Did somebody just try to buy the British government?
I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X [sic] is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this present moment, as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy.
The lampshade that drives its owners mad: Strange truth behind 20th century’s most disturbing object
The lampshade’s current proprietor […] won’t keep it in his home and says that, even now that it’s here, safely in storage, he feels more at ease when he knows the shade is shut away in its white cardboard box. The longer I am left alone with it, standing by a window as the daylight is beginning to fade, the more I can understand why.
James Elkins: How to Look at Mondrian
He wasn’t especially careful with his repainting, which is a clue to how closely he expected people to look. Art historians have noticed his change of mind, and it has been said that before the early 1920s, Mondrian thought of his compositions as part of an infinite plane, which could go on indefinitely in all directions. Starting with paintings like this one, the canvas is the whole object, the whole universe, and there is nothing beyond it.
(via Metafilter)
Margaret Atwood & Ursula K. Le Guin – Space Canon
[…] they’ve evidently been friends for years.
[…]
Le Guin works very comfortably under the mantle of science fiction, having penned some of the classics of the genre, while Atwood waffles, preferring to stay in the mainstream literary conversation.
With respect to SF, Le Guin is invariably right and Atwood is almost always wrong.
Atwood: “What about Star Wars?”
Le Guin: “There have been really few science fiction movies. They have mostly been fantasies, with spaceships.”
Reinstate Rick Salutin << Murray Dobbin's Blog
That the Globe would fire him is indicative of the final stage of the Canadian political and economic elite’s betrayal of the country’s traditions and values. It’s all just business now and anything that isn’t business – certainly anything that questions it’s “natural” dominance – is simply dispensable. I can just imagine the suits at the Globe having a brief conversation about Rick’s column: “By the way, why are still publishing Rick Salutin?” Long silence. “Rick who?” I wonder if any of these guys ever even read him. It reminds me of a Star Trek episode where a representative of a race completely dedicated to trade and commerce, looks at Captain Picard who is trying to engage him in civilized conversation and says “Why are we speaking?”
Indeed, why are we speaking?
via rabble.ca
Kieron Gillen’s Workblog >> On Leaving RPS
What they don’t tell you is that they don’t pick the writers randomly. From that mob of people who want to be games journalists, they can pick. And, because these are not stupid people, they pick the best available. They’re not going to pay for better writing, but since it doesn’t cost them any more, they may as well have it.
In other words, don’t think about the fact you’re replaceable. Think about the fact that out of the enormous mob of people who wanted your job, you’re the one who got it. No matter how much they treat you with disdain, they actually think you’re the best.
In other words, have some pride.
The Infamous Brad – Christians in the Hand of an Angry God (part 3)
And when a group of Pharisees caught an adulterous couple, they figured they had the perfect trap for Jesus. You see, the holiness code very specifically prescribes the death penalty for adultery (Leviticus 20:10). However, Roman law said that only the Roman governor could prescribe the death penalty. So by bringing him the woman caught in adultery, they figured that they could force him to choose between offending the Jews (and losing his followers) or offending the Romans (and being put to death). Instead of answering, Jesus just crouched down and wrote on the ground with His finger for a while, then stood up and said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The Pharisees slunk away in cowardice and shame, which raises the interesting unanswerable question, what the heck was Jesus writing? My theology professors’ favorite speculation was that it was a list of other death penalty offenses that the Pharisees might reasonably suspect Jesus of somehow knowing they were guilty of, daring them to start a stone-throwing festival that would have left the hypocrites as dead as the adulteress. Nonetheless, as fun as this story is, let’s not miss part of the point here. Jesus was specifically asked whether or not we as human beings should continue to enforce the holiness code in the Law of Moses, and Jesus very specifically said no. (John 8:1-11)
via Metafilter
TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome
“She says, ‘He got it right on the nose.’
” ‘Has that ever happened?’
“And she says, ‘No.’
“I said, ‘Holy shit.’ ”
And then [Drew] Carey remembers what happened next: “Everybody thought someone had cheated. We’d just fired Roger Dobkowitz, and all the fan groups were upset about it. I thought, Fuck, they just fucking fucked us over. Somebody fucked us over. I remember asking, ‘Are we ever going to air this?’ And nobody could see how we could. So I thought the show was never going to air. I thought somebody had cheated us, and I thought the whole show was over. I thought they were going to shut us down, and I thought I was going to be out of a job.”
And just over there, just on the other side of that curtain, was twice-perfect Terry Kniess, still dancing to the music. “I was like, Fuck this guy,” Carey says. “When it came time to announce the winner, I thought, It’s not airing anyway. So fuck him.”
Johann Hari – How Goldman Sachs gambled with the world’s poor – and won
There are some smaller explanations that account for some of the price rise, but not all. It’s true the growing demand for biofuels was gobbling up much-needed agricultural land – but that was a gradual process that wouldn’t explain a violent spike. It’s true that oil prices increased, driving up the cost of growing and distributing food – but the evidence increasingly shows that wasn’t the biggest factor.
[…]
Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into ‘derivatives’ that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in “food speculation” was born.
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