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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 4 June 2015
[life] Highlights From The Guardian’s Soulmates Dating Site… ‘I have simple tastes – I want a man who enjoys cross training on Hampstead Heath, Kurdish folk music retrospectives at the Barbican and the ability to quote every Polly Toynbee column from the last 18 months.’
26 May 2015
[death] The most insane deaths seen by an NYC medical examiner … fascinating overview of the career of a Medical Examiner in New York …‘When Judy Melinek was considering where to begin her career as a medical examiner – New York or LA? – she was given great advice. “If you really want to learn forensic pathology, do a rotation in New York City,” her chief resident said. “All kinds of great ways to die there.” Including, but not limited to: plummeting down a manhole, attack by egg-roll machine, miscalculating the tensile strength of cable cord and scaffolding collapse. In Melinek’s first week on the job, the tone became clear. As one novice began describing the case of “a man who was shot by a lady,” Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Charles Seymour Hirsch corrected him. “Shot by a woman,” Hirsch said. “Ladies don’t shoot people.” And so began Dr. Judy MelÂinek’s education in life and death in New York City…’
5 May 2015
[life] Quite possibly the greatest Internet comment ever… posted by VoteUKIPforTheKids on a Guardian article on Steve Strange.
These guys were Bohemians? Don’t make me laugh. Do you know where the most bohemian place in this country is – The Church of England! 3 April 2015
[life] Inspiration Quote … by Michael Kleinman.
29 March 2015
[funny] 19 Trees Totally Sucking On Things … Who knew there was a Reddit for Trees Sucking On Things?
25 March 2015
[life] 12 Devastating Middle Class Problems … ‘A huge amount of my time is spent picking coriander out of things.’
21 March 2015
[philosophy] ‘Kant is a moron’: vandals critique the philosopher’s home … 210 years after his death an unknown critic vandalizes Immanuel Kant’s home … ‘The Russian word used is a relatively mild term of abuse for a slow-witted or foolish person, and could also be translated as “loser,” “dumb-ass,” or “chump”. The vandals did not, however, leave any accompanying critique of Kant’s thinking to justify the smear on his intellectual powers. Kant (1724-1804) is generally considered one of the most formidable philosophers to have lived, and is credited with breakthroughs in epistemology and moral philosophy that continue to define the fields to this day.’
16 March 2015
[royalty] What happens when Queen Elizabeth II dies? … fascinating look at the first few days after the Queen dies … ‘For at least 12 days – between her passing, the funeral and beyond – Britain will grind to a halt. It’ll cost the British economy billions in lost earnings. The stock markets and banks will close for an indefinite period. And both the funeral and the subsequent coronation will become formal national holidays, each with an estimated economic hit to GDP of between £1.2 and £6 billion, to say nothing of organisational costs. But to focus on the financial disruption doesn’t begin to describe the sheer magnitude of it. It will be an event unlike anything Britain has ever seen before. There will be trivial disruptions – the BBC will cancel all comedy shows, for example – and jarring cultural changes. Prince Charles may change his name, for instance, and the words of the national anthem will be changed, too. The deaths of Princess Diana and the Queen Mother both brought on waves of public mourning and hysteria. But the Queen, due to her longevity and fundamental place atop British society, will be on a whole new level above that. The vast majority of British people have simply never known life without the Queen. It will be a strange, uncertain time…’
3 March 2015
[life] What is blue and how do we see color? … a look at why the Ancient Greeks could not see the colour blue … ‘Davidoff says that without a word for a color, without a way of identifying it as different, it is much harder for us to notice what is unique about it – even though our eyes are physically seeing the blocks it in the same way. So before blue became a common concept, maybe humans saw it. But it seems they did not know they were seeing it. If you see something yet can’t see it, does it exist? Did colors come into existence over time? Not technically, but our ability to notice them may have…’
27 February 2015
[life] The truth about evil … a long-read from John Gray on the nature of evil and how politicians deal with it … ‘Here Blair is at one with most western leaders. It’s not that they are obsessed with evil. Rather, they don’t really believe in evil as an enduring reality in human life. If their feverish rhetoric means anything, it is that evil can be vanquished. In believing this, those who govern us at the present time reject a central insight of western religion, which is found also in Greek tragic drama and the work of the Roman historians: destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within human beings themselves. In this old-fashioned understanding, evil is a propensity to destructive and self-destructive behaviour that is humanly universal. The restraints of morality exist to curb this innate human frailty; but morality is a fragile artifice that regularly breaks down. Dealing with evil requires an acceptance that it never goes away.’
