Murderous Mary and the Dumb Hat Blues
On this day in 1962, professional photographer Jim Meads was out for a walk with his daughter by a nearby airfield. Intending to take a picture of 15-year-old Mick Sutterby sitting on a tractor, he captured something far more captivating. As an English Electric Lightning F1 was about to crash, test pilot George Aird ejected sideways at only about 100 feet. He crashed through a greenhouse and survived!
This is one of my top favorite photographs.
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I remember when I was about 16 my Grandpa asked me if I wanted a dumb hat, his words. I took it, but I don't know whatever happened to that dumb hat. I think when I turn 50 I'm going to buy myself another dumb hat, maybe 60.
September 13, 2020
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One morning before school when I was in like 4th grade I was listening to the radio and they were going to announce the celebrity birthdays. Somehow I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was Mark Hamill's birthday. When they mentioned that it was, it wasn't even a surprise. Somehow I just knew. It was like I had seen several seconds into the future.
The same thing just happened. I was listening to a podcast and one person asked another if there's any university that has been dealing with the microaggression, safe space, trigger warning phenomenon in a way that could be an example to other universities. It was like my brain had a little blip, as if I had seen the future again. I would have bet anything that they we're going to say the University of Chicago. And they did! It wasn't a deja vu. In a deja vu your brain might have a little seizure they think, and what you're experiencing goes into your memory instead of your frontal lobe, so it just seems like something happened again. This was different, I had about 10 seconds before they would say it. I was waiting for it and waiting for it, not even question my mind. I had seen the future. This was a very weird experience and I'm going to be thinking about it for a while.
September 13, 2018
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The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias essentially saying that stupid people are too stupid to realize their stupidity. Imagine all those idiots wallowing in their own idiocy and too stupid to realize it. Almost funny, isn't it? Until we realize that if we are one of them we wouldn't even know!
September 13, 2017
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Galileo- "With regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them."
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The other night my little baby Zuzu looked off to the left and smiled- spitting image of Mr. Roper. Just now she looked up at me with her eyes wide and her lips puckered- spitting image of Mr. Furley. I might have watched so much Three's Company in my life that it entered my genes.
September 13, 2015
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I hear that Trump thinks some lady doesn't have a good face. Of course Trump looks in his mirror and sees beauty, but he's just seeing the dollar signs in his eyes.
September 13, 2015
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An illustration from The Sociable Ghost by Olive Harper, 1903. "But you must join us."
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For our tenth anniversary dinner Emma just got a fortune cookie that said- time heals all wounds. "Not the wounds that kill you," she said. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my girlfriend.
September 13, 2009
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Michelangelo began work on his statue of David on this day in 1501. What did you do at work today?
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On this day in 1848, Vermont railroad worker Phineas Gage survived an iron rod 1+1⁄4 inches in diameter being driven through his brain. The effects on his behavior and personality stimulated discussion of the nature of the brain and its functions.
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On this day in 1862, Union soldiers found a copy of Robert E. Lee's battle plans in a field outside Frederick, Maryland. Imagine their jubilation! And imagine Lee's fury when he realized they were left behind, "FUCK!"
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The people of Erwin, Tennessee hung Murderous Mary on this day in 1910. She was the five ton elephant who had just killed her handler on her second day in the job at the circus over in Kingsport. Thousands of people came out and were by all accounts very satisfied with the guilty verdict and execution.
Apparently the person wrangling her had no training and prodded her on the side of the head exactly where she had a severely infected tooth.
James Agee mentioned the incident in Letters to Father Flye.
Want a tip? Don't look up the picture.
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Summer Evening 1947, by Edward Hopper
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Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven was released on this date in 1978. Perhaps most beautiful film ever filmed. Maybe tie with Barry Lyndon.
I always wonder whether that picture of the locust is the most famous locust in the history of cinema.
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Milton S. Hershey, of Hershey Bar fame, was born on this day in 1857. His great-grandparents, Christian and Susanna Hershey, are my great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. That makes him my second cousin, three times removed.
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Sherwood Anderson was born on this day in 1876. From Winesburg, Ohio:
"There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun."
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Roald Dahl was born in 1916.
"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."
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Fiona Apple was born on this day in 1977. Her video for Across the Universe, directed by PT Anderson, is in my top five videos of all time.
https://youtu.be/CmlnO1EwCT4
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Michel de Montaigne left us on this day in 1592. From Essais:
"The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold… The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war between princes."
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Steven Woods was executed on this day in 2011 at the age of 31 for the murder of a young couple. His last meal:
Two pounds of bacon, a large four-meat pizza, four fried chicken breasts, two drinks each of Mountain Dew, Pepsi, root beer, and sweet tea, two pints of ice cream, five chicken fried steaks, two hamburgers with bacon, fries, and a dozen garlic bread sticks with marinara on the side.
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Jean-Luc Godard apparently left us today. Mandela Effect in full force. I distinctly remember him dying a few months ago. Clashes in the multiverse. I tried to like him but couldn't. Antonioni Effect in full force.
September 13, 2022
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Basket of Deplorable alternatives, courtesy of The Daily Show
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Jesus himself couldn't beat Federer...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVQhIEPbM0g&feature=player_embedded
September 13, 2009
Postscript: BROKEN LINK! DAMN, I WANT TO SEE THAT SHOT!
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Salon, from September, 2015- Get Donald Trump out of my brain: The neuroscience that explains why he's running away with the GOP
The reality TV star and first-rate attention getter knows how to manipulate the media -- and our emotions
By GLEB TSIPURSKY
Spot on! And ahead of its time.
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/12/get_donald_trump_out_of_my_brain_the_neuroscience_that_explains_why_hes_running_away_with_the_gop/
September 13, 2015
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Excellent interview with John Cleese!
I never knew that Jesus supposedly never laughed in the Bible. That seems somehow important.
Question: As someone who’s spent a lifetime working in and thinking about comedy, is there one joke you can point to as being the funniest thing that you ever said?
Cleese: Interesting. It would probably have been something unscripted. Eric Idle and I were performing in Florida once, taking questions from the audience, and a woman stood up and asked me, apparently seriously, “Did the Queen kill Princess Diana?”
Question: What’d you say?
Cleese: Certainly not with her hands.
http://www.vulture.com/2017/09/john-cleese-monty-python-in-conversation.html
September 13, 2017
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Montaigne again- "Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens."
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David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest- "Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."
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23 emotions people feel but can't explain
21. Liberosis
The desire to care less about things.
22. Altschmerz
Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had — the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.
23. Occhiolism
The awareness of the smallness of your perspective
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Louis C.K.- "The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them."
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D.H. Lawrence- "Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved."
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Stephen Jay Gould- "Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail."
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Me, in Lucifer Spam's Party
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Just the other day, I went home with this girl and she had the best pussy ever.
AW CMON!! I was talking about her cat! You people make me sick!
[pause]
That cat was the best fuck I ever have.
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