January 2012
27 posts
salt in the wound, Wall Street Journal
From a piece on the shutdown of Ticonderoga Securities:
A call to [the CEO] Mr. McLoughlin, who was in meetings with employees and clients during the afternoon, wasn’t immediately returned. An employee who answered the phone, and sounded choked-up, declined to comment.
“He was allying himself to science, for what was science but the absence of...”
– Henry James, The Golden Bowl.
Someone I know has at times insisted on calling Facebook “Thefacebook” because of history. I now feel the same way about SeamlessWeb. It was a stupid name to begin with, but I’m never going to call it just “Seamless.” Fuck you.
non-great moments in judging human character,...
He told me that I should try to be more misanthropic and more contrarian. A first!
He believes I am “happy” and “not dejected” and “energized.”
insights from Top Chef
CHARLIZE THERON HAS AN AMAZING PERSONALITY. WHO KNEW??
video-game idea
Mortal Wombat.
mortgagez: yeah, the whole "bucket list" thing kind of demonstrates a lame european hedonist perspective on life
mortgagez: the world is not for seeing, it is for either creating or destroying
guilty as charged
mortgagez: it is possible that you put too much of a premium on fonts and their moral equivalents
lessons learned from my first trip to the Brooklyn...
All the world’s cultures have always loved depicting lions.
“In a non-smoking carriage Miss Emily Brent sat very upright as was her custom....”
– Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None. Later: “I think there is really an opening for a place where there is good plain cooking and a nice old-fashioned type of person. None of this nudity and gramophones half the night.”
the wife and I are going to read Henry James's The...
Me: Let's take a quick look at Wikipedia first. It was published in 1904...
The Wife: Okay...
Me: It's "complex" and "intense"...
The Wife: Uggghhhhhhh.
Surely one of the single most potent arguments against unbridled capitalism is the existence and success of “BluePrintCleanse” (six days for $390). Relatedly, one of the single most potent arguments against our particular form of semi-bridled capitalism is that, of all the billions of pages of federal, state, and local regulations, none seem to prohibit this.
the anxiety of influence
I just finished reading the book Supergods by beloved comics writer Grant Morrison. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a letdown. For one thing, no one seems to have edited it; Morrison repeats himself all over the place. For another thing, he spends a weird amount of time badmouthing Alan Moore. But methinks he protests too much…
Supergods: “A fist-shaking Moore disowned [the Watchmen...
“For the first time in almost half a century, homicide has fallen off the list of...”
– Obviously suicide needs to be higher on this list. (via nodicesoldier)
“In recent weeks, the government has stripped two-thirds of entertainment...”
– USA Today. Who among us can really say they’re wrong?
For literally years, I’ve been jokingly using the anti-expression “At the end of the day, it is what it is,” because it combines my two least favorite pseudo-wise tautologies (both of which are particularly popular with businessfolk).
On this week’s episode of Top Chef, the irritating contestant Sara(h) actually used that exact string of words, in a very serious way, to...
fun with numbers
mortgagez: you know that rule "80% of contributions are made by 20% of people at arbitrary organization"?
mortgagez: if that was fractal (ie "20% of the 20% do 80% of the 80%")
mortgagez: then 0.8% of people do 50% of the work
mortgagez: and the #1 person in the us does ~7%
“I love you, even though no one else could.”
– my boo, speaking truth to power.
“I think I have good, complicated ideas!”
– Lola. No, Lola, you don’t. Also, I’m pretty sure that complicatedness is not in itself a virtue when it comes to ideas. But she really thinks that it is.
more notes on Work of Art (I'm catching up)
Lola is exactly the same person as Jaclyn from the first season, down to the fact that they both interpret criticisms about not opening up enough creatively as demands to take naked photographs of themselves because they think they’re so irresistible.
Obviously I hate Lola.
Michelle was kind of the same as Peregrine from the first season.
I loved Peregrine. I also started to fall...
“I’m just not sure there’s any inner Sucklord there to find.”
– Jerry Saltz, Work of Art. Kind of impressive that he was able to say this with a straight face.
December 2011
40 posts
“The tautological emptiness of a Master’s Wisdom is exemplified in the...”
– weird to see Zizek quoted on Less Wrong!
not a typo
losel (n.): a worthless person
“A Florida animal sanctuary said Cheetah, the chimpanzee sidekick in the Tarzan...”
