Persons attempting to find a "text" in this [story] will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR - Wendell Berry's introduction to Jayber Crow.
My name is Mark Benson; this is my blog. More on the about page.
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No names will be dropped, but word on the street is that a freestyle rap battle spontaneously broke out between team Lefty & Skinny and the rest of the pack coming out of the second checkpoint at Minneathlon v2.0. Overheard on the course:
Typical Bo Jackson Run on Tecmo Super Bowl. Ahh, the memories.
The Minneathlon is this Friday. Our team profile (Lefty and Skinny) was recently posted, and there seems to be some decent banter in the trash-talk section. Also, since the race coordinators are running the prize give-away like a horse-race, they’re posting revised odds as people make their bets.
Minneathlon v2.0: Brains vs. Brawn. This is Logic’s version of the Amazing Race in and around downtown Minneapolis, to be held on June 27th, 2008. This year, Jason and I were granted entry as team Lefty & Skinny. More updates to come.
Welcome to Haley Jo, born on Tues, May 27, 2008, 6lb 10oz and 20".
What a cutie. Congratulations Brian and Jill!
Jon Henley on the fate of the semicolon. The debate on the value of the semicolon goes on. Some authors love it, some hate it. Why is this discussion so divisive? The semicolon is just a misunderstood grammatical outsider with a split personality — sometimes a comma and sometimes a period — that wants to be left alone.
Here are some quotes from the article. First, Guillemette Faure:
It’s true that computer programmers use an awful lot of them, mainly as separators. And that’s surely the last step on the line before it’s reduced to a mere email emoticon.
Obviously Mr. Faure has not heard of ML. Next, George Bernard Shaw to TE Lawrence, on the Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.
Err, childish? Next, Kurt Vonnegut:
If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
Yikes! I haven’t finished thinking about that one. Finally, George Orwell:
I had decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.
Hm, hard to argue with G.O. on style.
A Cooks.com user-submitted recipe for Wiener Water Soup. (Via Serious Eats, Kottke.)
Wiener Water Soup
1 pkg. wieners
3 c. waterCombine wieners and water in a two quart saucepan. Bring to a boil until wieners are cooked. Throw the wieners in the garbage. Serve soup. Serves 3.
Patrick Power’s Night Harvest from the excellent FILE Magazine.
Hunched, shivering, goose-pimply and bare, I assembled with other pubescent boys on the wet, slippery, and slimy concrete of our Junior High locker room after a pre-swim rinse. I could smell the dry chlorine in the air, and had already started prophesying to myself the inevitable ashy dander that would ensue that afternoon in the form of an anhydrous itchy epidermis.
I could see our commanding gym teacher strolling towards us from his office while whistling a confident but unidentifiable and ugly tune. (Why did he always do that?) He was carrying an orange 5-gallon pale and a clipboard for roll-call.
When he got near, he dropped the bucket from a distance too high to be considered careful, and as it hit the concrete, it startled us and made an echoing and hollow thud which reverberated through the cavernous shower room.
Each of us stood quietly wide-eyed, anticipating the unknown thing we would be forced to do next. Then, without notice, he dropped his clipboard to his thigh, turned his right foot 90 degrees outward, shifted his weight to his left hip and assumed an awkward pose that seemed as though he were about to demonstrate a textbook touch-pass.
With his extended right foot, he kicked the pale of tiny, cold, wet, Speedo swimsuits to the center of our mass, and said unsympathetically as though he were a raspy-voiced and condescending army sergeant who yelled and smoked too much, “Strap ‘em on, boys”.
After entering the pool, we sat impatiently to be inspected for Scoliosis. The girls (who where just finishing their own swim unit) skittered past us like a set of nervous ants trying to orient themselves to a nest that didn’t exist.
It was at this point, as I looked down the row of us boys, observing our varying reactions to the girls that were walking by, that I realized that there were two kinds of people in my class: those that were popular, confident, and coordinated; and those that had an inborn mistrust of their personal adequacy as men.
I was an accepting member of the latter, but wished dearly that I could somehow skip adolescence before my weakness could be solidified further. Unfortunately, as I would find out, I would just have to wait.
Saw Prince Caspian last night with Mandy and was pleasantly surprised by the closing song, sung by Regina Spektor, called The Call. The style differs markedly from the full majestic orchestral phrases that were common throughout most of the movie, but the lyrics and the modern folk melody seemed to correspond well with the closing geo-time-travel from Narnia to England.
