Tag: Burst of Weirdness

Odd and amazing stuff!

:: This is really cool. I wanted to embed the video, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it without also embedding the entire post, which I didn’t want to do. Anyway, it’s a performing artist whose medium is…bubbles. Seriously.

:: The CIA has its very own Starbucks. Working there is weird.

:: Good piece by Emily Gould on the act of quitting your job on the spot. Salty language alert, because Ms. Gould’s jumping-off point is an Alaskan teevee news person who decided that it was time to quit, so during her segment, she literally said: “F*** it, I quit.”

Editorializing a bit: What a self-centered jerk (the teevee lady, not Ms. Gould). I’m sympathetic, really, to the fact that lots of times, people are in jobs that push them to a breaking point, but it’s my view that quitting on the spot is rarely justified (as opposed to giving respectful notice). Quitting on the spot only screws your coworkers, and it’s an indulgence of self-pity that’s almost narcissistic. Plus, by saying f*** on the air, this woman put her station in a very troubling spot, through no fault of its own, as regards the FCC coming knocking on the door with a couple of buckets and saying “Fill these with money, please.” It was a jerk thing to do.

Working in restaurants and retail, I’ve seen my share of people quit on the spot, or simply stop showing up for jobs. It’s not hard to give two weeks, people. One boss of mine once told someone who announced that he was quitting that night, “You know, we’re closing tonight at the same time as always and we’re opening tomorrow at the same time as always. Same thing the day after, and the day after that. You’re not hurting the company at all, you’re only hurting the people you work with, and you’re only hurting them temporarily.” Another boss of mine responded to a guy who announced he was quitting because he wasn’t getting enough hours, “Well, if you’ve convinced yourself that working zero hours is better than working twenty-five, be my guest.”

Anyway, I’m not thrilled that this lady has become something of a folk hero. It’s kind of like a video that went viral of some high school student getting up and walking out of his class after lecturing his teacher on how she should be doing her job. That video got a lot of praise too, but I always wondered, What kind of student was that kid, anyway? Because he struck me not as a guy standing up for himself, but as more of an attention-whore.

More next week!

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A few things for your consideration:

:: Liam Neeson’s global reign of violence.

:: A brief history of the dominion of the awfullest of apples, the Red Delicious.

:: Daily rituals of great writers.

More next week, if I’m so inclined….

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Just a couple of things this week:

:: A fascinating GIF breaks down how we’ve been paying for music over the last 30 years. You can see formats rise and fall, and in the case of the CD, the fall is pretty spectacular. I was a long digital media holdout myself, and yet, I haven’t bought a CD in at least four years.

:: A couple falls in love and marries, sixty years after they met one summer as teenagers.

More next week!

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A couple of nice items this week:

:: Stephen Colbert, known for (among other things) his intense JRR Tolkien fandom, gave a short speech introducing a panel discussion of The Hobbit at ComicCon:

I was given hope that finally, finally people might not roll their eyes when I started talking about Middle-earth. That my head full of facts from Fëanor to Faramir might suddenly have some social value! That someone might say to me, “Hey Stephen, you know a lot about Tolkien. Can you explain something to me?” And I would say “Yes, oh God yes, I will!”

Read the whole thing!

:: Lots of links around the sports sites on the Interweb, so I won’t bother, but I couldn’t consider myself any kind of real Buffalonian if I didn’t salute this guy’s enshrinement in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

More next week!

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Oddities and items of questionable interest to occupy your time this Sunday morning!

:: How Secret Societies Stay Hidden On The Internet.

It all started with a Facebook message from a dead guy.

Seems to me a wild-and-wooly adventure novel, full of globe-trotting exploits and hidden treasures, should start with a line like that. Someone needs to write that. (Not me, I’m booked.)

:: It turns out that actors don’t always like other actors, and are sometimes quite willing to say so. For example, Rex Harrison on Charlton Heston:

“Charlton Heston is good at playing arrogance and ambition. But in the same way that a dwarf is good at being short.”

Ouch. More actor-on-actor insults here!

:: I am forever fascinated by questions of artistic process, such as “What’s your desk look like?” or “What’s the atmosphere of the room you work in?” or “What pen do you use?” Well, the world hasn’t gone completely to electronica: Creative Types on their Favorite Writing and Drawing Instruments.

I will show up at a client meeting with a museum director and curators with a bowl of about 50 Sharpies in different colors. People just never see that. It’s like candy. When I start sketching, generally the purple comes out first – it is strong, but not too out there. I also love orange. The different colors help you clarify things: layering, floors, spaces, doorways.

–Architect Kulapat Yantrasast, who loves Sharpies.

