Random

The missing shipment has been found and is enroute from NYC! so while I wait for my inventory to arrive, enjoy...

✜How did I not know about this blog before?! "How to Be Like Robert Benchley":

Look at the people in the Congress, or the Chamber of Deputies, or the Parliament in London, and listen to what they say. The only logical ending to it all is that the world is headed for dementia praecox, with all the buildings tumbling down, all the water works shooting up into the air and all the citizens bumping into each other with trays of hot soup.

And yet automobiles dodge each other as if by magic, passable motion pictures are produced, many people stay married all their lives and actually don’t seem to mind, and only occasionally does hell break loose entirely. It’s a pretty lucky old world we live in, when you consider its possibilities.

✜And this store? Office supply heaven.

✜Sylvia Plath wrote a children's book? An odd concept, maybe, but the illustrations by Rotraut Susanne Berner are charming:

and I'm off to mail my first modest round of packages...

Random

❧ Shakespeare's "Yo Momma" joke.

❧ Flowers and vegetables! Very pretty:

❧ The Basics of Herbs. (with a helpful illustrated chart)

❧ The Open Goldberg Variations. A kickstarter-funded, open-sourced recording of Bach's masterpiece, downloadable for free. This is a newly-released recording by Kimiko Ishizaka, performed on a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial piano in Berlin.

❧ Cary Grant and his Sealyham Terrier, just because:

Random interests

Currently reading:

I'm enjoying it, especially the part about the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Basically, it's the physiological counterpart of our (at times) overzealous super-ego. It keeps us from knocking someone down on the sidewalk and taking their gorgeous boots, but it can also keep us creatively blocked when doing its job too well.

image from here.

Steven Poole of The Guardian has another view. You can read his snarky review here. I agree with him that Lehrer's book has a little too much emphasis on corporate creativity as the ultimate goal, but this is the U.S.A. in 2012, after all. (Go read about Monoculture if this kind of thing interests you.)

Here's the link for Jonah Lehrer's website.

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Brian Greene and the multiverse:

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Found this recipe at Pinterest and made it last night. Really, really good. Spinach and Artichoke Grilled Cheese. Recipe at A Couple Cooks.

Source: acouplecooks.com via LB on Pinterest

Random (again) Monday.

Random things from the internets today.

The Zombie Apocalypse of Daniel DeFoe, from Lapham's Quarterly:

Defoe’s novel, published in 1722, is a mutant factual-fiction that recounts the plague epidemic of 1665, which dispatched almost 100,000 Londoners. Purporting to be the “memorial” of a survivor known only as “H.F.”, it was based on genuine documentary sources, including the diary of Defoe’s uncle.

A Japanese scroll from the Edo period (1603 to 1868) about... um, farting. (I know.) From the Daily Mail:

Made by an unknown artist or artists, the scroll depicts a number of different scenes - all linked by the fact that at least one character is directing a debilitating blast of flatulence towards another character.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2104250/Divine-wind-Japanese-He-gassen-art-actually-form-social-commentary.html#ixzz1qCLtD45f

 

See more at Tofugu.

This is so cool I can't even begin to tell you:

Source: bigthink.com via LB on Pinterest

From BigThink.com:

This fantastic contraption, called the ‘Routefinder’, showed 1920s drivers in the UK the roads they were travelling down, gave them the mileage covered and told them to stop when they came at journey’s end.
The technology – a curious cross between the space age and the stone age – consisted of a little map scroll inside a watch, to be ‘scrolled’ (hence the word) as the driver moved along on the map. A multitude of scrolls could be fitted in the watch to suit the particular trip the driver fancied taking.