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These tips for keeping distracting people out of your office appeal to the productive misanthrope in me.
A lot of people who are down on the river a lot, they know who I am. They’re like, “Hey that’s the trash man.” And people come up to you, and they are like: “That’s so great that you’re picking up trash. How can I get involved?” And I’m like, “You see some trash, pick it up.”
First Person Singular: Ezra Duong-Van, Volunteer with Potomac Riverkeeper - washingtonpost.com
The Femmes were eating dinner at Doyle’s Seafood in Sydney. Ritchie ate a live lobster served sashimi style. When Gano saw the arms of the lobster waving around while Ritchie munched the raw flesh he called a taxi and went back to the hotel. The next day Gano announced he was becoming a vegetarian and has never eaten meat since then.
VIOLENT FEMMES Band Info is full of tales seemingly too good to be true.
I did a recipe in “Red, White and Greens” for Pasta Poma Sarde al Mare: Pasta With Sardines at Sea. It’s a concept that I love. It means they’re in the sea — and not in the dish, which is vegetarian.
Sometimes the Best Ingredient Is the One That Isn’t There - washingtonpost.com
Freakonomics Blog: If Public Libraries Didn’t Exist, Could You Start One Today?
Given the current state of debate about intellectual property, can you imagine modern publishers being willing to sell one copy of a book and then have the owner let an unlimited number of strangers borrow it?
(via librarian.net by Jessamyn)
I just finished reading Book 7 and am now back online.
NPR : Dean Reed: The Man Who Rocked the Iron Curtain — NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Reggie Nadelson, author of Dean Reed biography Comrade Rockstar.
Binary America: Split in Two by A Digital Divide - washingtonpost.com
Declare the Internet a public good in the same way we think of water, electricity, highways.
“Apparently,” said my friend knowledgeably, as we watched McEwan swing his new wife around the dance floor, “he only writes fifteen words a day.” This was an unfortunate piece of information to give an aspiring writer. I was terribly susceptible to the power of example. If I heard Borges ran three miles every morning and did a headstand in a bucket of water before sitting down to write, I felt I must try this myself. The specter of the fifteen-word limit stayed with me a long time. Three years later I remember writing White Teeth and thinking that all my problems stemmed from the excess of words I felt compelled to write each day. Fifteen words a day! Why can’t you write just fifteen words a day?
From Zadie Smith's intro to her interview with Ian McEwan (excerpt), in The Believer.
I’ve been honestly kind of freaking out about the spoilers this week.
randomwalks/dj: David’s reblog is one of the only sites I can think of which I trust not to spoil my weekend.
Macintouch Reader Reports: iPhone
With the earbuds in, using the phone function, the caller’s voice is now comfortably in the middle of my head, in the center of my aural space. This makes talking on the phone SO much easier, since I don’t have to automatically shift my attention to one ear, and exclude the other. It feels like telepathy, really.
What a dramatic change in how I talk, done so simply, and found so unexpectedly…
“Fixing a small iPhone annoyance” with a bookmarklet which opens links in new windows.
Trying to schedule your sequestration this weekend so the end of Harry Potter isn’t spoiled for you? Me too. Let’s see. The book will be 784 pages, and I read about 300 words per minute. (How Many Words-Per-Minute Do You Read?) Now if I had a copy of one of the Harry Potter hardcovers handy, I’d count a few pages to get a figure for words per page. Anybody got a good guess?
We were very conscious that our audiences, our people, are artists themselves, musicians themselves, the record store clerks of America, and we wanted to remind them that they're being told to shut up and not have an opinion and not state your opinion unless you are a politician or a Middle East expert. And we wanted to remind them that actually the voice of the poet, and the artist, and the musician is often where the deeper wisdom comes from. Those voices have always been heard, have always needed to be present and have always played a role.
To do what I’m called to do, I need to have a human body. I live in a body in order to bring man closer to God.
This is the first time I have been needed in 2,000 years. This is a critical point. Only when mankind becomes one family on Earth will the doors to the universe become open to them.
Seventeen years ago, a young man in Siberia realized he was the second coming of Christ.
The interface for completing a form in Safari on iPhone is quite nice. “Previous” and “next” buttons swoop the focus through the form elements, so there’s no need to zoom when moving from one input to the next. The magnifying loupe is a brilliant solution to the daunting problem of intuitive cursor control, and as I type this, I’m delighted to find that simply tapping a word places the cursor smartly at the end of it.
Which means it’s pretty easy to post to your weblog when you’re sitting on the toilet.