Good Reads

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I went to see The Phantom of the Opera a few years ago. I was at the bar with a friend. This guy across the way wouldn't stop staring. After a while his staring started to make me feel a bit uncomfortable. I thought, 'what the fuck is his problem? Is it my dress? Is he having a perve? Do I know him from somewhere?'

Anyway. He came up to me and asked if I was a dancer. I said that I was just here to enjoy the show.

My head was so huge I could barely make it through the aisle to get to my seat. Not ballet, but still.

About 30 years ago I saw a woman who seemed familiar but I couldn't place her, and I stared at her for a long time, till she left her table to give me what for. The woman was my sister. She and my wife had a battle, and I hadn't seen her for 10 years or so.

 

[girlsmiley]

About 30 years ago I saw a woman who seemed familiar but I couldn't place her, and I stared at her for a long time, till she left her table to give me what for. The woman was my sister. She and my wife had a battle, and I hadn't seen her for 10 years or so.

That's a long time.

 

[girlsmiley]

How the heck could you not recognise your own sister? Even after 10 years?

Old eyes. You have old man eyes.

 

[lovetoread]

How the heck could you not recognise your own sister? Even after 10 years?

Old eyes. You have old man eyes.

I snorted.

 

[Laurel]

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/SutherlandSisters.jpg

These days, the biggest stars—like Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé—know the easiest way to get the world to gawk is to chop off your long locks for a “boy cut.” And then, perhaps, perform some sexually provocative dances moves on TV.

In the late 19th century, though, the most startling, erotic thing you could do as a stage performer is let down your Rapunzel-esque floor-length hair. In fact, according to their biographer, the first real celebrity models in the United States were known as the Seven Sutherland Sisters, who had 37 feet of hair between them. Sarah, Victoria, Isabella, Grace, Naomi, Dora, and Mary Sutherland sang and played instruments—but no one really cared about that. No, the crowd came to ogle their magical, mythical, uber-feminine hair.

Flaunting all that awesome hair onstage wasn’t quite enough to launch the Sutherlands from abject poverty to riches, so the sisters’ father, the Rev. Fletcher Sutherland, concocted a patent hair-growing tonic. Because Victorian women coveted the sister’s luscious locks, the cash came flooding in. The family grew rich beyond its wildest imaginations, as the sisters knocked serious political issues off the newspapers’ front page with their outrageous celebrity antics. By the mid-1880s, none of the sisters could walk down the street, their flowing tresses dragging behind them like dress trains, without being mobbed by starstruck fans.​

- read the full article Untangling the Tale of the Seven Sutherland Sisters and Their 37 Feet of Hair (from Collectors Weekly)​

 

[neci]

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/SutherlandSisters.jpg

These days, the biggest stars—like Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé—know the easiest way to get the world to gawk is to chop off your long locks for a “boy cut.” And then, perhaps, perform some sexually provocative dances moves on TV.

In the late 19th century, though, the most startling, erotic thing you could do as a stage performer is let down your Rapunzel-esque floor-length hair. In fact, according to their biographer, the first real celebrity models in the United States were known as the Seven Sutherland Sisters, who had 37 feet of hair between them. Sarah, Victoria, Isabella, Grace, Naomi, Dora, and Mary Sutherland sang and played instruments—but no one really cared about that. No, the crowd came to ogle their magical, mythical, uber-feminine hair.

Flaunting all that awesome hair onstage wasn’t quite enough to launch the Sutherlands from abject poverty to riches, so the sisters’ father, the Rev. Fletcher Sutherland, concocted a patent hair-growing tonic. Because Victorian women coveted the sister’s luscious locks, the cash came flooding in. The family grew rich beyond its wildest imaginations, as the sisters knocked serious political issues off the newspapers’ front page with their outrageous celebrity antics. By the mid-1880s, none of the sisters could walk down the street, their flowing tresses dragging behind them like dress trains, without being mobbed by starstruck fans.​

- read the full article Untangling the Tale of the Seven Sutherland Sisters and Their 37 Feet of Hair (from Collectors Weekly)​

one day my pubes will be this famous.

