Some 80 percent of all U.S. commerce is carried on pallets. So widespread is their use that they account for, according to one estimate, more than 46 percent of total U.S. hardwood lumber production.
Takes me back to high school, working the night shift stocking the shelves at Kroger. So. Many. Pallets.
Pallets: The single most important object in the global economy. – Slate Magazine
the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the clauses display inverted parallelism.
So they’re mirrored (like the shape of the letter X… Greek letter chi… chiasmus…). Think ABCCBA, or ABCDEDCBA, or whatever. This is really common in the Bible, e.g. Isaiah 6:10:
A “Make the heart of this people fat,
B and make their ears heavy,
C and shut their eyes;
C lest they see with their eyes,
B and hear with their ears,
A and understand with their heart, and convert [return], and be healed.”
And in songwriting, e.g. Snoop’s Gin and Juice:
I got my mind on my money, my money on my mind.
Or the wisdom of Stephen Stills:
If you can’t be with the one you love, honey / Love the one you’re with.
You also see chiastic structure for an entire work, like the Song of Songs or Paradise Lost.
Man, I really like words.
I hadn’t considered this. Socio-cultural roots of the modern fantasy melodrama?
Part of what makes supernatural romantic melodramas stories of amours fou, arguably, is how they go about addressing a fundamental problem for the love story in the contemporary social context: how do you erect obstacles between the couple? If they are in love enough for us to be invested in their situation, how can you have a plausible enough obstacle for them to have to overcome in order to be together? Unless you want to do a period picture (be it Thomas Hardy, Far from Heaven or The Notebook), class, nationality, religion, and other aspects of social background just aren’t sufficiently convincing barriers to a Western audience, even if really they should be; we have all been raised, mostly by movies and pop songs, to believe that True Love Conquers All.
Mad Love: The Surrealism of the Supernatural Romantic Melodrama, Part One « The Third Meaning
Soderbergh is not parodying or denigrating his chosen genre framework, though; […] one is left with little doubt that he could pull off a more straightforwardly commercial film if it wasn’t for the probability that doing so would bore him to tears.
Steven Soderbergh Is Better Than You Think He Is « The Third Meaning
I never knew the word was connected with the Spartans. Awesome:
“concise, abrupt,” 1580s, probably via L. Laconicus, from Gk. Lakonikos, from Lakon “person from Lakonia,” the district around Sparta in southern Greece in ancient times, whose inhabitants were famously proud of their brevity of speech. When Philip of Macedon threatened them with, “If I enter Laconia, I will raze Sparta to the ground,” the Spartans’ reply was, “If.”
One source of this story is Plutarch’s On Talkativeness.
I have a theory that Stallone films, like Bond films, are excellent indicators of what film style looks like in popular cinema at any particular moment – they tend to be competent, and to show off whatever is thought to be “stylish” in current mainstream filmmaking, but they rarely break new ground.
Scott Higgins, Thinking Cinematically: Stallone, Expendables, and Color Today
When lots of people are doing something and valuing it as a part of their lives, it cannot be changed by fiat, no matter how good the arguments on paper are for doing it.
And also:
Since any meaningful discussion of politics is off limits at TED, the solutions advocated by TED’s techno-humanitarians cannot go beyond the toolkit available to the scientist, the coder, and the engineer. This leaves Silicon Valley entrepreneurs positioned as TED’s preferred redeemers. In TED world, tech entrepreneurs are in the business of solving the world’s most pressing problems. This is what makes TED stand out from other globalist shindigs, and makes its intellectual performances increasingly irrelevant to genuine thought and serious action.
On criticism:
Only fans should be allowed to criticize. Because it’s for the fans. When I hear somebody go, “Country music [stinks],” I’m like, well, country music’s not for you. You’re just being elitist. Only a fan of Travis Tritt can say the record [stinks], because he’s got every one.
Also, on the need to work up your craft in private:
When you’re workshopping it, a lot of stuff is bumpy and awkward. Especially when you’re working on the edge, you’re going to offend. […] You’re mad at Ray Leonard because he’s not in shape, in the gym? That’s what the gym’s for. The sad thing, with all this taping and stuff, no one’s going to do stand-up. And every big stand-up I talk to says: “How do I work out new material? Where can you go, if I have a half an idea and then it’s on the Internet next week?” Just look at some of my material. You can’t imagine how rough it was and how unfunny and how sexist or racist it might have seemed. “Niggas vs. Black People” probably took me six months to get that thing right. You know how racist that thing was a week in? That’s not to be seen by anybody.
Q. and A. – Chris Rock Is Itching for Dirty Work – NYTimes.com
I’d never thought about this before:
Here’s something to consider: Not everyone is comfortable with the abundance of noise, speech, color, smell, touch — especially touch — involved with small children. They’re in your lap, your arms, they’re tugging your hands, your shirt, your hair. Again, this affects men and women, introverts especially, older more than younger, and leads both men and women to withdraw (though women still tend to be the parent in the thick of it).
I’ve been reading the NYT for long enough that I’ve read these pro-forma sentences many times, but they haven’t really sunk in until today; […] My theory is that these weird sentences, inserted into long stories somewhere before the jump, are the NYT’s way of saying “sorry this story goes on so long, but it’s really important, and you really ought to read it anyway”.
This is so awesome.
So here’s something you don’t hear about a lot — Bob Ross, the famous afro-ed host of The Joy Of Painting, was taught his famous “wet on wet” fast painting technique by a German expatriate painter named Bill Alexander, who, believe it or not, had his own PBS painting show calledThe Magic of Oil Painting, that ran from 1974-1982.
AUSTIN KLEON: Bob Ross’s rivalry with his mentor, Bill Alexander: “He betrayed me!”
We forget that doing the work makes us better, and being better makes us dislike the work that made us that way.
In-Use: FF Quadraat in ‘The Shape of Design’ – An interview with Frank Chimero
Like cookbooks, kitchen equipment is a talisman.
Restaurant supply stores are dope.
The Minimalist – A No-Frills Kitchen Still Cooks – NYTimes.com
Cupcakes are serial cakes. Mass produced but conveying a sense of homestyle goodness. Cupcakes are the perfect homeopathic antidote for the industrially-produced food we mostly consume. Fordism never tasted so sickly sweet.
Choice commuters want a transit solution that seems modern, even if it’s actually old school. Really, they want a transportation choice that feels made for people just like them.
[Hair-metal musicians] are idealists, some of the last true believers in a weird idea that had floated around for decades: that rock music could be used to escape all the moral and hygienic values of the working and middle classes–self-restraint, work ethic, humility, sexual decency–and live happily among baser pleasures.
The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites. Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment. As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed.
It’s hard to see yourself from the outside. This also made me think of arguments in favor of monarchy in Hoppe’s Democracy.
Couldn’t you argue that the men and women who make Battlefield and Modern Combat and Call of Duty are making the world a demonstrably worse place? I think you could. Sometimes I wonder how they sleep at night. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I play Call of Duty.
Mark Larson 