LITEROTICA PODCAST
LIT CAMS (200 Free Tokens)ADULT TOYSVOD MOVIES

Good Reads

Facebook cofounder on Burning Man and turnkey camping.

I have opinions on this. Not Burning Man in particular (I've never been), but on what wealthy people do to cool small scenes and communities (gentrification etc) they invade. But it's an interesting read nonetheless.

http://0.tqn.com/d/sanfrancisco/1/0/c/S/-/-/Freedman_Burning_Man_10.jpg

The animosity towards wealthy burners is supposedly based on the concept that they are violating the core principle of Radical Self-Reliance. People too often lose sight of the fact that this is a directional stance and not something actually achievable. Self-reliance is a fully continuous spectrum that extends in both directions forever. Did you build your camp by yourself? Did you pave the road that led to it? Did you grow your own food? Did you weld the frame of your bike? Did you raise yourself as a baby? Every burner is as radically dependent on the community as they are on themselves. When the Dislocated Hipsters came, most of them lived in RVs. Though this would be considered a cop-out by average burning man standards, it was still incredibly adventurous for them, and they learned e.g., how to start a generator and how to wash your hair with only a few ounces of water. I imagine the experience is somewhat similar for the “turnkey” folks; no matter how much assistance they get, at the very least they still need to learn how to keep themselves hydrated.

The founder of Burning Man, Larry Harvey, has left no room for doubt that he sees the world similarly, and all writings by core members of the org are consistent. Burning Man is for absolutely everyone. Everyone. That’s what Radical Inclusion means. If you’re a starving artist, you should go. (if you want to, of course!) If you’re a plumber, you should go. If you’re a billionaire, you should go. If you’re a Saudi Prince that can only go if a turnkey camp is provided for you, please, please come. I’ll make you a sandwich. If you believe you’re a member of the class of people who actually deserve to be there, well then I definitely want you to keep going. One day, you’ll get it. Elitism in all forms distracts us from the truth of our common humanity.​
- read the full article Radical Inclusion vs. Radical Self-Reliance at Burning Man (from Medium)​
 
http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/5227889669beddd11b91d363-800-/nelumbo_nucifera_fruit_-_botanic_garden_adelaide.jpg

Does the lotus fruit image above make your skin crawl?

Up to 16% of people (18% of females and 11% of males) become viscerally upset after looking at images of clustered holes, according to the first ever study on the condition known as trypophobia. These clusters of holes are common in nature, also including honeycombs and clusters of soap bubbles.

One sufferer reports: " can’t really face small, irregularly or asymmetrically placed holes, they make me like, throw up in my mouth, cry a little bit, and shake all over, deeply."

It turns out this strange revulsion could be rooted in biology, according to the study by researchers Geoff Cole and Arnold Wilkins, of the University of Essex, in the journal Psychological Science.

"There may be an ancient evolutionary part of the brain telling people that they are looking at a poisonous animal," Cole said in a press release. The disgust we feel is an evolutionary advantage, even if we don't know it consciously, because it sends people with trypophobia running as far as possible from the holey thing.​

- read the full article Science Explains Why This Image Disgusts Some People (from Business Insider)​
 
http://the-toast.net/okay/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/swordhat2-300x202.jpg

He woke up ambiguously. “Hmm,” he seemed to say as he looked warily around him. Time for another day of swords or drugs or making business, whatever his job was.

He lit seventeen cigarettes, because who the fuck cared. “I’m a man,” he announced to the room. “I’m a goddamn man and sometimes I have to make the tough decisions that no one asked me to make and my jaw looks like a shovel and I have an important job, so fuck you,” just in case someone was listening.

He got out of bed.​
- read the full article A Day In the Life of a Troubled Male Antihero (from The Toast)​
 
The Puchallas had rescued Quita from an orphanage in Liberia, brought her to America and then signed her over to a couple they barely knew. Days later, they had no idea what had become of her.

