Good Reads

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In December 1992, the Fox network broadcast a particularly memorable episode of The Simpsons. It recalled the time Bart, then still a toddler, was to be promoted from the crib of babyhood to a proper bed. Finding his young son resistant to this move, Homer constructed a special bed inspired by Bart's affection for Krusty the Clown. Alas, Homer's bed-building skills left much to be desired, and the clown of Bart's new bedroom was a grotesque, maniacal interpretation of Krusty. Unable to sleep, young Bart spent much of the next day curled in the living room uttering the troubling catchphrase: "Can't sleep, clown will eat me."

I was reminded of those words when I heard about Northampton's clown mystery. "A spooky clown has been scaring Northampton residents in full costume and makeup," reported the Northampton Herald & Post. "According to reports it has knocked on someone's door and offered to paint their sills despite having no painting equipment." The clown has quickly acquired its own dedicated Facebook page and a fevered Twitter discussion has ensued. By Sunday evening a photo of the clown itself had emerged, showing the mysterious figure in gaudy makeup, carrying a bunch of bright balloons.

A person dressed in any costume roaming the streets of Northampton and offering to perform DIY tasks would be fairly chilling, but someone in full clown regalia carries a particularly sinister air; clowns are, by common modern consent, really rather scary.

Coulrophobia, the little-studied, statistically uncharted fear of clowns, is a phobia I suspect many can relate to. I feel decidedly uneasy in the presence of clowns, though I am uncertain whether it is their blank, crayon faces or my deep dislike of Enforced Fun (see also: theme parks, slapstick, Rentaghost) that makes me recoil. The only reason for this I can think of is that fundamentally I do not find clowns funny. I also, like many people, find them a bit scary.​
- read the full article Don't send in the clowns – we're too scared (from The Guardian)
 
Great read: http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/how-chris-mccandless-died.html

"Twenty-one years ago this month, on September 6, 1992, the decomposed body of Christopher McCandless was discovered by moose hunters just outside the northern boundary of Denali National Park. He had died inside a rusting bus that served as a makeshift shelter for trappers, dog mushers, and other backcountry visitors. Taped to the door was a note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol:

ATTENTION POSSIBLE VISITORS. S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE I AM ALL ALONE...."

Apologies for not following the format. It would take about 10 minutes of cut and paste from my cell to fit the format. I have tried several times to make it work using a template from the first page of this thread, but I have given up hope with the cut and paste function of this cell phone. Yeah, my $500 cell phone. Fuck.
 
Great read: http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/how-chris-mccandless-died.html

"Twenty-one years ago this month, on September 6, 1992, the decomposed body of Christopher McCandless was discovered by moose hunters just outside the northern boundary of Denali National Park. He had died inside a rusting bus that served as a makeshift shelter for trappers, dog mushers, and other backcountry visitors. Taped to the door was a note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol:

ATTENTION POSSIBLE VISITORS. S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE I AM ALL ALONE...."

Apologies for not following the format. It would take about 10 minutes of cut and paste from my cell to fit the format. I have tried several times to make it work using a template from the first page of this thread, but I have given up hope with the cut and paste function of this cell phone. Yeah, my $500 cell phone. Fuck.

Awesomeness! The format's not required at all, so feel free to post links w/a c&p summary or quicky explanation of why they're interesting anytime. :rose:
 
Awesomeness! The format's not required at all, so feel free to post links w/a c&p summary or quicky explanation of why they're interesting anytime. :rose:

I love the format because it gives me a reason to click through. I am currently scrolling tech sites to figure out why me phone's cp feature sucks ass. For the price I paid, it should cp when I just think about the words. I am so demanding.

This remains my favorite thread of all forums of the entire interwebz for all of times.
 
I love the format because it gives me a reason to click through. I am currently scrolling tech sites to figure out why me phone's cp feature sucks ass. For the price I paid, it should cp when I just think about the words. I am so demanding.

This remains my favorite thread of all forums of the entire interwebz for all of times.

:heart: :heart: :heart: You just made my day!
 
