January 2011
51 posts
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metalocalypse cat moment
“oh my god oh my god oh my god he’s deeead! oh nooooooo! that cat was the bestest friends i ever hads!” - Toki Wartooth
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last night we had lobster for dinner
And really, looking into the beady eyes of a lobster in the last few minutes of its life is disconcerting. The lobster is the crustacean manifestation of the ‘it sucks to kill this thing, but the results taste so good’ conundrum. And like just about any other topic, David Foster Wallace says all of it better than I can.
hi guyz
This-a here’s my last review for Inyourspeakers for the time being. You should still read everything else on this site, because it’s good stuff, and they just did a redesign that is pretty much ‘baller-ina’ if I do say so myself.
The hiatus is happening because I’ll be studying abroad in Prague for the next four months. (Side note: YEEEEEE). I leave in a week...
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whadja have fer lunch ta-day?
Oh, just a grilled cheese made with Cabot Private Stock Cheddar. Boosh! Biggie Smalls may have sipped on private stock (way back, when he had the red-and-black lumberjack with the hat to match), but I snack on it.
(P.S. can we all agree that if you’re going to have a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, the tomato has to be at least somewhat grilled? Nothing worse than a giant,...
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top three theme songs
“Misirlou,” perhaps better known as the Pulp Fiction theme song. Just another beautiful thing that the Black Eyed Peas thoughtlessly ruined.
The Sister, Sister theme song. There’s really something to be said for mid-’90s Janet Jackson-style dance music with terrible keyboards.
Any of the theme songs of Food Network shows. Barefoot Contessa, Everyday Italian,...
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mental block
When engaging in Sporcle trivia games, mental blocks are frequent. Like yesterday. The game? ”Name the movies based on the verbosely paraphrased versions of their titles.” One of the clues? ”Musician Playing a Bowed Instrument Atop the Protective Covering That Forms the Upper Extreme of a Building.”
I just couldn’t get it. For an embarrassing number of seconds,...
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“When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to...”
– Haruki Murakami, speaking troof in his Paris Review interview.
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middle school
the guys who gelled their hair into crispy peaks
the principal who you saw on vacation: same plane, same hotel, same beach (instantly ruddy and always holding a Heineken)
the mondo-sized warm gooey chocolate chip cookies at the snack bar
the ‘healthy living’ teacher who said that the caloric value of five of those cookies was equal to one extra pound of body fat (and the girls...
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“The Rip” - Portishead
This is...
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analogy
An Arcade Fire concert was on a cable channel the other day. Régine Chassagne looked really good and was wearing some sort of glove that made her look like she had a bionic arm. She sang, cranked an unidentifiable instrument, then even played drums on “Ready To Start.” They sounded good. The crowd was huge — U2 concert-huge, or at least White Stripes-huge, Jumbotron screen,...
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good words and sentences today
1. Got an e-mail from the Red Cross. Apparently the Bloodmobile is in town. Bloodmobile. It has a nice ring to it, a little creepy and vampiric. Hop on the bloodmobile, kid, we’re going for a ride.
2. There’s an Eminem song on the radio which has quickly become an early frontrunner for containing the Best Lyrics of 2011. (Last year’s went to Akon’s “I’m...
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JUST REGISTERED TO TAKE THE COLLEGE JEOPARDY...
MARCH FIFTEENTH, Y’ALL
WHO’S WITH ME?
GET AT ME, TREBEK
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"forget you!"
People can gripe all they want about the way movies are edited for television, but to me, the substitutions they use for curse words are sometimes funnier than the former fucks and shits themselves.
For example, the VH1 version of The Breakfast Club had some good angry exclamations, “Eat slop!” being one. FX just aired Forgetting Sarah Marshall; the strategic nudity-hiding cropping...
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ja...zzzzz
Watched this last night:
Catherine Zeta-Jones gets this great demented facial expression sometimes when she dances.
which pretty much sucks
I had a really, truly terrible thought the other day: when I get older and have a real job and real responsibilities, I won’t just be able to lie down and nap whenever I feel like it.
