Newspaper story quote without context

"Have a nice day," Mitchell said as the woman walked away, carrying a petite dog. "It's going to cost you your soul. This is not a game, kiddo."

Popery.

I just got The Pope's album in the mail today. Now I like them more than ever. Lots of screaming and smashing and loud guitars. Another thing they remind me of is the Three Johns. Or maybe if the Pixies got very, very, very, very wasted and turned up too high.

If you like noisy, exuberant music or if you just enjoy falling downstairs into the lawnmower, buy the damned thing

Art notes from all over

"I decided to do something in China first, and I realized tattooing pigs would be a good introduction to the country."

My Working Life: Jerrold

Jerrold (not his real name) was a coworker at the hospital. He was a trim, slightly built black man in his late forties with thinning hair. He and I were both transcriptionists and later I was his supervisor.

Jerrold clearly had high standards for his own behavior. He was invariably polite and friendly to everyone. If a contentious question arose he would find a way to bow out, and it was hard to drag a critical statement out of him about anyone. A few times someone played a prank on him and he just grinned for about an hour. The only time he was really concerned or upset at work was when we had a crazy prejudiced lady working there who made accusations (that's another story), and when he realized no one was going to listen to her he went back to his phlegmatic self.

He'd gone into the service during the Vietnam War and done a tour overseas with the Air Force. He was in a group that was sent behind enemy lines to retrieve airmen, and it's clear he had a rough war. After he got out of the service he went to work as a police dispatcher, working 12 hour days seven days a week. He then spent ten years as a Los Angeles bus driver. These experiences gave him a lot of stories to relate. Because life as a black man in Los Angeles is also bizarre and stressful, he had some stories like that, and some others about his family, all of which were extremely dramatic. But Jerrold told them in a curiously flat way. He had a kind of Midwestern male reserve that did not allow his voice to raise, or his tone to become excited, or even his adjectives to get terribly descriptive. This made the stories punch harder, because he was so clearly just relating a series of facts. I'll try to recreate a couple of them.

( Stories )

Suspected what?

Via robotwisdom, the dangers of linguistics on official flights.

( suspected language 1052x744 .png web screenshot )

Time to go mow the triffids again.

The real problem with genetically modified food is not that your tomato will turn you into a halibut. The real problem is that we might, you know, make a superweed and stuff.. Oops.

Some idiot somewhere is mixing kudzu with algae, or poison ivy with mint. You just know it.