-The Nine Eyes of Google Street View

-The David Foster Wallace Audio Project

I speak to fewer people

I have been in touch lately with my inner self,
the fruit picker who lived all those years in a motel.
I shaded my story so it proved everything I did was
by intention. After each love affair, each participant
received a little gift. I mean someone always said:
You didn’t really love her. I speak to fewer people
than ever. No matter what it looks like—I say this
every chance I get—something divine is going on.
And wonder: Is it? I’d like to lose a little weight.
Just the same, the marriage had its good points.
I still can’t tell you what I am known for. I’m easily
shamed. On my walks I hope to meet someone interesting,
someone I have been headed toward all my life,
or simply someone without too much guile, a friendly
person with a little intelligence. Maybe we will
walk along together, talking about romance or trucks.

-Charlie Smith, from Word Comix (Norton, 2009)

[via belz, see also "Los Dos Rancheros"]

Laugh, kookaburra, laugh.

"If owls were the professors of the avian kingdom, then kookaburras, I thought, might well be the gym teachers."

-David Sedaris, "Laugh, Kookaburra"

17 Least Appropriate Playmobil Sets for Children
[via ayjay]

-Amy Bennett

How Is America Going to End? Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" lets you map out the death of the United States.

Michael Cera on "Arrested Development"

My favorite Millennial actor is Michael Cera, from "Arrested Development," "Superbad," and "Juno." He's perfected the art of pushing the good-kid stereotype to its limit (on "Arrested Development," he'd study math behind his father's back), thereby revealing it as an absurd ideal. Why should we want young Americans to be so damn good?

-Joshua Glenn

From Joshua Glenn at Hilobrow, an alternate generational periodization scheme:

1844-53: The Prometheans
1854-63: The Plutonians
1864-73: The Anarcho-Symbolists
1874-83: The Psychonauts
1884-93: The Lost Generation The New Kids
1894-1903: The Lost Generation The Hardboiled Generation
1904-13: The Greatest Generation The Partisans
1914-23: The Greatest Generation The New Gods
1924-33: The Silent Generation The Postmoderns
1934-43: The Silent Generation The Anti-Anti-Utopians
1944-53: The Boom Generation
1954-63: The Boom Generation, or Post-Boomers The OGXers (Original Generation X)
1964-73: Generation X The PC Generation
1974-83: Generations X/Y The Net Generation
1984-93: The Millennials
1994-2003: The Millennials TB

[kottke]

Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827–1895) was a French artist, astronomer and amateur entomologist. (Curiously, he is most noted for the unfortunate introduction of the Gypsy Moth into North America.)

His drawings of celestial phenomena were so good that the Director of Harvard College Observatory put Trouvelot on staff where he gained access to their powerful telescope. He would go on to produce some 7000 astronomical drawings and publish 50 scientific papers.

- but does it float

He watched Sheila and her new husband whispering and box-stepping, and undertook the same experiment. She seemed pleased enough - smiling and flushed and mad to be wearing that dazzling dress - but she didn't look like she was in love, as he imagined love to look. Her eye was restive, vaguely troubled, as though she were trying to remember exactly who this man was with his arms around her waist, tipping her backward on one leg and planting a kiss on her throat.

-Michael Chabon, "S Angel"

It was a windy, damp evening with no trace of June in it, and as they drove into the pale, almost imperceptible sunset he toyed with the idea of leaving without saying a word, of truly deserting Nathan - as his own father had done, in a different way, a year ago. The thought of his own insubstantiality, of his capacity simply to vanish, was horrible and seductive.

____

The best man in the world could fill a thousand pages with fine resolutions and still feel forced to leave his home in shame.


-Michael Chabon, "More Than Human"

What really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov's heroes he recognized the Russian idealist, a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything - a good man who cannot make good. This is the character that passes - in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, many other professional people - all through Chekhov's stories.

-Nabokov

[emphasis added, via April's note]