 

[Laurel]

No doubt. I wanna buy the mannequin you make with them. And sleep with it every night.

 

[Laurel]

http://beta.images.theglobeandmail.com/25a/life/article14321885.ece/ALTERNATES/w220/literate14fo2.JPG

Let’s start with some hard data. The only way to tell whether kids today are really less coherent or literate than their great-grandparents is to compare student writing across the past century. Tricky, but precisely what Andrea Lunsford, a scholar of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, managed to do by collecting 877 “freshman composition” papers from from 2006 and comparing their error rate to those in papers from 1986, 1930 and 1917. If the digital age had hurt students' prose, the error rate in spelling, grammar and word use should have increased.

It hadn’t. Indeed, the average rate of errors had barely budged in almost a century, from 2.11 errors per 100 words in 1917 to 2.26 words today. What’s more, there were “almost no instances” of the smileys or LOL-style short forms that have supposedly metastasized everywhere. (When students do deploy “textisms,” it’s not unintentional, University of Toronto linguist Sali Tagliamonte has found: They use short forms as flourishes of wit; and they do it more rarely than you would suspect.)

But Prof. Lunsford did find a big change in how students were writing – and it was a positive shift. Over the past century, the freshman composition papers had exploded in length and intellectual complexity. In 1917, a freshman paper was on average only 162 words long and the majority were simple “personal narratives.” By 1986, the length of papers more than doubled, averaging 422 words. By 2006, they were more than six times longer, clocking in at 1,038 words – and they were substantially more complex, with the majority consisting of a “researched argument or report,” with the student taking a point of view and marshalling evidence to support it.​

- read the full article The dumbest generation? No, Twitter is making kids smarter (from The Globe and Mail)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/tumblr_msvtij1qYb1qztvpwo3_500.gif

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/tumblr_msvtij1qYb1qztvpwo4_500.gif

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/tumblr_msvtij1qYb1qztvpwo5_500.gif

In this new short from Marc-Antoine Locatelli, dancer Lucas Boirat is seen battling with various geometric forms of light that launch and morph as part of a carefully choreographed dance that marries human motion with motion graphics. It reminded me a bit of Proeigon. Gifs courtesy Vimeo.​

- see the video Nuance: Dancing with Light (from The is Colossal)​

 

[Balladeer08]

one day my pubes will be this famous.

Due to their length?


Ew.

 

[Laurel]

http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/walmart-parking.jpg

It seems that the people who actively look for the “best” parking place inevitably spend more total time getting to the store than those people who simply grab the first spot they see…

They observed two distinct strategies: “cycling” and “pick a row, closest space.” They compared the results. “What was interesting,” [Professor Andrew Velkey found], “was although the individual cycling were spending more time driving looking for a parking space, on average they were no closer to the door, time-wise or distance-wise, than people using ‘pick a row, closest space.’”​

- read the full article Parking space strategy: pick a row, closest space (from Mind Your Decisions)​

 

[Laurel]

- 'Le Loyon' has been haunting the woods of Maules for a decade
- First photograph of sinister figure taken last month by a passer-by
- Was once seen clutching a bouquet of flowers despite menacing air
- Local officials are hoping to speak to him or her after children flee the woodland in terror

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/11/article-2417685-1BBD5C46000005DC-239_634x421.jpg

A mysterious person has been photographed for the first time after apparently wandering around a patch of woodland for the past 10 years.

The figure, who is known as 'Le Loyon' and has been called Switzerland's answer to the Loch Ness Monster, wears a military uniform and a thick cloak, with a gas mask covering his or her face.

While he does not seem to be obviously aggressive or dangerous, police are hoping to speak to Le Loyon in an effort to encourage him to be less threatening.

Tales of Le Loyon have been reported in the woods of Maules in western Switzerland for the past decade, apparently walking the same route every day.​

- read the full article Who is Le Loyon? Police hunt 'terrifying' figure who has stalked Swiss woodland wearing gas mask, boiler suit and cloak for TEN YEARS (from The Mail Online)​

 

[SBroadB9]

- 'Le Loyon' has been haunting the woods of Maules for a decade
- First photograph of sinister figure taken last month by a passer-by
- Was once seen clutching a bouquet of flowers despite menacing air
- Local officials are hoping to speak to him or her after children flee the woodland in terror

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/11/article-2417685-1BBD5C46000005DC-239_634x421.jpg

A mysterious person has been photographed for the first time after apparently wandering around a patch of woodland for the past 10 years.