:: How they make Ramen noodles:

:: A brief history of Sambo’s Restaurants, which aren’t all gone yet.

I don’t recall ever once eating at a Sambo’s, and if we did, it was likely on a road trip of some sort when we needed breakfast. I never knew about the racism in the name until the places were all gone.

:: Kevin Smith on walking on board the Millennium Falcon. (Salty language warning.)

:: Scared of heights? Don’t go to these places. I, however, would love to go to each one! (I’m not doing that “tether myself to the CN Tower and then lean over the edge” thing, though. That way, madness lies.)

:: My new life goal is to have a book of mine summarized on Thug Notes.

OK, that’s about all for this week. Enjoy and stay weird!

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Strange and weird and oh so awesome!

:: First, something downright scary: Adolf Hitler’s official photographer managed to save shots he had taken (which Hitler had ordered destroyed) of Hitler practicing his wildly-gesticulating speaking style. No crowds, no audiences at all…just Hitler in a room, wearing a suit a banker might wear, rehearsing his techniques for capturing the imagination of a beaten and broken nation. Hitler’s evil was so pronounced that it’s often hard to come to terms with the fact that he was a guy who worked at it.

:: Watch this in HD, in the bigscreen version. I also muted it and played other music while I watched it. I guy piloted a drone into the middle of a fireworks display.

Wow.

(I’ve seen this video linked and featured in a number of places, and in each instance, there’s a debate in comments as to whether or not this was actually a dangerous and potentially illegal thing to do in the first place. I honestly don’t know, on either count.)

:: Cal collects a sequence of comic strips and titles the sequence, “Cat Owners Will Undertand”. Yup, I do indeed understand!

More next week!

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Oh, Internet, how weird you are!

:: They will make jewelry out of anything these days.

Via Cal, who is always a prime source of odd stuff.

:: This is weird: not five minutes after I posted the thing below about the book Farmer Boy did this show up in my Twitter feed: all the meals from Farmer Boy. Too bad Laura Ingalls Wilder wasn’t a food writer, because she’d have been a good one.

:: Every kitchen needs a gizmo to make pancakes on a stick.

:: Three weird items, so here’s some Awesome for you: a guy who carries a camera right into big ocean waves so you can see what they’re like. Amazing.

More next week!

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Oddity and Awesome go hand in hand!

:: Andy called my attention to this (on Google Plus, no less!), and it’s hysterical: kids of today reacting to a computer from when I was their age. A nine-year-old’s take on an old-school Apple Computer? Awesome! I love the snort of derision the one kid does when he’s told where the computer’s power switch is.

:: And Roger forwarded me this howlingly funny commentary on that most evil of card games, the most demented game of chance of all…UNO. Don’t believe me?

I was at a birthday party yesterday (no, not mine, that’s in a few months from now), and the topic of discussion involved board games – the ones I loved playing as a kid (like Mouse Trap) and the ones I never got around to playing (like Candy Land). Ah, great memories of board games and card games and spinner games and “roll the dice and move six spaces” games. All fun stuff.

And then there was that ONE game. It seems like an innocuous game. You play your cards in a pattern, and hope that you don’t get stuck with a wild card before you’ve had a chance to use it.

It seems like an innocuous game.

That is, until you get into an argument with someone because their final card was a Draw Four and they used it on you as they shouted “UNO!” at you.

Ah, the wonderful game of UNO. This game has probably made more enemies, broken up more relationships, and caused more dirty looks than trying to guess who just passed wind.

I never played UNO much. I enjoyed it when I did, but it does seem to be the love-child of poker and Sorry!.

More next week!

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Time for some oddball stuff, eh?

:: Roger e-mailed me the links to these first two items. First, it turns out that this week’s surprise re-emergence of Bill Watterson onto the comics page had a charitable side to it. The original Pearls Before Swine strips done by Watterson and Stephan Pastis are being auctioned to raise money for Michael J. Fox’s charity, which focuses on research into Parkinson’s Disease. The connection here is cartoonist Richard Thompson, whose work on the amazing strip Cul De Sac was brought to an end by Thompson’s struggle with that same disease. This story just gets better and better.

:: This is just plain weird: a guy in Australia who takes weird recipes sent to him from all over, prepares them, and sees what’s what. In this case, a gonzo variation on Pigs-in-a-Blanket, I suppose. I’m not sure I’m going to try this.

(OK, fine. I’m totally going to try this. But not for a while. I’m going to pretend that I still have standards, once in a while.)

Thanks for the links, Roger!

:: This is a great prank. Kudos to the kids who executed this. I like pranks that are funny and weird, but not hurtful.

More next week!

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