As Archaeologists of the future sift through the shattered remains of our once great and glorious culture, they’ll no doubt wonder what in the Sam Hill happened to us.
This, that’s what.
Which reminds me of my ad agency days. We had a client who disallowed the use of the word but. Not in copy, not in headlines, not anywhere. Why? “Because,” he told us, unable to hide the exasperation—and impatience—in his voice. “It’s negative.”
“This is a very complicated case, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous. And, uh, a lotta strands to keep in my head, man. Lotta strands in old Duder’s head. Fortunately, I’m adhering to a pretty strict, uh, drug regimen to keep my mind, you know, uh, limber.”
Over at More Intelligent Life, Robert Lane Greene takes a look at how the word dude went from pejorative to mainstream.
What might prove to be the remains of a group of 15th-century Franciscan monks has been found just six inches below the surface.
Alien space wreckage lands in Siberia. C’mon. What else could it be?
“California is known for being the only place in the world with bioluminescent millipedes.” Not all that surprising, really.
Five hundred new fairy tales have been discovered in Regensburg, Germany. You can read one of them—”The Turnip Princes”—here.
“Mysterious booms” in Clintonville, Wisconsin have authorities “flummoxed.” That’s right. Flummoxed.
Christopher Shea takes a look at what a group of social scientists and evolutionary theorists—along with the Google Books team—have discovered about word usage.
Published in Science,…[it’s] the best-yet estimate of the true number of words in English—a million, far more than any dictionary has recorded (the 2002 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has 348,000). More than half of the language, the authors wrote, is “dark matter” that has evaded standard dictionaries.
From Good Report comes this story of the first dual living organ donor who’s walking across America to inspire others to the cause.
And here I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for tipping the barista yesterday.
Friday, March 16, near High Drive and 31st. If I’d been thinking—instead of distracted by the pretty sunset—I would have tried to include Jupiter and Venus in the frame. They were just to the left and maybe 6–8 degrees above the horizon. Shot with an iPhone 4S, naturally.
Charles Murray’s latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, has been getting a lot of attention of late. In it, he argues that the upper and lower classes have diverged so far that they no longer share core values and beliefs—and that a new upper class of super-wealthy, over-educated elites has cloistered themselves in a social and cultural bubble.
So. Are you in that bubble? Take the quiz and find out—and be sure to report back. For what it’s worth, I scored a healthy, middle-America, God-fearin’ 75.
File this story under “Duh.”
The European Chess Union, in what surely is a calculated response to this stunning turn of events, isn’t taking any chances: they’ve placed restrictions on cleavage.
It’s somehow fitting that today, Pi Day (3.14—get it?), we write our 400th blog post. Why? Because 400 is both a self number and a Harshad number.
As for the fact that we’re a creative design firm and 400 just happens to be the HTML status code for a bad client request? Never crossed our minds.
Lowercase or capital letter after a colon? Depends. When it’s used within a sentence, the first word following the colon is lowercased unless it’s a proper name.
There are two kinds of people: those who generalize and those who don’t.
When a colon introduces two or more sentences, however—or when it introduces speech in dialogue—the first word following it is capitalized.
CK was faced with an impossible choice: Should he complete his evening ensemble with the charcoal jacket in hand-finished merino wool? Or should he throw caution to the wind and wear the grey pinstripe with Jacquard stitching?
Shot with an iPhone the evening of Friday, March 9, from the alley between Second and Third Avenues, just east of Washington.
An alert reader sent in this item today:
We breathlessly await confirmation of its authenticity.
Here’s a welcome dose of common sense regarding phone protection. Best line: “Our fear drives us to insane lengths to protect our devices, taking marvels of industrial design and mutilating them with rubber bumpers and dusty screen protectors.”
Fact: I’ve had my iPhone 4S since the day it was released. The first half of its life was spent encased in one of those rubber bumpers; the second half free and unencumbered. Today, neither scratch nor ding besmirches its pristine beauty. Save your money.
We’re a little late to this story. Apparently, the AeroShot has been on college campuses (where else?) since January. And while the idea of inhalable caffeine should give pause to anyone concerned about the state of today’s misdirected youth, I’m frankly more alarmed that one of the AeroShot’s creators is reported to have described the device as “an appealing alternative to sugar-laden energy drinks.”
Um…dude. Have you heard of coffee?
Retronaut has quite the collection of Soviet space posters. Do stop by and take a look.