26 February 2015
[hst] Hunter S. Thompson, Existentialist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Finding Meaning in Life … ‘Let’s assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let’s assume that you can’t see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN- and here is the essence of all I’ve said- you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH. Naturally, it isn’t as easy as it sounds…’
7 February 2015
[life] Health Experts Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back … some working life advice from The Onion … ‘We encourage Americans to experiment with stretching their legs by strolling across their office and leaving all their responsibilities behind forever just one time to see how much better they feel. People tend to become more productive, motivated, and happy almost immediately. We found that you can also really get the blood flowing by pairing this activity with hurling your staff ID across the parking lot.’
18 January 2015
[herzog] 24 pieces of life advice from Werner Herzog … ‘Get used to the bear behind you.’
8 January 2015
[quotes] Flash Card Quotes …
6 January 2015
[funny] 36 Truly Terrifying Middle-Class Injuries … ‘Today I suffered the most middle class injury ever. I hurt my wrist while rinsing kale.’
27 December 2014
[serial] ‘Serial’ Podcast Finale: A Desire for ‘Eureka’ as the Digging Ends … More thoughts on the conclusion of Serial … ‘The last episode was a tangled and heartfelt yet frustrating hour of radio in which Ms. Koenig hemmed and hawed and pored back over old evidence and asked, “Did we just spend a year applying excessive scrutiny to a perfectly ordinary case?” The answer to that question, apparently, is no and yes, and yes and no. Unlike the conclusions of Agatha Christie novels, real life can make only murky puddles.’
19 December 2014
[life] This scientist solved the mystery of belly button lint … ‘It was mostly people that had stomach hair who also typically found belly button lint. He proved it by shaving his own stomach, and seeing that he didn’t produce any belly button lint until his hair grew back. He also confirmed the seemingly obvious fact that lint originates from shirt fibers in two ways: by seeing that it always matched the color of the shirt he was wearing, and by chemically analyzing the lint and finding that it was mostly made of cellulose (the material that makes up cotton). It also contained some nitrogen and sulfur, likely from sweat and skin cells.’
15 December 2014
[sea] Tjipetir mystery: Why are rubber-like blocks washing up on beaches? … ‘The word Tjipetir turned out to be that of a rubber plantation in West Java, Indonesia, which operated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The blocks were not strictly rubber – they are most likely gutta-percha, the gum of a tree found in the Malay Peninsula and Malaysia. It was used in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries to insulate telegraph cables on the seabed. Before modern plastic began to be widely used, gutta-percha was also made into such items as golf balls, teddy bear noses, picture frames and jewellery, among many others.’
25 November 2014
[history] The Very First Written Use of the F Word in English (1528) … ‘Here the word appears (for the first time if not the last) noted down by hand in the margins of a proper text, in this case Cicero’s De Officiis.’
21 November 2014
[space] An Astronaut Reveals What Life in Space Is Really Like … ‘It turns out that once you’re actually in orbit, zero-g has some upsides. Without gravity, bodily fluids move toward your head. It’s a great face-lift. Your stomach gets flat. You feel long, because you grow an inch or two. (I thought, “Oh cool, I’ll be tall,” but of course everybody else was taller too.) But zero-g also has some disadvantages. As that fluid shifts north, you get an enormous headache. Your body compensates and loses about a liter of fluid in the first couple of days-you essentially pee the headache away.’
8 November 2014
[net] What happens when you accidentally become internet famous? … ‘Fist clenched, a look of pure determination on his face, Success Kid is the boy who can do it all. You may have seen his face posted when someone’s particularly proud of an achievement. Success Kid’s real name is Sam Griner and the photo is one of many his mother Laney, a photographer, took of her son and posted on her Flickr page. She still remembers the day and the moment she snapped this picture…’
26 October 2014
[work] The Open-Office Trap … Why open plan offices don’t work … ‘Psychologically, the repercussions of open offices are relatively straightforward. Physical barriers have been closely linked to psychological privacy, and a sense of privacy boosts job performance. Open offices also remove an element of control, which can lead to feelings of helplessness. In a 2005 study that looked at organizations ranging from a Midwest auto supplier to a Southwest telecom firm, researchers found that the ability to control the environment had a significant effect on team cohesion and satisfaction. When workers couldn’t change the way that things looked, adjust the lighting and temperature, or choose how to conduct meetings, spirits plummeted.’
5 October 2014
[life] 26 Times Waitrose Outright Ruined The Lives Of Decent People … ‘It would be much easier if Waitrose kept the carrot batons next to the houmous.’
2 October 2014
[tech] Londoners Give Up Eldest Children In Public Wi-Fi Security Horror Show … seems like a reasonable deal to me! … ‘The experiment, which was backed by European law enforcement agency Europol, involved a group of security researchers setting up a Wi-Fi hotspot in June. When people connected to the hotspot, the terms and conditions they were asked to sign up to included a “Herod clause” promising free Wi-Fi but only if “the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity”. Six people signed up.’
25 September 2014
[life] The Eleven Worst Plants … an amusing list of awful plants … ‘#3 Yucca – Utterly, utterly loathsome. Why is the bottom a hazardous nest of spikes and sticks, while the top is a nauseating puff of white fuzz? Whither so tall? What colors run riot here? Sickly facsimiles of green, pungent half-dead attempts at brown. This is a corpse attempting to revive itself. I would take a flamethrower to the entire San Joaquin valley if I could rid the country of them.’
10 September 2014
[life] Maslow’s Modern Hierarchy of Needs … another addition has been made to Maslow’s pyramid.
1 September 2014
[people] Werner Herzog On Chickens … ‘The enormity of their flat brain, the enormity of their stupidity, is just overwhelming.’
20 August 2014
[facts] 33 “Facts” Everybody Knows That Are Actually Total Lies … ‘Napoleon Bonaparte wasn’t short; his height was actually above average for his time.’
18 August 2014
[box] Expensive Shoebox – What would be the most expensive way to fill a size 11 shoebox (e.g. with 64 GB MicroSD cards all full of legally purchased music)? … ‘A gram of pure plutonium, for example, would cost about $5k. As a bonus, plutonium is even denser than gold, which means you could fit almost 300 kilograms of it in a shoebox. Before you spend $3 billion on plutonium, take note: Plutonium’s critical mass is about 10 kilograms. So while you could fit 300 kilograms of it in a shoebox, you could only do so briefly.’
11 August 2014
[life] Britain On Instagram Vs. Britain In Real Life … amusing comparison of pictures of Britain on Instagram with real life.
6 August 2014
[clowns] Don’t Be Afraid Of The Clowns … Leigh Cowart visits the 2014 World Clown Association convention …
I am not afraid of clowns. But there’s something that happens when you walk into the forgettable bathroom of a hotel lobby and meet a fully made-up clown standing by the sink, reflection staring back at you with the Kubrickian blankness of a greasepaint grimace. 31 July 2014
[life] Love in the Key of Partridge … trying to find love – using only the words of Alan Partridge.
7 July 2014
[crime] Pablo Escobar’s hippos: A growing problem … a strange legacy of the the late Colombian drug lord … ‘[Carlos] Valderrama, whose job until recently included watching over the hippos in the Magdalena, has seen animals up to 250km (155 miles) away from Hacienda Napoles. Fishermen are terrified of the three-tonne herbivores, he says. At night, the animals roam the countryside, wandering into ranches, eating crops and occasionally crushing small cows.’
1 July 2014
[religion] Bedtime Story From Fucking Bible Again … ‘Andrew Neel was exasperated to learn Thursday that the bedtime story his mother would be reading him was once again from the fucking Bible, sources confirmed. “Oh, please no, not another one of these,” Neel reportedly said to himself upon hearing his mother begin telling yet another tale about shepherds, adding that he’s listened to the account of that little shit Zacchaeus probably a hundred fucking times now and that he just wants to hear a regular goddamn bedtime story with a talking frog or a modern kid who maybe has some sort of magical adventure, even if it’s Amelia fucking Bedelia.’
19 June 2014
[life] Has David Birnbaum solved the mystery of existence?… engrossing profile of “outsider thinker” David Birnbaum … ‘There is no shortage of people who would say no, at least in Birnbaum’s case. His work, said a commenter on the Chronicle’s website, “reads like L Ron Hubbard had drunken sex one night with Ayn Rand and produced this bastard thought-child”. One scholar who became professionally involved with Birnbaum described the experience as “unsettling, unfortunate and, to my knowledge, unprecedented in academic circles”. Another just called him “toxic”. But then again – as Birnbaum pointed out to me, more than once, during the weeks I spent trying to figure out exactly what he was up to – just suppose that a scrappy, philosophically unqualified Jewish guy from Queens really had cracked the cosmic code, embarrassing the ivory-tower elites: well, isn’t this exactly the kind of defensive response you’d expect?’
11 June 2014
[people] 27 People Who Have Better Job Titles Than You … ‘Lonnie Johnson – Professional Snuggler’
7 June 2014
[life] Tweet … Channelling Allen Ginsberg in 2014 … ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning…’
4 June 2014
[shops] Britain’s Soulless And Generic High Streets Under Threat … ‘Chef Carolyn Ryan said: “It’s terrifying to think that unless we act fast, our children will never know a world of mobile phone shops, Greggs and Clinton Cards.”
14 May 2014
[life] 15 weird things that 9% of Britons say they believe. Including supporting the Lib Dems … ‘When it comes to foreigners, 9% of Brits would like to see less tourists arriving from China. Which seems an incredibly specific and odd thing to be getting vexed about.’
1 May 2014
[lost] Lost Your Keys Again? Eight Tips to Find Misplaced Objects … ‘Check to see if it’s somehow hidden in its proper place. Look carefully and systematically-don’t just rummage around (which is very tempting) Note: objects are usually found within 18 inches of their original location. This sounds impossible, but I’ve found this to be uncannily accurate.’
14 April 2014
8 April 2014
[london] What is it like to live on Britain’s most expensive street?… ‘Eskimo Ice services draws up outside one house – the company delivers ice sculptures for parties, and its website shows glassy ice lions and carved statues of the London skyline. Elsewhere, a van – Anglo-Italian marble installation – is delivering bespoke marble, granite, limestone and porcelain tiles. Gardeners arrive in a van marked Siddeley landscape design (a company that also appears to work on mammoth private estates in China and Russia). British Security Technologies is parked outside another mansion, its van promising in italic lettering: “We’ll Keep You Safe ‘n’ Sound Tonight.” A vehicle drives up to provide swimming pool and whirlpool maintenance. There is also a fire-protection services van, an emergency plumbing car and Rentokil pest control – because, it seems, money offers no real protection against fire, rats and plumbing catastrophes.’
5 April 2014
[property] Terrible Real Estate Agent Photographs Tumblr … ‘Jean-Paul Sartre said “hell is other people”. It is not. Hell is this patio.’
31 March 2014
[funny] Bollocks is Britain’s first language … ‘The Institute for Studies found that most Britons were fluent speakers of bollocks, and could talk bollocks on almost any subject without the need for facts or logic. Professor Henry Brubaker said: “Bollocks is a rich and vibrant language that enables the speaker to sound knowledgeable despite being what we linguists call ‘a knob’.’
28 March 2014
[suicide] The Woman in 606 … well written investigation into the suicide of a woman in Seatle …
What could she be trying to communicate through all that stuff about being from the future? I asked. What about the flour she poured everywhere? 17 March 2014
[life] Report: Only 20 Minutes Until Introverted Man Gets To Leave Party … ‘I told myself I’d stay here until 8:30, and I already killed about 15 minutes avoiding conversation by circling repeatedly around the table of hors d’oeuvres to appear occupied, and another cumulative half hour pretending to text friends, so I just need to make it a few more minutes…’
23 February 2014
[weird] The 38 Most Unexplainable Images On The Web … WARNING: Contains traces of Garry Glitter. NSFW. Tasteless.
20 February 2014
16 February 2014
[life] Distant Planet Terrified It Might Be Able To Someday Support Human Life … ‘The 5.2-billion-year-old celestial body, which is located roughly 1,100 light years from Earth, said that for both its own sake and that of its entire solar system, it can only hope to never possess the necessary planetary characteristics and chemical elements needed to support either a deep-space human outpost or, more gravely, an entire human colony. “Luckily, with my high levels of atmospheric sulfur dioxide, methane, and radon, there’s no way any human could survive on my surface for more than a few seconds,” said WR 67c, adding that it is “incredibly lucky” to have developed extremely violent and widespread volcanism in addition to its poisonous atmosphere.’
7 February 2014
[posh] The 28 Poshest Things That Have Ever Happened … ‘This birth announcement in The Times: On 29th March 2013, to Emily (née Kew) and Christian, a son, Biggles George Fittleworth, and a daughter, Posie Betsy Winifred, a brother and sister for Tuppence.’
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