Via Animal Planet, a mermaid sighting in Kiryat Yam. Watch:
Now that your imagination has whiplash, here’s the full story.
An interview with David Foster Wallace, which includes his reading of a passage from a piece called ‘Adult Life’. The narrator does a dance between a reminiscing adult and a child terrified of the inevitable boredom that waited for him at adulthood.
Part 1:
Part 2:
On what it’s like to be working hard on your art after being marketed to all your life:
“You want your art to be hip and seem cool to people; you want people to like the stuff. But a great deal of what passes for hip and cool is now highly, highly commercially driven. Some of it I think is important art. The Simpsons is important art. On the other hand, it’s also — in my opinion — relentlessly corrosive to the soul when EVERYTHING is parodied and EVERYTHING is ridiculous. Maybe I’m old, but for my part I can be steeped in about an hour of it and then I sort of have to walk away and look at a flower.” — DFW
Steve Forrest, a.k.a. Lieutenant Dan “Hondo” Harrelson on the ’70s series S.W.A.T., has died at 87.
I was a huge fan as a kid. Four buddies and I would play S.W.A.T. every day of the summer, with each of us assuming the role of one of the five S.W.A.T. team members. I was TJ, the sharpshooter. (ASIDE: There was a sixth and seventh buddy in the neighborhood as well. They got stuck being the bad guy and the van driver, respectively.)
Here’s the S.W.A.T. opening, featuring one of the best TV theme songs ever. Performed by American funk band Rhythm Heritage.
Forrest also starred in one of my favorite hour-long Twilight Zone (Season 4) episodes entitled The Parallel.
I’ve become a bit of a World War II buff over the years, but I hadn’t heard of this one. Crazy stuff.
1944 United News Newsreel Operation Pluto (Pipe-Lines Under The Ocean) was a World War II operation by British scientists, oil companies and armed forces to construct undersea oil pipelines under the English Channel between England and France. The scheme was developed by Arthur Hartley, chief engineer with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Allied forces on the European continent required a tremendous amount of fuel. Pipelines were considered necessary to relieve dependence on oil tankers, which could be slowed by bad weather, were susceptible to German submarines, and were also needed in the Pacific War. Geoffrey William Lloyd, the Minister for Petroleum, met Admiral Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, whose area this was, in 1942 and then the Chairman of Anglo-Iranian. Hartley’s idea of using adapted submarine telephone cable was adopted.
Told ya.
Steve Wilhite, father of the Graphics Interchange Format, has ended the heated debate on how to pronounce “GIF”. For those new to the topic, the question dates back to the 1900s: Is “gif” pronounced with a hard g (like goat) or a soft g (like giraffe)?
It is in fact the latter, and I’ve found myself in more than a few violent arguments about it over the years. Those who’ve insisted on awkwardly pronouncing “gif” with a hard g have been a pet peeve of mine since, I don’t know, before the OJ trial? Especially the ones who’ve simultaneously been scoffing at peeps who use the correct pronunciation.
Not that it matters much anymore. It’s all PNG these days.
Anyway, within a day of the official-albeit-delayed reveal, the Jif peanut butter company weighed in:
Couldn’t have written it better.
With this week’s Oklahoma tornado rolling through the neighborhood, a woman ducked for shelter in a small bathroom with her dog. That was their tornado drill for years. At impact, she got blown around, losing the dog, but never losing consciousness. She remained alone under the rubble all night, finally emerging at daybreak.
And then…