– ?!?!?!?
everyone is a groupuscule: Ineffectively Corrupt →
I see this in lobbying all the time. Because, I am a soulless technician who will faithfully advise anyone and everyone who asks I see the back rooms of opposing lobbyists all the time.
Here at the state level I can safely say that virtually no one has any idea what they are doing. That is, for…
Goddammit, I was going to post this. Fucking Christmas. I’m off my game.
it's a talent
me: it sucks to be able to experience stress and boredom at the same time
me: you'd think they'd kind of be mutually exclusive
cashflowz: god you are so right
cashflowz: can you write a book?
cashflowz: I feel like you are very good at expressing all these negative things
Wife: Let's get some tea.
Me: But I want to stop having caffeine. And stop eating sugar and wheat again. And not have alcohol anymore. I'll just be my real self all the time!
Wife: Uggghhhhhhhh.
so bored
cashflowz: I am literally looking up amazon SKUs and comparing them to lowe's SKUs and seeing which products are cheaper
cashflowz: I AM SO BORED I WANT TO DIE
me: that's kind of cool, though!
me: "granular"
me: think of how bored i must be
cashflowz: robots should do this
me: if that sounds cool to me
cashflowz: you must be SO bored
“Instead of housing precocious well-to-do children with names like Finnegan and...”
– Curbed
“Peter Damian [1000-1072 A.D.] justified his letter to the pope attacking...”
– Eugene Rice in an GLBTQ encylopedia article article about homosexuality in the Middle Ages. You have to admit — those priests were pretty clever! See also munchkining.
soon almost everyone will feel this way
lol, this dude sucks — I’ve achieved pretty much the same results but with like 25% less time spent!
I’ve spent the last two years working nearly 80 hours per week in graduate school. My work time is split between writing computer code, compiling results into summaries, charts, and papers, and doing lots of reading for research and for software development skill building.
I can give...
How is Kay Jewelers allowed to have a commercial touting its “Leo” diamond (I hate that I even know the name) as “the first diamond ever certified to be visibly brighter,” full stop? “The first diamond ever certified to be visibly brighter.” End of sentence. Brighter than what?! The words are meaningless!
That’s not even false advertising —...
I was explaining the term “pons asinorum” to the wife. The relevant Wikipedia page has some crazily off-style-guide prose!
Whatever its origin, the term is also used as a metaphor for a problem or challenge which will separate the sure of mind from the simple, the fleet thinker from the slow, the determined from the dallier…
“So as you all know, I was in New York last week, and it was a really interesting...”
– Jared Dillian, The Daily Dirtnap
“This prologue miniseries is by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness. And let’s be blunt...”
– Paul O’Brien. It’s probably not accurate to say that his reviews are enjoyable enough to read even if you don’t care about the X-Men, but…wouldn’t it be nice if that were true?
“I understand that debates are not conducted in front of perfectly rational...”
– EY
seedz:
keyholez:
seedz reblogged a post from The Economist that began:
GENE MARKS’S blog post on Forbes.com, ostentatiously headlined “If I Was a Poor Black Kid”, didn’t actually offend me as much as it did many of the plethora of bloggers who’ve pilloried it over the past few days. As Forbes’s Kashmir Hill later posted, most of the vitriol seemed to be responding to the title. The post...
“Glass-Steagall is a divine right for investment bankers to make a lot of profit....”
– Charles Sanford, via some guy.
SOCIAL NETWORKING!
gothamspoilers:
seedz reblogged a post from The Economist that began:
GENE MARKS’S blog post on Forbes.com, ostentatiously headlined “If I Was a Poor Black Kid”, didn’t actually offend me as much as it did many of the plethora of bloggers who’ve pilloried it over the past few days. As Forbes’s Kashmir Hill later posted, most of the vitriol seemed to be responding to the...
“If your body’s worth anything when you’re done with it, you should...”
– Louis C.K. (well worth your $5!)
Judy gets around
“Judy Is a Punk” (the Ramones)
“Judy Is a Dick Slap” (Belle & Sebastian)
“Judy Is Your Viet Nam” (They Might Be Giants”
shouldn't someone be out there claiming victory?
Bank of America: cutting 40,000 jobs
Morgan Stanley: cutting 1,600 jobs
Citigroup: cutting 4,500 jobs
Credit Suisse: cutting 1,500 jobs
Goldman Sachs: cutting 1,000 jobs
You can add UBS, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan, and everyone else to the list too, but I got bored of googling the numbers. And note that, with the exception of Bank of America, these are mainly trader/investment-banker jobs, not...