Silver Jacket

Bloggy Blog

  • Can I Help You?

    PotpourriOccasionally I check my blog’s referrer log to see how people get here. When people come from search engines, I can see what search terms they used when my blog popped up. I am rarely unamused.

    Below are my top 12 favorite searches over the first 6 months of SilverJacket. Some of the words in the queries are spread over multiple posts, but I have linked the queries to the posts most responsible for luring the searcher.

    This list might also serve as a quick review for new readers eager to catch up.

    12. {regression in the time machine}
    11. {"extreme sand castles"}
    10. {song, unattractive person}
    9. {video footage of Ligers}
    8. {charles barkely woman problems}
    7. {what does Boyakasha mean}
    6. {two dicks in her ass}
    5. {smoking embalming fluid}
    4. {CLown kicking random people’s nuts}
    3. {on;y people i know listed in my address boob}
    2. {andrew barlow really had his arms ripped off}
    1. {absurdity and arbitrariness}

    I hope the next 6 months continue to be as eventful.

  • At the Heart of it All

    NinNine Inch Nails kicked off their fall tour–their first large-venue tour in 6 years–last night here in San Diego. And they fucking kicked ass, at least for 43 minutes, until the drummer Jerome Dillon ran off stage with chest pains and heart palpitations. Twenty minutes later they canceled the show, and today canceled tonight’s show in Tuscon. Here‘s a pretty accurate summary of events.

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  • Tiger Style!

    KamasutradollsWhy do we buy furniture? To have sex on, right? Right. Finally a furniture seller has faced up to reality and offered a web interface that lets you animate people having sex on their wares. This is shopper-centric merchandising without the BS.

    Tok&Stok, Brazil’s answer to Crate&Barrel, provides for your enjoyment three tables, three couches, a beanbag chair, and what look to be two dog beds(!). Fun for the whole family…

    Under the description of each item, there are five "Suggestions of use." You’ve got your doggy style, your 69, your reverse cowgirl, and a few other standards (and exotics) I don’t recall the names of. (The muscle memory is strong though.) Take your pick and watch Moby and Sinead O’Connor rub naughty bits right there. In case they didn’t include your favorite Kama Sutra position, there’s a SuperSpecialBonusFeature that I just LURVE. Click on "my own style" and play with 27 variables, creating the most bizarro antigravity freakazoid borderline-non-Euclidean mf lovemonkeyness you can fathom. (You cannot, however, toggle off the damn floating hearts.)

    Presumably they created their Valentines Book of Styles after receiving too much icky returned merchandise or witnessing too many unmentionable incidents on floor demos. "Try before you buy"? Not so much. "Um, yeah, Union of the Tiger isn’t compatible with these arm rests. Oh, sorry if the cushions are stuck together."

    update:
    My friend Jack–who is a chaplain and a grandfather–looked at the site and wrote: "I enjoyed the furniture thing but thought it was not very diverse. In Massachusetts we would hope the narrowness of heterosexuality would not be celebrated."

    Indeed. At Brown we would have called it heteronormative. At Brown that’s about the worst insult there is.

  • Crank It Up, Beaker!

    BeakerdollThe question I encountered earlier about whether we can slow hurricanes with ice  reminded me of when I worked in the public affairs office of Fermilab, a national physics lab outside Chicago. The lab is home to the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, but people would occasionally call us with wildly non-particle-physics-related questions and suggestions. I fielded one call by a man arguing that we should look into preventing cases of summer heatstroke. His idea: store up snow during winter and give it to those without air conditioning in the summer. Now, I’m not a physicist, but I had some immediate ideas as to why this scheme might not be the panacea he suggested–collecting, refrigerating, and redistributing millions of tons of snow would prove intractably difficult and expensive–and I naively tried to share my reasoning with the caller (who apparently was a regular.) He remained unconvinced, and I promised to pass along the enterprising imagineer’s insights.

    My favorite call at Fermilab went like this:

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  • Common Sense is Relative

    IcetraysRecently someone on an email list I’m on posed the following question:

    "So, how come we don’t dump large quantities of ice in the water when we know hurricanes are over it gaining their strength from warm water?"

    Good idea. Also, how come we don’t counteract the winds with big fans blowing in the opposite direction? With enough fans, we could stop a storm in its tracks. Oh, and how about preventing global warming by everybody turning up their air conditioning?

    Now, contributors to this email list are almost exclusively well-educated, especially in scientific fields. And I knew from previous posts that the ice questioner was no dummy. So I assumed the question was a joke.

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  • Dept. of Overachieving

    SuperbabyCNN video montage quote of the day: In Mississippi, Hurricane Katrina left "cars rearranged into piles as if a child had put them there." Maybe they should have specified which child they were thinking about. (Or did they mean this one?)

