Guilt and Logistics
Hi there! This is Melanie and these are my curated bits and pieces from the interwebs. I also occasionally link to my own websites - Italofile and Miss Adventures - and my writing on Gadling and About.com. Cheers!
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Texas y’all.
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Sue Lyon as Lolita, by Bert Stern 1960
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Love Song - William Carlos Williams
I lie here thinking of you:—
the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it... -
zadi:
disneyprince: The original trolls. Video here.
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Dr. Dog - “Warrior Man”
Digging this new track from the soon to be release Dr Dog record, ‘Be The Void.’ It sounds like some sort of awesome,...
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Greenland’s Ice is Growing Darker
In the past, the bright surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet reflected well over half of the...
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The Beatles - “Tomorrow Never Knows”
With my week long Beatles chronological listen over, I still say that this is their...
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The Sounds. Malmö, Sweden.
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Something pops up, an image, a sound, anything you’re drawn to but for all the rice in china you can’t figure out why. Then one night you spend an...
The escalator in the Tel Aviv Municipality Building
(via pie0)
Wow. This angers me. And yet…I love it! Look at the mod eye makeup!
We live in politically correct times, well, except for the people of China. At Dwarf Empire, an amusement park of tiny mushroom-like castles that is part of the World Ecological Garden of Butterflies, visitors are entertained twice daily by the hundreds of dwarves who live and work here. Amongst the people dressed up as medieval soldiers, acrobats, butterflies, cooks and hip hoppers (what is that, like a small Tupac?) is the sun glass-wearing King, wearing a colorful hippie coat, who welcomes everyone to his tiny kingdom. Then like Wizard of Oz on crack, all the dwarves break out into a song and dance number. The owners have plans to expand, creating an army of thousands of dwarves from across China.
Considering the average yearly salary in China is $4,260, the performers, who have come from all over the country, don’t have it too bad. Instead of living a life on the streets, the park guarantees them free housing and extracurricular activities as well as a monthly income of $147. That’s better than some University graduates. Maybe some see this business venture as exploitative and demeaning, while others believe it sounds a lot better than the circuses and freak shows of the past. Well, if it makes you feel any better…the visitors are forced to sit in tiny chairs during the performances and use tiny urinals during bathroom breaks. Well, the men anyway.
Great pics of the place here.
Second day in a row of ice skating. I’m becoming a regular Oksana Baiul.
Informationally, we are becoming lard-asses. In the pageview and ratings driven media economy, too much of the content these days is designed to be just like junk food to quickly boost quantifiable viewership. If you make content that is the intellectual equivalent of gummy bears, your site will appear to grow quickly. Advertisers reward size, and growing fast is expected in most places I’ve seen. Last month I visited Xeni Jardin, my blog-sister from Boing Boing and she said to me, “Only cancer and bullshit websites grow fast.” It’s happened to TV with reality shows, radio with clear channel, and it’s happening to words online. I’ve never seen a world-class sized publication that was founded in the past decade do world class quality work. It’s not because the people running them are dumb–it’s because they don’t have enough time to think their work through because there’s no short term incentive to. There’s an excuse there aren’t enough resources to go around, but that’s bullshit. It just takes a little confidence in the long game.
Reading The Obama Memos this morning in the New Yorker and had a strong desire to revisit this Obama speech. Damn, I miss that momentum.
Covers warm and tight up around my chin. I’m in bed at 10 on a Saturday night and no one can stop me. I’m gonna be a rebel and sleep tonight. Bonne nuit, iyi geceler.
