“I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career… I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate.” —Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)
This is so wrong. Celebrated reactionary British curmudgeon physician Theodore Dalrymple argues that, because universal healthcare in the UK has such grievous faults, we should abandon the project. He does nothing to make his case, although he is articulate. (WSJ)
“There are many ways to cope with death, but founding an online book club is a pretty unique approach. “When I heard that David Foster Wallace had died, it was like remembering an assignment that had been due the day before,” said Matthew Baldwin. A blogger who regretted never having finished “Infinite Jest,” Baldwin founded InfiniteSummer.org, a Web site and collaborative reading experiment that creates a vast literary support group for completing the late author's 1,079-page tome over the course of this summer.” (Salon)
Registering for an account at any web site almost always requires an email address, and some people like to use a secondary address they don’t really care about instead of their real email address to avoid spam. If you do this, don’t use a Hotmail (Update: or other free webmail) account.
Microsoft shuts down Hotmail accounts that haven’t been logged into after nine months. So if you registered for your Gmail account two years ago and used your Hotmail address as your secondary email address and never logged back in, you’ve put your Gmail account at risk.
Here’s how: If your Hotmail account gets shut down due to inactivity, someone else can open a new one using your Hotmail address. Then, if that someone else requests a password reset from Gmail, it goes to that address, and that someone can get into your primary email account. This is how Twitter employees’ Gmail accounts got broken into last week.” (Smarterware )
“Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. 'Transparent aluminium' previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.” (physorg.com)
“Bill O’Reilly explaining that of course America has lower life expectancy than Canada — we have 10 times as many people, so we have 10 times as many deaths.
I need a drink.” — Paul Krugman (New York Times op-ed)
The only thing not to appreciate about this analysis is the gratuitous digs at Van Morrison.
“The main syntactic problem is to determine whether the fuck is being used as an [sic] pleonastic (semantically empty) direct object of shut or as a pre-head modifier of the preposition phrase (PP) headed by up. (Yes, the up of shut up is a one-word PP. It is not an adverb — all the traditional grammars are flat wrong on that…
I conclude that in colloquial English the NP the fuck (and it does indeed have the form of an NP) can function as a pre-head modifier in a PP, including the light one-word PPs (like up) that are known as particles.” (LanguageLog)
Can anyone think of a construction similar to this use of “…the fuck…” other than “…the hell…”?
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/img.ffffound.com/static-data/assets/6/a91575f96f54b7624fca3e58534664a2a81fca60_m.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://img.ffffound.com/static-data/assets/6/a91575f96f54b7624fca3e58534664a2a81fca60_m.jpg)
via FFFFOUND! | ace..
“The same blue food dye found in M&Ms and Gatorade could be used to reduce damage caused by spine injuries, offering a better chance of recovery, according to new research.
Rats injected with BBG not only regained their mobility but temporarily turned blue.
Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center found that when they injected the compound Brilliant Blue G (BBG) into rats suffering spinal cord injuries, the rodents were able to walk again, albeit with a limp.” (CNN)
