This goes against everything I believe in BUT:
Luke Perry. At DragonCon. With a guy in a Labyrinth t-shirt.
Archive for the ‘It Could Be Worse…’ Category
Reblogged Without Commentary
April 2, 2012Problems
March 27, 2012My colleague HW sent me this last night and I died laughing. I can’t tell if it’s serious, but something tells me at least part of it is.
Home > All Categories > Food & Drink > Other – Food & Drink > Resolved Question
Submitted to Yahoo! Answers:
Im really hungry and have no money and no food to eat. What should I do?
— boop83
Submitted 3 years ago
Best Answer – Chosen by Voters
Sell your computer to get money to eat.
Kimberley wrote:
I’m sorry to hear this, no one should go hungry. Do you have a local food bank you could visit? They are really reasonable and help those in need. Otherwise I would visit your local church and see if they can help you. Another place to look into is your local Senior citizens center, they usually have lunches there daily. All that being said, if you live in an area where there are no facilities like I mentioned maybe you should knock on your neighbors door. I know its not the most appealing thing to do, but most people will help out when they can, its human nature. Good luck to you.
Sangeeth K wrote:
If this is really your state…I am very sorry about it. Get a job asap. But if you are asking for the sake of asking a question, you can drink lot of water. It will reduce the hunger. In olden days there were saints who drank only water and lived for years. But you need practice for that.
vee-smalls wrote:
go to a food bank…..or go to a mcdonallds and say that they messed up your food. their policy says that they have to give you what you sey they messed up without having to see a recipt.
Jez N wrote:
I’m on the same boat as you. thats why im a go chaw from the supermarket. they got loads of money. don’t rob independent shops, they need the cash.
Chelsea V wrote:
sneak into costco and eat all the samples.
middleEngland wrote:
dust. anybody….no?….dust
Jersey Girl wrote:
Go to a food bank.
No money – who’s paying for your internet connection?
Ally wrote:
wow go find some change on the ground and go to wendys or somthing
~M@~me~ wrote:
Call ur Mom, or be a man about it.
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Some of these are predictable, and yet some are genius. I’m totally trying that McDonald’s thing next time I’m hungry and my change doesn’t add up.
Brave New World
March 25, 2012I so look forward to Harry Davies-Carr’s essay “Society Bit Me: I Was An Internet Meme” about his rise to fame and subsequent descent into bath salts and sex addiction.
Someone Get On This
March 25, 2012How is it possible that this documentary has never been given English subtitles?
Berlin Muren
Mrs. Wall. No, seriously, that's her name.
The video Berlinmuren (2008) tells the story of a highly unusual relationship: the love affair between the Swedish woman Eija-Riita Berliner-Mauer and the Berlin Wall. She considers November 9th, 1989, the day the Wall “fell,” the saddest day of her life. Berliner-Mauer now lives in Liden in northern Sweden where, besides running a museum that displays models of guillotines and the Berlin Wall, she moderates a number of websites about the Wall and the phenomenon of human love for objects.
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Also someone/publication ought to give me the money to go visit this chick and write a profile on her. Paging David Remnick…
THE NEW LOWS GAME
March 22, 2012I’ve decided that playing this game (seeing what kind of new lows you can reach before you cease to be human) really can help add levity and joy to one’s miserable existence. For example, last night I couldn’t sleep and so was lying awake at 2 AM watching an old episode of Law and Order: SVU that I’ve seen no less than THREE times under the guise of “research (trying to write a list –– subject cannot be disclosed –– which requires me spending upwards of 24 hours rewatching SVU’s and in the end, McSweeney’s won’t even touch my shit, guaranteed) and I actually started TEARING UP when the dad from The Wonder Years begged for judicial mercy for his sociopathic adopted daughter, and then when I was just about to chastise myself for being so PATHETIC, I chuckled and thought, “Gee, this is a new one! What a funny sad sack I am!”
And now I’m off to read a bitter comedian’s tweets instead of do worthwhile work. NAMASTE, THESE ARE PRAYER BEADS!
Reasons Why I’m Posting A Random Funny Picture
March 13, 20121. I drank two glasses of wine and ergo cannot write anything of value (I wanted to put every word of that in quotes –– overly quoting I find actually side-splitting hilarious these days, which… )
2. I am full because I –– get this –– after my drinks date went to get a piece of pizza, ate it as I walked to the subway, rode the subway home, on the way decided I STILL WANTED PIZZA, and then got another slice in my neighborhood on my way to my house.
3. Melancholy Mondays
4. Still feeling a little raw from being burned by Vice
5. It’s hard to concentrate with Law and Order in the background.
4. I have actual work to do. Sheesh, you think all I do is write down genius one-liners, think about schadenfreude and eat pizza? I’m a multitalented multitasker (that’s my rap name, actually.)
A funny picture:
By the way, the categorization of this as “It Could Be Worse…” refers to reader’s comparing him/herself to me. It could be worse, Nabokovian reader. You could be pathologically obsessed with pizza.