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where did this come from?
Google Ads at the bottom of a (terribly obsolete) Thought Catalog article:
Bereavement
Words of Bereavement
Poems on Bereavement
Air Bereavement Fare
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16 'n' pregnan'
Language acquisition happens when babies hear people speak around them. If babies grew up in front of all the shows that were on MTV today, they would end up being unable to pronounce 85% of the consonants at the end of words. It’s like something out of No Country For Old Men. ”Nothin.” ”Runnin.” ”Whuhh’?” ”Whaahh?”
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fact of the day
When filming Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino asked a friend to describe the feeling of being on heroin so that John Travolta could research the role of Vincent Vega. The friend told Travolta that the closest he could get without ingesting the drug was to drink a lot of tequila and lie in a hot pool.
something d-o-o economics
Caleb Crain wrote a small analytical essay on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He’s concerned with socioeconomic matters — the ‘so choice’ red Ferrari representing capitalism, Ferris’ capacity for technological innovation as a harbinger of automated messages and recorded telemarketing, etc. etc. — but I always thought of the movie as a character study in...
WHISKEY IN A CAN. →
nedhepburn:
Whiskey. In A Fucking Can.
¡WHISKEY IN A CAN!
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“Autumn Sweater” - Yo La Tengo
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i went to new york
and a baby was wailing on the corner of Broadway and something. As if by magic (or sitcom-level choreography) the dad popped a pacifier in said baby’s mouth, and the wee one shut right up. It was beautiful. Wah wah wah *pop* silence.
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It's impossible to tell you what I'm going to do... →
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Q: what will be the best thing about becoming a...
A: Couch shopping! Moving from couch to couch in a furniture store. Testing for different couch attributes: squishiness, fuzziness of fabric, leanability on armrests, maximum napping capacity, and so on. Gallivanting about the store, petting fabric samples, putting fingers up in movie director fashion to frame the image of the couch in one’s living room
( )
and otherwise imagining...
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“Grandpa Bought Me A Corndog from the Devil” - a lost Flannery O’Connor story
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“Jeff thought of having a Campari and soda and then, as usual, changed to a beer....”
– Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
(this is for Ruby, probably leaving all kinds of indelible impressions in London as we speak)
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kanye's workout plan
The gym! Cvičení, třeba běh, je dobré pro tvé zdraví. That means “Exercise, such as running, is good for your health” in Czech*. At the gym there is always a woman who wears an all-spandex outfit and looks as though her muscles would withstand a punch from a ninja trainee. She is a solid lady, a DVD-workout lady. And she has these fingerless gloves. Weightlifting gloves?...
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i like my sugar with coffee and cream
Seth Rogen as Mike D, Elijah Wood as Ad-Rock, and Danny McBride as MCA. This is going to be so sweet!
(p.s. what if Beastie Boys were a medieval rap group called Baestie Boyes?)
question
Who is Jen Brill? Or, rather, what does she do? She’s so cute. She must DJ or something. Handbag designer, perhaps. All socialites have at least one baseline pet project, right?
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boston cream pie
Yesterday we went on a ‘sojourn’ to Boston. Just for the day: change of scenery. It was freezing. I associate Boston with two things: the cold, and colonial happenings. Maybe it’s the by-product of a Revolutionary War-heavy elementary education, but brick buildings and Charles River equal Paul Revere and redcoats and bayonets and so on. Very patriotic stuff.
The North End...
facebook status update:
Sad lyrics from obscure song; everyone comments and asks “What’s going on?” ”Is something wrong?” etc.; you comment back and say, “No, guys, they’re lyrics”; “Oh what song?”; “You wouldn’t have heard of it,” etc. etc.
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hiring center
It’s a magical box in which your future career hides, waiting to flash upon the screen. Major? English. Interests? Reading, writing, Ramen noodles. Congratulation, you’re hired! As what? Hmm. Unsure. We’ll figure it out later. Sorry about that. Go have a hot dog and come back later.
