Chindogu vs. chingaladdo
Chindogu – brilliant ideas that have broken free from “the suffocating historical dominance of conservative utility.” * via Pink Tentacle
Chingaladdo – equates to thingamajob, thingumbob, whatsis, and whatchamacallits of this ilk. * via a misspent youth
Wade Davis – student of Richard Evans Schultes – on disappearing indigenous culture.
I don’t remember how I found this (blog? twitter?), but thanks, someone!
Update – the TED talk originally embedded has fallen off the internet – I’ve substituted a different Youtube clip with Mr. Davis telling the same story.
I suppose this blogging is often merely a therapeutic measure, as though one were laying one’s self on Freud’s couch while the great man was out of the room, in his stead standing a curious, humming device much like an evil oboe, which took in one’s spoken words and distributed them across an incredible, instantaneous, world-wide network of tin ear-horns. *
Read the linked posts from the bottom up and enjoy.
(OK, properly speaking, these are homophones – but way back when, my teachers confused me and homonym is the word that pops up first.)
I heard a reporter on the radio just now describe some Mexican kids as au fait (the story was on the anti-emokid violence in Mexico). For a confusing instant, I heard ofay and the sentence made no sense to me. Then my head reoriented – a grin ensued.
I’ve been getting a lot of hits on searches for Gabrielle Drake – something I find myself taking a perverse pleasure in. I thought I’d use the google and see what was coming up; before I got anywhere near DoaMNH, I encountered this essay, Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon, on the Ballardian. Yes, Ms. Drake appeared in a 1971 short titled Crash!, opposite some guy named J.G. Ballard. Click through and read the essay – meanwhile, I’ll just continue to shake my head in amazement.
Indeed, the egocentric popular culture of today, the all-invasive media landscape in which the private becomes public — the Myspace glossolalia of intimate, private space projected onto a global screen — can perhaps be understood in these terms, a result of what Ballard sees as ‘the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape’.
Mild warning – the film is titled Crash! after all…
Today’s word is from a discussion of eccentric bottom brackets – grubscrew:
…which bemoaned detents created in BB eccentrics by grubscrews. If hollow-point grubscrews fix that, then I can’t think of any other problem with them.
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I assume “grubscrews” is the UK equivalent of setscrews?
*
Technically, a grubscrew has no head at all, and is turned by a small Allen wrench or screwdriver. Thus it can screw down below the surface against an internal sliding object.
A bad review that make me want to read the book.
Compare Kakutani:
Vanessa Cole is a parody of the crazy femme fatale, a woman, Mr. Banks would have us believe, so beautiful that men are willing to overlook her obvious mental illness.
with Bad New Hughes:
Sure, she’s good-lookin’. She’s also crazy. Crazy as a shithouse rat. Run for your life.
I’m with Uncle Patrick on this one. Parody? Hah.
While looking to see if the NYRB had weighed in on Mr. Banks’ latest, I came across:
In Japan neglected or abandoned blogs are called ishikoro, pebbles. *
Completely unrelated to Banks, but too nice a word to pass unmentioned.
Two good new (to me) turns of speech:
We took the son down to Pratt yesterday for his first year of college. He is in the Industrial Design program and is – I think – quite excited. My emotions are a bit of a stew: sadness, excitement, worry, anticipation, and more. Even if I were good at sorting through this kind of thing (typically I’m not), it certainly isn’t going to happen on four hours sleep. The dogs, understandably, don’t really care that I spent 10 hours driving yesterday – their chief concern is the fact that they had a really boring day and would like to go for a run. Now. Again. More.
We did have yet another bit of cosmic synchronicity hit us on campus. The lawn where we were served a cookout dinner last night is lined by sycamore trees. Tree identification is not my strong suit – I know the locals (red maple, poplar, red oak, hemlock, and pals), but get me out of the New England woods and I’m in trouble. I knew sycamores, though. Why? Because Pluvialis mentioned plane trees and lime trees recently and I looked ’em up on Wikipedia. I had this suspicion that citrus (limes) might not be winter-hardy in Cambridge and was tired of not knowing anything about plane trees other than the assumed fact that they’re trees. If you don’t want to click through, here’s the key point – what are plane trees in Pluvialis’ neighborhood are sycamores here. While we were waiting in line for our picnic dinners, S (the boy’s mom) commented on the trees – the last time she was on campus was January and the foliage makes the area even more beautiful. I allowed as to how I thought they were sycamores; she looked at the leaves and noticed how maple-like they were. I wouldn’t budge and told her why I was pretty sure. Somewhere in my explanation, Jesus College in Cambridge was mentioned.
Aside – both the boy and I have been known to start with a reasonable sounding kernel and spin an increasingly baroque and improbable story out of it – absolutely deadpan. My son is much better at it than I am and does it to his mom regularly, but I’m a known offender as well.
At this point, S thinks I’m spinning a yarn. The Cambridge that springs to her mind is the one 30 miles away outside of Boston, not the one an ocean away. The existence of Jesus College is questioned, but before I can clarify, the man standing behind us (nice south-Asian accent) interjects, “Why yes, there is a Jesus College in Cambridge. I went there.” The sycamore identification went unresolved, but there is now general agreement that Jesus College exists and that the world is weirdly folded-up-on-itself small.
A very neat artist/caddis collaboration (via ectoplasmosis). I guess at nugget and wire scale the density of gold isn’t an issue. Any fisherpeople visiting New Hampshire in late June should make a point of getting up to Errol to catch the Alderfly hatch – Alderflies are medium-large caddis that emerge in huge numbers. Also – I’ve got to get a subscription to Cabinet!
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Goldfarming was a popular topic last week. I heard a reasonably good explanation on NPR in the context of South Korean gaming and some law-making around same. Then a BoingBoing post (great title – “Gold-farmers beat ad-ban by spelling URL in dead gnomes”) pointed me at this crazy video.
*
Charlie Stross weighed in with a great little essay about explaining the video above to someone from the distant past – say, 1977. I can’t end a goldfarming item without a hat tip to Cory Doctorow’s great story on the topic – Anda’s Game.
Finally, on a personal note, things are going well (knock wood) with Luz, preparations are being made for the shorthair pup, and the summer is flying by. My energy has been very critter directed over the past few weeks – expect posts to be either linky (like this one) or snapshots of falcons, dogs, etc.