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/files/2013/09/pickering-611.jpg

In 1881, Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory, had a problem: the volume of data coming into his observatory was exceeding his staff’s ability to analyze it. He also had doubts about his staff’s competence–especially that of his assistant, who Pickering dubbed inefficient at cataloging. So he did what any scientist of the latter 19th century would have done: he fired his male assistant and replaced him with his maid, Williamina Fleming. Fleming proved so adept at computing and copying that she would work at Harvard for 34 years–eventually managing a large staff of assistants.

So began an era in Harvard Observatory history where women—more than 80 during Pickering’s tenure, from 1877 to his death in 1919— worked for the director, computing and cataloging data. Some of these women would produce significant work on their own; some would even earn a certain level of fame among followers of female scientists. But the majority are remembered not individually but collectively, by the moniker Pickering’s Harem.

The less-than-enlightened nickname reflects the status of women at a time when they were–with rare exception–expected to devote their energies to breeding and homemaking or to bettering their odds of attracting a husband. Education for its own sake was uncommon and work outside the home almost unheard of. Contemporary science actually warned against women and education, in the belief that women were too frail to handle the stress. As doctor and Harvard professor Edward Clarke wrote in his 1873 book Sex in Education, “A woman’s body could only handle a limited number of developmental tasks at one time—that girls who spent to much energy developing their minds during puberty would end up with undeveloped or diseased reproductive systems.”​
- read the full article The Women Who Mapped the Universe And Still Couldn’t Get Any Respect (from Smithsonian Magazine)
 
Great read: http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/how-chris-mccandless-died.html

"Twenty-one years ago this month, on September 6, 1992, the decomposed body of Christopher McCandless was discovered by moose hunters just outside the northern boundary of Denali National Park. He had died inside a rusting bus that served as a makeshift shelter for trappers, dog mushers, and other backcountry visitors. Taped to the door was a note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol:

ATTENTION POSSIBLE VISITORS. S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE I AM ALL ALONE...."

Apologies for not following the format. It would take about 10 minutes of cut and paste from my cell to fit the format. I have tried several times to make it work using a template from the first page of this thread, but I have given up hope with the cut and paste function of this cell phone. Yeah, my $500 cell phone. Fuck.

Still a bit of a question on this.......
 
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‘Swearing’ in English covers two distinct but interconnected activities. If I say ‘bugger’ when my grocery bag splits and the yoghurt bursts all over the floor I do something which the OED temperately calls ‘the uttering of a profane oath’ (we should remember that the OED was fuckless and cuntless until its supplement of 1972, and remains a chaste organ: it thinks ‘biscuit’ is just ‘crisp, dry bread’, though it’s more sound on ‘crumpet’). But we also call it swearing when we affirm that we will tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth (‘the action of taking an oath’), or swear by black Hecate and the night that we will get our revenge on someone. We can swear on our own (‘Fuck!’), as an act of aggression (‘Fuck off!’), as an expression of frustration (‘For fuck’s sake!’), in company as an act of bravura or camaraderie (‘Fuck you!’), and as a comic performance of anger (‘Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on!’). We can also swear by my hat, by my faith, or by some greater authority, that we will perform a particular act, and we can make such oaths in jest or in earnest. Or both at once.

Our routine bad language instantly says something about who we are and where we are from. Americans tend not to use ‘bloody’ as a swear word unless they are trying to sound British. British people use it quite a lot less than Americans think they do and a great deal less than British people think Australians do. In John O’Grady’s poem ‘Integrated Adjective’, an Australian in a bar is overheard saying he’s been ‘Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin’ kanga-bloody-roos’. The poet describes the integration of the group around the use of the inte-bloody-grated adjective:​
- read the full article review of 'Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing' by Melissa Mohr (from the London Review of Books)
 
*Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind*

http://mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_640x430/public/tks_1983_erin1.png

In the fall of 1981, second grader Mike Ryan was walking through the halls of his new school when he realized something terrible: He was the only kid without a Trapper Keeper. “I'm sure there were others,” he says now. “But I certainly didn't notice them because they weren't worth noticing because they didn't have a Trapper Keeper.” After school, he told his parents his tale of woe, and his father picked one up—but it was the wrong thing, a rip-off made of what appeared to be denim. To Ryan’s horror, everyone noticed. “Trapper Keeper? That looks more like a Trapper Jeansper,” one kid sneered.

