This post is just an excuse to post a photo of Tom Selleck…

:: swoon ::

but is educational nonetheless. I don’t feel strongly about any of these ill-fated actor/role combos, but am always interested in stories of what might have been.

Also, in case you somehow missed it, Selleck Waterfall Sandwich. You’re welcome.

Jeez

Things I do not understand:

How could this kid have scammed so many prestigious universities and organizations? Why is it that only the Rhodes Scholarship people figured out what a bunch of BS all this was? And why did he keep doing it even after he got caught? (via Metafilter)

Also, if we ever perfect time machines, an early-20s Jake Gyllenhaal would have to be my first choice to play Young Mr. Wheeler.

Imagine if the Tea Party was Black

Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black by Tim Wise, via Ephphatha Poetry.

Cute!

I love everything about this picture and the article that goes with it. Listening to little kids talk amongst themselves is one of the things I love the most; they’re hilarious, and make a surprising amount of sense when they’re being serious.

I’m old

I’m turning 29 this year, and I feel really old. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it seems amazing to me how fast my 20s went. I feel like my 29 years have gone so fast, and am beginning to understand what genuinely old people (those in their 40s, say) mean when they talk about life going by quickly.

This weekend, I went to Connecticut for my aunt’s 70th birthday party. It was a (gentle) roast, and my cousin, the MC, decided to put the passage of 70 years in perspective. We found a web site that helped us, and she started off her speech to my aunt with the following facts:

What Things Cost in 1940:
Car: $800
Gasoline: 18 cents/gal
House: $6,550
Bread: 8 cents/loaf
Milk: 34 cents/gal
Postage Stamp: 3 cents
Stock Market: 131
Average Annual Salary: $1,900
Minimum Wage: 30 cents per hour

Everybody laughed at the huge difference in price between then and now, and it made think of the changes I’ve seen in many things, just in my own lifetime. A postage stamp cost $.18 when I was born, and I remember watching televised reports of people’s outrage when it went up to $.29 (I just checked, and that happened when I was 9). My undergraduate college now costs about %55 more (!!) per year for tuition, room, and board than it did when I was a student there. I doubt that it’s 55% more awesome than it used to be, but that’s neither here nor there. I remember a forward that the new students sent to each other about knowing that you were a child of the 80s if… It pointed out the differences between the world in which we lived and the one into which we’d been born, and mocked 90s babies for all that they’d missed (I still take this stance, by the way; the 80s > the 90s).

But then I read this piece, and it shocked me. Of course, most American kids today have never used a physical card catalog, unless they’re from a very small library system. That makes sense, but it seems odd that kids today have never experienced something that I enjoyed so much when I was younger. For me, the physical card catalog was interesting because of the “See also” and “See instead” references. I liked it when I thought the way the cataloger had and found what I wanted the the first time. I also liked when I had to look unexpected to find what I wanted. Either way, it was like participating in a scavenger hunt that I always won. Now, people who know what they’re looking for can do the same with an online catalog, search engine, or database in a fraction of the time. The results are the same, although the process is now disappointingly straightforward.

I’m used to people thinking that Google is magically going to spit out the answer to every question they have, and thinking that the Internet is broken if all is not revealed by the first link, but I sometimes forget that there was a time when people regularly had to do more to get information.

Reaching?

I know that James Cameron’s Avatar may not be everybody’s cup of tea, and I’m not a doctor, but it seems like a bit of a reach to blame this man’s death on watching the film.

A real good idea

Who doesn’t like free stuff? That (and the realities of garbage collection) is pretty much the idea behind curb shopping/dumpster diving. Somebody tosses out an item that is no longer needed, and if another person who wants it sees it before it’s collected by the trashman, it’s fair game. (Although, randomly, a few weeks ago I ran across this online discussion as to whether this practice is allowed by Jewish law.) I guess this practice might seem strange to people who live in places where this just isn’t done, but know people in the New York metro area who’ve gotten really nice items (coffee tables, bookcases, etc.) this way. I myself am always on the lookout, though I’ve yet to see anything on the curb that I wanted to take home with me.

So I thought it was cool/creepy/cool when I heard about the Blu Dot Real Good Experiment. Product by the Mono advertising agency for Blu Dot, a furniture company, the idea was to leave 25 of their Real Good Chairs in various NYC locations. They put GPS monitors on the chairs, and the approached the people who took them to ask why they had. My first exposure to the project came via the video below, which was a bit twee for me (the British woman’s voiceovers and fake interview questions especially killed me), but still seemed cool. I did think it was weird and intrusive to put the GPS in the chairs without notifying the curb miners (not EVERYBODY who took a chair knew beforehand what was going on), but it seemed that enough people didn’t mind it for the experiment and documentary to go on.

Then I read this article in the New York Times, which managed to clarify details of project. It did seem interesting to me that so many of the chairs seemed to go to artsy or well-to-do people. Obviously, a lot of New Yorkers fit either or both of those descriptions, but there were only 25 chairs…I thought it was disappointing that the video made no reference to tweeting the chairs’ locations, or to the lengths to which some people went to try to get one.

Blu Dot Real Good Experiment from Real Good Chair on Vimeo.

Dan Brown does not approve

Every armchair conspiracy theorist’s favorite secretive organization is stepping into the 21st century, and making a special effort to be more transparent and less mysterious, in an effort to recruit younger members. But if the Freemasons prove that they’re not trying to overthrow the world’s governments/kill all Jews/destroy Catholicism, etc, how will Dan Brown write his next book???

You mean that’s still Manhattan?

The Allman Brothers will be playing their annual New York residency at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights, instead of at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side. They weren’t looking for a new space, but it seems that MSG Entertainment, the people who run the Beacon, made a boo-boo. Their release of the following statement only makes my suspicion stronger: “We are proud of our long-standing history with the Allman Brothers Band at the Beacon Theater. We hope to have them back at the Beacon in 2011 and beyond.” This may be the first time that some of my friends make it above 110th St.

To add insult to injury, the Beacon was rented out to Cirque du Soleil for their new show, “Banana Shpeel.” When you’ve resorted to a pun for your show’s name, I’d worry. I would have stuck with “Vaudeville,” the show’s original working title. The show has been postponed for three weeks, mostly due to the mostly negative reviews it received during previews in Chicago.

I feel vindicated about that apology thing

I’m really big on apologies. I mean, I hate to apologize, because it sucks to acknowledge that I was wrong, but I think it’s even worse not to say anything when I clearly wasn’t in the right. My mom never used to apologize when she was obviously wrong, and it made me angry. Why would she admit that she was wrong, and then not take the obvious (to me) next step and apologize to the person she’d wronged? I didn’t get it, and I felt that it undercut some of the things she and my father taught me about being a good person. She got over it and began to apologize like a normal person when I was a teenager (why then? I don’t know), and I really feel like it has contributed to our generally excellent relationship today.

And apologizing is not just for myself or my mom; I feel that everybody could benefit from including more sincere apologies in their life. I know it sucks to say sorry, but I feel that what one gets in return, the other person’s restored faith in your understanding of right and wrong, and perhaps in the universe at large, not to mention maybe forgiveness, is worth more than wounded pride. Anywhozit, here’s a list of some interesting psychological studies that were conducted in 2009, including one on apologizing.