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short hair/long jacket
Ooh, haircuts. Besides getting the shampoo head massage (which is amazing and makes me want to be more religious so I have a better shot of getting into heaven [because I assume heaven involves like seven hours of shampoo head massages a day]), the best part of getting a haircut is watching the other ladies getting haircuts.
It’s funny how having decent-looking hair is important to a...
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"Escape From Spiderhead" →
Guys. George Saunders is killing it in this story. Remember Will Ferrell’s SNL frat boy character, when he yells about his bro friend? ”He was the COOLEST! You guys don’t even KNOW!” That’s how I feel about George Saunders.
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“In the cap’s pocket there’s hash, Tuinals, some coke. I greet the...”
– Keith Richards, Life
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“Maggie May” - Rod Stewart
It’s...
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>
The phenomenon of getting a song stuck in one’s head is one thing, but what about a specific phrase from a book, or a whole scene? Today’s examples: “naterally wicious” from Great Expectations; the part in Play It As It Lays when Maria Wyeth’s hairdresser scolds her for brushing her wet hair.
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toothsome
Heard two Michael Bublé songs in the waiting room. There was a little boy in a big blue coat with a corresponding daddy. God, I hate the dentist. Much more than I was a kid. The dentist’s office was fun as a kid because you got a new toothbrush at the end of the visit. And a sticker. Killer combination. Now it’s all about fillings and Novocaine and drool seeping out of the...
i'm sorry this gif is so so scary
gifparty:
Hi this is only going up temporarily, just long enough to FREAK Y’ALL THE EFF OUT.
Oh Natalie. MDMA and Swan Lake got you feeling like a champion, insanity never sleeps, better slip you an Ambien. Or anything in this category.
basic breakfast
At breakfast the waiter was sullen and mustachioed, sort of a fashionable Ringling Bros. type. ”He never speaks,” said K. ”He might be depressed.”
Maybe he was sad because he’d rather be a 19th-century lion tamer in a red jacket and safari boots. Maybe he was sad because he had to go to work at seven o’clock that day, far too early for a night owl. Maybe he...
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word up
A New Yorker blogger’s take on the Kindle: “Am I supposed to understand the desire of the Kindle to be held and read? Or the humans who prefer them to books? When I read a book all the way through to the end, I want the evidence stuffed and mounted on my bookshelf.” The book-as-taxidermy metaphor is very fitting here.
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moop
Cannot believe I missed Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor. This would have been great General-Sherman-conquering-the-library music last semester. Give me art related to the Civil War and I just giggle with glee. Tee hee. Pitchfork described the theme as such: “In the annals of using historical metaphors for emotional communication, it’s up there with Jeff Mangum empathizing with...
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un oeuf
Woke up with a pressing craving for egg salad. Looked up eight different ‘best ways’ to hard-boil an egg, picked least suspect version, executed it as little sisters sang saccharine ’90s hits in the next room.
Speaking of hard-boiled, I’ve been reading Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, and the third-person POV hampers the detective narrative in an irritating way....
on video games
L: “See all the usernames that have to do with weed? Like ‘Blazed’ and ‘Coconut420’? The stoners are the ones who are, like, really really good at Call Of Duty. Kevin has a theory about it: they think it’s actually real.”
$
Luxury, to me, seems less about the physical material of something and more about ridiculous quantity. Large quantities are a pioneer’s idea of luxury. A freezer full of different Ben & Jerry’s flavors, or a wealth of athletic socks, or all of the 33 1/3 books, all seem more luxurious than a single pair of cashmere knee-highs or a [very imaginary] pint of ice cream made...
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'personal'
“missmollymary.tumblr.com is probably written by a female somewhere between 36-50 years old. The writing style is personal and happy most of the time.”
MATURITY ARRIVES, THANK YOU URLAI!
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what's in a college photo?
A red cup
A tapestry
At least one person who didn’t mean to be in the picture