When she arrived in the United States, Quita says, she "was happy … coming to a nicer place, a safer place. It didn't turn out that way," she says today. "It turned into a nightmare."

The teenager had been tossed into America's underground market for adopted children, a loose Internet network where desperate parents seek new homes for kids they regret adopting. Like Quita, now 21, these children are often the casualties of international adoptions gone sour.

Through Yahoo and Facebook groups, parents and others advertise the unwanted children and then pass them to strangers with little or no government scrutiny, sometimes illegally, a Reuters investigation has found. It is a largely lawless marketplace. Often, the children are treated as chattel, and the needs of parents are put ahead of the welfare of the orphans they brought to America.

The practice is called "private re-homing," a term typically used by owners seeking new homes for their pets. Based on solicitations posted on one of eight similar online bulletin boards, the parallels are striking.​
 
A true entrepreneur

http://www.trbimg.com/img-522f55c0/turbine/la-car-dealer-cal-worthington-dies-at-92-20130910/400/16x9

If you watched television in Southern California in the 1970s and beyond, it was impossible to miss Cal Worthington, the lanky pitchman in the cowboy hat touting deals on a sprawling car lot with his "dog Spot."

"Spot," however, was anything but a dog — think lion, tiger, bull, penguin, anteater, iguana, even a whale. And Worthington, the Oklahoma transplant who rode and wrestled with the exotic creatures in one of TV's wackiest and longest-running ad campaigns, kept the gag going for decades, building a cult following along with one of the most successful car dealerships west of the Mississippi. "Go see Cal" became a part of Southern Californians' vocabulary.
[...]
Calvin Coolidge Worthington was born in Bly, Okla., on Nov. 27, 1920, and grew up in the poverty of the Dust Bowl, the seventh of nine children. His home had no running water and was heated by a wood stove. His father, a man who, Worthington once remarked, "couldn't sell eyes to a blind man," was a common laborer.

Worthington quit school at age 13 to help support his family and worked as a dollar-a-day cowboy. He also worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps.

When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the Army Air Forces and at 21 became a B-17 pilot. He was among the first bomber pilots to lead daytime raids over Berlin. In all, he flew 29 missions with the Army's 390th Bomber Group, including raids over Hamburg and Frankfurt, and earned a Distinguished Flying Cross.
[...]
"I don't do anything very well," Worthington told The Times. "I just stick at it."​
- read the full article Cal Worthington dies at 92; car dealer known for wacky 'dog Spot' ads (from The Los Angeles Times)​
 
Laurel said:


Does the lotus fruit image above make your skin crawl?

Up to 16% of people (18% of females and 11% of males) become viscerally upset after looking at images of clustered holes, according to the first ever study on the condition known as trypophobia. These clusters of holes are common in nature, also including honeycombs and clusters of soap bubbles.

One sufferer reports: " can’t really face small, irregularly or asymmetrically placed holes, they make me like, throw up in my mouth, cry a little bit, and shake all over, deeply."

It turns out this strange revulsion could be rooted in biology, according to the study by researchers Geoff Cole and Arnold Wilkins, of the University of Essex, in the journal Psychological Science.

"There may be an ancient evolutionary part of the brain telling people that they are looking at a poisonous animal," Cole said in a press release. The disgust we feel is an evolutionary advantage, even if we don't know it consciously, because it sends people with trypophobia running as far as possible from the holey thing.​

- read the full article Science Explains Why This Image Disgusts Some People (from Business Insider)​
Click to expand...


ew ew ew ew I'm glad I'm not the only one. Fuck, get it out of my head.
 
Laurel said:
The Puchallas had rescued Quita from an orphanage in Liberia, brought her to America and then signed her over to a couple they barely knew. Days later, they had no idea what had become of her.

When she arrived in the United States, Quita says, she "was happy … coming to a nicer place, a safer place. It didn't turn out that way," she says today. "It turned into a nightmare."