“It was that weird thing where having a knockoff was worse than having nothing at all,” Ryan, now a senior writer at the Huffington Post, says. “Being the new kid, this was strangely devastating.” He would eventually get the real thing—bright red, with red, green, and blue folders. “It didn't make me cool, but at least I felt like I was conforming. Which, at that point, is all I had hoped for.”

Launched in 1978 by the Mead Corporation (which was acquired by ACCO Brands in 2012), Trapper Keeper notebooks are brightly colored three-ring binders that hold folders called Trappers and close with a flap. From the start, they were an enormous success: For several years after their nationwide release, Mead sold over $100 million of the folders and notebooks a year. To date, some 75 million Trapper Keepers have flown off store shelves.​
- read the full article The History of the Trapper Keeper (from Mental Floss)
 
*Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind*

http://mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_640x430/public/tks_1983_erin1.png

In the fall of 1981, second grader Mike Ryan was walking through the halls of his new school when he realized something terrible: He was the only kid without a Trapper Keeper. “I'm sure there were others,” he says now. “But I certainly didn't notice them because they weren't worth noticing because they didn't have a Trapper Keeper.” After school, he told his parents his tale of woe, and his father picked one up—but it was the wrong thing, a rip-off made of what appeared to be denim. To Ryan’s horror, everyone noticed. “Trapper Keeper? That looks more like a Trapper Jeansper,” one kid sneered.

“It was that weird thing where having a knockoff was worse than having nothing at all,” Ryan, now a senior writer at the Huffington Post, says. “Being the new kid, this was strangely devastating.” He would eventually get the real thing—bright red, with red, green, and blue folders. “It didn't make me cool, but at least I felt like I was conforming. Which, at that point, is all I had hoped for.”

Launched in 1978 by the Mead Corporation (which was acquired by ACCO Brands in 2012), Trapper Keeper notebooks are brightly colored three-ring binders that hold folders called Trappers and close with a flap. From the start, they were an enormous success: For several years after their nationwide release, Mead sold over $100 million of the folders and notebooks a year. To date, some 75 million Trapper Keepers have flown off store shelves.​
- read the full article The History of the Trapper Keeper (from Mental Floss)

I remember the one with the horse! I had this one.

http://www.stealingfaith.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/trapper-keeper-630x472.jpg
 
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I first met Alice Cooper at a party on Park Avenue in the mid-1970s. It was really one of those, “I’m not worthy” moments. Alice was one of the few guys I truly respected back then, because he’d made it on his own terms: by “driving a stake into the heart of the peace-and-love Generation,” and by playing delinquent rock ‘n’ roll for punks like me. That night on Park Avenue, Alice invited me to interview him, so we sat down for a long session at his place in Bel Air a few days later. Alice was deeply disturbed by what he’d heard about some of the punk bands, telling me, “I don’t get this scene, I mean, do they wanna make money or don’t they?”

I explained that yes, they did want to make money, but they wanted to do it on their own terms like he’d done. Alice was relieved that the punks wanted to make money – and so we’ve remained friends ever since. He's just finishing a new album of cover songs by all his old friends from the Hollywood Vampires, the old drinking club he conducted at the Rainbow in LA that included Harry Nilsson, John Lennon, Ringo, Micky Dolenz, Keith Moon, and Jim Morrison, among other rock luminaries, I called him up to talk about some of his old pals.​
 
This one's a Good Listen. This is about a year old, but I just bought the album of her standup set last week and I've listened to it four times already. Linking to an NPR interview so people can get a feel for her style, but you really have to listen to the set. It's $5.99 on iTunes.

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/browbeat/2012/10/08/notaro.jpeg.CROP.article250-medium.jpeg

"Good evening, hello. I have cancer. How are you?"