The figure, who is known as 'Le Loyon' and has been called Switzerland's answer to the Loch Ness Monster, wears a military uniform and a thick cloak, with a gas mask covering his or her face.

While he does not seem to be obviously aggressive or dangerous, police are hoping to speak to Le Loyon in an effort to encourage him to be less threatening.

Tales of Le Loyon have been reported in the woods of Maules in western Switzerland for the past decade, apparently walking the same route every day.​

- read the full article Who is Le Loyon? Police hunt 'terrifying' figure who has stalked Swiss woodland wearing gas mask, boiler suit and cloak for TEN YEARS (from The Mail Online)​

Wow. I've been there, many times. Not in the past 10 years, though, so I've got an alibi.

 

[Balladeer08]

- Tales of Le Loyon have been reported in the woods of Maules in western Switzerland for the past decade, apparently walking the same route every day.​

He's been walking the same route every day for ten years and the Swiss cops can't find him?

Apparently there are some holes in their training as well as their cheese.

 

[Laurel]

He's been walking the same route every day for ten years and the Swiss cops can't find him?

Apparently there are some holes in their training as well as their cheese.

Yeah, I didn't get that part either.

 

[Laurel]

http://images.nymag.com/news/features/turbines130916_560.jpg

In the past decade, hundreds of people who live near wind turbines in places like Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin, and Japan have reported that the windmills are giving them a litany of ailments. The first complaints were recorded in 2003, when a British physician wrote an unpublished report about 36 people in the U.K. who said the turbines made them sick. Then, in 2004, a physician in Victoria, Australia, distributed questionnaires to 25 people living near local turbines, and three of them wrote back about severe stress, insomnia, and dizziness. Even some Scottish Buddhist monks have complained of symptoms, including dry retching and crying. Last summer, Tharpaland International Retreat Centre sold its land to Scottish Power after its monks found they were approximately 70 percent less able to meditate.

This hodgepodge of maladies has an unofficial name: wind-turbine syndrome, coined in 2006 by Nina Pierpont, a pediatrician, whose husband, it should be noted, is an anti-wind activist. Those who believe in the syndrome say it’s caused by sound waves released when the giant turbine blades collide with the wind—not just the audible whooshing noise, but the rumbling vibrations created by a low-*frequency sound, or infrasound. Nonbelievers, including most scientists and doctors, say it doesn’t exist, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do not recognize it as a legitimate syndrome.​

- read the full article “Never Stops, Never Stops. Headache. Help.” (from NY Mag)​

 

[Laurel]

L O L

http://the-toast.net/okay/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/wilde-300x223.jpg

Because mine is an evil and a petty mind, suitable more to wallowing in the sordid sexual goings-on of literary giants than in reading their work, I take every opportunity I can to inform people who may not have known that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde almost certainly had sex in 1882.

You are either the kind of person to whom this matters a great deal, or the kind of person to whom it matters not at all. To the latter I say: yours is the narrow road and the straight, and I extend to you a hearty and fulsome handshake, as well as my sincerest wishes for your continued good health. To the former I say: Want to hear about the time Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde (probably) hooked up??

Of course you do. You’re my kind of person. Why do we ever talk about anything else? Let’s never do that again.​

- read the full article Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman Almost Certainly Did It (And That’s Wonderful) (from The Toast)​

 

[Laurel]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/files/2013/09/Screen-shot-2013-09-16-at-10.18.44-PM-195x300.png

I don’t know about you, but onions make me MISERABLE. I love them, and I cook with them probably 5-6 days a week, but the chopping, oh the chopping. I can barely make it halfway before I’m unable to keep my eyes open. We even have a pair of goggles we keep around to make it less miserable.

But what if there was an onion, still flavorful, and TEARLESS? Would people should “evil GMO”, or would they sigh in relief? I’d be in the latter category, myself.

