I knew these two brothers, Lance and Dan Hubp, in high school, in Panama
While I’m posting short films… most of y’all have seen this one before – it’s a little film a friend of Nick and Lee did a few years ago. That’s Lee driving, and the kids’ Mustang. Of course the key to the whole thing is the subtle acting ability of the “Gas Station Attendant.”
When you are camping indoors, be careful about the bears.
I have never been a big fan of the city of Chicago… but now, after seeing this… I have to go there.
After having looked at this cartoon, I’m going to reread “Brave New World.” The horrors of “1984” are always with us, always on our mind, but thinking of the years since the turn of the century, perhaps Huxley’s distopia is the one to fear, the one to fight, and the one to rail against. Oh, but what a slippery devil it is.
Mistakes teach you important lessons. Every time you make one, you’re one step closer to your goal.
There is nothing to hold you back except you.
You can press forward long after you can’t. It’s a matter of wanting it bad enough.
No matter how much progress you make there will always be the people who insist that whatever you’re trying to do is impossible.
You are limited only by your own imagination. Let it fly.
Perception is reality.
Your instincts can be trusted.
There is only one question to ask yourself: “What would you do if you were not afraid?”
It’s often hard to tell just how close you are to success.
The only mistake that can truly hurt you is choosing to do nothing simply because you’re too scared to make a mistake.
Never let success get to your head, and never let failure get to your heart.
You have to fight through some bad days to earn the best days of your life.
Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.
Do what you love, not what you think you’re supposed to do.
Laughter is the best medicine for stress. Laugh at yourself often.
If you want to feel rich, just count all the great things you have that money can’t buy.
Forgiving yourself is far more important than getting others to forgive you.
If you awake every morning with the thought that something wonderful will happen in your life today, you’ll often find that you’re right.
Be nice to yourself.
For the most part, it doesn’t matter what people think. Follow your own truth.
No education is wasted. Drink in as many new experiences as you can.
Making one person smile can change the world.
Don’t forget to enjoy your journey!
You never know how strong you really are until being strong is the only choice you have.
Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.
You cannot change what you refuse to confront.
Crying doesn’t indicate that you’re weak. It doesn’t always solve your problems either.
No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress, you are still way ahead of everyone who isn’t trying.
Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.
You can learn great things from your mistakes when you aren’t busy denying them.
Give up worrying about what others think of you.
When you stop chasing the wrong things you give the right things a chance to catch you.
You have to accept that some things will never be yours, and learn to appreciate the things that are only yours.
As Henry Ford put it, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right.”
Don’t be afraid to move out of your comfort zone. Some of your best life experiences and opportunities will transpire only after you dare to lose.
Giving up doesn’t always mean you’re weak, sometimes it means you are strong enough and smart enough to let go.
You’ll rarely be 100% sure it will work. But you can always be 100% sure doing nothing won’t work.
Don’t dwell on the past or worry about the future for too long. Right now is life. Live it.
No matter how cautiously you choose your words, someone will always twist them around and misinterpret what you say. Just say what you need to say.
Not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of good luck.
If you are passionate about something, pursue it, no matter what anyone else thinks. That’s how dreams are achieved.
If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.
What lies before us and behind us are tiny matters when compared to what lies within us.
Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.
It’s not about getting a chance, it’s about taking a chance.
If it were easy everyone would do it.
Be vulnerable.
A problem is a chance for you to learn.
Regardless of the situation, life goes on.
All my life I have loved to look out the windows of airplanes. I like to look for places I’ve been. I like to figure out where we are at any time. If I see something cool I’ll make a note of it and try to find out what it was by looking on Google Maps – by something cool, I mean stuff like this – 100 Incredible Views Out Of Airplane Windows
Anthony Bourdain Pho – Food Porn
“This, is the good stuff. You might find, in the great kitchens of Europe perhaps, something as good… but you will never find anything better than this.”
The last thing in the world I need is another weird time-sucking project. But I want to build a Harmonigraph. What I want to do is to build a four-pendulum harmonigraph, like this one:
Now, what I want to build is one that moves a camera and a light so that it makes digital photographs instead of pens on paper. Painting with light.
