The existential question of the week:
If the MBAs in charge of Darden Restaurants, parent company of Olive Garden, allowed the pasta water to be salted again, thus forfeiting the extended warranty on Olive Garden’s pots, would Olive Garden’s pasta still be terrible?
!["olive garden penne" by Krista [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)], via Flickr](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/4943393950_c4fa1fbc09_z-2.jpg "\"olive garden penne\" by Krista [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)], via Flickr")
Photo credit: “olive garden penne” by Krista [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr.
The Sleep Burrows Wombat Sanctuary, located in New South Wales, Australia, offers ten possible employment opportunities for wombats. You should definitely check out all ten, but I’m still stuck on having them do your laundry.
Remember the crocoduck? Its non-existence is the supposedly definitive proof against evolution presented by aging teen heartthrob Kirk Cameron. Well, it turns out that such an animal, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, actually existed:
This is “the first water-adapted non-avian dinosaur on record,” said University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno in a press conference yesterday. Sereno is part of a team of researchers that was finally able to reconstruct Spinosaurus in full using newly discovered fossils and information gathered from the dinosaur’s initial discoverer, a German paleontologist named Ernst Stromer. According to their reconstruction, published today in Science, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus was a gigantic fish-eating, water-paddling marvel; one that, in Sereno’s words, was “a chimera — half duck, half crocodile.”
[Emphasis added.]
![By Insomnis (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Spinosaurus.jpg "By Insomnis (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")
And Spinosaurus wasn’t the only one to fit the arbitrary “crocoduck” description: Continue reading
The following picture was posted to the Facebook page “Being Liberal” with the caption “Can you see the differences?” (h/t Jen).
Via Being Liberal on Facebook
I’m not a fan of the meme, in part because I think it takes some very complex issues and drastically oversimplifies them.
The top picture is Holly Fisher, a/k/a Holly Hobby Lobby, who posted a picture of herself in front of a Hobby Lobby in a “pro-life” t-shirt whikle holding a Chick-fil-A cup in July, pretty much just to piss off liberals. When people said that she forgot a flag, a Bible, and a gun, she obliged.
The bottom picture is Samantha Lewthwaite, a/k/a the White Widow, a British citizen who is suspected of being a member of the Somali group al-Shabaab, but is not affiliated with the Taliban in any known way.
I have nothing kind to say about either woman, but in a one-on-one fight, my money’s on the Brit. Anyway, the Taliban ≠ al-Shabaab. That’s the sort of mix-up people like Holly Fisher make. Continue reading
Russian exceptionalism is no less ridiculous than American exceptionalism.
David Foster Wallace was right: Irony is ruining our culture, Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll, Salon, April 13, 2014
Twenty years ago, Wallace wrote about the impact of television on U.S. fiction. He focused on the effects of irony as it transferred from one medium to the other. In the 1960s, writers like Thomas Pynchon had successfully used irony and pop reference to reveal the dark side of war and American culture. Irony laid waste to corruption and hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the ’60s, as Wallace saw it, television adopted a self-deprecating, ironic attitude to make viewers feel smarter than the naïve public, and to flatter them into continued watching. Fiction responded by simply absorbing pop culture to “help create a mood of irony and irreverence, to make us uneasy and so ‘comment’ on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.” But what if irony leads to a sinkhole of relativism and disavowal? For Wallace, regurgitating ironic pop culture is a dead end:
Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It [uses] the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.
So where have we gone from irony? Irony is now fashionable and a widely embraced default setting for social interaction, writing and the visual arts. Irony fosters an affected nihilistic attitude that is no more edgy than a syndicated episode of “Seinfeld.” Today, pop characters directly address the television-watching audience with a wink and nudge. (Shows like “30 Rock” deliver a kind of meta-television-irony irony; the protagonist is a writer for a show that satirizes television, and the character is played by a woman who actually used to write for a show that satirizes television. Each scene comes with an all-inclusive tongue-in-cheek.) And, of course, reality television as a concept is irony incarnate.
