writes things here.
Best music videos ever made, ranked (many NSFW):
5. Whiskey Shivers – Gimme All Your Lovin’
4. DYE – Fantasy
3. Major Lazer – Pon De Floor
2. Biting Elbows – Bad Motherfucker
1. Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart
Honorable mentions: DJ Snake & Lil Jon – Turn Down For What, Major Lazer – Bubble Butt, El Guincho – Bombay
Nightmares are much more powerful when you’re younger. I can’t really remember any bad dreams I’ve had over the past five years (although I’m sure that I had them) but I still vividly remember a nightmare I had at age five when a wolf was stalking our family van. I was looking out the back of the car after I thought we lost him, only to have his head appear around the corner of a building and turn to look at us. That seemingly innocuous dream influenced my sleeping position for months, afraid that if I ended up in the same position I’d fall back into that dream. While the finer details are now gone (I know the dream was much longer), I still can pinpoint that nightmare as a major event in my young life.
There was another nightmare that I had as a child that’s a little more fuzzy. In fact, I don’t remember a single detail. But here’s the weird part: I vividly remember not ever remembering a single detail. In the days and weeks that followed this event, I couldn’t tell you what took place in the dream. I only knew the subject of the dream: the Berenstein Bears.
It wasn’t one of those dreams that wakes you with a start. In fact, it wasn’t even a dream that comes back to you in when you open your eyes in the morning. Instead, I remember seeing a Berenstein Bears book and getting a sudden jolt of dread. Of re-remembering something terrible. I couldn’t place my finger on what it was. Some sort of deja vu. It must have been because of an unremembered nightmare.
This happened in the early ’90s. The memory had lied completely dormant, until The Berenst#in Bears Theory started growing in popularity.
I’m not submitting my experience as proof one way or the other. But this is a 100% true story, and I’m feeling all weird inside now.
From The Economist’s “Mapping the invisible scourge“:
Berkeley Earth’s scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing’s air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day and calculates that air pollution causes 1.6m deaths a year in China, or 17% of the total.
Um, holy crap.
The joking/not joking tone of this post really gets me.
From Rob Rhinehart’s How I Gave Up Alternating Current:
With no fridge, no dishes, no microwave, no oven, no range, no dishwasher, no utensils, no pests, no cleaning products nor dirty rags, my life is considerably simpler, lighter and cleaner than before. I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it.
Also, he too has a magnet in his finger, so I guess that makes us best friends.
Stefanie Cohen, writing about Robert Askins (playwright, Broadway’s “Hand to God“) for the Wall Street Journal1:
Mr. Askins wrote “Hand to God” five years ago and it was staged in 2011 at the off-off Broadway Ensemble Studio Theater. The show was critically praised, and producer Kevin McCollum, (“Avenue Q,” “Motown” “Rent,” “In the Heights”) who had been told by a friend to see it, introduced himself to Mr. Askins in the lobby after the show…Within 24 hours, Mr. McCollum was in negotiations to option the piece.
This reminds me of the blade of grass paradox, which shows that events with really low odds (being plucked from a small theater and brought to Broadway) aren’t actually as low as you might think. Imagine standing in a large field of grass, reaching down, and touching a blade. There are millions of blades of grass that you might have touched, so the odds of being one of those blades of grass is extremely slim. Yet, a blade of grass did get touched, which means that there’s a 100 percent chance that one of the blades of grass will be touched.
Stories like Askins’ are inspiring (and “Hand to God” is amazing, so the fast track to Broadway is well deserved) but the resulting inspiration is inherently conflicted. Something like this will never happen to you…unless it does. Which it won’t. The odds are extremely low, but not that low(?). What if Askins is that single blade of grass, which has already been touched?
Then again, what are the odds that someone standing in a field reaches down and touches only one blade of grass?
David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, for the New York Times:
President Obama’s newly installed defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, toured Silicon Valley last week to announce a new military strategy for computer conflict, starting the latest Pentagon effort to invest in promising start-ups and to meet with engineers whose talent he declared the Pentagon desperately needed in fending off the nation’s adversaries.
While I do believe that the Pentagon “desperately” needs talented engineers, I find it difficult to believe anything else out of the Pentagon’s mouth. I wonder why…
He acknowledged that the documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, “showed there was a difference in view between what we were doing and what people perceived us as doing.”
Oh, there it is.