I have never ordered or eaten a McRib in my life. I don’t think this article is going to change my mind. I especially like this paragraph:
McDonald’s relationship with the pork industry goes back to the McRib’s conception. In 1972, Roger Mandingo, a University of Nebraska professor, received a grant from the National Pork Producer’s council to develop a technology that bound small “umarketable parts of the animal” into a formation that looked more appetizing. In other words, he figured out how to mold tripe, heart or stomach bits into something that looked like a choice cut of meat. Let’s say, the ribs.
Looking around the shelves at a used book store I came across a copy of 500 Essential Cult Books. I’m casting around for something to read right at this moment.
I didn’t buy the book, but I did sit down with it, some index cards, and a Parker 21 that I carry, and sat down at a table to go through most of the 500.
My first impression is that I was shocked at how many of the books I had already read… somewhere around half. The books were divided into categories and some I had read almost all of the selection.
At any rate, I filled a couple cards with books that I had not read and that looked interesting. Some I already have in my library or Kindle, most I do not. Here’s the list, in no particular order:
Generation X – Douglas Coupland
Nausea – Jean Paul Sartre
Been Down so Long it Looks Like Up to Me – Richard Farina
You can read both of these articles and decide what you think about it on your own, but it does bring back an experience of my own, one I’ve talked about ad nauseum – but still…. I think I’ll write it down here. This is something that happened almost forty years ago… so maybe the trends identified in the articles aren’t so new after all.
I remember my first freshman chemistry class at the generic big Midwestern public university. It was held in a large old gothic auditorium (since burned down) where they played the basketball games back in the twenties and thirties. The professor walked out on the first day and said, “This is Chemistry 301, Introduction to Chemistry for Chemistry Majors. You should only take this class if you are going to get a major in Chemistry. There are three hundred and fifty students in this class. We graduate about forty chemists a semester. You need to do the math. If you don’t think you can make it through this class, drop as soon as you can to minimize the damage to your academic career.”
I was stunned when about a dozen kids walked out at that point. How low must their self-esteem be to give up at that point (or maybe they realized they were in the wrong classroom). The first exam took over half the class. The mid-term dropped half of those that were still left. At the end of the semester the class was well under a hundred. The really bad thing was that, three years later, Physical Chemistry took a third of those that had made it that far (I still believe that P-Chem is one of the absolute evils in the world – I know if any other chemists are reading this – I just gave you a nightmare).
A few years ago I was at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Arlington (I remember there were three Nobel Prize Winners at the dinner) and the the topic was improving chemistry education. I was talking to a professor afterward about how to increase the enrolment of chemists and he said, “Actually, in my experience, most of the student that can be chemists, are chemists… what we need is to increase the understanding of some of the basic tenets in the non-chemist population.” This was a guy that should know what he was talking about.
Oh, and the article talks about how grades are lower in STEM classes than in, say, business or liberal arts. No shit. My goal in chemistry was to graduate, that was it (I consider my bare C- in P-Chem I and II to be one of the greatest accomplishments in my life. I managed to pass two semesters in a subject where I had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on at all). In the decades since, I don’t think I have ever had anyone ask me my GPA. I have hired a few chemists in my day and if I ever had a job applicant with a 4.0 and a major in chemistry (In reality I never have seen or heard of such a thing) I would not hire them. To get a 4.0 in a chemistry curriculum you would either have to be too smart to be in the same world as I am, or some sort of mutant that could not relate to ordinary human beings in any meaningful way.
Another list of “Must Eat At” places in New Orleans.
I’ve been to six of the nine… though some were a long time ago. I wrote about Joey K’s the other day. Last year I set out to find the best Shrimp Po-Boy in New Orleans, and Parkway was the best, IMHO.
Man, I would love to snag a 2011 Rangers World Championship Cap. I wonder what impoverished tropical hell hole I’d have to go to so I could buy one of some poor dude’s head.
A few more Scopitones. Starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
I used to Love the Tijuana Brass, back in the day. This song and Scopitone is not why.
Great Hair… terrible rock and roll.
There have been some very good versions of Telstar over the years. This is not one of them. Plus odd and wildly inappropriate footage.
Petula Clark… one of the greats. There was “Downtown”, “I Know a Place”, “My Love”, “Colour My World”, “A Sign of the Times”, and “Don’t Sleep in the Subway.”
Maybe I should take this list and try to get through it before I die (probably right before). So far, before reading the article, I’ve been to five (that I can remember).