Forget Mars. Here’s Where We Should Build Our First Off-World Colonies. David Warmflash, The Crux, September 8, 2014 Continue reading
– Worst plane ride ever: You think crying babies are bad? How about a woman who won’t stop singing “I Will Always Love You” (originally by Dolly Parton but made famous by Whitney Houston…..and The Simpsons)? It was so bad that the Los Angeles-to-New York flight had to land in Kansas City so the woman could be removed.
I imagine she switched over to “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”
– This is not what we do in a civilized society: I’ve written about this before. It is absolutely, completely unacceptable to do this sort of thing. I don’t even want to write down what it is. You will go to jail, and your name will be in the news.
– Principals just don’t understand: The first day at a new school is always scary for a teenager. Administrators at a school in Florida (where else?) decided to add some public humiliation and emotional trauma for one 14-year-old girl on her first day, when she violated a dress code she might not have even known existed: Continue reading
Satire and fake news stories, Mano Singham, Freethought Blogs, September 2, 2014
I enjoy satirical websites like the The Onion that take current political events and trends and then twist them around and manufacture a ‘story’ to illustrate some point about it or to highlight some absurdity. It is not uncommon for people who are not aware that these are satirical sites to take them at face value, even though it should be fairly clear that they are meant as humor.
But there has emerged a new kind of website whose purpose seems to be to write stories that are not clever satire but are written as straightforward supposedly news items, just with fake ‘facts’. The point of these sites seems to be to dupe readers and even news organizations into reporting on them as if they are true stories.
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Admittedly, drawing a clear line between ‘real’ satire and ‘fake’ satire is not easy because it can come down to intent. The idea of the The Onion seems to be to make people laugh while that of sites like National Report seems to be to fool them into thinking it is real. Some of the latter’s stories are so extreme that it is hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously but clearly some people do.
Islamic State is a threat, so let the neighbors deal with it, kos, Daily Kos, August 27, 2014 Continue reading
You may have heard about the Yazidis in the news recently. I you’re not familiar with them or their culture, you’re not alone, especially among Americans. An article by Michael Smith in Vice* gives a brief overview of the Yazidis, their beliefs, and the possible reasons why the Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS or ISIL, hates them so much. Since their beliefs are so unfamiliar to the outside world, there is a long history of outsiders misrepresenting them, intentionally or not. I don’t actually know how much Vice gets it right, but the article is worth a look.
![By Hadi Karimi (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/111356808) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Amir_Chakhmaq_Complex_Hadi_Karimi.jpg "By Hadi Karimi (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/111356808) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")
According to Wikipedia, the Yazidis “are a Kurdish ethno-religious community” numbering about 700,000, with about 650,000 living in Iraq. Sizable populations also live in Syria, Germany, Russia, Armenia, and Georgia. Their religion is linked by scholars to “Zoroastrianism and ancient Mesopotamian religions,” and is part of a tradition known as Yazdânism. ISIS has been trying to annihilate them, as Vice reports:
An entire people forced to abandon their ancestral homeland with only the shirts on their backs, they’re making the gruelling and perilous trek to refugee camps in Kurdistan, on foot through mountains and along desert dirt tracks. Many weren’t fortunate enough to escape mass executions at the hands of Islamic State militants, and thousands are still trapped up Mt. Sinjar in the baking heat with no food, water or shelter. Children and the elderly are dying in their droves.
As well as the attempted annihilation of an ethnic group, it’s also their religion IS want to destroy. One of the strangest survivals throughout the entirety of human culture, their faith has been viewed as so subversive and unsettling that it’s brought holy war and near extinction to the Yazidis throughout history. Continue reading
Is it weird that I want the car in this Febreze commercial, which I assume is supposed to represent the exact sort of car we shouldn’t want?
It’s not that I have any great love of dog smell. I think it’s just preferring dogs to anything human.
The Dumb and Dumber car can only dream of being this cool.
