March 2010
66 posts
Lena's Law Petition →
In a nut shell, once the train is in motion and the doors are locked, rail companies use good old fashioned extortion to extract the maximum amount of money from law abiding citizens by not accepting rail cards and ignoring valid excuses. Fare dodging is of course illegal, and should be correctly punished, but the system as it stands is too inflexible to allow for honest people who boarded the...
“Black Book, the Sonderfahndungliste GB (Special Search List GB) which was...”
– “Black Book”, The Oxford Companion to World War II
Objectification: what if the world were different... →
gauntlet:
Picture this. You open the newspaper one grey morning, and there in a bright pixel smear on the third page is a full-length photograph of a young man. The young man is almost naked; a flesh-coloured thong clings tightly to his hairless cock and balls; he looks over his shoulder at you, his jaw a perfect masculine square, his dark eyes smouldering. Everywhere, this young man is hard,...
“Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the...”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Just got my first ever taste of the Tumblr Radar. Holy crap.
Robert Mugabe backs David Cameron's Conservatives... →
“We have always related better with the British through the Conservatives than Labour,” Zimbabwe’s president said today. “Conservatives are bold, [Tony] Blair and [Gordon] Brown run away when they see me, but not these fools, they know how to relate to others.”
[…]
Speaking in Zimbabwe after hearing of Brown’s comments to Zuma, Mugabe said: “We...
Vatican hit by gay sex scandal | guardian.co.uk →
Vatican chorister sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for papal gentleman-in-waiting.
One of those news stories that just warms my cockles.
Computers find male voices 'harder to recognise' |... →
Researchers have discovered voice recognition computers find men harder to understand than women.
Edinburgh University scientists found computers failed to understand men’s speech because they make “umm” and “err” sounds more frequently.
This is how the robot apocalypse starts. Less of a mechanical uprising and more of a misunderstood mumble. You may think you...
February 2010
74 posts
“But surely Facebook has its benefits. Long-lost friends can reconnect, far-flung...”
– William Deresiewicz: Faux Friendship | The Chronicle of Higher Education
It’s that time of the week when I post quotes from articles weeks (or months) after everyone else has because to me ‘read later’ apparently means ‘read when your instapaper list is longer than an...
“The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has...”
– The End of Solitude ChronicleReview.com (via somethingchanged)
“Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible...”
– Edward Bernays (via azspot) (via jhnbrssndn)
Hmm. Advanced paranoia never good. Haven’t we all seen this paragraph before, but with ‘persons’ replaced with ‘jews’, ‘masons’ ‘space aliens’ etc… ? (via feastingonroadkill)
It’s not paranoia in Bernays’ case. It’s...
“Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but I feel more lonely in a crowded...”
– Henry Rollins (via buyhercandy) (via bryonmcdonald) 