Sometimes I look ahead and read a book because there is a movie coming out at some future date made from the book. Thus it is with Hunter Thompson’s The Rum Diary.
I enjoyed the book more than it deserved. That whole Caribbean Ex-Pat wasting away in Margaritaville, almost getting killed by the government dictator’s thugs thing is very attractive to me. Probably better read (and written about) than lived.
The movie is out now and it looks good. At least to me.
It is interesting that this is the second time Johnny Depp has played Hunter S. Thompson in a film. I always thought that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was unfilmable… and the film proved me right. This one should be very different.
1. “Don’t be wimpy with your eggs. Whisk well and be vigorous about it–you want to add air and volume for fluffy eggs. And whisk the eggs right before adding to pan; don’t whisk and let mixture sit (it deflates).” –Kay Chun, Deputy Food Editor
2. “Don’t add milk, cream, or water to the eggs. People think it will keep the eggs creamy while cooking, but in fact, the eggs and added liquid will separate during the cooking process creating wet, overcooked eggs. Stir in some creme fraiche after the eggs are off the heat if you want them creamy.” –Mary-Frances Heck, Associate Food Editor
3. “Don’t use high heat. It’s all about patience to achieve the soft curd. Whether you want small curd (stirring often) or large curd (stirring less), you need to scramble eggs over medium-low heat, pulling the pan off the heat if it gets too hot, until they set to desired doneness.” –Hunter Lewis, Food Editor
4. “Don’t overcook them! Take them off the heat a little while before you think they are done. The carryover heat will keep cooking them for a minute or so. Also: Use a cast-iron or a nonstick skillet. If you don’t, there will be a rotten clean-up job in your future.” –Janet McCracken, Deputy Food Editor
And last but not least, ditch that fork! Scramble your eggs with a heat-proof spatula, a flat-topped wooden spoon, or for the perfect curd, chopsticks.
The song isn’t too bad, and the guy has a fantastic voice – but I have never seen dancing more out-of-step-and-time with the song in my life. Ahh, the Scopitone World.
Nobody does it better than Malcolm Gladwell.
I enjoyed this talk and Malcolm Gladwell is so entertaining and informative. Even in a case like this, when his conclusions are completely and absolutely wrong.
For example – the Norden Bombsight. He makes the point that it could not actually drop a bomb into a pickle barrel and that in actual use, it was not very accurate, had a lot of shortcomings, and was negatively affected by weather and wind.
So what.
It did not live up to its hype. Nothing does. It had a lot of unforeseen problems. Everything does.
The important thing is that during World War II the entire free world was in an existential struggle with the forces of fascism and a large contributor to victory was the destruction of German industry wrought by the American bombing forces… using the Norden Bombsight.
The fact is that the Norden bombsite succeeded in its purpose – helping to save the free world. Everything else is just noise – interesting noise… educational noise, even important noise – but noise nonetheless.
Then we come to the drones in Afghanistan. He claims that even with a 95% kill rate the drones make them hate us so much that IED device attacks on US soldiers go up. Exactly where is that connection? Again, we are in an existential struggle against an enemy as evil as we faced in WWII, if not as powerful.
The purpose of the drones is to prevent an organized attack like we saw on 911 – and so far, so good. Everything else is noise. You can criticize the drone attacks as immoral, illegal, or too expensive – but to say they aren’t successful… there’s scant evidence for that. Or at least Gladwell doesn’t present it.
When you listen to (or read) someone as entertaining as Malcolm Gladwell you have to be careful to watch the point of view he is working from. Look for the logical leaps that are glossed over by glibness – like a skilled three-card-monte player, he’ll get you looking one way and slide the card somewhere else.
Sure do like to listen to him, though.
Some guy would like to show you the pictures he took on his last dive trip to the Caymans… but he can’t find his camera.
Isn’t that the point of a maize maze? Aren’t you supposed to get lost? I went to one once, with two kids, and it was a little disconcerting – but I was also aware that at any time I could walk through the corn if I had to.
OK, I hate Martha Stewart as much as you do… actually I hate her more, because I actually have a reason to be pissed at her. If you ask me nice, some day I’ll tell you about it.
In the meantime, she may be a nasty little piece of work, but she does know how to:
Bill Chance 