- Is this the world’s best job? I don’t know how to sail or snorkel, but there are worse ways to spend one’s day, that’s for sure.
- Gerry Canavan has an interesting post about imaginative urtexts, the seminal influences that define us and, more specifically, or respective nerdities. It’s tough to narrow these down to just a select, specific few, but my own urtexts include The Muppet Show, Monty Python, Ray Bradbury stories, He-Man and G.I. Joe, Douglas Adams, Infocom and Sierra games, the Beatles, and a host of others I’m equally proud of and embarrased by. What are yours?
- I’d read (via Waxy.org) that small, handmade toy manufacturers might be seriously hurtby new regulations to protect children from lead exposure. But I’m shocked (via Neil Gaiman’s twitter) that the same regulations might apply to children’s books. That seems a bridge too far, if you ask me.
- This is not something you read every day:
At the start of the Year of the Ox, researchers announced they had kept frozen for 13 years the testicles of a bull named Yasufuku, the progenitor of the expensive Hida-gyu brand of beef in central Gifu prefecture.
Don’t the Japanese listen to This American Life? [via]
- And finally, a short logic test. Although what does it say that I, who earned a D- in my freshman year formal logic class, scored 100% on this? [via]
Day: January 20, 2009
The sweet smell of success?
As if their joke — it was a joke, right? — body spray wasn’t weird enough, now Burger King wants you to ditch your friends for food. Friendship is fleeting, but the Whopper’s flame-broiled empty calories are forever. [via]
As to the body spray, Burger King might be interested in a recent study that suggests it’s not how you smell, but how confident thinking you smell good can make you. [via]
Then again, as Maureen F. McHugh says, “I am willing to be convinced that food could be a fragrance….But fast food? It’s a terrifying world.”
“Oh, I’m on vacation.”
Last night, I watched Eraserhead. I can’t pretend to have understood it, and it would probably be going too far to say I “enjoyed” it, but… It’s a very interesting movie, but it also felt disorienting even by David Lynchian standards.