Well, there IS a tearless onion! It exists! But how does it taste? Well, they don’t KNOW. We’ll get to that.​

- read the full article IgNobels 2013: The Tearless Onion (from Scientific American)​

 

[oggbashan]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/files/2013/09/Screen-shot-2013-09-16-at-10.18.44-PM-195x300.png

I don’t know about you, but onions make me MISERABLE. I love them, and I cook with them probably 5-6 days a week, but the chopping, oh the chopping. I can barely make it halfway before I’m unable to keep my eyes open. We even have a pair of goggles we keep around to make it less miserable.

But what if there was an onion, still flavorful, and TEARLESS? Would people should “evil GMO”, or would they sigh in relief? I’d be in the latter category, myself.

Well, there IS a tearless onion! It exists! But how does it taste? Well, they don’t KNOW. We’ll get to that.​

- read the full article IgNobels 2013: The Tearless Onion (from Scientific American)​

You don't need a tearless onion.

You need this advice from wikihow.

I use a very sharp knife and have no problems at all.

 

[trysail]

Hiding in N. Virginia, a daughter of Auschwitz (from The Washington Post)

I've grown to expect this kind of sensationalist garbage from tabloids and the WaPo.

 

[Laurel]

http://regmedia.co.uk/2013/09/16/mp_2.jpg

The MessagePad was priced at $699, and the first 5,000 devices sold out within hours of being made available to buy. Some 50,000 went in the first 10 weeks. It’s easy to forget now, but the arrival of the MessagePad, rushed though it may well have been, was a topic of real enthusiasm among not only Mac fans but the broader tech community too.

At the time, notebook computers were chunky, weighty devices priced well beyond the wallets of most users. Palmtops were small and cheap but lacked sophistication and power. Might the much less expensive MessagePad at long last open up the world of mobile computing?

Apple began work on what would become the MessagePad back in the late 1980s. In 1987, Steve Sakoman, an Apple engineer, decided it would be a good idea to make a device capable of interpreting its user’s handwriting. Indeed, the user would interact with the gadget entirely with a pen, not a keyboard. The device might share information wirelessly.​

- read the full article Stylus counsel: The rise and fall of the Apple Newton MessagePad (from The Register)​

 

[Laurel]

You don't need a tearless onion.

You need this advice from wikihow.

I use a very sharp knife and have no problems at all.

Ooh, very cool! *bookmarked*

 

[Laurel]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2013/09/pollack-card-800x600.jpg

Think managing your finances has to be complicated? Wonkblog contributor (and UC Chicago social scientist) Harold Pollack doesn't. After a talk with personal finance expert Helaine Olen, Pollack managed to write down pretty much everything you need to know on a 4x6 index card. And it would probably fit on a 3x5 index card if you really crammed (that last point, for instance, is probably not strictly necessary for managing your money). He explains:

The card came out of an RBC chat I had with Helaine Olen regarding what I view as the financial industry’s basic dilemma: The best investment advice fits on an index card. A commenter, Alex M, asked for the actual index card. Although I was originally speaking in metaphor, I grabbed a pen and one of my daughter's note cards, scribbled this out in maybe three minutes, snapped a picture with my iPhone, and the rest was history.​

Pollack's right. Follow these principles and you'll be in much, much, much better shape than most Americans — or most anyone. And all it will cost you is $2.20 for a pack of index cards — and you'll have 99 of them left over.​

- read the full article This 4×6 index card has all the financial advice you’ll ever need (from Washington Post)​

 

[SeaDaddy1]

The original Constitution of the United States of America.

http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/freedom/constitution/text.html

 

[Laurel]

http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/09/17/_mg_9621_wide-b07adb1374922a6e540c603a4d364ba0cd1f39c8-s4-c85.jpg

This medical case may give a whole new meaning to the phrase "beer gut."

A 61-year-old man — with a history of home-brewing — stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyzer test. And sure enough, the man's blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas.

There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn't touched a drop of alcohol that day.

"He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," says , the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas. "His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer."​

- read the full article Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Apparently, You Can Make Beer In Your Gut (from NPR)​