The teenager had been tossed into America's underground market for adopted children, a loose Internet network where desperate parents seek new homes for kids they regret adopting. Like Quita, now 21, these children are often the casualties of international adoptions gone sour.

Through Yahoo and Facebook groups, parents and others advertise the unwanted children and then pass them to strangers with little or no government scrutiny, sometimes illegally, a Reuters investigation has found. It is a largely lawless marketplace. Often, the children are treated as chattel, and the needs of parents are put ahead of the welfare of the orphans they brought to America.

The practice is called "private re-homing," a term typically used by owners seeking new homes for their pets. Based on solicitations posted on one of eight similar online bulletin boards, the parallels are striking.​
Click to expand...

I just finished reading this whole series and I have to warn you - don't read this unless you're ready to be angry to the point of homicide. And completely disgusted/horrified.
 
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/mccandless-580.jpeg

From a cryptic diary found among his possessions, it appeared that McCandless had been dead for nineteen days. A driver’s license issued eight months before he perished indicated that he was twenty-four years old and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. After his body was flown out of the wilderness, an autopsy determined that it weighed sixty-seven pounds and lacked discernible subcutaneous fat. The probable cause of death, according to the coroner’s report, was starvation.

In “Into the Wild,” the book I wrote about McCandless’s brief, confounding life, I came to a different conclusion. I speculated that he had inadvertently poisoned himself by eating seeds from a plant commonly called wild potato, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum. According to my hypothesis, a toxic alkaloid in the seeds weakened McCandless to such a degree that it became impossible for him to hike out to the highway or hunt effectively, leading to starvation. Because Hedysarum alpinum is described as a nontoxic species in both the scientific literature and in popular books about edible plants, my conjecture was met with no small amount of derision, especially in Alaska.
[...]
The debate over why McCandless perished, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering, and occasionally flaring, for more than two decades now. But last December, a writer named Ronald Hamilton posted a paper on the Internet that brings fascinating new facts to the discussion. Hamilton, it turns out, has discovered hitherto unknown evidence that appears to close the book on the cause of McCandless’s death.​
- read the full article How Chris McCandless Died (from The New Yorker)​
 
Laurel said:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/mccandless-580.jpeg

From a cryptic diary found among his possessions, it appeared that McCandless had been dead for nineteen days. A driver’s license issued eight months before he perished indicated that he was twenty-four years old and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. After his body was flown out of the wilderness, an autopsy determined that it weighed sixty-seven pounds and lacked discernible subcutaneous fat. The probable cause of death, according to the coroner’s report, was starvation.

In “Into the Wild,” the book I wrote about McCandless’s brief, confounding life, I came to a different conclusion. I speculated that he had inadvertently poisoned himself by eating seeds from a plant commonly called wild potato, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum. According to my hypothesis, a toxic alkaloid in the seeds weakened McCandless to such a degree that it became impossible for him to hike out to the highway or hunt effectively, leading to starvation. Because Hedysarum alpinum is described as a nontoxic species in both the scientific literature and in popular books about edible plants, my conjecture was met with no small amount of derision, especially in Alaska.
[...]
The debate over why McCandless perished, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering, and occasionally flaring, for more than two decades now. But last December, a writer named Ronald Hamilton posted a paper on the Internet that brings fascinating new facts to the discussion. Hamilton, it turns out, has discovered hitherto unknown evidence that appears to close the book on the cause of McCandless’s death.​
- read the full article How Chris McCandless Died (from The New Yorker)​
Click to expand...

Plus, Krakauer quote on of the guys who lives in my extended neighborhood!
 
thør said:
Plus, Krakauer quote on of the guys who lives in my extended neighborhood!
Click to expand...

Really? That's awesome!

