Usually, writers will do anything to avoid writing. For instance, the previous sentence was written at one o’clock this afternoon. It is now a quarter to four. I have spent the past two hours and forty-five minutes sorting my neckties by width, looking up the word “paisley” in three dictionaries, attempting to find the town of that name on The New York Times Atlas of the World map of Scotland, sorting my reference books by width, trying to get the bookcase to stop wobbling by stuffing a matchbook cover under its corner, dialing the telephone number on the matchbook cover to see if I should take computer courses at night, looking at the computer ads in the newspaper and deciding to buy a computer because writing seems to be so difficult on my old Remington, reading an interesting article on sorghum farming in Uruguay that was in the newspaper next to the computer ads, cutting that and other interesting articles out of the newspaper, sorting—by width—all the interesting articles I’ve cut out of newspapers recently, fastening them neatly together with paper clips and making a very attractive paper clip necklace and bracelet set, which I will present to my girlfriend as soon as she comes home from the three-hour low-impact aerobic workout that I made her go to so I could have some time alone to write.
PJ O’Rourke (via neon-loneliness)
love-and-radiation:
You can get a free download of Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners, one of my favourite short story collections ever, featuring “The Faery Handbag.” If you don’t like short stories, I hate you and you’re tacky.
Why are you reading this instead of Kelly Link right now.
Fat kids everywhere, rejoice! There’s no link between childhood obesity and junk food sold in schools, a new study has found.
Cities all over the country have been busy banning the sale of sweet and salty snacks in public schools in a bid to fight childhood obesity (thanks, Mrs. Obama). But a new study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University suggests that the strategy may be ineffective,The New York Times reports. The research appears in the January issue of the journalSociology of Education.
Researchers tracked the body mass indexes of 19,450 students from fifth through eighth grade. They found that 59 percent of fifth-graders attended a school where candy bars, chips and/or soft drinks — so called “competitive foods” — were sold. That number had risen to 86 percent by eighth grade.
Scientists compared children’s weight in schools where junk food was sold and in schools where it was banned. They also evaluated eighth-graders who moved into schools that sold junk food with those who did not, and children who never attended a school that sold unhealthy snacks with those who did. Finally, they compared children who always attended schools with snacks with those who moved out of such schools.
No matter how they sliced the data, they could find no correlation at all between obesity and attending a school where candy and junk food were sold. The study also found that “the relationship between competitive foods and weight gain did not vary significantly by gender, race/ethnicity or family socioeconomic status.”
1) Wow, no kidding.
2) But did the availability of crappy food correlate with worse health?
3) It’s idiotic to frame discussions of health around physical appearance. STOP IT NOW.
(Source: abbyjean)
kelsium:
They need to develop a pill that would ensure that no matter what happens you will not cry within a certain length of time after you take it. Useful for meetings, breakups, fights with your mother, and so many other things. Get on it, science.
Science, please invent this and deliver one to me before my meeting with my graduate director tomorrow morning to discuss why I have four incompletes on my record and am the worst student ever.
hardlyinventive:
It’s hard not to share this.
Brb stealing snow
(via neon-loneliness)
therapsida:
Medically Accurate Tom Waits Anatomy
(Source: thechibbsjermaine, via freibiergesicht)
desliz:
smiletothevie:
OMGGGG
where’s the bread
what kind of communist sandwich is this
GET IN MAH BELLEH
(Source: foodographies)
neveralovelysoreal:
It was just between 4 am and noon.
Oh, grad school, destroyer of schedules.
That’s as close as I get to a regular sleeping schedule anymore.
I have now entered the Sneezing Phase of this cold.
wine-loving-vagabond:
theholyprepuce:
White Jesus modeled on Cesare Borgia?
The theory is that people were generally not too enthusiastic about the Catholic Church’s regular massacres of Jews and Crusades against Muslims, because the people they were killing looked like Jesus. Pope Alexander VI then ordered the destruction of all art depicting a Semitic Jesus and commissioned a number of paintings depicting a Caucasian Jesus. His son, Cardinal Cesare Borgia, was the model for these paintings. Thus, the nastiest of all the Borgias, became the iconic Caucasian Jesus so loved by Christians today.
In 1995, GZA’s Liquid Swords album featured the solo track by Wu-Tang Clan affiliate, Killah Priest, ”B.I.B.L.E. (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth)”. The lyrics include the lines; “I even learnt Caucasians were really the Tribe of Edam, The white image, of Christ, is really Cesare Borgia”
hmmmm
Well, it’s good to know that when I was a baby my mom made sure Cesare Borgia was looking down on me while I slept.
(via alexandraerin)
(Source: devoureth, via desliz)
Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.
Letters of Note: Thou eunuch of language (Robert Burns to a critic, 1791)
This site might be my new favorite thing.
