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Washington Post is running a poll for the worst idea of the Aughts. It's a close race between the vaccine phobia (my vote if worst is defined by stupidity and idiocy), torture memos, housing bubble, prosperity gospel, and in first with 21%, compassionate conservatism.
Housing prices always rise Plenty of mistakes and delusions brought on our financial crisis, writes Greg Ip of the Economist, but none so much as the belief that housing prices can only go up.
[Hat tip: Mun!]
In part 3 of his latest thought provoking and entertaining conversation with the Sports Guy Bill Simmons, author Malcolm Gladwell summarizes his thoughts on why (American) football has "been ruined for [him]" and "increasingly of the opinion that it is screwed up -- on a moral level -- in a way that no other professional sport is."
Think about it. The league has a salary cap (which limits players' pay), minimal health insurance for retirees and no guaranteed contracts. In other words, the owners reserve the right to limit the pool of money available to players, to walk away from contracts whenever they please and then hold no long-term responsibility for the health of the players whose contracts they have limited and declined to honor. Coal miners aren't treated this badly. And now we strongly suspect a fourth fact: that some significant percentage of ex-players, as a direct result of playing professional football, will suffer from dementia in their 40s and 50s, in addition to all the known and significant other health risks of the game (severe arthritis, substantially elevated risk of heart disease, etc.).
This list captures the hive-mind of all of us in the digital generation. Some excerpts below that made me laugh and sometimes nod my head in agreement.
8. Do you remember when you were a kid playing Nintendo and it wouldn't work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid in America did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ's. We just figured it out. Today's kids are soft.
11. I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I'll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone's laughing at the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a millisecond earlier) to prove that I'm still the only one who really, really gets it.
14. I think part of a best friend's job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.
20. Answering the same letter three times or more in a row on a Scantron test is absolutely petrifying.
29. Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.
32. Whenever I'm Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public I feel like a kid on Christmas morning who just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don't mind if I do!
33. Is it just me or do high school girls get sluttier & sluttier every year?
35. Why is it that during an ice-breaker, when the whole room has to go around and say their name and where they are from, I get so incredibly nervous? Like I know my name, I know where I'm from, this shouldn't be a problem....
40. I hate being the one with the remote in a room full of people watching TV. There's so much pressure. 'I love this show, but will they judge me if I keep it on? I bet everyone is wishing we weren't watching this. It's only a matter of time before they all get up and leave the room. Will we still be friends after this?'
44. I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it's on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.
52. It really pisses me off when I want to read a story on CNN.com and the link takes me to a video instead of text.
54. I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lites than with Kay.
The estimated total of all the gold mined by humans in our existence would fill a cube sized 82 feet a side, or roughly one third of the Washington Monument. Platinum is even more rare and discovered much later (18th century). All the platinum in the world would fit a cube 20 feet a side.
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Okay, after reading this article about contaminated tap water, I don't care how good the New York City water is, I'm getting a filter. I mean, damn, look at that photo. I need to protect the temple that is my body.
One blogger recounts a recent encounter with the Israeli security at the airport while attempting to travel to Tel Aviv.
Then they asked me to wait. Since they had asked for friends and families phone numbers I assumed they might be calling to verify my answers to questions or confirm I really had extended family in Tel Aviv. An announcement played over the sound system, interrupting my break in the sunshine. First in Hebrew, then Arabic, then in English. It was something along the lines of, "do not to be alarmed by gunshots because the Israeli security needs to blow up suspicious passanger luggage."
I went inside to check on my bag. I had left it unattended, where they instructed. It was still there so I went back outside.
Moments later a man came outside and introduced himself as the manager on duty. And then, "I'm sorry but we had to blow up your laptop."
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
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Interesting short essay in Prospect that argues that the distinction between cool and uncool is increasingly irrelevant.
We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
I bet Thomas Friedman loved this article.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LkhVeW7VV0] A video clip of Shaolin monk Si Xingsong balancing on just his index fingers, a trick that supposedly only one other person can do in this world. The main risk, the video states is breaking the index fingers. ORLY?
I can now check off "Getting quoted in the New York Times" off my list of to-do's before I die. I'm mentioned in this article published today.
The top 500 most common passwords or in other words, the top 500 worst passwords to use ever. The top 10:
In order to survive during the financial meltdown last fall, Morgan Stanley received a $9 billion investment from Mitsubishi UFJ. Andrew Sorkin writes, "The payment was supposed to be wired electronically, but because it needed to be made on an emergency basis on a holiday, Mitsubishi cut a physical check, perhaps the largest ever written." Here's the check:
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GOOD Magazine has a transparency that looks at "your most likely cause of death (excluding uncontrollable events like accidents and homicide), given your race, sex, and age." Suicide among the young is just insane. Come on, kids, stick around...at least for cancer when you're 45.
I get an odd feeling of alterna-history when gazing at this photograph of Fidel Castro visiting Lincoln Memorial when he visited Washington, DC in April 1959 shortly after he assumed power in Cuba.
Neatorama rounds up some of the darker incidents from past post-Thanksgiving Black Friday sales, including this shootout at Toys R Us.
Last year was definitely a bad year for Black Friday shoppers. On the same day, but a different coast, two men were shot and killed after an argument at a Toys “R” Us in Palm Desert, California. The women they were with were arguing – even coming to blows, according to the Huffington Post – and the fight escalated when the men discovered that they belonged to rival gangs. They ended up shooting only each other – no other injuries were reported.
Apropos a similar topic yesterday during lunch, I'm reminded of this clip of an Italian singer performing a song that is meant to mimic how English spoken by Americans sound like to foreigners.
Silicon Alley Insider collected a sample of 15 questions that have been asked by Google recruiters in interviews. And you thought "List your biggest weakness" was a tough interview question.
And if you got through those, here are 15 more questions.
I'm proud I actually got a couple of them right. Yay, me. Back to paying for my own lunches and massages.
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The gruesome murder 50 years ago of Herbert Clutter and his family in Holcomb, Kansas unwittingly thrust this sleepy town and its residents into the national spotlight following Truman Capote's detailing of the crime in "In Cold Blood." The Guardian takes a look back at the town today including interviews with local residents such as Bob Rupp, who was mentioned in the first chapter of Capote's book. Rupp, then 16 was the boyfriend of Clutter's eldest daughter, Nancy of the same age, and was the last to see the family alive. If you haven't read "In Cold Blood" I highly recommend you pick it up. It's a chilling yet excellent read.
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Larry Granillo has an interesting blog entry that analyzes the New York Times' front page coverage of the Yankees' World Series championships from their first victory over the Giants in 1923 to this year's post-season success.
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South Korean grandmother, 68-year-old Cha Sa-soon passed her driver's license written test on her 950th attempt. According to the BBC (and now this humble blog?), this is newsworthy. She must now pass the road test. Thank god there isn't a stereotype about bad driving and old Asian women.
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Today is election day in New York, which means it's the perfect excuse to share this photo of a woman demonstrating proper firearm usage.
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