  • Bombs Away

    FbombMy latest contribution to Language Log: an email to Arnold Zwicky instigating the post "No fuckin’ winking at the Times."

    Basically I found it absurd that the prudish Gray Lady had written an entire article about the word fuck without even going so far as to call it "the f-bomb." Instead, the author called it "a word-bomb." He explains:

    …very rarely does the paper print those obvious, winking, letter-word stand-ins. As The Times’s two-page stylebook entry on obscenity says, "An article should not seem to be saying, ‘Look, I want to use this word but they won’t let me.’ "

    Looks like he failed on that one.

    [The funniest part of the article is the correction: 

    An article last Sunday about shifting standards for the use of profanity misspelled the surname of the bartender in the television series "The Simpsons." He is Moe Szyslak, not Syzlak."

    Reminds me of a correction I cut out of the Brown Daily Herald once. It said that they had misspelled the name of Xena the Warrior Princess as Zena, tacking on, solemnly: "We regret the error."]

  • Spammer Names: July Edition

    Top ten spammer names in my inbox for the month of July:

    10. Thumbtack K. Population
    9. Employees V. Shaver
    8. Sweatier C. Anthropomorphism
    7. Disagreeing R. Freakiest
    6. Seediness O. Obstetric
    5. Diagrammatic J. Kibitzed
    4. Presidency T. Chumminess
    3. Grammatical B. Boneless
    2. Funeral O. Undershorts
              [drumroll]
    1. Cupsful J. Tightwad

    Congratulations, Cupsful!
    Join me next month for the August edition. The competition looks heavy already.

  • When is a cliché not a cliché?

    CatsuitSo yesterday I’m reading an article in Slate itemizing government idiocy, and I come across the following sentence:

    We are witnessing that rare occasion when the phrase "I don’t know whether to laugh or cry" can be uttered without lapsing into cliché.

    Really? We are?

    Has the writer successfully avoided cliché by couching a cliché as he did? (My vote: No. The sentence is clumsy and hackish.)

    On a deeper note, can a cliché ever not be a cliché?

    (Actually, I do recall one other rare occasion when the phrase "I don’t know whether to laugh or cry" could possibly have been uttered without lapsing into cliché. Years ago, in an attempt to manifest a version of the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment for a school science fair project, I locked a clown in a large wooden box. I arranged the triggering device so that it had a 50% chance of launching a cream pie at Hobo Jim’s face, and a 50% chance of hitting him with an exploding baby. [Not everyone is familiar with quantum mechanics, so here is some background: Pies in the face are funny. Gruesome infant fatality is horrendous.] Until I opened that box to witness the results, I truly did not know whether to laugh or cry. So I did both.)

  • Diamonds are Harder than Iron(y)

    KanyeThe latest Kanye West video, for his song "Diamonds (From Sierra Leone)," has played pretty heavily on TV of late, and it confused me, until now. You see, the song is truly a tribute to himself and his record label, Roc-A-Fella Records. The chorus goes "diamonds are forever" because the Rocafella associates rep their label by putting their hands together to form a diamond-shaped gap in the middle. (Thus the lyrics "Throw your diamonds in the sky if you feel the vibe," echoing Big Poppa‘s "Throw your hands in the air if you’s a true player.") Why diamonds? Conspicuous Consumption Rules Everything Around Them.

    Now why would a self-congratulatory song about a label that glorifies the diamond trade have "From Sierra Leone" in the title? Seems an afterthought to me, as there is no mention of conflict diamonds at all in the lyrics. And why would the video dramatically portray children slaving away in African diamond mines, possibly indicting members of the Roca fam for their fashion choices? Seems an arrestingly self-ravaging afterthought, actually. Has irony reached a new apogee?

    It’s as though Kanye produced the song, then heard about the diamond situation in Africa, and suddenly felt bad about the whole affair. Not bad enough to change the song, mind you, just bad enough to wrap what he had in a public service message and put it out there. I never bothered to research my suspicion, but yesterday Kelefa Sanneh confirmed it in the Times:

    After he had recorded "Diamonds," he learned about the conditions of diamond workers in Sierra Leone and elsewhere. He went back and retitled the track "Diamonds (From Sierra Leone)," and flew to Prague to shoot an apocalyptic video (with conflict diamonds a central, if mysterious, plot point).

    But to Kanye’s half-hearted credit:

    Then the images in the video didn’t match the lyrics, so Mr. West recorded a new version of the track, with a verse from Jay-Z; now the popular remix doesn’t match the music in the video. A few days ago, Mr. West said he still wasn’t sure which version would wind up on the album.