“Happy” Monday
March 5, 2012This gives me joy in the same way that a missive from a someecard my friend once sent me did –– the card read, “When work sucks, just remember that some day you will die.” So nice to remember there’s a light at the end of this tunnel.
Euthanasia Coaster by Julijonas Urbonas
The Euthanasia Coaster is a roller coaster designed to kill you. From Urbonas’ website/mission statement:
“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasing, elegant and meaningful. Celebrating the limits of the human body but also the liberation from the horizontal life, this ‘kinetic sculpture’ is in fact the ultimate roller coaster: John Allen, former president of the famed Philadelphia Toboggan Company, once sad that “the ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead. This could be done, you know.”
On the website, it has a very interesting hypothetical play-by-play of what a rider would experience, along with a great interview with the inventor.
Wee!
Question: Do you really believe it’s more humane, say, than a lethal injection?
Answer: First of all, we need to clarify what do we mean by saying “humane” as there is quite a myriad ways of understanding it. Of course, the key description might be something which is painless, pleasant, basically referring to some kind or level of pleasure. But the human being is a cultural being and therefore, in my opinion, we have also refer this term to dignity, compassion, benevolence and meaningfulness. The latter is exactly what a lethal injection lacks. It is highly hospitalised and not much different from a mundane injection of medicine. There is no special ritual nor death is given special meaning except that of the legal procedures and psychological preparation. It is like death is divorced from our cultural life as much as the death rituals in our secular and postmodern Western society. But if it is already legal, why not to make it more meaningful, not in a way the aboriginals mourn the deceased by ecstatic singing and dancing around a bonfire, for example, but as a ritual adapted to the contemporary world where churches and shrines are being replaced by theme parks or at least achieving the equal power of producing spiritual effects (more and more people attend theme parks for self-meliorative purposes — relaxation, self-cultivation, socialisation). This is, of course, a food for thought.
It has been observed that the jumpers, people who commit suicide by falling to the ground, often demonstrate some sort of aesthetic preference for a nice place or structure to kill themselves, for example, by traveling long distances for that, but also performing some forms of rituals such as folding their clothes neatly before the jump or holding a hat on the head with both hands all the way down. What’s more, sometimes the jumpers fall undressed or perform some choreography — it seems that they care about how their bodies meet the air. All this testifies that self-murderers are not apathetic in relation to the ritual of killing themselves, and seek some sort of aesthetic meaning in it.
My coworker and I are going to get tattoos of this shape.
In fact, falling is a unique experience that sets itself apart from other types of death: while rushing towards the ground or, in the case of the Euthanasia Coaster, towards the loop, knowing and anticipating with the whole body the exact time of death, there is still a fraction of time for reflection. Its real-time interface and inherent dramatic structure — the leap, the fall, the impact — a three act tragedy, are not present in lethal injection, shooting yourself or in overdosing on drugs, for example. Pull the trigger and you receive the shot — there is no gap between the act and its result, while with lethal injection or overdose there is an unknown time interval. In the Euthanasia Coaster the ritualistic drama is exaggerated even more: there is a lift up the tower, the drop, the serpentine fall, the vertiginous and euphoric entry to a series of the loops, and, eventually the fatal ride within the loop. Moreover, another unique thing is that this dramatic spectacle is open to the public, be it the relatives of the rider or the victims of the sentenced to capital punishment, revealing the full drama of their demise. Given all that, the coaster incorporates the private and public aesthetics of a humane and meaningful death: for the faller it is a painless, whole-body engaging and ritualised death machine, for the observers — a monumental mourning machine.
Is Whatever Wednesday Over Yet?
February 15, 2012
It could be worse, Alexander. You could be a suicidal Russian slut.
Shit got weird today, and I all of sudden was washed over with a wave of DOOM, as if something really terrible was going to happen or had happened and I just hadn’t found out about it yet. I’m counting down the moments until I can go home and hide underneath my blanket with a wee flashlight and Anna Karenina. Don’t bother me –– I’m indulging in some at-least-I’m-not-_____ (basically, insert ANY CHARACTER from Russian literature here.)
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!
February 14, 2012If you really love me, you’ll know not to buy me these pants.
I am ashamed of whomever designed these.
I Have Officially “Made It” as a Blogger
February 14, 2012… because I have to welcome my dear friend, the Doyenne of Dumbo, as my first GUEST BLOGGER!
I wanted to post a montage of heinous pants, but I promised her she’d get to be post #600. Faithful readers will immediately be able to figure out which part of this piece I am currently OMGing over. And here we go!
