Bench Crafted makes a magnetic knife holder called the Mag-Blok, which is both beautiful and functional; oh, and it’s made out of wood. Extremely strong neodymium-iron-boron magnets are sandwiched under the surface of the wood, making anything metallic (ostensibly) stick to the wood… makes for a tiny bit of cognitive dissonance. As an added bonus, the wood does not damage your knives. Given such good looks, I would expect a high price… but this thing is affordable. Dan’s Data writes:
This Mag-Blok is the eighteen-inch cherry-wood model, yours for a mere $US35 plus delivery. You can get Mag-Bloks made from a variety of other woods, plus smaller 12-inch versions as well.
Guy talking to his girlfriend at Blockbuster: “See, this one has dragons in it. Every movie is better with dragons. What movie
have you seen with dragons in it that you didn’t like?”
These little hand drawn characters are adorable, though they are “a blatant rip-off of Lewis Trondheim’s style.” Still, very nice. My favorite of this series is probably “The Pessimistic Rector.” By the excellent artist Meng Shui.
This interesting tidbit about TV syndication is brought to you by lonelysandwich, who originally read it at neonmarg:
A lot of TV shows when run in syndication are sped up slightly and voices pitch corrected to sound normal (this lets the station get more commercials in). We observed that this is an unwise techinque when applied to the fast-talking Gilmore Girls.
Yes “techinque” is misspelled, but this is still a very interesting tidbit. I hadn’t noticed — I’ll have to try A-B’ing some Friends on TBS with a DVD of the same show.
Happy Birthday, dear Mykala! As you turn a year older, I’d like to take a moment to remind you that the best is yet to come. You are always on my mind, and always in my heart. It bears repeating: Happy Birthday — I’m looking forward to celebrating many more with you.
43Folders is a website dedicated to the finer points of organization, task tracking, and goal-completion. As such, an essay about the huge value of underachievement would seem orthogonal to the site’s goals. However, the ideas mesh quite well with the larger fabric of 43Folders; plus, this is easily the best blog post I have read in a long while (the vocabulary alone is perfection)… the mythology and philosophy references don’t hurt, either. A snippet:
And indeed this is why there is no despair when we truly confront the empty promises of achievement—and view our work and accomplishments in the light of that insight. We don’t give up and shake our fists at the unfeeling universe and embrace total idleness. Nor do we ignore the awesome preciousness of the life and time that chance has bestowed upon us. We try to be nice, have a little fun, and expand our awareness of the world we live in. We do the best work we can, but we don’t fret when we fail, nor do we jeopardize the quality of our work—or the happiness of our days—by bowing to the pressure to take on more than we can handle.
Actually, the metric equivalent to a ‘shitload’ is the metric ‘assload.’ As in, ‘That’s an assload of storage!’
It’s much easier to talk in terms of milliassloads, centiassloads, assloads, kiloassloads and mega-assloads than in shitloads; who can ever remember that one shitload=4 ‘whole piles of’ = 7.46 ‘whole lotta’s = 14.5 (14 even in certain states) ‘whole buncha’s = 31 ‘fair chunk of’ which, finally, contains 252 ‘bitta’s.
After all, isn’t it easier to say ‘there’s 40 centiassloads of storage on that mem card’ than ‘there’s a whole lotta and a bitta space on that mem card’?
Biologist Richard Dawkins makes a case for “thinking the improbable” by looking at how our human frame of reference — the things we can perceive with our five senses, and understand with our eight-pound brain — limits our understanding of the universe. Think of it: We can’t see atoms, we can’t see infrared light, we can’t hear ultrasonic frequencies, but we know without a doubt that they exist. What else is out there that we can’t yet perceive — what dimensions of space, what aspects of time, what forms of life?
I appreciate that Dawkins doesn’t break out his intense atheistic views in this talk, as I don’t think they fall within the scope of what he’s saying here. Besides, I’ve “always taken issue” with the title of Dawkin’s book “The God Delusion”. All that said, this is the best talk I’ve heard in quite some time.
