Good Reads

[kotori]

http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/who-was-jd-salinger.html

The subject of the book and documentary is not Salinger the writer but Salinger the star: exactly the identity he spent the last fifty years of his life trying to shed. Cast entirely in terms of celebrity culture and its discontents, every act of Salinger’s is weighed as though its primary purpose was to push or somehow extend his “reputation”—careerism is simply assumed as the only motive a writer might have. If he withdraws from the world, well, what could be more of a come on? If it turns out that he hasn’t entirely withdrawn from the world but has actually participated in it happily enough on his own terms: well, didn’t we tell you the whole recluse thing was an act? This kind of scrutiny might possibly say something about a writer like Mailer, whose loudest energies (if not his best ones) were spent playing in the public square, not to mention Macy’s windows. But it couldn’t be worse suited to a writer like Salinger, the spell of whose work is cast, after all, entirely by the micro-structure of each sentence—on choosing to italicize this word, rather than that; on describing a widower’s left rather than right hand; on the ear for dialogue and the feeling for detail; above all, on the jokes.

From WHO WAS J. D. SALINGER? By Adam Gopnik

 

[glynndah]

http://payload109.cargocollective.com/1/9/308012/4483750/Dildo-03_1200.jpg




Dildo-Maker

 

[lovetoread]

I want that.

 

[neci]

i make my dildos in my mouth.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

http://payload109.cargocollective.com/1/9/308012/4483750/Dildo-03_1200.jpg




Dildo-Maker

Not everyone seems thrilled with the new technology.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7195/6954152147_50cac9ca67_z.jpg

 

[Laurel]

http://o.onionstatic.com/images/23/23389/original/700.jpg?7667

WASHINGTON—As President Obama continues to push for a plan of limited military intervention in Syria, a new poll of Americans has found that though the nation remains wary over the prospect of becoming involved in another Middle Eastern war, the vast majority of U.S. citizens strongly approve of sending Congress to Syria.

The New York Times/CBS News poll showed that though just 1 in 4 Americans believe that the United States has a responsibility to intervene in the Syrian conflict, more than 90 percent of the public is convinced that putting all 535 representatives of the United States Congress on the ground in Syria—including Senate pro tempore Patrick Leahy, House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and, in fact, all current members of the House and Senate—is the best course of action at this time.​

- read the full article Poll: Majority Of Americans Approve Of Sending Congress To Syria (from The Onion)​

 

[Laurel]

http://myds.jp/illustration/cuisines/salad/a.jpg

Even the more willing salad-eaters among us tend to think of salad as the culinary equivalent of floss, i.e. as a depressing incarnation of grim, miserable healthfulness wagging a finger of admonishment from the most boring sector of the table. At family functions, you scoop some onto your plate with the same shrugging resignation with which you put in your yearly appearance at a church service: Ah hell, better heap some of this crap on there so Grandma won't get on my case.

Hey, maybe if I dump half a bottle of ranch dressing on it, you think, brightening, then it'll be more like somebody just spilled a harmless fistful of lawn clippings into an otherwise delicious puddle of mayonnaise!

Friends, that's not what a salad is meant to be. A salad, well executed and embraced as an opportunity to stuff more things that are good into our bodies, should be a carnival of lively flavors, textures, and colors. It should excite your eyes, exercise your teeth, and make your palate sing with joy. You should stare at it intently while you eat, lustily mixing and matching its various ingredients on your fork; you should finish before you're ready to be done and then nudge your dumb salmon toward the edge of your plate to make room for more salad. It should be a glorious, indulgent feast: healthful, sure, yeah OK, but mostly delicious and diverse and fresh and ecstatic.

* * *

The real tragedy of salad's abysmal reputation among people who otherwise know what is good is that it's neither challenging nor particularly pricey to construct a salad that is tasty enough to literally—literally!—cause your eyes to come together and fuse into a single enormous Cyclops eye when you taste it. Commonly, at restaurants and in cookbooks, salads are presented to us as long lists of fancy ingredients—this is a combination of shaved jicama, fresh bonsai leaves, blood orange-marinated apricots, and chicory root, dusted with fennel pollen and drizzled with fermented lingonberry dressing, served on a bed of albino mesclun and angel fingernail clippings—and you think you're supposed to get all that stuff, or at least know what it is, in order to put together a salad of your own that doesn't need to be served with a chair and a pre-tied noose.

