Virtual Flaneurism

I agree with this wholeheartedly, though I must add that the reason Americans and Australians originally deemed football "soccer" is from a nickname that caught on: the game was Association Football, and the players took the "soc" and turned it into "soccer". Why it isn't pronounced "sosher", I cannot tell you.

EDIT: Though it is ridiculous that we call our sport football, for the very reasons Cleese brings up.

Who loves this Steampunk Monkey Coloring Book?

I love this Steampunk Monkey Coloring Book.

We can dance if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
Cause your friends don't dance
And if they don't dance
Well, they're no friends of mine.

Cat video of the MONTH.

I Hate Capri Pants

My favorite love song...

Who is the cutest?

Lobster Dogs!

Video of the WEEK:

Not as impressive as the others, but the ending makes it worth it.

From my Prof. Also be sure to check out this song.

You will never know happiness like this.

“Harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance. Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.”

- Justice Antonin Scalia, concurring opinion, Doe v. Reed (2010)

Oh my lord, Scalia and I are on the same page. The sow drowning in my toilet finally explained.

I don't know what this says about me, but I have long adored this video:

This evening I looked through a collection of "rules for writing" by published authors that Pete had forwarded to me. As a creative writing student, suggestions directed towards aspiring writers was relatively commonplace (one of my favorite rules - and one of the more impenetrable I've come across - has been, "Write what you know about what you don't know." I have my own interpretation, but make of it what you will). The pleasant part of these "rules" is that they are anything but - published authors almost universally amend such lists with the fact that there are no rules for writing. Even so, one can usually find a novel thought among the lists, so they are worth looking through.

These particular lists of rules got me thinking about writing - or rather not writing, which has been my habit for the past nine months or so. The thought of writing seriously again got me a bit frightened: do I still (or did I ever) have a talent for this; when would I find the time; would it be a waste of that time? This immediately reminded me of something one of my first creative writing professors said on the topic of writers avoiding writing.

"Only bad writers think what they write is any good," he said (or so I now humbly paraphrase). "We avoid writing because it could be bad -- what we write -- and though usually it isn't, and though when we do sit down and do write we have moments of clarity and genius or maybe spend three hours on one simile that we ultimately erase, despite all that joy, we are constantly frightened that this thing we love to do, this thing that exposes a part of us is not going to work. Like one day we are going to sit down at our desk and, like a pacifistic Jack Torrance, find we can do little more than repeatedly peck ERROR ERROR CANNOT LOCATE TALENT onto a page. And this thing is so important that the thought of it not working is terrifying enough to make you not want to try. But then you write because it frightens you, because you want to create something good despite the risk that you'll break -- because if it didn't frighten you, if it didn't matter enough to scare you, then you couldn't be a writer."

Not only do I agree, but this is the Catholic guilt of writing rules. Write, or you're not a writer. Dance, or you're not a dancer. Teach, or you're not a teacher. I could go on and on. If only these thoughts got me writing, rather than digging through old short story compendiums and daydreaming about prospective projects.

Anyone not watching Archer on FX is doing themselves a serious disservice. Gotta love this English joke: