- “Local business owners say Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews of their businesses on its web site…for a price.” [via]
- The GOP’s Blatant Racism:
The problem with the illusion of a postracial society is that at almost any moment the systemic nature of racism, its legacy, methods and impulses, might have to be rediscovered and restated as though for the first time. If the problem has gone away, those who point it out or claim to experience it are, by definition, living in the past. Those who witness it in action must be imagining things. Those who practice it are either misunderstood or maligned. [via]
- The Tragedy of the Smurfs:
Imagine what that must feel like, to be forced into a single role at birth, a role that not only defines what you’ll do for the rest of your life, but what you’ll be. Trapped. Unchanging. Your name is a black hole, and no matter how hard you try, you’ll never escape its pull. And then to see in humans a freedom that you yourself will never know.
That’s the true dystopian horror of the Smurfs. [via]
- Zack Handlen on the most recent Supernatural episode:
As a straight dude, I have a sneaking suspicion I missed out on one of the main appeals of 1944 for a large part of Supernatural’s audience, but an outfit isn’t really enough. If Mad Men did an episode called “Christina Hendricks Goes To Bikini Island,†I wouldn’t automatically praise it. I’d watch it, sure, but c’mon.
- And finally, Philip José Farmer’s calling card [via]:
various
Wednesday various
- How Doctors Die [via]
- A Drug That Wakes the Near Dead
- Every Beatles song played at once. Can you make it to the end? It isn’t easy, and I’m not sure it rewards you for your efforts — audibly, that is; some of the comments are quite funny — but it’s an interesting experiment nonetheless. [via]
- “Won’t it make you lose your wits, / Writing groats and saying grits?” Can you pronounce all these words correctly? [via]
- And finally, Warren Ellis on what sounds like the worst computer repair problem ever:
One day, a few years ago, my backups all got corrupted, and my backup device died. I didn’t have online backups at the time. I’ll fix that on Sunday, I thought, as I was under deadline pressure. Saturday evening, my main machine died in flames. Sent it off for data recovery. The guy running the data recovery shop took it in and then went off to Europe for an operation. And died on the operating table. Came back to the shop to get my machine, because no-one was answering the phone, to find it boarded up, the (mostly off-the-books, apparently) employees scattered to the four winds, and the shop stripped down to the plaster. Not a computer left in there — not even mine. I lost everything, all notes and scripts for work in progress as well as the entire archive.
Tuesday various
- Has literature always been dying since the beginning?
- Pictures of David Bowie doing normal stuff [via]
- The New York Times wonders if it should investigate the news. No, really. (More here.) [via]
- First Hybrid Shark Found: “The first-ever observed hybrid may be a sign the predators are adapting to climate change.” [via]
- And finally, The Thing in claymation [via]:
Monday various
- Top Five Most Destroyed Canadian Cities In The Marvel Universe [via]
- Sam Worthington now admits he also sucked in Clash of the Titans. Well, it’s something, at least.
- New York Times Crossword Puzzlemaster Schooled on Definition of ‘Illin’. Crossword to your mother. [via]
- “Back in 2005 I did an evil, evil thing.” College professor seeds Internet with fake term paper to catch plagiarists
- And finally, Maureen McHugh on zombies:
Zombies, of course, are the opposite [of vampires]. They lack individuality. They are mindless, ugly, hungry. In a world where everything is ecologically interconnected they are outside nature, and therefore something that we can kill without concern or discrimination. And yet they are us, transformed into trash. Zombies, in one sense, are the ultimate ecological disaster.
Holiday various
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