Of course, you’ll never know what this score was before I used my HTMLanguage Arts on it. If I got any of it wrong, it was that monkeys - monkey’s, monkeys’ - monkey’s, monkees - monkeys’, monkies - monky’s thing, and only because I liked the image of Micky Dolenz buying a chimp a beer.
Your Language Arts Grade: 100%
Way to go! You know not to trust the MS Grammar Check and you know “no” from “know.” Now, go forth and spread the good word (or at least, the proper use of apostrophes).
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Via: martha martha who didn’t have any trouble with it’s vs. its either.
Here’s another of the two-word reviews that made Inedible Ink as famous as it is, this one for the 2004 film Napoleon Dynamite.
Flippin’ sweet!
Truth be told, I didn’t write a review when I saw Napoleon Dynamite the first time, or the second, or the third. I knew I liked it, but I couldn’t explain why. In Touchstone Magazine Michael E. Bailey tells me why, and he uses Thomas Hobbes’ philosophy, the Apostle Paul and Blanche DuBois to do it.
Touchstone Archives: Napoleon Blown Apart
Michael E. Bailey on the Pauline Aliens of Preston, Idaho
This little blog has a ton of fresh articles and links to all kinds of interesting stuff.
collected feeds and scraps
RSS feeds and streaming audio links I’ve assembled for myself. Help yourself, there’s plenty to go around.
Trouble is, It’s my own blog. I’d, uhm, forgotten about it. I set it up in a couple of hours one day long ago with a bunch of RSS-to-Javascript in the body and a sidebar full of links. Now I can’t find the keys. Blogger won’t let me log in to delete it, or at least fix those annoying cascading indents.
Here’s one for Black Friday:
Variety.com - VHS, 30, dies of loneliness
After a long illness, the groundbreaking home-entertainment format VHS has died of natural causes in the United States. The format was 30 years old.
No services are planned.
The format had been expected to survive until January, but high-def formats and next-generation vidgame consoles hastened its final decline.
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VHS is survived by a child, DVD, and by Tivo, VOD and DirecTV. It was preceded in death by Betamax, Divx, mini-discs and laserdiscs.
-*-*-Born Vertical Helical Scan to parent JVC of Japan, the tape had a difficult childhood as it was forced to compete with Sony’s Betamax format.
Via:MIT AD LAB
Jill Carattini asks an arresting question that she starts with the Doxology You know, the one that goes: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”
A Slice of Infinity: From Whom?, by Jill Carattini
The four lines of what is commonly known as the Doxology have been sung for more than three hundred years.
Can you give thanks without giving thanks to anyone in particular? Worthy read.
The Atlantic has compiled a list of the top 100 most influential Americans.
It starts out OK…
The Top 100 Most Influential Americans (Ever)
1 Abraham Lincoln
He saved the Union, freed the slaves, and presided over America’s second founding.
2 George Washington
He made the United States possible—not only by defeating a king, but by declining to become one himself.
(I’d have put Jefferson ahead of Washington.) …but later on it becomes maddening…
25 John Adams
His leadership made the American Revolution possible; his devotion to republicanism made it succeed.
26 Walt Disney
The quintessential entertainer-entrepreneur, he wielded unmatched influence over our childhood.
John Adams is only one click higher up this list than Mickey Mouse’s daddy?!
Oh well, how seriously can you take a list that considers “Lewis and Clark” as one man anyways?
via Port McClellan
I would like to ignore these kinds of things, but I just don’t have the constitution. If there’s a traffic monitor, a link counter or a site ranker out there, I check it. Frequently.
The Truth Laid Bear says we’re a Flappy Bird among blogs.
That’s a whole lot of evolving we’ve done in the last two and a half years since we were a wee microbe. The next step is [shiver] mammalian. I think the blog might have to be about something before it can be promoted to primate, so if it gets stuck at that three-toed sloth tier, it’ll be OK.In other meta-blog news, real visitors continue to outnumber spammers by almost 2-to-1. The bad guys are gaining on you, people.
I was surprised to notice that I have been doing this blogging thing for more than two years, yowza. I should have figured it out by now.
Information on sponsoring this Marine is in the following link.
Wisconsin State Journal
It was almost a year ago that Lance Cpl. Neil Schalk, then 19, a Marine from Richland Center serving in Iraq, was wounded by a homemade bomb during a convoy mission from Fallujah to Ramadi.
He lost two fingers on his right hand and is preparing for his 13th surgery to reconstruct his left hand. -*-*-*-
On Oct. 29 Schalk ran the Marine Corps Marathon in Arlington, Va., finishing 3,514th out of 20,934 runners in 3 hours, 55 minutes.
“It was my third full marathon,” Schalk said. “My goal was to break four hours.”
Great quantities of art changed hands last month. It’s impressive, really.
Impressionists at Christies:
$491 Million Sale Shatters Art Auction Record - New York Times
nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of art changed hands last night at Christie’s sale of Impressionist and modern art.
The Pochoir elite Banksy at Sotheby’s
(IHT) The artist’s “Mona Lisa,” spray-painted with stencil on canvas, set the auction’s top sale at £57,600, or $109,600, closely followed by six Warholesque silkscreen prints of Kate Moss, which sold for more than five times their estimate. Banksy has “underlined his credentials as a heavyweight in the art world,”
Banksy again, at Bonhams:
(BBC)A spray painting of a couple embracing clad in deep sea diving gear - which was used for the cover of Blur’s Think Tank album - went for 10 times its estimated value at Bonhams.
My own happy success in the world of original art auctions broke few records, even among eBay’s small category of Canadian sketchbook pages, and generated even less press coverage, but I am very pleased all the same.
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Scott Adams is the Dilbert blogger and comic strip artist. He’s reveling in those small pleasures that are most evident within the first days of getting over the flu:
The Dilbert Blog: Small Pleasures
And caffeine. I know that some of you think that life without caffeine is actually worth living. But it isn’t. My first Diet Coke after four days of abstinence was shiver-worthy. I didn’t see the hand that reached inside my head and removed the wads of cotton, but suddenly I remembered that I have hopes and dreams. Excellent!
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I love the smell of vanilla.
I love the feeling of doing something right, no matter how inconsequential, such as guessing the exact right time it will take to warm a yam in the microwave. It makes me feel in control of my life.
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I like a pen that has good balance, opens easily, and leaves a clean line with no skipping, blotching or fussiness. Such pens are rare. I have one in my pen cup right now. Sometimes I just look at it and feel happy that my species could make such a pen.
I like rubbing my head after I give myself a haircut. It feels good on my hand and my head at the same time. It’s a win-win rubbing situation. And it’s totally free.
I’ve selected these five things because they’re my favorites too, and I haven’t even had the flu.
