Y'know, there are some times when it's awesome that your dad is an accountant. This is one of those times.
Well, just filed my first tax-return as a self-employed type. It wasn’t as horrible as expected, thanks to a handy online system, but I think it could be easier still. How about it, HMRC? Pretty please?
From Richard Cobbett.
Holy crap this is better than a Bop It.
A silly new instrumental toy from Takara Tomy lets you play music on your friends' faces.
(Thanks, Stuart!)
From TOKYOMANGO.
Man, I would get kicked out of the Alamo Drafthouse so fast…
I hope they show this video as a PSA before every movie they show
This is all too much. His books are wonderful, but the man… apparently he wasn't so pleasant.
Dear Roald,
This is not in response to the specifics of your last several letters to me and my colleagues, but a general response to everything we've heard from you in the past year or two.
In brief, and as unemotionally as I can state it: since the time when you decided that Bob Bernstein, I and the rest of us had dealt badly with you over your contract, you have behaved to us in a way I can honestly say is unmatched in my experience for overbearingness and utter lack of civility. Lately you've began addressing others here - who are less well placed to answer you back - with the same degree of abusiveness. For a while I put your behavior down to the physical pain you were in and so managed to excuse it. Now I've come to believe that you're just enjoying a prolonged tantrum and are bullying us.
Your threat to leave Knopf after this current contract is fulfilled leaves us far from intimidated. Harrison, Bernstein and I will be sorry to see you depart, for business reasons, but these are not strong enough to make us put up with your manner to us any longer. I've worked hard for you editorially but had already decided to stop doing so; indeed, you've managed to make the entire experience of publishing you unappealing for all of us - counterproductive behavior, I would have thought.
To be perfectly clear, let me reverse your threat: unless you start acting civilly to us, there is no possibility of our agreeing to continue to publish you. Nor will I - or any of us - answer any future letter that we consider to be as rude as those we've been receiving.
From thisrecording.com.
Oh Stephen, you make me so happy.
“After The Graham Norton Show I went to Annabel’s and I performed…” (I was lucky enough to be there myself: it was a magnificent acoustic show, one Nat King Cole song and three of her own and it was all over, but never in the long, louche history of Annabel’s can there have been many evenings to match it) “…and then yesterday I watched the Graham Norton performance when it aired. And I watched it over and over and over and over and over. And I looked at all the parts that I liked and all the parts that I didn’t like … and I said, ‘OK, maybe this part, if your breath control was different, and here, maybe you should try this step…’ I study everything that I do to become better all the time at my craft. The beauty for me about being an artist is that the dream will never die, because I’m not obsessed with material things and don’t care about the money and don’t care about the attention of the public, but only the love of my fans, so for me it’s about how much more devoted, how much better an artist can I become.”
I gulped back my own feelings of inadequacy. I almost never watch myself back on anything. And I suppose it shows.
Whether you call Gaga a pop star or a performance artist is irrelevant; she has created her own category and she works at every element of the discipline that contributes to her persona. The music and lyric writing, the dancing, the costuming, the whole schmear. With her famous team, “Haus of Gaga”, she plans every detail of every video, every album, every tour and the timing of every record release.
From www.ft.com.
When I started my job, I was most definitely a cowboy programmer. (Yes, that's a thing.) I'm not exactly the most excellent member of our 10-person pit crew yet, but I'm getting better at it every day.
This afternoon, Atul Gawande delivered this year’s commencement address at Harvard Medical School.
In his book “The Youngest Science,” the great physician-writer Lewis Thomas described his internship at Boston City Hospital in pre-penicillin 1937. Hospital work, he observed, was mainly custodial. “If being in a hospital bed made a difference,” he said, “it was mostly the difference produced by warmth, shelter, and food, and attentive, friendly care, and the matchless skill of the nurses in providing these things. Whether you survived or not depended on the natural history of the disease itself. Medicine made little or no difference.”
That didn’t stop the interns from being, as he put it, “frantically busy.” He learned to focus on diagnosis—insuring nothing was missed, especially an illness with an actual, effective treatment. There were only a few. Lobar pneumonia could be treated with antiserum, an injection of rabbit antibodies against the pneumococcus, if the intern identified the subtype correctly. Patients in diabetic coma responded dramatically to animal-extracted insulin and intravenous fluid. Acute heart failure patients could be saved by bleeding away a pint of blood from an arm vein, administering a leaf-preparation of digitalis, and delivering oxygen by tent. Early syphilitic paresis sometimes responded to a mix of mercury, bismuth, and arsenic. Surgery could treat certain tumors and infections. Beyond that, medical capabilities didn’t extend much further.
The distance medicine has travelled in the couple of generations since is almost unfathomable for us today. We now have treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousand of diagnoses and conditions that afflict human beings. We have more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures, and you, the clinicians graduating today, will be legally permitted to provide them. Such capabilities cannot guarantee everyone a long and healthy life, but they can make it possible for most.
From www.newyorker.com.
This video is almost heartbreaking. And now I am hungry.
“Breakfast Interrupted” is a whimsical slow motion ode to breakfast. The video begins with luscious imagery of a lavish breakfast spread, before slow motion mayhem begins at the 25 second mark. “Breakfast, Interrupted” is the creation of Bruton Stroube Studios, a St. Louis production company with a focus on food and beverage commercials. They’ve also posted a making of video for the slow mo curious.
From laughingsquid.com.
I call Fry.
Futurama + Dungeons & Dragons.
View FULL SIZE on FlickrBy Remiel
I’m just going to go ahead and order business cards that say “Dork” on them.
Update. Thanks to @arepty for pointing out that Zoidberg has a full name.
From Remiel.
So it's been a while. Here's a treat. Best song evar.
261 ratingsTime: 05:06 More in Music
