a blog of personal eccentricity
This is rough. He leapt from a bridge in daylight. The blood-stained man is the boy’s father. His son was tortured and raped because of the young man’s participation in the post-election protests. The shame of the acts inflicted on him in prison were too much for him to live with.
(via Daily Dish)
I admire the gusto, and the adherence to principles, but someone needs to get a girlfriend.
Mr Gatward…will not join the ‘five items or less’ queue at the supermarket, in protest that the sign should read ‘five items or fewer’.
He also gets annoyed when people-neglect the ‘Royal’ in ‘Royal Tunbridge Wells’, and was vexed when he saw a major chain store advertising sales with signs saying ‘until stocks last’ rather than ‘while stocks last’.
‘I fought for the preservation of our heritage and our language but some people seem happy to let that go. I’m not,’ he said.
‘I feel very strongly about the English language.
I guess the animal kingdom can get in on the fun, too. An account from the photographers:
We had our camera set up on some rocks and were getting ready to take the picture when this curious little ground squirrel appeared, became intrigued with the sound of the focusing camera and popped right into our shot.
Examples of the human form can be found here.
The Daily Dish publishes a reader’s email:
I worked a number of jobs in college to make ends meet. My parents were able (and gracious) to help me out my freshman year, but with two more siblings following me to college in short order, I knew I had to get off the parental dole after that. I was fortunate to have an academic scholarship to pay for tuition, so all I had to cover was room, board and incidentals (including books). I worked at McDonald’s and as an overnight stocker in a grocery store in the summers, and during the school year in the cafeteria and at a tutoring center. These experiences have led to my “shitty job” theory: everyone should have to work a shitty job at least once in their lives. It does two important things for you:
Among them: laughter, art, and pubic hair.
Ross Douthat makes a case:
Don’t laugh. No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism. No recent movie has made the case for abortion look as self-evidently awful as “Knocked Up,” Apatow’s 2007 keep-the-baby farce. No movie has made saving — and saving, and saving — your virginity seem as enviable as “The 40-Year Old Virgin,” whose closing segue into connubial bliss played like an infomercial for True Love Waits.
A new site.
A cosmological whodunnit? on Saturn’s rings.
Over the past few months, as the Sun shines almost straight into the rings (instead of down on them), every bump and irregularity sticks out like, well, like a tree in the desert. Weird gravitational effects from Saturn’s fleet of moons tune and resonate the countless particles making up the rings, creating beautiful waves and ripples.
But this, this is something new.
It’s not exactly clear what’s going on here, even in this slightly zoomed shot. But it looks for all the world – or worlds — like some small object on an inclined orbit has punched through Saturn’s narrow F ring, bursting out from underneath, and dragging behind it a wake of particles from the rings. The upward-angled structure is definitely real, as witnessed by the shadow it’s casting on the ring material to the lower left. And what’s with the bright patch right where this object seems to have slammed in the rings? Did it shatter millions of icy particles, revealing their shinier interior material, making them brighter? Clearly, something awesome and amazing happened here.
(rolling my eyes)
An interactive feature that lets you decide the fate of the Great American Experiment. My diagnosis of finality:
You are a humanitarian internationalist. You’re convinced mankind will terminate America—but at least we won’t off ourselves in the process. You’ll know you’re right when: Everyone on Earth pledges allegiance to a world government; the feds default on the national debt.
An interactive graph.
I don’t think that my mother and the IRS Chief Council Library, where she works, will be doing this anytime soon, but the Texas Library Association has a forthcoming calendar showcasing some of the tattoo work of their librarians.
