This one guy could play trumpet with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and at night you could see little puffs coming out of the bell. There was another who played the euphonium and poured wine into it. He gurgled. - An old post on Beirut: The Band from New York magazine.
BrastempKillerWhale

BrastempKillerWhale

Big Farting Bull

Big Farting Bull

The Gilbreths divided human action into seventeen motions, which they called “therbligs”—it’s an eponymous anagram—in order to determine the one best way to do a piece of work. -

Everything about this sentence delights me. Especially the eponymous anagram part.

The History of Management Consulting, The New Yorker

A Victor II Gramophone.

I can make my voice do than if I plug up my nasal passages with enough wine.

Paintings about menstruation are like sign language about baking

via Harper’s. NSFW, I guess.

The comments are intense.

Those of you who despise my regular blog will be unaware that I have a healthy obsession with videos of phonographs playing music.

(Bing Crosby, “White Christmas,” Electrola 4A sound box)

But advertisements do more than exaggerate the basic function of a product. They imbue products with all kinds of social abilities. Marx called this process the fetishism of commodities. - “Marxism and Cellulite: A consumer’s guide to marketing,” Catherine Lyons, Red Banner: A magazine of socialist ideas via Harper’s - Funny, because I happened to have just friended Bud Light on Facebook.
This is how I pseudonymously blogged in 2003.

Someone get me an editor. Then. And now.

An ad for White Lead Paint brand from the July 1940 Better Homes and Gardens. Some copy: “So no wonder folks up on paint say it’s a good idea when buying paint to find out how much white lead it contains. They’ll tell you it’s a pretty safe rule to say: the higher the lead content, the better the paint.” Lead miners. Ugh.

An ad for White Lead Paint brand from the July 1940 Better Homes and Gardens. Some copy: “So no wonder folks up on paint say it’s a good idea when buying paint to find out how much white lead it contains. They’ll tell you it’s a pretty safe rule to say: the higher the lead content, the better the paint.”

Lead miners. Ugh.

I think it’s nice since we have limited time—it’s nice to read a page that is truly intricately worked. It rewards attention. So much doesn’t reward attention; you wish you could read it faster. - Updike, The New Yorker - If “we have limited time,” that doesn’t necessarily mean writers should keep it short. They should reward any attention given.
Reasons I have lost situational awareness

  1. Sleeping.
  2. Drunk.
  3. Reviewing company policies on my laptop.
  4. Toilet.
  5. Reading a good novel.
  6. Beginning on a path to a state of heightened awareness in which I was eventually able to change my body’s shape into that of a crow. While on peyote.
  7. Receiving instructions from spouse.
  8. Peeing.
  9. Standing at the backyard grill, tongs in hand, awash in Proustian memory enacted by the smell of beef cooking, the clarity of the bottom third of a gin martini and the cold crunch of fall pushing me back into myself.
  10. Masturbating.
  11. Combination of 1,2,6 and 10.

Tags: @ed_x
ragbag: logopandecteision as many of you have read in the tabloids, i lost my virginity to rabelais’ the life of gargantua and pantagruel. what you may not know is that sir thomas urquhart, the english translator of the book was a rascally rascal in his own right. get a load of this shenanigan » Logopandecteision is a 1653 book by Sir Thomas Urquhart, disingenuously detailing his plans for the creation of an artificial language by that name. The book is written in several parts, most notably including a list of the language’s 66 unparalleled excellences; the rest is made up of rants against his creditors, the Church of Scotland, and others whose neglect and wrongdoings prevent him from publishing this perfected language. Urquhart was fond of this kind of very elaborate joke, sometimes so elaborate as to be taken by his contemporaries as in earnest. In this case, it is posterity which mistakes his intention. He promises twelve parts of speech: each declinable in eleven cases, four numbers, eleven genders (including god, goddess, man, woman, animal, &c.); and conjugable in eleven tenses, seven moods, and four voices. you can peruse this short book for $0.00 here; in these tough economic times, that is a deal that even you cannot lightly refuse. Seems like every couple of days you see ideas you should have had, pictures you should have taken, books you should have written, fake languages you should have pretended to create.

ragbag:

logopandecteision

as many of you have read in the tabloids, i lost my virginity to rabelais’ the life of gargantua and pantagruel. what you may not know is that sir thomas urquhart, the english translator of the book was a rascally rascal in his own right. get a load of this shenanigan »

Logopandecteision is a 1653 book by Sir Thomas Urquhart, disingenuously detailing his plans for the creation of an artificial language by that name. The book is written in several parts, most notably including a list of the language’s 66 unparalleled excellences; the rest is made up of rants against his creditors, the Church of Scotland, and others whose neglect and wrongdoings prevent him from publishing this perfected language.

Urquhart was fond of this kind of very elaborate joke, sometimes so elaborate as to be taken by his contemporaries as in earnest. In this case, it is posterity which mistakes his intention.

He promises twelve parts of speech: each declinable in eleven cases, four numbers, eleven genders (including god, goddess, man, woman, animal, &c.); and conjugable in eleven tenses, seven moods, and four voices.

you can peruse this short book for $0.00 here; in these tough economic times, that is a deal that even you cannot lightly refuse.

Seems like every couple of days you see ideas you should have had, pictures you should have taken, books you should have written, fake languages you should have pretended to create.

from ragbag
I remember an entry in Kafka’s diary. ‘Gardening. No hope for the future.’ - Samuel Beckett in a letter from late in his life, 1983. Today is the anniversary of the first performance of “Krapp’s Last Tape.” [coudal]
Gratuitous picture of your two-year-old reading sidewalk poetry that at first appeared to be some kind of inspired vandalism, but later turned out to be a St. Paul civic art project.

Gratuitous picture of your two-year-old reading sidewalk poetry that at first appeared to be some kind of inspired vandalism, but later turned out to be a St. Paul civic art project.