Good Reads

[Laurel]

http://mirroronmywall.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/female-orgasm.jpg

“You can't see Hendrix anymore because he's dead, so you gotta go see Nicole stroke pussy!”

It was a summer evening inside San Francisco’s Regency Center and Eli Block, tall and toned, was trying to round up spectators for what was being billed as the largest live demonstration, ever, of “a woman in orgasm.” Block used to be an Apple Genius Bar troubleshooter. Now he works for OneTaste, a company devoted to a practice called "orgasmic meditation," or OM, as an orgasm coach. He wore a navy-blue t-shirt that read "Powered by Orgasm."

OneTaste has been operating at the distinctively West Coastal junction of the carnal, the spiritual, and the theoretical for nine years now, expanding from a San Francisco commune to a multi-city business. Its work has been validated by South by Southwest—the annual marketer’s paradise in Austin, Texas, that helped popularize Twitter and Foursquare—and TEDx SF, one of the idea conference's independently organized confabs. It also appeared in the Tim Ferriss bestseller The 4-Hour Body. “The 15-minute orgasm”? That’s OneTaste.

This was the first night of OMXperience, a three-day August conference meant to "kick off the industry of orgasm," with speakers including Naomi Wolf, New York Times bestselling author Dr. Sara Gottfried, and Robbie Richman, the former "culture strategist" at Zappos. Roughly 1,400 people had paid between $200 and $400 to attend.​

- read the full article My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult (from Gawker)​

 

[lovetoread]

I'm very willing to be powered by orgasm.

 

[Saint Peter]

I wish I had a pussy.

That would be awesome.

 

[Laurel]

http://thumbs.ifood.tv/files/images/starbucks-pumpkin-spice-latte.jpg

The pumpkin spice latte, Starbucks’ most iconic and popular seasonal drink, almost didn’t happen. “A number of us thought it was a beverage so dominated by a flavor other than coffee that it didn’t put Starbucks’ coffee in the best light,” says Tim Kern, who recently left Starbucks after 20 years, and who started at Starbucks when it was a regional chain of just six stores.

This year, Starbucks celebrates the tenth anniversary of the drink, which now goes by the “PSL” shorthand, and has its own hashtag on Twitter. The flavor itself is now so popular that incidence of “pumpkin spice”—that distinctive mix of pumpkin, nutmeg and cinnamon—in food served by restaurants increased 234% from 2008 to 2012. It’s everywhere in the US, from air fresheners to tortilla chips, and the drink itself has been copied by Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s and home chefs.​

- read the full article The untold history of Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte (from Quartz)​

 

[JohnnySavage]

I find the subset of humanity that drinks flavored coffee abhorrent. They should be flogged (and not in the good way). If you want coffee, then drink coffee!

Black and nasty - like my heart.

 

[Laurel]

I find the subset of humanity that drinks flavored coffee abhorrent. They should be flogged (and not in the good way). If you want coffee, then drink coffee!

Black and nasty - like my heart.

Those drinks have like 8 million calories and 500 grams of saturated fat, too. Might as well eat ice cream. But people love those things.

 

[Laurel]

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5213/5449210425_e45ffb0a08.jpg
image from Just Thomas Misund (Flickr)

Once upon a time, I had a home of my own, and a wide social circle, and I never had any reason to go to a bar alone. These days, however, I pinball around the world looking after other people's pets, which sometimes lands me in places where I don't know anybody, and there's only so much internet even I can take when that happens. I may live on a shoestring, but I still like a drink.
[...]
I have met many great people while drinking alone in bars. Sometimes we've been best friends for a night, sometimes we've kept in touch and seen each other regularly, sometimes we've just had a pleasant conversation that lasted for the duration of a glass of wine. All of these are reasons why I still do it. However, I have also had many uncomfortable experiences, a selection of which I shall now share with you. I have decided to restrict my list to those encountered over the past year, and to further restrict that list only to uncomfortable experiences in New Zealand and the Netherlands, and I shall list them in order of least to most awful.


The Woman Who Thought I Was Too Foreign To Understand Poetry

I met this woman after a poetry reading. We enthused to each other about how good it was, then she kind of fished around a bit to find out where I was from (instead of just, you know, asking me straight out). She then declared, "Of course, you probably wouldn't have understood most of it." I think I was too floored to comment for a moment, because it seemed like such a weird thing to say. The performance had been in English, my native language, with a handful of Maori words, most of which I knew. This was my fifth visit to New Zealand, and I felt reasonably familiar with the general subject matter; maybe I might miss a couple of historical or place references, but that wasn't going to eclipse my overall grasp of the piece. Also, I knew the poet in question, and perhaps he would have advised me not to bother coming had he expected my comprehension to be so poor. And furthermore, I probably wouldn't have been enthusing about the performance just a minute ago to this same woman if I hadn't understood most of it. I could be wrong, but I felt like a white New Zealander (such as, seemingly, herself, as well as most of the audience) wasn't going to have that much of a head start on me here. And now here I am, months on, still indignantly expounding my qualifications for understanding something that I don't understand why I would not be expected to understand.

Difficulty Rating: 1. It was stupid, but it's not like I often encounter discrimination as a white native English speaker. It didn't take place against a backdrop of societal prejudice against folks of my ethnicity or linguistic background. So.


The White Dude Who Demanded I Justify Asian Feminists' Existence

I'd met this dude once or twice before; he had a really amazing voice that made him sound like he was perpetually doing the voiceover for a Hollywood trailer. On this particular night, he asked what I was reading, and I explained that it was Mellow Yellow, a (seriously excellent) zine by Asian feminists in New Zealand. He took the zine from me and flicked through it looking for reasons to disparage it, while asking me why they were "so worried about being Asian" and "So if I go to Asia, can I write a zine about being white?" "You can write whatever you like," I said, "but it is not a parallel experience." This is how I ended up delivering an impromptu lecture on white privilege in Malaysia, after which he looked at his shoes for a minute and then announced that he was going outside for a smoke. I concealed a tiny smirk of victory, and then the bartender informed me that this white dude was known to exclusively date Asian women.

Difficulty Rating: 2. It was tedious and enraging and I also felt that I needed to keep the peace somewhat because it was a small town and I was going to run into him again; but I concentrated on responding to his statements one by one, and felt like I said what I needed to.​

- read the full article I Talk to Problematic People in Bars (from Autostraddle)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.bloomberg.com/image/iLJ05S_6nAwM.jpg

Hair, breast milk and eggs are doubling as automated teller machines for some cash-strapped Americans such as April Hare.

Out of work for more than two years and facing eviction from her home, Hare recalled Louisa May Alcott’s 19th-century novel and took to her computer.

“I was just trying to find ways to make money, and I remembered Jo from ‘Little Women,’ and she sold her hair,” the 35-year-old from Atlanta said. “I’ve always had lots of hair, but this is the first time I’ve actually had the idea to sell it because I’m in a really tight jam right now.”

The mother of two posted pictures of her 18-inch auburn mane on www.buyandsellhair.com, asking at least $1,000 and receiving responses within hours. Hare, who also considered selling her breast milk, joins others exploring unconventional ways to make ends meet as the four-year-old economic expansion struggles to invigorate the labor market and stimulate incomes.​

- read the full article Bodies Double as Cash Machines With U.S. Income Lagging: Economy (from Bloomberg)​

 

[Laurel]

#firstworldproblems

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/70531000/jpg/_70531722_large.jpg

A month into their journey, one of the team, along with the tent, most of the provisions and six dogs plunged into a crevasse, never to be seen again. Mawson and the other surviving member, Xavier Mertz, started to return to base, surviving in part by eating the remaining dogs. After a few weeks Mertz developed stomach pains and diarrhoea. Then his skin started to peel off and his hair fell out. He died incontinent and delirious a few days later.

Mawson suffered similar symptoms. With the kind of understatement typical of his generation of polar explorers he described the skin of the soles of his feet peeling off: "The sight of my feet gave me quite a shock, for the thickened skin of the soles had separated in each case as a complete layer... The new skin underneath was very much abraded and raw."

It was the suffering of early explorers and sailors that motivated the first studies of vitamins and their deficiency diseases.

At first sight Mawson's story seems to be another such tale - starvation combined with a lack of some vital nutrient. In fact, Mawson's description of his symptoms is an almost textbook description of vitamin A overdose - probably from eating dog liver. As little as 100g of husky liver could give a hungry explorer a fatal dose.

Mawson lived to the decent age of 76 but in his story we find the cautionary tale for our times - vitamins can be very bad for you.

This piece is about what we have learned about vitamin supplements in the last few years - if you are healthy, and you live in a country like the UK, taking multi-vitamins and high-dose antioxidants may shorten your life.​

- read the full article The problem with taking too many vitamins (from the BBC)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/images/lastmeals.jpg

In January 1985, Pizza Hut aired a commercial in South Carolina that featured a condemned prisoner ordering delivery for his last meal. Two weeks earlier, the state had carried out its first execution in twenty-two years, electrocuting a man named Joseph Carl Shaw. Shaw’s last-meal request had been pizza, although not from Pizza Hut. Complaints came quickly; the spot was pulled, and a company official claimed the ad was never intended to run in South Carolina.

