The way the world worked was not cause for some sort of blanket cynicism or sophomoric despair…the way the world worked—which was badly—was just a strong incentive to live purposefully, and to be determined about living well.
John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire. New York: Ballantine, 1981, page 157.
This is for anyone who had a favorite stuffed animal as a kid. Or who has a favorite stuffed animal as an adult. Watch her face when she realizes that the gift from her fiancé is her childhood teddy bear.
This post is dedicated to Petey, who was my teddy bear.
Sometimes people need medicine. This is addressed to the people who dismiss everything and anything that comes from “Big Pharma” in favor of healthy food and “natural” remedies—or “Big Placebo,” as I (and others) call them.
More specifically, I hope the person who made this cartoon eats a bunch of organic fruit full of spiders:
See, I’ve dealt with intestinal issues pretty much my whole life, and the less processed certain foods are, the more distress they cause me. So if health food works for you, that’s awesome and more power to you, but don’t assume I don’t know what I’m talking about just because I don’t share your passion for kelp or whatever.
My issues, by the way, do not remotely compare to those of people with Crohn’s or other forms of inflammatory bowel disease. My diagnosis has always fallen in the catch-all category of irritable bowel syndrome, which also sucks but…..well, you’ll see. Take the story of Sarah at Skeptability (h/t Stephanie Zvan), a vegan who must contend with Crohn’s every day: Continue reading
This describes how I’ve been feeling of late, I dare say.
![Randall Munroe [CC BY-NC 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/)], via xkcd](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/superlative.png "Randall Munroe [CC BY-NC 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/)], via xkcd")
Photo credit: Randall Munroe [CC BY-NC 2.5], via xkcd.
![By Unknown. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/University_of_Texas_Law_Building_postcard_1908–1924.jpg "By Unknown. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
It turns out that admissions at the state’s top law school are influenced by politics. Who knew?
Some of the least-qualified graduates of the University of Texas School of Law in recent years have high-level connections in the Legislature, which may explain how they got into the prestigious law school in the first place.
A months-long Watchdog.org analysis of political influence on the admissions process at UT Law found there’s some truth, after all, to the old line about who you know mattering more than what you know. We found dozens of Longhorns who don’t know enough to be lawyers but know somebody important in the Legislature.
Two of those mediocre students are legislators themselves.
It’s not even exclusive to one party or the other.
Where I’m not sure they’re right is in their apparent correlation between qualifications to go to law school and bar exam passage rates. One could argue that those are two separate things, as least where UT Law School is concerned. Continue reading
As a kid, I aspired to build my own LEGO Star Destroyer. The goal was to build an Executor-class ship. It’s been done, but I wanted to build one at minifigure scale—meaning that it would include all of the ship’s interior details (bridge, launch and landing bays, crew quarters, commissary, canteen, latrine, etc.) Still, I would’ve settled for an Imperial-class ship. (Such a thing has been attempted, although it was a Corellian Corvette instead of a Start Destroyer.)
Between all the Town and Space LEGOLAND sets that I had as a kid, I probably still never came close to having enough pieces for such an ambitious project—and certainly not enough gray pieces. The thing probably would’ve been about fifteen feet long, at least. Besides that, I never really had the attention span for the project.
It was therefore with a mixture of admiration and mild jealousy-fueled disdain that I learned of Bonsol Colony, an expansive LEGO project by Flickr user wobnam (h/t Kevin).
Flickr won’t allow embedding because of frames, so here’s a screen shot instead. Go check out the whole set. Continue reading
In a few months, I’ll be turning 40. I think this is supposed to be a big deal, but so far it’s eliciting a big old “meh” from me.
I’m pretty sure there is no way that my generation will be as insufferable about hitting middle age as the Boomers were, but everything is relative, and we won’t be the ones to make the final determination. I guess time will tell.
Anyway, I came across a few good screeds about the malaise of the Gen Xer. Read on, and remember how we used to have to read about what a bunch of slackers we all were in periodicals printed on paper.
This one’s a doozy. No multiple choice or “find X on a map.” You just type in the name of every country you can think of in twelve minutes (h/t Kerry).
I got all but three, although not many people get those countries right on the test: Antigua and Barbuda (12%), São Tomé and Príncipe (7%), and Fiji (29%). I can’t believe I forgot Fiji! My brain must have frozen or something.
Spelling can be an issue, too. I got lucky on Kyrgyzstan and the Philippines (one “l”), but kept misspelling Guatemala.
(I should note that I’m kind of a showoff about this sort of thing. None of my friends will play Trivial Pursuit with me anymore.)
![Igor Schwarzmann [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en)], via Flickr](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/12856399525_5a76338a77-300x300.jpg "Igor Schwarzmann [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en)], via Flickr")
This was the ONLY result on a Google image search for “normcore” labeled for commercial reuse. That’s just how avant garde normcore is.
As near as I can tell, New York Magazine reported on the trend of people wearing clothes that make them obviously unobvious (that’s my description and no one is allowed to use it!), which someone somewhere apparently called normcore, and because anything that anyone wears in New York is destined to become a trend somewhere else, “normcore” was born. (Actually, the term dates all the way back to October 2013, when something called a “trend forecasting group” first used it. Here’s a PDF file the group put out that I’d prefer not to read. I’d like to think that a shipment of radioactive L.L. Bean shirts was somehow involved in the genesis of normcore, but I doubt it.) Soon, HuffPo chimed in on normcore, Know Your Meme got an entry, and Vogue ripped on the trend. In the UK, the Guardian reported on it in an effort to look cool, and the Telegraph declared Barack Obama to be “normcore’s latest poster boy.” First of all, I don’t know if they meant that as a good thing (the hip president), a bad thing (“normcore” is the new “mom jeans”), or just a British thing; and I don’t know if normcore had any previous poster boys that would let Obama be the “latest” one.
Before most of these stories even made print, Mashable was reporting on how the internet was getting sick of normcore. It barely took two weeks after the New York Magazine article before Esquire was lecturing people on how they just. don’t. get. normcore: Continue reading
!["frog in a bad mood" by Alexander Maier (originally posted to Flickr as sad frog) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/473px-Sad_frog-236x300.jpg "\"frog in a bad mood\" by Alexander Maier (originally posted to Flickr as sad frog) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")
It would appear, at least according to some researchers, that genius strikes and/or peaks in one’s late 30’s. I take this to mean two things:
Also, relying solely or primarily on positive thinking might make you less likely to succeed. (Put another way, it’s further evidence that “The Secret” doesn’t work.)
Happy Monday, all.
Photo credit: “frog in a bad mood” by Alexander Maier (originally posted to Flickr as sad frog) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
