* Mental health activist Judi Chamberlin dead at 65. Keep mad pride alive!
* Delusional optimism: we all need a refreshing dose of reality.
* Even more on the power of negative thinking.
* ‘Beginning to suspect humans are actually superorganisms, being 92% bacteria and all…
* Your sci-fi plot bunny for the day: If New Mexico seceded, they’d be the third largest nuclear power in the world.
* More dystopias: British soil could disappear within sixty years…
* Great, green power programs are scams…
* And wtf is a Scott Brown Republican??
* The GOP doesn’t understand sex.
* Why have I never heard of worker-owned companies before?? My mother ran for state office as a Socialist, for ****’s sake…
* Straight talk about grad school.
“Graduate school is not education. It is socialization. It is about learning to behave, about mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner in 19th Century Western Europe. Graduate school is cotillion for eggheads.”
* Bookstore employees protest destruction of unsold books. This comment summarizes my experience as a holiday helper:
“I can say with conviction that 99% of it is crap. There’s a good reason it didn’t sell.”
Hear, hear. People who love the earth should say no to anything with a passionate couple, crime tape, or dragons on the cover.
* iPads and Kindles’ appearance on campuses could spell trouble for the textbook industry…
* If the government gets copies of all the info we need to fill out tax forms, why can’t they just fill them in for us?
* While we’re bitching like A. Rooney: “Since we all have nine-digit zip codes now, why is it still necessary to include the city and state in a postal address?”
* In search of the world’s hardest language.
“Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga, means ‘I do not know how to write.’ The noun classes (genders) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as ‘bark that does not cling closely to a tree’, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.”
* Are Americans finally done with fast food?
* 10 most useless kitchen gadgets. Fark commenters take it down a notch:
“No Slap Chop?!”
“How about the Ez Cracker?”
“No love for Mini Cupcake Maker or the Tuna-Squeeze?”
“The apple torture device and the giant needle are AWESOME.”
“When I was growing up we used to have a hot dog cooker that worked by electrocuting hot dogs.
“Also worked well in the garden if you needed to round up some earthworms for bait. After it rained was the best, them little bastards couldn’t get out of the dirt quick enough.”
* Fourth season of IT Crowd announced. Yay for nerdy Seinfeld derivatives!
* Matt just broke it to me that Venture Bros. season “4.2″ won’t start ’til August 22. ****. ****ety **** ****. Oh well. What unreasonable expectations can we set by then?
“I’m hoping that Helper makes a return, preferably in his normal robot form.”
“what about jonas jr?”
“I really want to know who killed 24.”
“Will we ever see more of Kim?”
“I’d be curious about Triana’s sorceress training down the line, and any plans the Master might have for her.”
“I want to see a dead Moppet impaled on each of 21’s arm-spikes.”
“MORE S.P.H.I.N.X., MORE S.P.H.I.N.X., and MOAR S.P.H.I.N.X.!!!”
“21 and sheila has to happen.”
I… just puked a little.