It’s not hard to understand why Pizza Hut’s creative team thought the ad was a good idea. The last meal offers an irresistible blend of food, death, and crime that drives a commercial and voyeuristic cottage industry. Studiofeast, an invitation-only supper club in New York City, hosts an annual event based on the best responses to the question, “You’re about to die, what’s your last meal?” There are books and magazine articles and art projects that address, among other things, what celebrity chefs—like Mario Batali and Marcus Samuelsson—would have for their last meals, or what the famous and the infamous ate before dying. Newspapers reported that Saddam Hussein was offered but refused chicken, while Esquire published an article about the terminally ill Francois Mitterrand, the former French president, who had Marennes oysters, foie gras, and, the pièce de résistance, two ortolan songbirds. The bird is thought to represent the French soul and, because it’s protected, is illegal to consume.
[...]
No matter your stance on capital punishment, eating and dying are universal and densely symbolic human processes. Death eludes the living, and we are drawn to anything that offers the possibility of glimpsing the undiscovered country. If, as the French epicure Anthelme Brillat-Savarin suggested, we are what we eat, then a final meal would seem to be the ultimate self-expression. There is added titillation when that expression comes from the likes of Timothy McVeigh (two pints of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream) or Ted Bundy (who declined a special meal and was served steak, eggs, hash browns, toast, milk, coffee, juice, butter, and jelly). And when this combination of factors is set against America’s already fraught relationship with food, supersized or slow, and with weight and weight loss, it’s almost surprising that Pizza Hut didn’t have a winner on its hands.
[...]
The idea of a meal before an execution is compassionate or perverse, depending on your perspective, but it contains an inherently curious paradox: marking the end of a life with the stuff that sustains it seems at once laden with meaning and beside the point. As Barry Lee Fairchild, who was executed by the state of Arkansas in 1995, said in regard to his last meal, “It’s just like putting gas in a car that don’t have no motor.”​

- read the full article Last Meals (from Lapham's Quarterly)​

 

[RobDownSouth]

I find the subset of humanity that drinks flavored coffee abhorrent. They should be flogged (and not in the good way). If you want coffee, then drink coffee!

Black and nasty - like my heart.

You're a man after my own heart, dad.

 

[JohnnySavage]

For the record, Rob is older than Johnny.

 

[trysail]

#firstworldproblems

Aye— though I once had a problem with scurvy that was solved by synthesiszed Vitamin C in the form of a daily pill.

 

[Laurel]

You're a man after my own heart, dad.

For the record, Rob is older than Johnny.

But how is that possible?

Aye— though I once had a problem with scurvy that was solved by synthesiszed Vitamin C in the form of a daily pill.

I take multivitamins. I think it's a good thing. That article's point seems to be that you shouldn't take any supplements because it's possible to overdose. Seems like saying you shouldn't drink any water because you might drown.

You can overdo anything. I don't think moderate supplementation is a bad idea.

 

[JohnnySavage]

I'm very mature for my age.

 

[Laurel]

No, I mean the younger dad than son part.

 

[JohnnySavage]

No, I mean the younger dad than son part.

Oh.

That's my bad.

 

[Laurel]

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2013/10/28/p233/131028_r24150_p233.jpg

In late May of this year, a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, my youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide. She was living in a room in a beat-up house on the hard side of Somerville, Massachusetts, and had been dead, the coroner guessed, for at least five days before her door was battered down. I was given the news over a white courtesy phone while at the Dallas airport. Then, because my plane to Baton Rouge was boarding and I wasn’t sure what else to do, I got on it. The following morning, I boarded another plane, this one to Atlanta, and the day after that I flew to Nashville, thinking all the while about my ever-shrinking family. A person expects his parents to die. But a sibling? I felt I’d lost the identity I’d enjoyed since 1968, when my younger brother was born.
[...]
The day before we arrived at the beach, Tiffany’s obituary ran in the Raleigh News & Observer. It was submitted by Gretchen, who stated that our sister had passed away peacefully at her home. This made it sound as if she were very old, and had a house. But what else could you do? People were leaving responses on the paper’s Web site, and one fellow wrote that Tiffany used to come into the video store where he worked in Somerville. When his glasses broke, she offered him a pair she had found while foraging for art supplies in somebody’s trash can. He said that she also gave him a Playboy magazine from the nineteen-sixties that included a photo spread titled “The Ass Menagerie.”
[...]
I stayed in the sun too long that day and got a burn on my forehead. That was basically it for me and the beach blanket. I made brief appearances for the rest of the week, stopping to dry off after a swim, but mainly I spent my days on a bike, cycling up and down the coast, and thinking about what had happened. While the rest of us seem to get along effortlessly, with Tiffany it always felt like work. She and I usually made up after arguing, but our last fight took it out of me, and at the time of her death we hadn’t spoken in eight years. During that period, I regularly found myself near Somerville, and though I’d always toy with the idea of contacting her and spending a few hours together, I never did, despite my father’s encouragement.​

- read the full article Now We Are Five: A big family, at the beach. by David Sedaris (from The New Yorker)​

 

[trysail]

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2013/10/28/p233/131028_r24150_p233.jpg​

In late May of this year, a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, my youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide.

