• Philadelphia Weekly Jan 2003:

    Who knew that a young man from D.C. with a disheveled fashion sense and an interest in music could come to Philadelphia, miss a chance at a record deal, dabble in drugs, have an on-again-off-again stint as a DJ and finally wind up on the couch watching a lot of cable? I thought such things only happened in Hollywood. You have broadened my world and lent meaning to an otherwise nondescript order of french fries.

    ANDY BRESNAN

    Philadelphia

    Every so often it’s nice to stumble across an old favorite.

  • There are two ways to surround yourself with people like you. One is to meet them; the other is to make them. If you’re average, meeting people like yourself is easy; people like you are everywhere. If you’re weird, though, meeting people like yourself is hard; people like you are few and far between. But fortunately, as the parent-child correlation rises, weirdos’ odds of making people like themselves get better and better.

    —Marginal Revolution: How to Make Friends Without Influencing People

  • Nuclear codes are a matter of national security. This crap isn’t. The “secrets” betrayed by this diplomatic cable dump range from the gossipy (“Prime Minister so-and-so has too much plastic surgery and a drinking problem!”) to the “Are you kidding? Everyone already knows that!” variety. The Russian mafia is intertwined with the government? My word! That is simply shocking. The effect of the most recent information dump is not, as Obama and Hillary have so idiotically warned, that “lives will be lost.” This isn’t blowing the cover of any double agents in the Kremlin. This is just making the government look stupid. If you think “We don’t want to be embarrassed” is a sufficient reason for the government to withhold information about its activities from the public, you have a very curious understanding of how this country is supposed to work.

    —ginandtacos.com (via zunguzungu)

  • Wikipedia contributor 207.171.180.101 wins the morning.

  • Just because it can be (or was in the past) made from cattle doesn’t mean it is normally – a large fraction of that stuff is now made much more efficiently from (vegan!) petroleum, soybeans and corn. But more notable is the debunking of the 70s myth that such-and-such primitive culture is superior because “they use all of the animal.” Modern industrial capitalism is nothing if not a hyper-efficient consumer of resources.