- I put no stock whatsoever in the Tarot (beyond what the individual being “read” reads into it), but Alexander Chee’s article on it is surprisingly interesting:
Fortunetelling is easy to ridicule, frequently misunderstood, and, for some people, extremely powerful. Unfortunately, what’s very tough to predict is what reading futures will do to the person with the cards. [via]
- Terry Gilliam on the making of Brazil. [via]
- Jack The Cat Found After Two Months In JFK Airport. There’s no way the film rights to this haven’t already been bought. [via]
- 13 Punctuation Marks That You Never Knew Existed. Unless, of course, you did. Or unless, like me, you think some of these are maybe more accurately referred to as typesetting marks. But, hey, a list!
- And finally, Google lately seems bound and determined to make their products more difficult to use, don’t they?
skepticism
Friday various
- Mark Evanier on skepticism:
I just like skepticism and wish we had more of it in the media. In fact, I wish we had more skepticism of the skeptics since despite what some skeptics seem to think, going against the Conventional Wisdom doesn’t automatically mean your wisdom is correct.
I was very briefly a member of the (I think now defunct) Penn State Skeptics Society. I attended a meeting or two, and later went to hear James Randi speak when they brought him to campus. But the fervor with which some people embrace skepticism — or maybe more accurately angry cynicism — has never sat well with me. I think agnosticism and atheism are defensible positions, but some people approach them like True Believers and dismiss all other arguments out of hand. Which, it seems to me, is usually what they accuse the other side of doing.
- Tomorrow morning, beginning at at 9 AM EST (and for the next 24 hours), Netflix will be streaming The Wizard of Oz for free to anyone (with or without a subscription), in honor of the film’s 70th anniversary. I’m not sure why 70 years is a particularly significant milestone, but the film holds up remarkably well, I think. [via]
- Barack Obama has one amazingly consistent smile.
- What do you buy for the Elder God who has everything? Why not Cthulhu Cologne, “Scents inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos”? [via]
- A finally, thinking about printing the internet? Um, don’t. [via]