- read the full article Now We Are Five: A big family, at the beach. by David Sedaris (from The New Yorker)​

As so well documented by David Sedaris, the clan was the inverse of "normal." Given a sample size of crazies that large, tragedy was an inevitability.

Remember, this is a family where paterfamilias advocated Windex as an antiseptic spray.

 

[Laurel]

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/autopia/2013/10/worldview-660x382.jpg

It’s not space. It’s more like a high-altitude vacation. A new Arizona company is joining the outer edges of the tourism industry to find passengers who want to see a dark sky and the curvature of the Earth, all without boarding a sub-orbital rocket and paying the insane entry price.

“Seeing the Earth hanging in the ink-black void of space will help people realize our connection to our home planet and to the universe around us,” World View CEO Jane Poynter said in a statement today. “It is also our goal to open up a whole new realm for exercising human curiosity, scientific research and education.”

Like the Spain-based zero2infinity, World View is planning rides in a relatively spacious gondola, suspended beneath a balloon, that will carry passengers to around 100,000 feet. The view is a long ways from Virgin Galactic’s plans for sub-orbital rocket rides at 360,000 feet, but the view from a gondola will last for a few hours (or more). It’s also a lot cheaper at $75,000, compared to the current ticket price of $250,000 for a ride on Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo which will only spend a few minutes at the peak of its flight before descending back to earth.​

- read the full article Get an Incredible View of Earth From 19 Miles Up — For a Cool $75K (from Wired)​

 

[JohnnySavage]

I'd do that.

 

[SeaDaddy1]

“I, Phoolan Devi – The autobiography of India’s Bandit Queen”

I'm told I'm getting the book for Christmas.
Here's an interesting synopsis: http://drambedkarbooks.wordpress.co...evi-the-autobiography-of-indias-bandit-queen/

 

[Laurel]

http://www.gq.com/images/news-and-politics/2013/11/confessions-of-a-drone-warrior/confessions-of-a-drone-warrior-gq-magazine-november-2013-01.jpg

He was an experiment, really. One of the first recruits for a new kind of warfare in which men and machines merge. He flew multiple missions, but he never left his computer. He hunted top terrorists, saved lives, but always from afar. He stalked and killed countless people, but could not always tell you precisely what he was hitting. Meet the 21st-century American killing machine. who's still utterly, terrifyingly human​

- read the full article Confessions of a Drone Warrior (from GQ)​

 

[Balladeer08]

America's Military Shakeup

It is a quiet autumn in Washington, warm seasonable breezes waft over the empty spaces. The government is shut down, victim of a constitutional crisis decades old that has allowed one or more branches of government to fall under the control of a minority party with less than 25% approval.

Worse still, due to procedural oddities, this minority, currently cited by most as having extremist beliefs, is capable of paralyzing not just America but mounting a threat against the world economy as well.

Within this framework, in these last few days of warmth and peace between summer and the onset of America’s consumer driven holiday frenzy, something else, something more dark, more sinister surfaces.

I received the email today from a senior officer in America’s Strategic Air Command:

“Gordon, during the last few days, America’s two top nuclear commanders have been dismissed for reasons none of us understand or believe. Can you get to the bottom of it?”

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/10/24/dismemberment-of-command-americas-military-shakeup/

 

[Laurel]

http://d1435t697bgi2o.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/alarm-silence.jpg
It's the enemy of both good sleep and productive wakefulness.

Snooze is the enemy of both sleep and wakefulness. Snooze is the devil that cheats us into thinking we’ll be more awake for those nine extra minutes of sleep, more rested for every one of those sleep extensions we accept from Mephistopheles. But it’s all a lie: Nine minutes at a time, the snooze cheats us of our waking life. It hasn’t always been this way. Alarm clocks are an ancient device, but the snooze button is a recent invention.

THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ways of waking: Even before clocks, there were crowing roosters and the rising sun. When water clocks first appeared centuries ago in Egypt, they were modified over time to include alarms. Bells and whistles were adjusted to specific levels in the container from which or into which the water fell. These noisemakers sounded whenever the water rose or fell to the appropriate level, providing a reliable alarm for keeping time. There’s some indication that even Plato used such a clock, sounding a water organ early every morning to mark the beginning of his lectures.

The history of horology is entangled with the history of commerce, so the next wave of time-keeping developments was tied to industry. Alarms came in the form of town clocks, factory whistles, and neighborhood knocker-uppers. Town clocks chimed the early morning hours; factory whistles sounded the hours of shift work; and knocker-uppers went around cities knocking on windows or doors at arranged times so that everyone could make it to work. None of these methods offered the opportunity for drowsing. Even when Seth Thomas patented a small mechanical alarm clock in 1876, there was still no snooze function.​

- read the full article The Devil Is in Your Snooze Button (from Pacific Standard)​