My Name is Not Susan
By DD
Upon waking up from my disco nap on Saturday, I found out that Whitney Houston died. My dear friend who introduced me to colorful resin ’80s vintage earrings and who does not shy away from spontaneously belting out a R&B classic fittingly broke the news of the latest celebrity death via mass text message. My husband was excited for the Whitney tribute! Everyone was talking about Ms. Houston on the Lower East Side that night. “Did you know that Whitney Houston died?” a loud girl exclaimed obviously on the corner of Ludlow Street. Who didn’t? Each of Whitney’s songs was memorialized with its own hash tag; Twitter was exploding as were the cramped quarters of our BYO sushi spot with a spontaneous restaurant-wide dance party. Someone had propitiously switched the iPod to a medley of the late chanteuse’s greatest hits!
Needless to say, waking up too early on Sunday morning hungover with no cell phone and another dead pop star was not pleasant. Luckily, Whitney Houston left behind a moving collection of music videos that helped ease the pain of my loss. My neighbors probably wanted to kill me (or maybe they too were having a rough morning?) as I watched Whitney’s greatest music videos lying in bed on full volume. I was mesmerized by the power of her voice and 1980’s fashion statements. In her 1987 hit, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” Whitney, resplendent in her signature floppy silk headband (leopard print), rocks a perm, neon knits and multiple shades of pastel eyeshadow. Her beautiful voice conveys a deep longing, which, as evidenced by last night, continues to move many a drunken party girl to gleefully engage in some embarrassing throwback choreography. Rewind to 1985: I watch a hardworking and earnest pop star, juxtaposed with an aspiring young performer (meta Whitney?) in the video for “Greatest Love of All.” The message here:
“I believe the children are our future/
Teach them well and let them lead the way/
Show them all the beauty they possess inside”
is all about learning to love yourself. Probably not a hard concept for Whitney during the decade of excess. She shines in a big gold hoops and a black leather motorcycle jacket fringed in copper, then dons a flashy silver sequin gown with elaborate rhinestone earrings/earmuffs for the final scene in which she sings to throngs of adoring fans. Whitney Houston was at the helm of the billboard charts when I was an uncoordinated 3rd grader taking hip-hop dance in the 1990s. I was very surprised when my tough middle school crush was moved to tears by Whitney’s performance in The Bodyguard. Yet, I’m still empowered by her rendition of Chaka Kahn’s “I’m Every Woman,” a much-needed message of girl power in the R&B canon. Whitney Houston brings us back to a time when pop stars could really sing and songs were true musical productions, rich with instrumentation (check out Kenny G’s cameo in “Saving All My Love For You”) and synthesizers.
Whitney’s 4-Octave vocal range and soul legacy upbringing were the true marks the world famous singer. Yet by the 1990’s we see our sweet Whitney embroiled in an identity crisis (“My Name is Not Susan”), and attempting to cross over to hip-hop with material that is not exactly hardcore and white overalls that could pass for a painter’s uniform. The hardworking singer’s marriage to bad boy hip-hop legend Bobby Brown is a surprising pairing of industry names and does little for her image.
The day after she passed away, as I watched Whitney Houston in the video for her 1999 comeback single, “It’s Not Right but It’s OK,” I began to feel a little better. Whitney, looking pretty with a sleek new do and smoky eyes, had fought hard her to restore her pedigree. This diva, post-divorce, was not taking shit from anyone. While I could not stop myself from singing off key throughout my homemade video tribute, I was perhaps most excited to see Whitney shine in “My Love is Your Love,” a song which never fails bring me back to my first taste of freedom: spending the summer in Paris with my best friend, hanging out on the Champs Elysee and watching a very zen Whitney, in a trench coat and afro, pay homage to 70s style and rule the charts on MTV Europe.
Fast forward to 2005: Whitney Houston’s hits are relegated to the playlists of our 80s themed parties in college but she finds her way back into our discourse with her erratic behavior on her ex- husband’s reality TV show, Being Bobby Brown. In light of our own habits, we had no doubts our beloved Whitney was on drugs. We knew she had recently sojourned to the holy land of Israel where she was hosted in the middle of nowhere desert town of Dimona by the African Hebrew Israelites, a vegan polygamist group who believe a former bus driver from Chicago was their messiah. (He is currently mourning the passing of his “spiritual daughter.”) Whitney’s bizarre attempt at spiritual rebirth before her 40th birthday did little to save the troubled star. We continued to see her in the tabloids, her expression, which in the ‘80s may have signified a glorious high note, stuck in a grotesque and messy manifestation of her alleged crack habit. Whitney tried to be a better role model for her fans during an interview with Diane Sawyer. “First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let’s get that straight. Okay? We don’t do crack. We don’t do that. Crack is wack.”
Whitney’s vast fortune could not save her from herself and rumors of her bankruptcy were not so hard to believe (drugs are expensive!). Sunday’s New York Post headline “Queen of Pop” places Whitney on the same pedestal as Michael Jackson, whose drug habits also proved insurmountable. Will we continue to be “So Emotional” over Whitney Houston’s passing? Most likely not. I’ll let ID elaborate on the theme of losing another mega-star to addiction, a time honored tradition in our society, yet one that keeps us asking, “Didn’t We Almost Have It All?”
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