As an Alaska person, what's your take on the McCandless story? Hero or idiot, or something in between?
 
http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/health_and_science/two_lives/2013/09/130911_TWOLIVES_Cotton.jpg.CROP.article250-medium.jpg

Lifespan has doubled in the United States in the past 150 years. This ridiculously wonderful change in the nature of life and death is something we tend to take for granted. When we do think about why we’re still alive, some of the big, fairly obvious reasons that come to mind are vaccines, antibiotics, clean water, or drugs for heart disease and cancer. But the world is full of underappreciated people, innovations, and ideas that also save lives. A round of applause, please, for some of the oddball reasons, in no particular order, why people are living longer and healthier lives than ever before.

Cotton. One of the major killers of human history was typhus, a bacterial disease spread by lice. It defeated Napoleon’s army; if Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture were historically accurate, it would feature less cannon fire and more munching arthropods. Wool was the clothing material of choice before cotton displaced it. Cotton is easier to clean than wool and less hospitable to body lice.

Satellites. In 1900, a hurricane devastated Galveston, Texas. It killed 8,000 people, making it the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history. In 2008, Hurricane Ike hit Galveston. Its winds were less powerful at landfall than those of the 1900 storm, but its storm surge was higher, and that’s usually what kills people. This time we saw it coming, thanks to a network of Earth-monitoring satellites and decades of ever-improving storm forecasting. More than 100 people died, but more than 1 million evacuated low-lying coastal areas and survived.​
 
http://en.spongepedia.org/images/thumb/5/50/Simple-Ton.jpg/200px-Simple-Ton.jpg

Simpleton is an irritating word. At first sight, its origin contains no secrets: simple + ton. And that may be all there is to it despite the obscurity of -ton. We find this explanation in the OED and in the dictionaries dependent on it. The word surfaced in the middle of the seventeenth century and must have been a facetious coinage, but we are not sure in what milieu it turned up, and quite often the etymologists’ biggest trouble is their ignorance of the initial environment of a new term. The earliest attestation sometimes misleads the researcher, because a popular word need not have been first recorded in its “cradle.” If we knew more about the center of dissemination of hobo, kibosh, and their likes, we might be able to offer truly persuasive hypotheses of their origin and discard others as untenable. Those who have read my posts on chestnut, masher, and dude will easily recognize the problem. Who were the wits responsible for launching simpleton, and why did it catch on? Samuel Johnson (1755) offered a piece of relevant information in that he called simpleton a low word. He often used this label and apparently knew what he was saying. We can assume that in his days simpleton was slang, cant (which is much worse than slang despite the horror stories told about slang at that time), or a dialectal word not fit for polite use. - See more at: http://blog.oup.com/2013/09/simpleton-word-origin-etymology/#sthash.91DpqjRB.dpuf​
- read the full article No simplistic etymology of “simpleton” (from OUP Blog from Oxford University Press)​
 
http://the-toast.net/okay/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/william-carlos-williams-300x196.jpeg

i have eaten everything
that was in the icebox
you should probably go to the store again.
-wcw



i have eaten the little red wheelbarrow
that was in the icebox
and upon which so much depended
forgive me
i don’t even know why i did that
i guess i thought it was one of those little ice cream cakes
you know the kind that they shape to look like cars or whatever
that shit was disgusting
hey do we have any ice cream cakes though
-wcw​
- read the full article Texts From William Carlos Williams (from The Toast)​
 
Laurel said:
http://the-toast.net/okay/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/william-carlos-williams-300x196.jpeg

i have eaten everything
that was in the icebox
you should probably go to the store again.
-wcw



i have eaten the little red wheelbarrow
that was in the icebox
and upon which so much depended
forgive me
i don’t even know why i did that
i guess i thought it was one of those little ice cream cakes
you know the kind that they shape to look like cars or whatever
that shit was disgusting
hey do we have any ice cream cakes though
-wcw​
- read the full article Texts From William Carlos Williams (from The Toast)​
Click to expand...

:heart:
 
http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/09/10/earltoned_vert-c52d8d5411e889252df6eda18ea44908ba371787-s51.jpg

In the ranks of English nobility, the Montague family may have just been earls. But in the kitchen, they were kings.

