweet, bitter and strong, who left you intoxicated because of his friendship.
Dean was a web person…someone who could do all of the things necessary to make a website – design, write, code – and damn him, he did them all really well. I got to know him through a pair of sites he built, Textism and Cardigan. His writing was clever and pithy and engaging and you wanted to hate him but couldn’t because he was the nicest guy, the sort of person who would invite you to stay at his house even if you’d never even met him before. He also built Favrd, which was a direct inspiration for Stellar.
Weirdly, or maybe not, my two biggest memories of Dean involve food. One of my favorite little pieces of writing by him (or anyone else for that matter), is How to Cook Soup:
First, you need some water. Fuse two hydrogen with one oxygen and repeat until you have enough. While the water is heating, raise some cattle. Pay a man with grim eyes to do the slaughtering, preferably while you are away. Roast the bones, then add to the water. Go away again. Come back once in awhile to skim. When the bones begin to float, lash together into booms and tow up the coast. Reduce. Keep reducing. When you think you have reduced enough, reduce some more. Raise some barley. When the broth coats the back of a spoon and light cannot escape it, you are nearly there. Pause to mop your brow as you harvest the barley. Search in vain for a cloud in the sky. Soak the barley overnight (you will need more water here), then add to the broth. When, out of the blue, you remember the first person you truly loved, the soup is ready. Serve.
In 2002, when Meg and I were staying in France for a month between moves, Dean and his partner invited us down to their house for a couple of days. Like I said, we’d never actually met and he collected us at the train station all the same. We ate like kings while we were there, but the thing I remember most (aside from their house being in the middle of a beautiful vineyard in Avignon) is after lunch one day, he just left the pot with the leftover soup on the stove. (Soup, again! No barley though.) “Oh, you forgot to put the soup away. Do you think it’s still good?” we said. Dean just shrugged and replied gently, so as not imply we were idiot germaphobic Americans for always putting any leftover food into the fridge immediately, that you don’t really need to refrigerate stuff like that, not if you’re going to reheat it and finish it in a day or two. Even now, whenever I have stovetop leftovers, I always just leave them out and think of Dean whenever I do.
I hope you find some peace, my friend.
January 18th, 2018 6:43pm
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George: “There’s just no justice. This experience has changed me! It’s made me more cynical, more bitter, more jaded!”
Jerry: “Really?”
George: “Sure, why not.”January 17th, 2018 8:39pm
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January 17th, 2018 8:39pm
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January 16th, 2018 10:10pm
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January 14th, 2018 9:15pm
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Susan Kare, famous graphic artist who designed many of the fonts, icons, and images for Apple, NeXT, Microsoft, and IBM. (1980s)
wow
awesome.
January 14th, 2018 9:15pm
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At the Cable Car Museum
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DJ Resentment
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January 9th, 2018 7:07am
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January 8th, 2018 9:49pm
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January 8th, 2018 9:43pm
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January 8th, 2018 9:42pm
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January 7th, 2018 9:01pm
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January 7th, 2018 8:57pm
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Ssh, the house cleaners are here.
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January 2nd, 2018 8:18pm
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Happy new year! Here’s John Berkey’s cover art to the January 1, 1976 issue of Modern Medicine, along with the 1929 Norman Rockwell it’s playing on.
January 1st, 2018 8:26pm
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January 1st, 2018 4:15pm
