textiplication.com

http://www.myspace.com/heartlessbastards

That is all.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/26/AR2009012601831.html

Mercury in high-fructose corn syrup. Nine of twenty samples.

One in three brand-name foods contained mercury.

The use of mercury-contaminated caustic soda in the production of HFCS is common. The contamination occurs when mercury cells are used to produce caustic soda.

OK, how many of you are happier knowing that the manufacture of high-fructose corn syrup involves a substance called “caustic soda”?  How many of you wouldn’t be any happier about that even if the caustic soda never contained mercury? 

Was there a person who said, “you know, it’ll probably be just fine to use the caustic soda with the mercury in it?”

Shades of leaded wine in ancient Rome.  History will not be kind to us, if anyone’s left around to write it.

Patent number: 4656917
Filing date: Jul 30, 1985
Issue date: Apr 14, 1987
Inventor: Edward L. Van Halen
Primary Examiner: David Warren

http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT4656917

Yes, it’s real.

The supporting device is constructed and arranged for supporting the musical instrument on the player to permit total freedom of the player’s hands to play the instrument in a completely new way, thus allowing the player to create new techniques and sounds previously unknown to any player.

[Italics added.  USPTO doesn't do italics, even on that which is entirely rad.]

The hair is purely illustrative, and a practitioner sufficiently practiced in the art will be able to determine many other hairstyles for which the invention works equally well.

http://gamu-toys.info/sonota/sw/obama/obama.html

Gets better the further down you scroll.

Yes, it is a reflection of how bored I am, after four days on the couch, that I’m watching actual television shows.

Day 4 out after ankle surgery, and I’m watching Leverage on DVR, mainly because this guy (who wrote this) is one of the executive producers.  I’ve been reading Kung Fu Monkey for years – ever since Crazification Factor, and it’s been fun trying to figure out from the blog who John Rogers is and what he does because he does so many different things.  I mean, Transformers, Blue Beetle, looks like he worked on the Cosby Show, and for the longest time I thought he was Yet Another Hilarious Liberal Blogger, one who didn’t post very often.

It’s been interesting watching Leverage, because I don’t watch much TV.  After all John’s posts on TV series sausage-making, I was curious how the show would turn out.  I was hugely disappointed by the first episode, which lays some pipe on how the group gets together, none of which I bought.  Not the characters, not the relationships, not the story, nada. It was all so quick, so shallow, so idiot-driven, that I couldn’t take it seriously.  “Television shows,” I said to myself, and didn’t watch further.  It took until I was laid up with the ankle to watch some of the episodes recorded since, and now I’m kinda hooked, and now I get it.  TV shows RELY on the fact that you’re coming back next week.  There’s no way they can do setting, characters, and plot in one short show, especially with all the commercials they have to show.

And, tentacles, do they show a lot of commercials.  If there were no DVR, I’d never be able to watch the sucker.  Even on fast fast-forward, the commercial breaks are almost more than I can stand.  And – memo to TV industry DVR haters – I still know what every one of them is for.  You watch the commercials REALLY intently when you’re FF’ing to make sure that you don’t skip over the next bit of show.

That is, music I’ve acquired in 2009.

Here we are, almost halfway through the month, and I’ve already bought/downloaded (eMusic) the following albums since 1/1:

1/13 – MGMT – Oracular Spectacular

1/13 – Kimya Dawson – Remember that I love you

1/11 – Joseph Arthur and the Lonely Astronauts – Temporary People

1/8 – Mr. Scruff – Ninja Tuna

1/8 – Kimya Dawson – Hidden Vagenda

1/8 – Juana Molina – Un Dia

1/4 – Laura Veirs – Two Beers Veirs

1/4 – Quasimoto – The Unseen

1/2 – The Presets – Blow Up

1/2 – Breakestra – Hit the Floor

So I’ve been going a little overboard.  That’s 119 tracks in 15 days, suggesting I’ll need a couple new hard drives by the end of the year.  

My favorites of these so far are:

Kimya Dawson – wordy, fearsomely smart, profane, progressive.  It was worth leaving the useless iTunes “genre” column in the display to discover that Apple classifies her under “Country”.  Toby Keith fans may pass right on by, though.
Yeah, I first heard her in the Juno soundtrack, too.

Juana Molina – Blurry loops of beautiful vocals, and I can’t understand a word.  An eMusic recommendation.

Breakestra – Throwback funk, with Chali 2na rapping on one track.  Why can’t we ever get more than one track of Chali 2na on any album? Another eMusic recommendation

Mr. Scruff and MGMT are promising, but I haven’t listened to them enough yet.

It shouldn’t be a secret to anyone that a large fraction of the few English grammar rules we’re ever taught were synthesized relatively recently.  Our prohibition on double negatives did not exist in Shakespeare’s time, for instance.  I long ago read the classic proof of this, a line from Twelfth Night:

Maria:  That if one break, the other will…you come speak with her; nor your name is not Master Cesario; nor this is not my nose neither. Nothing that is so is so.

But when you look at the line as a whole, it’s clear that Maria is playing games with language herself, and, in particular, with the idea of negation.  Is this example, “not my nose neither,” in any way an outlier?

Clown: Not so, neither

Take a look at INDRI (http://indri6.cs.umass.edu/~strohman/demo/), an open source search engine used for language analysis.  They’ve loaded a demo site with Shakespeare’s complete plays, and it’s loads of fun.

Query for “not” and “neither” within three words of each other:

http://indri6.cs.umass.edu/~strohman/demo/query.php?query=%233%28not+neither%29

Twelfth Night

…and, for turning away, let summer bear it out. MARIA You are resolute, then? Clown Not so, neither; but I am resolved on two points. MARIA That if one break, the other will…you come speak with her; nor your name is not Master Cesario; nor this is not my nose neither. Nothing that is so is so. SEBASTIAN I prithee, vent thy folly somewhere else: Thou…

[ Cached ]

The Merchant of Venice

…makes me not sad. SALARINO Why, then you are in love. ANTONIO Fie, fie! SALARINO Not in love neither? Then let us say you are sad, Because you are not merry: and ’twere as…done too, sir; only ‘cover’ is the word. LORENZO Will you cover then, sir? LAUNCELOT Not so, sir, neither; I know my duty. LORENZO Yet more quarrelling with occasion! Wilt thou show the whole…

[ Cached ]

Much Ado About Nothing

…BEATRICE Speak, cousin; or, if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss, and let not him speak neither. DON PEDRO In faith, lady, you have a merry heart. BEATRICE Yea, my lord; I…that thou hast shifted out of thy tale into telling me of the fashion? BORACHIO Not so, neither: but know that I have to-night wooed Margaret, the Lady Hero’s gentlewoman, by the…

[ Cached ]

Henry VIII

…III. An ante-chamber of the QUEEN’S apartments. Enter ANNE and an Old Lady ANNE Not for that neither: here’s the pang that pinches: His highness having lived so long with her, and she…to hear the city Abused extremely, and to cry ‘That’s witty!’ Which we have not done neither: that, I fear, All the expected good we’re like to hear For this play at…

[ Cached ]

….

And the list goes on and on.  It’s obvious from this list that Shakespeare routinely uses “neither” for emphasis, as an intensifier of negation, whereas our modern strict grammar holds it as inapplicable except when constituting a disjunction in concert with “nor.”

http://www.fontcraft.com/fontcraft/?p=271

Very cool fonts and metallic textures.

This one’s free!

These two look more Art Nouveau to me than Steampunk, but still very cool.

Go figure!