With a Little Help From My Friends

For the record, I think this is the only Beatles cover that surpasses the original.

My worst fear

After, you know, Nothingness and all of that. Via Ashley.

I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door

I loved Maira Kalman as a kid (Ooh La La, Max in Love), Tibor Kalman as a teenager (he's responsible for Red Square on Houston St, among a multitude of other wonderful things), and now I'm back to being in love with Maira Kalman again. Her new post on her New York Times blog is beautiful.

Positive and Negative

Photo of the 1919 eclipse said to have verified Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

SIPs

Dennis Cooper posted a game of sorts, where you try to guess a book based on its Amazon.com "Statistically Impossible Phrases" - aka phrases that are unique (more or less) to the book. But it's fun to just read them, because it's like revisiting old friends without rereading the entire book. And each phrase signifies a concept that's vital to the book, and the meaning behind it.

The Infinite Jest ones are pretty amazing: medical attaché, annular fusion, entertainment cartridge, improbably deformed, howling fantods, feral hamsters, dawn drills, tough nun, professional conversationalist, new bong, ceiling bulged, metro boston, tennis academy, red leather coat, soupe aux pois, red beanie, addicted man, magnetic video, littler kids, little rotter, technical interview, police lock, oral narcotics, sober time, veiled girl.

My Favorite Pen

The original Zebra F-301 Retractable Ballpoint Pen.



Sleek stainless steel barrel, sturdy metal pocket clip, textured grip, refillable. I like it because it will stay clipped to the spiral wire of my notebook, and it writes evenly and smoothly.

David Foster Wallace

It's nearly a year since he killed himself. RIP.

Richard Farnsworth

I just found out that he killed himself in 2000. How could I have missed this? I loved him.

Second Skin

Via Colin Meloy. Particularly interesting w/r/t Infinite Jest.

Creepshow

"Junior" Gaultier

Nate Page

Turtles!

This website tells me: "The Soviet Union sent some turtles, flies, and worms around the the Moon in the Zond 5 mission in 1968." I wonder if they got along. I hope the turtles didn't eat the flies.

Couples, part 2

Vanessa told me that Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman got married on a lunch break while filming Taxi.


That made me think of the fact that Alan Alda and his wife wear matching sneakers.

I love them all.

Ham the space chimp

Ham was born in Cameroon and then kidnapped and eventually purchased by NASA. (So says Wikipedia.) They only named him after his first trip into space, and he was the first animal to actually perform functions while out there. His life seems so sad to me (stolen from his family, forced into labor, experimented upon, always frowning in pictures) but then I like to think that maybe he really enjoyed being a space traveler and transcending his monkey limitations. I guess the world will never know.

You can also watch a newsreel about him.

The Screw

Phil Spector tried to make an "unplayable" song to piss off his former business partner, but I think the song turned out to be pretty awesome. I think I like part 2 better.

Francois Truffaut

“I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.”

Beneath the paving stones

Melissa made an awesome post of Situationists photos.

Caius Is Mortal

"Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he unaccustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it.

"The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: 'Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,' had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but it certainly didn't apply to himself. That Caius - man in the abstract - was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with toys, a coachman and a nanny, afterwards with Katenka and with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth.

"What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother's hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle for Caius? Had he noted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at session as he did?

"'Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but as for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it's altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.'

"Such was his feeling."

Leo Tolstoy

Empire of Light, II

René Magritte

Letters from John Hughes

Please read.

The scariest thing I've ever seen

From Eadweard Muybridge's locomotion studies.



Francis Bacon's interpretation.

Made Me Think of Stephanie

Hypnic jerk

A lot of times, when I'm falling asleep, I wake up with a start, as if I was falling. I googled it today and found out that, according to the unimpeachable Wikipedia, some researchers think that "as a subject falls asleep, their muscles begin to relax and cease working, causing the brain to believe that the body must be falling through air." So then you move around in the interest of self preservation.

Smooth

I don't smoke but if I did, I would want to know how to light my cigarette with a piece of glass.

This is really not good

Stupid pictures that were enclosed in Baldric cigarette packs in the 1930's. I never want to look at these again.