Digable Planets - Rebirth Of Slick. I still love these guys (Butterfly, Doodlebug, Ladybug Mecca, Silkworm).
We be to rap what key be to lock.
I was going through some old jayber.org designs of mine, came across a few that caught my eye, and realized that they all have a common theme in that they are: (1) urban, and (2) green. Here are some samples:
Pimped-out van on Flickr. Dang, wouldn’t want to take that thing off road. Nice wings though! By the way, is that a chihuahua in the front window? This definitely one-ups the Popemobile. (Via Matt H.)
‘skine.art. is a site dedicated to Moleskine lovers and their art.
[…] we encourage anyone and everyone to […] submit their artwork. There is no “good” or “bad” art, just Art.
There’s some good stuff on there. Like this. (Via Dan O.)
A Peek Inside the Popemobile - Newsweek
The popemobile isn’t its official name, because it doesn’t have one. In fact, Pope John Paul II pleaded with journalists to stop using the term in 2002 because he thought it sounded “undignified.” So it’s not surprising that a Vatican spokesman couldn’t say whether popemobile (small p) describes every car in the pontiff’s fleet or whether only the car in use by the pope is the Popemobile with a big p […]
I just like the name Popemobile for some reason. I can’t get it out of my head. I just keep saying it silently. Popemobile, Popemobile, Popemobile.
My professor continues to keep the compiler-theory zingers coming. Today, he rattled off another set that had me laughing quietly.
Fortran is structurally deficient. It’s really a shame that people use it.
Zing!
Algol is the father of all sensible languages we have today. And then, there’s C…
Bwa!
Hong Kong Handshake. White & Gold foil stamping on White Shiro 80, 1400gsm.
Oliver Munday business card and resume, printed on quarter roll paper. Very nice.
After a year of riding a fixed-gear without brakes, I decided to add a cheap front calliper and lever (AKA, a Chicken Switch) so I can have some additional stopping power during my impulsive kamikaze bombing runs down by the river. I figure if these guys use one, so should I. Here’s a few photos on Flickr.
I remember driving by this sign every day for a few years on the corner of North Penn and West Broadway in North Minneapolis: Love Thy Bro (cf. Mark 12:28-31).
Martial Arts Knockout. Nice tornado.
Created as a high-school class project with some friends, my cousin Alex Benson (the floppy-haired head-banger in red pantaloons), rips a stadium-worthy solo at 2:23 in their Paramore Music Video (Misery Business). How can you not love this?
I’ve been listening to Bon Iver (pronounced: bohn eevair; French for “good winter” and spelled wrong on purpose) recently (thanks EA). This album is deeply contemplative, which I deeply appreciate. Justin Vernon:
Nearly without fail, each time my compiler theory class meets, our professor comes up with some linguistic boner that a language (not based on Lambda Calculus) commits that further validates the righteousness of ML. Here’s the compiler-theory insult of the day.
The only time I could conceive of this type of approach for resolving shift-reduce conflicts is in C++, which I would consider more of an ad-hoc language—not a real language.
Zing!
I’ve waffled for a few days on whether to post this or not, but the font that Obama’s campaign uses for their “Change We Can Believe In” marketing material, uses Gotham, which was originally designed for GQ by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, inspired by a sign for the NY Port Authority.
H&FJ say of Gotham’s original aesthetic intent:
GQ had a dual agenda of wanting something that would look very fresh, yet very established, to have a credible voice to it. It also needed to look very masculine and ‘of-the-moment.’
Seems to go well with Obama’s message. Perhaps we should add Typography to the list of our country’s important political issues.
[A website dedicated to] hand-written signs with letters in all-caps, except for the letter L.
Find out more about what the L this is all about. (Via DF.)
From Ironic Sans, a new typography term: Keming. Bwa!
Awry. Great photo and orientation of a catawampus shed by Charlie Clark.
Nick Fraser on the American novelist, Richard Yates, quoting a character from Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, on the topic of Revolutionary Road:
I wouldn’t recommend finishing it on Christmas Day, in a cold-water bedsit, […] It probably didn’t help my general sense of well-being, if you know what I mean, because the ending is a real downer.
Ellen Barkin, producer of an upcoming film based on Easter Parade:
Brits immediately get Yates - maybe because they have never bought into anything as dumb as the American dream. There’s no “glad morning” in his books.