sorry about that half written blog post, a gang of midgets broke into my house because they thought it was the french revolution and my house was the bastille. One of them knocked my computer a bit while I was having a Saffron Tonic (1 part gin, 3 parts tonic and a quarter of an orange) with coblogger Kimpossible.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, relax, that’s normal. Carry on, carry on.
par⋅o⋅no⋅ma⋅si⋅ac [par-uh-noh-mey-zhee-ak]
–noun Rhetoric.
– one addicted to word play or puns.
Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to resolve the semantic confusion. Most resemble mathematical formulas: clever, perhaps, but hardly occasion for knee-slapping. The worst smack of tawdriness, even indecency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often followed by apologies.
….
The true punster’s mind cycles through homophones in search of a quip the way small children delight in rhymes or experiment babblingly with language. Accordingly, the least intolerable puns are those that avoid the pun’s essential puerility. Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, was a specialist. He could effortlessly execute the double pun: Noah’s Ark was made of gopher-wood, he would say, but Joan of Arc was maid of Orleans. Some Whately-isms are so complex that they nearly amount to honest jokes: “Why can a man never starve in the Great Desert? Because he can eat the sand which is there. But what brought the sandwiches there? Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered and bred.”Whately shows us that it is the punner himself who gives his art a bad name, by so frequently reaching for the obvious. Nothing vexes so much as a pun on a name, for instance. Yet even these can rise to wit if turned with finesse. Jean Harlow, the platinum-blond star of the 1930s, on being introduced to Lady Margot Asquith, mispronounced her given name to rhyme with “rot.” “My dear, the ‘t’ is silent,” said Asquith, “as in Harlow.” The writer Andrew Lang asked his friend Israel Zangwill if he would take a stand on an issue. Zangwill wrote back: “If you, Lang, will, I. Zangwill.”
Why do puns offend? Charles Lamb, a notorious punster, explained that the pun is “a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.” Surely puns silence conversation before they animate it. Some stricken with pun-lust sink so far into their infirmity that their minds become trained to lie in wait for words on which to work their wickedness. They are the scourge of dinner tables and the despised prolongers of office meetings, some letting fly as instinctively as dogs bark and frogs croak, no longer concerned even with drawing applause; they simply can’t help themselves.
:: via the NYTimes ::
Just read a fascinating statistical analysis from the OKCupid blog about the effectiveness of different pictures for online dating. Some weird and unexpected stuff in there. (fyi: OKCupid is a web2.0 dating site that takes user generated content and uses it to match people).
:: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words (if you want to get laid) via Danah::
I was on okc for a bit a few years ago when it first came out. It resulted in:
+ a bunch of emails
+ easily the most awkward date I have ever been on (seriously, I left mid-beer)
+ a bunch of emails
+ four or five cool people that ended up becoming friends bc there was no chemistry in person
+ one super hot summer fling
If you’re lovelorn, it will definitely pay off with the right strategies. My current, more successful & less email intensive, strategy is to cultivate interests and meet people via related experiences. I also do it like Gandhi
It should be illegal to eat french fries on a crowded subway train and not share. Proper etiquette and common decency demands that you offer other commuters any pungent, delicious fried food.
This is pretty mind blowing. Just start watching the first one. 5-8 will be out later this week.
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I would say that in about 80% of cases where someone says that something was stolen they actually just lost it. I’m pretty sure this is because being a victim is more emotionally gratifying than simply being inattentive.
Like many people, I’m very angry about today’s supreme court ruling which allows corporations to give an unlimited amount of money to politicians. I’m writing another blog post about it but right now the question is simply: will I express that rage in the form of cunning italics or merely sink to sarcasm? To be honest, I’m kind of having trouble deciding. YOU’LL JUST HAVE TO WAIT AND SEE
Washing his sins away, a Hindu holy man takes a dip at Sangam, the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, on the auspicious day of Basant Pachami.
Photo: Rajesh Kumar Singh / AP
:: via the SFGate via email, {thanks Masala}
I haven’t been blogging as much because I’ve been traveling and working on a small consulting job on the east coast. One of my favorite things about getting older is that I have friendships that have blossomed over the course of several years. I was just remarking that I wish I had a teleporter to come and visit friends in NYC, Boston, LA and Europe more frequently. Then I realized that “teleporters” are called “airplanes.” and that I can “teleport” almost anywhere for “money.” Life rules.
Dear Parents,
As a matter of course, I will not accept friend requests from your newborn baby.
Best,
//Dustin
“We’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U.S. income tax,’” Limbaugh said earlier this week. Considering the enormity of the Haitian tragedy, which is unfolding in real-time across our television sets and computer screens, that was pure Ebenezer Scrooge. Limbaugh’s suggestion invited reproach from many. Even Republicans like Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan expressed dismay. But making this into a referendum on whether Limbaugh has a heart of lead leads nowhere. He was doing what he gets paid to do as a radio provocateur. Besides, he relishes the attention.
In effect, he’s not a serious political commentator and should be ignored.
:: Full Article which is actually about something else mostly ::
The article is also about how absurd it is that we give massive aid to Israel and Egypt and almost nothing compared to Haiti. Here I shall attempt to make an extremely nuanced point: Israel no longer needs US aid. It’s a fully established, first world nation with a full capacity to defend itself. This point stands not as a criticism of Israeli policy but of economic fact.
This is surprisingly exhaustive
In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto’s GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats.
According to the study, which was summarized by Adam Shake at Twilight Earth, “Three varieties of Monsanto’s GM corn – Mon 863, insecticide-producing Mon 810, and Roundup® herbicide-absorbing NK 603 – were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities.”
Monsanto gathered its own crude statistical data after conducting a 90-day study, even though chronic problems can rarely be found after 90 days, and concluded that the corn was safe for consumption. The stamp of approval may have been premature, however.
In the conclusion of the IJBS study, researchers wrote:
“Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity….These substances have never before been an integral part of the human or animal diet and therefore their health consequences for those who consume them, especially over long time periods are currently unknown.”
Monsanto has immediately responded to the study, stating that the research is “based on faulty analytical methods and reasoning and do not call into question the safety findings for these products.”
The IJBS study’s author Gilles-Eric Séralini responded to the Monsanto statement on the blog, Food Freedom, “Our study contradicts Monsanto conclusions because Monsanto systematically neglects significant health effects in mammals that are different in males and females eating GMOs, or not proportional to the dose. This is a very serious mistake, dramatic for public health. This is the major conclusion revealed by our work, the only careful reanalysis of Monsanto crude statistical data.”
:: Huffpost via Email {Thanks Dennis!} ::
As the article states Monsanto gets to gather it’s own data about toxicity in a particularly way.
Honestly, I’m exhausted and I would like to read the actual study but I’m just trying to jam through email right now.