haha
A thousand years
In Bailey’s Democracy, David Bailey photographed a raft of people in the nude, including Damien Hirst, pulling his prepuce and mugging at the camera. A telling image of Hirst’s skills – not that much, stretched not very far.
{ Craig Raine/New Statesman | Continue reading }
I like her early stuff. You know, Lucky Star, Borderline.
In what is surely the most shocking celebrity revelation of 2012, Ashley Olsen has announced that she plans to focus on the fashion empire she’s created with her twin sister Mary-Kate. (…)
Olsen revealed that it’s finally time to step down from her position as Hollywood’s most respected A-lister performer.
Tragically for the millions who have long worshipped her brilliant talent and her status as the unparalleled master of character, accents, and genres, Olsen says that she’s never going to act again.
‘The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom… for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.’ –William Blake
Putting Helium in a Dolphin. Two opposing hypotheses propose that tonal sounds arise either from tissue vibrations or through actual whistle production from vortices stabilized by resonating nasal air volumes. Here, we use a trained bottlenose dolphin whistling in air and in heliox [a mixture of helium and oxygen] to test these hypotheses.
(…)
Sixty-two percent of the dishwashers were positive for fungi.
(…)
Some years ago a colleague pointed out that there was a connection between paranoid symptomatology and the drawing in of joints on arms and legs on human figure drawings. [A researcher named] Buck states that emphasis upon knees suggests the presence of homosexual tendencies. Over a period of time, this investigator was impressed with the frequent connection between these two variables. This study was designed to determine the validity of this hypothesis.
(…)
In Study 1, 55 young women responded that they preferred men with hairy chests and circumcised penises.
{ Annals of Improbable Research | Special Body Parts Issue | PDF }
Thanks to the @FederalReserve arrival, the value of all tweets will collapse by 98% in a few years
The @FederalReserve is concerned about declining characters per tweet - to fix that it will give $1.6 trillion to insolvent US banks.
{ @ZeroHedge }
I am so booking the Hilton for next year like, today
‘I don’t see Airbnb being a sustainable business in the long run.’ Pause ‘Want to go to their party later?’
related { SXSW 2012: Design from the Gut: Dangerous or Differentiator? }
I had no idea whether Brad Pitt’s character was happy or upset in each scene
My wife quit watching 20 minutes into the movie preferring to play Words with Friends on her I-pad. I toughed it out hoping that it would get better and it finally did… it ended.
photo { Colleen Nika }
‘Wow, that is a nice lookin pair of Crocs,’ said no one ever.
To explain the pervasive role of humor in human social interaction and among mating partner preferences, Miller proposed that intentional humor evolved as an indicator of intelligence. To test this, we looked at the relationships among rater-judged humor, general intelligence, and the Big Five personality traits in a sample of 185 college-age students (115 women, 70 men).
General intelligence positively predicted rater-judged humor, independent of the Big Five personality traits. Extraversion also predicted rater-judged humor, although to a lesser extent than general intelligence. General intelligence did not interact with the sex of the participant in predicting rating scores on the humor production tasks.
The current study lends support to the prediction that effective humor production acts as an honest indicator of intelligence in humans. In addition, extraversion, and to a lesser extent, openness, may reflect motivational traits that encourage humor production.
And then what after supper? Music? Whispers?
Microwave Massacre is a 1983 dark comedy/horror film directed by Wayne Berwick. (…)
After coming home drunk one night and getting into an argument with his wife May, Donald loses his temper and bludgeons her to death with a large pepper grinder. He wakes up the next day with a bad hangover, no memory of the night before, and a growling stomach. He discovers May’s corpse in the microwave and after the initial wave of horror passes, he starts to take it in stride, telling his co-workers that he and May separated. After work, he cuts up May’s body and stores it in foil wrap in the fridge.
