Saturday leftovers

  • Michael Schaub on being an English major:

    I remember being an English major at a Big 12 school in the mid-’90s. This was an agriculture- and engineering-heavy school where liberal arts departments were isolated in a building that permanently smelled like paint thinner. Whenever I’d tell people I was an English major, they’d look incredulous and say “What are you going to do with that? Teach?” Like in the same tone you’d say, “What are you going to do with that? Trade blowjobs for meth?” Good times!

    I was an English major at a pretty agriculture- and engineering-heavy school myself, so I know the feeling. Even my undergraduate advisor told me, “You know, you really can’t get a job with this degree.” (My advisor within the English department was a lot more encouraging, but I met with him all of once, the day I declared, and he left Penn State around the time I graduated. So take from that what you will.)

  • Are you now, or have you ever been, a Lovecraftian horror? [via]
  • Will we be telling our grandchildren (or even our children) about this thing we used to call “fish”? [via]

    While the climate crisis gathers front-page attention on a regular basis, people–even those who profess great environmental consciousness–continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable practice. But eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee. In the past 50 years, we have reduced the populations of large commercial fish, such as bluefin tuna, cod, and other favorites, by a staggering 90 percent. One study, published in the prestigious journal Science, forecast that, by 2048, all commercial fish stocks will have “collapsed,” meaning that they will be generating 10 percent or less of their peak catches. Whether or not that particular year, or even decade, is correct, one thing is clear: Fish are in dire peril, and, if they are, then so are we.

  • Sorry I missed this around Halloween (and by dint of not living in Chicago), but I think a zombie-preparedness fitness class is a terrific idea!
  • Has xkcd been watching the Penn State Monty Python Society’s Mall Climb?
  • Ken Jennings takes the logic of Pixar’s Cars maybe a little too far.
  • Speaking of Pixar, this Pixar opening parody is pretty great. [via]
  • Imagine if the producers of FlashForward had gone with Robert J. Sawyer’s original concept and made the Large Hadron Collider responsible for everything that happens? Imagine how laughable the show might seem then. [via]
  • I’ve never been remotely tempted to buy a bootleg DVD, despite an abundance of them on the streets of Manhattan. Still, their cover art can be pretty delightfully bizarre. [via]
  • NBC sued over font usage. Really.
  • Well, Coldplay does kind of put me to sleep anyway… [via]
  • According to a recent survey:

    Almost half of British consumers have lied to their friends about seeing a classic film to avoid the embarrassment of admitting ignorance of great movies.

    I’m reminded — as it seems I often am, often enough that I should probably get around to reading the book — of the literary parlor game described here, where everybody one-ups each other with all the books they haven’t read. (The “winner is an American professor who, in a rousing display of one-downmanship, finally announces that he’s never read Hamlet.”)

    For the record, of the “top ten classic films people most lie about seeing,” I’ve seen all but one of them. Can you guess which one I haven’t seen? [via]

  • I often find it a little ridiculous what parts of the internet they do and don’t block in my office: blogger.com, but not www.blogger.com; twitpic.com, but not Twitter itself. We have a YouTube channel, for instance — I’d link to it, but there’s nothing there right now — except I can’t visit it at work, even when I’m working with our UK team to upload video to it. Glad I’m not the only person who thinks these policies are a little outdated:

    As I’ve said a whole bunch of times, the “competition” for those of us in traditional media industries—book publishing, broadcasting, newspapers and magazines—is no longer other book publishers, broadcasters, or newspapers and magazines. Instead, our “competition” is now the plain fact that, even if you stipulate that 99.9% of the for-free internet is worthless nonsense, the remaining 0.1% is large enough to absorb anyone’s attention full-time for the rest of their life. For anyone with an internet connection, running out of interesting things to read is completely a thing of the past.

  • This is probably the subtlest Rickrolling I’ve ever seen. [via]
  • And finally, Birds on the Wires [via:

    Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

I scream, you scream

In the fall of 2003, the Penn State Creamery announced that it would debut a new ice cream the following summer, “as part of a yearlong series of events and celebrations commemorating Penn State’s establishment in 1855.” I left Pennsylvania in July of 2004, the very month the new flavor was to be announced, so I never did find out what it was, nor how the new flavor was received by the hungry masses.

However, I recently learned that some librarians are petitioning for their own ice cream flavor from Ben & Jerry’s. (Or at least, somebody’s started a Facebook group around that idea.) And, in the rush to make up silly names for it like “the Dewey Caramel System,” it occured to me that the Penn State Monty Python Society had once spent way too much time thinking up silly ice cream flavor names of its own. Then this afternoon at work, we had an “ice cream social” — one of those office events they trot out now and then to force people to mingle with coworkers — and so I thought I’d look through the list the Society came up with six years ago and maybe post them here.

In 2003, I printed nearly 100 of the best names in the club’s weekly newsletter — which I edited as a labor of deranged love for several years — but in retrospect most of the names aren’t very funny. Like a lot of the newsletter’s content, in retrospect it’s mostly just filler. Some of the suggested flavors were local inside jokes — like CATA Bus Crunch, Sproul Hall Elevator, Nittany Nutz, and We Don’t Know the Goddamn Flavor — and some were just vaguely college-related — like Freshman 15, Student ID Number, Tüition Increase, and Condom Co-op Mint. Some were even more specific to the club — like Free the Hole, FROH, or Wimpy (“it’s gerbilrific!”) — while others just defy understanding half a decade later — like Skrinchie, OMG!!!!!1!!!1!!one!B-P, or Contains No Potatoes. (That said, I would totally order a scoop of Contains No Potatoes, if just to try it.) Most of the rest are just juvenile and/or sex-related — like Syphilicious! and Delicious Wang. And those are the best of them.

In fact, looking over the list now, there’s only a few I find genuinely amusing, like No Means Nougat!, or Soylent Cream (“Good people, good ice cream!”), or even the bizarre Explode! (“the Russian Roulette of ice cream: every 15 cones has a bomb!”) There were some nice meta ones, like The Creamery is Now Closed, or simply Ice Cream. And there’s a weird over-abundance of umlauts — which actually makes me nostalgic for a time when I got to hang out with people who were way too amused by umlauts every week.

But I think my personal favorite — in a list to which I’m no longer entirely sure how I directly contributed, and which nowadays just strikes me as kind of dumb — is the no-doubt sinfully delicious You Can Take Our Ice Cream, But You’ll Never Take Our Freedom.

Okay, that or Squirrel Nuts. It’s kind of a toss-up.