A historian has the first English recipe for a frozen chocolate dessert — think chocolate sorbet crossed with a Slurpee. Even in 17th century speak, it sounds simple:
Prepare the chocolatti [to make a drink] ... and Then Putt the vessell that hath the Chocolatti in it, into a Jaraffa [a carafe] of snow stirred together with some salt, & shaike the snow together sometyme & it will putt the Chocolatti into tender Curdled Ice & soe eate it with spoons.​
But in 1668, these instructions for "Curdled Ice" were revolutionary. They married two culinary innovations of the time — chocolate and ice. And they offered a glimpse at the frozen desserts on the horizon — sorbet, gelato, ice cream and even the Starbucks frappuccino.

Guess who wrote the recipe? The Earl of Sandwich.

No, not the guy credited with inventing the so he didn't have to leave the gambling table, but his great-grandfather, Edward Montague, the first Earl of Sandwich.​
- read the full article Earl Of Sandwich Blended Frappes Long Before Starbucks (from NPR's The Salt)​
 
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/files/2011/08/molasses.jpg

People between North Carolina and Vermont are cleaning up after Irene, the storm that destructively tromped along the eastern seaboard this past weekend. Hurricanes in the northeast are pretty rare and can leave people at a loss for how to prepare for extraordinarily severe conditions. At the very least, there are standard pieces of advice you can use to more or less muddle through a nasty situation. But perhaps even rarer are freak events involving food that cause a lot of damage. Those with an appetite for tragic tales might enjoy the following:

London Beer Flood: In the late 18th century, the Meux family brewery attained celebrity status, at least on account of the spectacular size of the vats they used to craft porter—one had the capacity to hold some 20,000 barrels of beer. Unfortunately, the hoops holding one of the vats together had corroded, and on the evening of October 17, 1814, they completely gave out, loosing some 3,500 barrels of beer that knocked down the brewery walls and flooded Tottenham Court, killing eight.​
- read the full article Four Deadly Disasters Caused by Food (from Smithsonian.com)​
 
Laurel said:
http://the-toast.net/okay/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/william-carlos-williams-300x196.jpeg

i have eaten everything
that was in the icebox
you should probably go to the store again.
-wcw



i have eaten the little red wheelbarrow
that was in the icebox
and upon which so much depended
forgive me
i don’t even know why i did that
i guess i thought it was one of those little ice cream cakes
you know the kind that they shape to look like cars or whatever
that shit was disgusting
hey do we have any ice cream cakes though
-wcw​
- read the full article Texts From William Carlos Williams (from The Toast)​
Click to expand...

Haha! Those are great. I love the ones from J. Alfred Prufrock, too.

do you want to go out tonight
where
idk
like a one-night cheap hotel
or maybe one of those sawdust restaurants
Sawdust restaurants?
Like with the peanut shells on the floor?
with oyster shells
Oyster shells on the floor?
let’s have a tedious argument in the streets
have you been drinking?
the sky is so beautiful tonight
like a patient etherized on a table
I’m coming over
I’m worried about you
there’s yellow smoke on the window-panes
What kind of smoke? Did you leave the stove on?
it’s curling all around the house
You need to get out of the house
oh it’s already sliding along the street
Get out of the house
now
I’m coming over
there will be time
there will be time for you and me

http://the-toast.net/2013/07/26/texts-from-wuthering-heights/
 
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

F
David Crosby, Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash Co-Founder, Dies at 81
Replies
8
Views
990
BongoGal
BongoGal
HornyHaileyVasquez
Bottomless Sandwich Artist
Replies
8
Views
6K
stargame
stargame
TwistedManc
An Authors Feedback
Replies
3
Views
993
PastMaster
PastMaster
taytay4eva
Is it still 'mature' if the character got de-aged but was previously elderly?
Replies
10
Views
278
iwatchus
I
B
Dad/daughter ideas
Replies
5
Views
573
Five_Inch_Heels
Five_Inch_Heels
Back
Top