That's not true, though. You don't need to know what the hell an endive is to make a salad that really and truly will distract you from damn near anything else you put on the plate with it, up to and possibly including a live hand grenade. What you need to know is that variety—genuine, consequential variety: variety of flavor, texture, color, food group—is your friend. And you need to know some easy ways to assemble that variety.​

- read the full article How To Make A Salad That Doesn't Suck: A Guide For The Nutritionally Unvirtuous (from Deadspin)​

Gonna make this tomorrow. Have no blackberries, so substituting blueberries. Wish me luck!

 

[Laurel]

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/9/4/1378287725090/Google-010.jpg

Google is 15 years old today. To celebrate, here are 15 facts you probably didn't know about them.

1. Google was originally called BackRub. The homepage read: "BackRub is a 'web crawler' which is designed to traverse the web."

2. Google has acquired an average of one company every week since 2010.

3. The first Google doodle was a Burning Man symbol. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin went to the Burning Man festival in 1998 and added the doodle to let users know they were away from the office that weekend.​

- read the full article Google's 15th birthday: 15 things you didn't know (from The Guardian)​

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

my theory is you should have your dick cut off.

I'd definitely fit in with all the other McLIT boys, huh?

 

[Laurel]

As Skype turns ten, a look back at how six Europeans changed the world.

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/125252146_042c71ac0c_o-640x480.png

"I don't care about Skype!" millionaire Jaan Tallinn tells me, taking off his blue sunglasses and finding a seat at a cozy open-air restaurant in the old town of Tallinn, Estonia. "The technology is 10 years old—that's an eternity when it comes to the Internet Age. Besides, I have more important things going on now."

Tallinn has five children, and he calls Skype his sixth. So why does he no longer care about his creation?​

- read the full article “How can they be so good?”: The strange story of Skype (from Ars Technica)​

 

[Laurel]

The synthetic drugs being invented, refined, and produced today—and often shipped in from China—would have blown Timothy Leary’s mind. Who knows what they’re doing to the brains of users.

http://images.nymag.com/news/features/drugs130422_1_250b.jpg

A few years ago, on the West Coast, I made the acquaintance of a 32-year-old whom some people call “the Wizard.” He’s a nice guy, quiet, with a long beard that he wasn’t going to cut until Americans stopped killing civilians in our two wars, and a deep interest in organic chemistry. He was once a computer programmer and at another time a pot dealer. “It wasn’t uncommon for me to drive around with pounds of weed in my truck,” he says. “I’d just put on a hillbilly hat, load up the car, and throw tools in the back.” Now, though, he’d wandered through a different door and found himself in the midst of a bazaar of weird new drugs. In the Wizard’s offline world, which was made up of patchwork-*wearing hippies and Rainbow Family elders, there was acid, pot, and MDMA, usually called ecstasy, and that was about it. But on the online forums he began to obsessively frequent, the Wizard learned about a vast array of new white powders. It was as if MDMA (now being called “Molly”) and LSD had somehow melded together, producing dozens of new psychedelic substances. On the forums, there were also whole new classes of dissociatives, stimulants, sedatives, and cannabis-based products (“cannabinoids”), along with a group of drugs called “bath salts,” which, of course, have nothing to do with Epsom salts or the lavender-scented kind purchased at Aveda.​

- read the full article Travels in the New Psychedelic Bazaar (from NYMag)​

 

[Laurel]

Daniel Taylor didn't commit murder — and the author, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, proved it in The Chicago Tribune. But it took the justice system more than a decade to catch up.

http://socialistworker.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/330/images/ct-ct-met-double-murder-questions.jpg-20130205.sm_.jpg

During nearly 25 years as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, I received hundreds of requests for help from convicted defendants. None was more compelling than the hand-printed letter from Daniel Taylor, a 25-year-old inmate at Stateville Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois. In neat block letters, Daniel explained that he was serving a life sentence without parole for a double murder in Chicago in 1992. Even though Daniel had given a court-reported confession, he said he was innocent and he had police records that proved it.