That's how comedian Tig Notaro began her set at Largo in Los Angeles the day she was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer. As she uttered those words to the audience, there was nervous laughter, weeping and total silence in response.

Comedian Louis C.K. was there that evening, and tweeted this about her performance: "In 27 years doing this, I've seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo."

When she spoke with Terry Gross, it had been an eventful four months for Notaro. Before her cancer diagnosis, Tig had pneumonia and contracted a severe intestinal virus, for which she was treated in the hospital. Shortly after being released, her mother died in a freak accident — and then Tig and her girlfriend broke up.

So when she got on stage that evening, Notaro told Fresh Air's Terry Gross, she was "in a very vulnerable, raw place."

"I had no idea what was in front of me," she says. "It was really just taking blind steps."

When Notaro conceived of the idea, "It just made me laugh so hard just in the shower" — but she wavered as to whether to include the cancer diagnosis in her set that night. Describing herself as a "dry, deadpan, one-liner comic," she says she rarely performs material as personal or revealing as her set at Largo was.

"I was scared of offending people and confusing people," she says. "You know, thinking about people that maybe did have cancer in the audience, or had somebody that they loved that had cancer. And then the reality hit me that I have cancer — this is my story."

- read the full article Tig Notaro On Going 'Live' About Her Life (from NPR)
 
Just posted this in another thread. An oldie, but fun, especially for Leibniz lovers.

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18lq2jya8tippjpg/original.jpg

Isaac Newton, as well as being a brilliant mind that split the difference between advancing and inventing physics as we know it, was very religious. When he was in his first year at Cambridge, he kept a debtor's ledger of the sins that he'd committed as a child. [....]

"Using Wilford's towel to spare my own."

Whatever else Newton was, he was a terrible roommate. Although he was a decent student, he was reputed to be bad at personal relationships with anyone, at any time. This sin, using someone's towel, was probably more a big deal during a time when plague was running through the countryside. He also confesses to, "Denying my chamberfellow of the knowledge of him that took him for a sot."

And his sweet tooth still reigned. Any plums anyone left out would probably be gone by the time they got back. He confessed the sin of "Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer." Just to top it off, Newton confessed to 'peevishness' with people over and over in his journal. He was clearly a moody little guy. No word on whether he apologized to them about it, but he apologized to God, and surely that was enough.

- read the full article 10 Self-Confessed Sins of Isaac Newton (from io9)
 
http://www.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Screen-Shot-2013-09-18-at-3.50.45-PM.jpg

I woke up one day not long after I started "Roving Typist" to a flurry of emails, Facebook posts, text messages and missed calls. A picture of me typewriting had made it to the front page of Reddit. For those who don’t know, being on the front page of Reddit is hallowed ground—the notoriety of being on the front page can launch careers, start dance crazes, inspire Hollywood. In other words, ending up on the front page of Reddit meant a decent chunk of the million-plus people who log on daily saw my picture.

Posted under the headline “Spotted on the Highline” was me.

It’s a pretty good picture, I thought. Although my shoes are beat up and missing their laces, my hands are frozen in a bizarre position, and that day was too hot for clothes that photograph well, I look deep in thought. Unfortunately, the two cute girls I was writing a story for are cropped out.

And so was my sign.

My sign said: “One-of-a-kind, unique Stories While You Wait. Sliding Scale – Donate What You Can!”

Without the sign, without the context, I definitely look like someone who is a bit insane. That’s how I thought of it, before I clicked to look at the hundreds of replies; I figured people were probably wondering why I would bring my typewriter to a park. And when I started reading the comments, I saw most people had already decided that I would bring my typewriter to the park because I'm a “fucking hipster.” Someone with the user handle “S2011” summed up the thoughts of the hive mind in 7 words: “Get the fuck out of my city.”

Illmatic707 chimed in: I have never wanted to fist fight someone so badly in my entire life.

Leoatneca replied: Bet 90% of his high school did to. It's because of these guys that bullying is so hard to stop.​
- read the full article I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything (from The Awl)
 
You are adorable. Lucky for my husband I found him first...I would snatch you up in a heartbeat.
 
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