Looking for a midnight snack one night, Donald unintentionally takes a few bites of May’s hand, and after the initial wave of horror passes, he realizes it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. He even brings some to work with him and shares it with Phillip and Roosevelt, who concur. He soon starts picking up hookers and using them for meat in his recipes. (…)
Donald’s lunches continue to be a hit with his friends, and he decides to cater an outing to a wrestling match with a new recipe he calls “Peking chick.” When Roosevelt and Phillip show up to pick up Donald, they discover him dead on the floor of a heart attack, and some body parts in the microwave. They leave in horror and disgust, realizing what Donald had been serving them.
photo { Glenn Glasser }
Lucas, who is 67 and still in possession of the full pompadour
Danilo is the only person allowed to cut my hair, really. He’s just the most magical, amazing human being. He’s on the whole Rooney Mara thing—he created her look for Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
Stuff the ice chest
{ On the campaign trail with Mitt Romney. And Bad Lip Reading. | thanks joshua }
Well, there’s art and there’s what’s right. I’m gonna do what’s right.
In 2008 just over $270m-worth of art by Damien Hirst was sold at auction, a world record for a living artist. By 2009 Mr Hirst’s annual auction sales had shrunk by 93%—to $19m—and the 2010 total is likely to be even lower. The collapse in the Hirst market can partly be ascribed to the recession. But more important are the lingering effects of a two-day auction of new work by Mr Hirst that Sotheby’s launched in London on September 15th 2008. (…)
Miuccia Prada, an Italian designer and longstanding Hirst collector, for example, spent £6.3m acquiring a trio of Mr Hirst’s trademark animals in formaldehyde: “The Black Sheep with the Golden Horn”, “False Idol” (a calf), and “The Dream” (a foal made to look like a unicorn). “I think it was an incredible conceptual gesture, not a sale,” she says. (..)
The Mugrabi family owns some 110 Hirsts, including an installation that features 30 sheep, two doves, a shark and a splayed cow in formaldehyde. The Mugrabis offered $35m for the artist’s diamond skull, “For the Love of God”, but failed to secure the work that was marketed at $100m and has never sold. “The Mugrabis rarely buy directly from me,” says Mr Hirst. “We can never work out a deal because they want such fierce prices.”
The Mugrabis liken the tumble in Mr Hirst’s secondary prices to Andy Warhol’s in the early 1990s.
{ Economist, 2010 | Continue reading}
His jam-packed 2000 Gagosian exhibition of medical equipment, anatomical models, live fish, pharmaceuticals, floating skeletons, and fake cut-up cadavers showed Hirst to be an artist whose No. 1 urge is to make a wow. Sadly for him, that urge got the best of him, turning him into a brand name and self-parody. By 2005, we saw Hirst the stagy photorealist making banal, insipid images of Iraq, autopsies, and bits of brains. Then there was a failed series of academic-looking Francis Bacon–like paintings. Finally, there was that $100 million diamond-encrusted skull. At the time, it seemed interesting, even though the object itself was visually dead. Now it only seems like a dull, neo-imperialistic bauble. He’s making mostly exhibitionistic schlock these days.
Who gave the West Coast mouth to mouth?
Dear Hiring Manager for [insert International Humanitarian Organization],
I would like to apply for the position of [insert vague sounding job title that has no meaning outside of the given organization]. I believe that my educational background and skills make me uniquely suited to this position. So far in life I have proven myself capable of taking on the challenges required for this position, which I understand pays under $20,000 a year for working in one of the most dangerous countries in the world and undertaking tasks that no one else wants to do. (…)
I became determined to not just help poor people, but to help the poorest and most desperate people, preferably those living in war-torn countries under military dictatorships where the chance of being kidnapped, blown up, or summarily executed is very high. Only by working under the very worst of conditions can I prove to myself and my peers that I am in fact as ballsy as they are and just as willing to die for a project that is under-funded, poorly planned and probably has little chance of actually helping anyone.
This experience will allow me to live on a permanent adrenaline rush, which will mean that I do not need to use drugs the way my over-privileged peers do. At the same time, it will allow me to become more arrogant and cynical and give me the credibility needed to scoff at anyone who questions the effectiveness of my chosen career. (…)
Thank you for your consideration, I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
E… W… S…
P.S. Do not ignore this cover letter because I have cc’d my professor who used to work for your organization as well as a family friend who is on your Board of Directors.