The letter was addressed to Steve Mills, my reporting partner on numerous stories about wrongful conviction. When Steve brought it to my desk, I was as intrigued—and skeptical—as he was. Why had this man confessed? How had he been convicted? Was he delusional about what the police records really showed?​

- read the full article How Two Newspaper Reporters Helped Free an Innocent Man (from The Atlantic)​

 

[lovetoread]

There has always been false confessions. They shouldn't be believed unless thy can prove they did it.

 

[crazychemgirl]

still working on GOT book 5... but in just 4 days of being back to school I read about 20%

 

[Laurel]

The world of container shipping is crucial to our everyday existence, yet few people have any idea what happens on the high seas. In an extract from her new book, Rose George delves inside this fascinating and secretive industry

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02662/Maersk_Kendal_2662924b.jpg

Friday. No sensible sailor goes to sea on the day of the Crucifixion, or the journey will be followed by ill will and malice. So here I am on a Friday in June, looking up at a giant ship that will carry me from Felixstowe to Singapore, for five weeks and 9,288 nautical miles through the Pillars of Hercules, pirate waters and weather. I stop at the bottom of the ship’s gangway, waiting for an escort, stilled and awed by the immensity of this thing, much of her the colour of a summer-day sky, so blue; her bottom painted dull red; her name – Maersk Kendal – written large on her side.

There is such busy-ness around me. Everything in a modern container port is enormous, overwhelming, crushing. Kendal of course, but also the thundering trucks, the giant boxes in many colours, the massive gantry cranes that straddle the quay, reaching up 10 storeys and over to ships that stretch three football pitches in length. There are hardly any humans to be seen. When the journalist Henry Mayhew visited London’s docks in 1849, he found 'decayed and bankrupt master butchers, master bakers, publicans, grocers, old soldiers, old sailors, Polish refugees, broken-down gentlemen, discharged lawyers’ clerks, suspended Government clerks, almsmen, pensioners, servants, thieves’. They have long since gone. This is a Terminator terminal, a place where humans are hidden in crane or truck cabs, where everything is clamorous machines.​

- read the full article Container shipping: the secretive industry crucial to our existence (from The Telegraph)​

 

[trysail]

Kitty Mama likes ships !!!

Who knew?


http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=778301&page=39
http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=48755269&postcount=960

 

[evesdream]

sorry for the overkill, it's on my mind

Four furry paws can turn the “Now is the time for all good men” that was left on screen into “Now is the time for all good mennnnnbbbbbbbvcccccccxzzzzzzzzxcvbnm,;/////////ppoooo,” a decidedly less cogent, if more original, thought.

We human beings are not completely without our wiles, though. Faced with this epidemic of cat hacking, a member of our species named Chris Niswander set his mind to cat-proofing computers for the benefit of all humanity. What sparked his thinking, Niswander says, was his sister’s cat, whose footwork crashed a running program and uninstalled some software. “It was kind of impressive,” he said of the cat feat.

Niswander, a 30-year-old software engineer and president of a Tucson soft ware company called BitBoost, ultimately created PawSense, a program that allegedly discriminates between people and cats.

http://radio-weblogs.com/0111737/categories/wow/images/catlike.jpg​

- read the full article Cat-proofing Your Computer and Computer-proofing Your Cat

C-A-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T (from Scientific American)​

 

[Laurel]

Four furry paws can turn the “Now is the time for all good men” that was left on screen into “Now is the time for all good mennnnnbbbbbbbvcccccccxzzzzzzzzxcvbnm,;/////////ppoooo,” a decidedly less cogent, if more original, thought.

We human beings are not completely without our wiles, though. Faced with this epidemic of cat hacking, a member of our species named Chris Niswander set his mind to cat-proofing computers for the benefit of all humanity. What sparked his thinking, Niswander says, was his sister’s cat, whose footwork crashed a running program and uninstalled some software. “It was kind of impressive,” he said of the cat feat.

Niswander, a 30-year-old software engineer and president of a Tucson soft ware company called BitBoost, ultimately created PawSense, a program that allegedly discriminates between people and cats.

http://radio-weblogs.com/0111737/categories/wow/images/catlike.jpg​

- read the full article Cat-proofing Your Computer and Computer-proofing Your Cat

C-A-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T (from Scientific American)​

This is awesome! Need!!!

 

[Laurel]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/h_12.01965067-580.jpg

At 10 P.M. on September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka, then a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer, sat down at his typewriter in Prague and began to write. He wrote and wrote, and eight hours later he had finished “Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”).

Kafka wrote in his diary, “I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water.” He later described the one-sitting method as his preferred means of writing. “Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and soul.”

In April, 1951, on the sixth floor of a brownstone in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, Jack Kerouac began taping together pieces of tracing paper to create a hundred-and-twenty-foot-long roll of paper, which he called “the scroll.” Three weeks later, typing without needing to pause and change sheets, he’d filled his scroll with the first draft of “On the Road,” without paragraph breaks or margins.

In 1975, Steve Jobs, working the night shift at Atari, was asked if he could design a prototype of a new video game, Breakout, in four days. He took the assignment and contacted his friend Steve Wozniak for help. Wozniak described the feat this way: “Four days? I didn’t think I could do it. I went four days with no sleep. Steve and I both got mononucleosis, the sleeping sickness, and we delivered a working Breakout game.”

The accomplishments of Kafka, Kerouac, and Wozniak are impressive, but not completely atypical of what can be achieved by talented people in states of supreme concentration. The more interesting question is this: Would their feats be harder today, or easier?​

- read the full article How Today's Computers Weaken Our Brain (from The New Yorker)​

 

[glynndah]

http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/eVVjUEzp925YuRFTtVhLGg--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Y2g9MzQyO2NyPTE7Y3c9NjA4O2R4PTA7ZHk9MDtmaT11bGNyb3A7aD0zNDI7cT04NTt3PTYwOA--/http://l.yimg.com/os/590/2013/09/10/ht-mullaney-obit-kb-30910-16x9-608-jpg_180120.jpg

"If you're about to throw away an old pair of pantyhose, stop" is not the way most obituaries begin, but, then, according to her family, Mary A. "Pink" Mullaney was no ordinary woman.

"Pink's Obituary" {Not our Pink.}

 

[Laurel]

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/DSCPhoto-1900s.jpg

It’s tempting to think of sacred tombs and ancient monuments as our best window into other cultures. But archaeologists have long known that if you really want to understand a civilization, to know its people’s passions, weaknesses, and daily rituals, look no further than their garbage.

Robin Nagle has spent much of her life fascinated by trash, and its oft-unseen impacts on our society, our environment, and our health. Nagle’s recent book, “Picking Up,” chronicles a decade working with the New York City Department of Sanitation, years spent in their offices, transfer stations, locker rooms, and of course, their garbage trucks. Interspersed with Nagle’s personal experiences are enlightening tidbits from the city’s long and difficult history of trash collection. As Nagle points out, we live in cities literally built on trash, yet the management of household waste remains one of the most invisible aspects of modern existence.​

- read the full article A Filthy History: When New Yorkers Lived Knee-Deep in Trash (from Collectors Weekly)​

 

[kotori]

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/DSCPhoto-1900s.jpg

I couldn't hear you: DSNY truck outside collecting a forty-yard dumpster. As they do every morning.

 

[remy_lebeau8]

still working on GOT book 5... but in just 4 days of being back to school I read about 20%

I'm about a quarter through the third. Really good shit

 

[gravyrug]

There has always been false confessions. They shouldn't be believed unless thy can prove they did it.

There's a case in Austin where they had something like 50 different confessions for the same murders, and it seems unlikely that the ones they eventually convicted were the right ones. Many prosecutors and cops are more interested in getting a conviction than catching the right person.

 

[Laurel]

http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/eVVjUEzp925YuRFTtVhLGg--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Y2g9MzQyO2NyPTE7Y3c9NjA4O2R4PTA7ZHk9MDtmaT11bGNyb3A7aD0zNDI7cT04NTt3PTYwOA--/http://l.yimg.com/os/590/2013/09/10/ht-mullaney-obit-kb-30910-16x9-608-jpg_180120.jpg

"If you're about to throw away an old pair of pantyhose, stop" is not the way most obituaries begin, but, then, according to her family, Mary A. "Pink" Mullaney was no ordinary woman.

"Pink's Obituary" {Not our Pink.}

This is beautiful