• Bullet Point Ballet

This interview with a young Tom Waits is inexorably linked to...

Sat, 26 May 2012 13:05:34 -0400

This interview with a young Tom Waits is inexorably linked to Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight.

While there’s no confirmation in any interviews (not that there were many interviews, since he died before the press push for the movie), it’s not hard to imagine that Waits could be an inspiration.

If you ask me, the resemblance is far too great to be a coincidence.

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Sat, 26 May 2012 12:23:02 -0400

I thought of this once but shortly after decided it WAS a bad...

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:55:00 -0400

I thought of this once but shortly after decided it WAS a bad idea.

Because nothing says “you’re special” like a pre-printed card.

[edit: I previously said I thought it wasn’t a bad idea, which is the opposite of my actual opinion and I don’t know why I wrote that]

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Thu, 17 May 2012 20:59:36 -0400

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Mon, 14 May 2012 13:49:57 -0400

I have some thoughts on suicide

Fri, 11 May 2012 18:17:32 -0400

I read this today and it got me thinking about suicide. Warning, if you’re prone to being sad about things - that’s a sad story I linked to.

I can get sad, but I read it anyway. Some people ride roller coasters to feel alive. I read stories like that one.

I have never been suicidal. I’ve always imagined that level of depression to be a few rungs below mine, like a wide, black chasm that people don’t get out of.

But I guess some people do. They survive their suicide attempts and never go back. Yet there are still more people who survive, only to fall back into the chasm again.

I understand suicide. I’ve felt hopeless and unloved. While I never got very close to the very bottom, I saw it and I had no trouble imagining myself getting helpless enough to try it. I wasn’t one of the poor souls jumping in, but they all reminded me of me.

My therapist has a sign in his office: “Don’t believe everything you think.”

To people thinking about suicide, remember that. Your brain is playing tricks on you. It will set you off on a spiral that goes deep, so deep you might even consider killing yourself. Along the way to that horrible end, you’ll have thoughts like “nobody loves me” and “my life is meaningless” and “I have nothing to live for.” These are all lies that a depressed mind tells itself.

Depression functions a bit like cancer - it’s your own body turned against you. Big chunks of you turn black and start trying to drag you down into the worst pain and suffering you’ve ever felt.

Just like there’s no single cure for cancer, there’s nothing that will cure your depression. Fixing you will be a process led by experts and doctors who will try different medicines and therapies. If one thing doesn’t work, they’ll try something else. As long as you’re still alive, they will never stop trying to save you.

But unlike cancer, your survival rate is 100%.

If you never try to kill yourself, depression can never kill you.

I don’t hit those depths very often anymore. Nobody’s love saved me. No amount of acceptance from the world turned my mind around. No meaning of life shone its light on me. Nobody reached down and pulled me out of it. I crawled out.

I had help - my family, my mother, my friends, my doctors - but it was all up to me. If I hadn’t done it for myself, nobody else would have been able to.

When you realize that life is worth living on its own terms, with no expectations or demands, beautiful things can happen.

The Twitter Prescriptivist's Manifesto

Wed, 09 May 2012 16:45:00 -0400

The following is a guide to using Twitter without annoying people. Note that even the author of the below outrageous screed breaks these rules on a regular basis. These are guidelines, not rules.

DO NOT tweet an endless stream of the pointless details of your mundane existence
- only tweet a Foursquare check-in if you have something interesting to say about it
- a few tweets about your mundane existence are fine. More than a few a day is pushing it.
- an easy way to tell whether a tweet fits the criteria of a pointless, mundane detail: would you care if a stranger told you the same thing? No? It’s pointless.

DO NOT tweet a question that could be easily answered by a Google search.

DO NOT use Twitter ONLY to promote your work.

DO NOT RT the following:
- a tweet that praises you
- a #ff tweet that mentions you
- a tweet with “this” as your only editorial
- anything that says “please RT”
- a news story that is more than one day old

photographs
- filters do not make you artistic
- nobody wants to see another photograph of you, what you’re eating or your pet

video
- hold your phone sideways, not vertically

LIVE TWEETING
- use a #hashtag (this provides context and allows users to mute/ignore you)
- say something interesting, not just exclamations
- avoid spoilers

None of the above DO NOTS apply to tweets that include humorous or interesting aspects.

pittsburghisbeautiful: Doorknob in the shape of a face on...

Mon, 07 May 2012 14:14:36 -0400

pittsburghisbeautiful:

Doorknob in the shape of a face on Butler Street in Lawrenceville.

Bonnie Parker, 1932

Sun, 06 May 2012 10:04:57 -0400

Bonnie Parker, 1932

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Sat, 05 May 2012 23:59:22 -0400

The review of the Avengers that most closely matches my own opinion

Sat, 05 May 2012 01:06:51 -0400

The review of the Avengers that most closely matches my own opinion

Sacha Baron Cohen as The Dictator on some Australian morning...

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:48:00 -0400

Sacha Baron Cohen as The Dictator on some Australian morning show.

My favorite Cohen character has always been Bruno (though TV-era Bruno is funnier, I think) for the same reason why I love this character - he simultaneously mocks the kind of person he portrays and subverts our perceptions of them.

Bruno is unabashedly gay and completely cool with it - so much so that he just assumes everybody else is, too. The funniest joke with Bruno is not that he’s gay (though that’s pretty funny) but how other people react to how comfortable he is with his own homosexuality and the homosexuality he assumes are in the people he talks to.

The Dictator is a ridiculous stereotype of a secular Middle Eastern dictator in the mold of Qaddafi with some pretty biting criticisms of islamic culture embedded even in the smallest things (notice how, in the above clip, he shakes everybody’s hand except the woman’s, who stands around awkwardly as if she doesn’t really know if she was part of a joke or not).

There’s a scene in the trailer where the dictator and his compadre talk, in a language that sounds vaguely arabic but probably isn’t, about a fireworks show at the Statue of Liberty, while a frightened middle-aged American couple look on, horrified at their apparent plans for blowing up a landmark.

That’s Cohen at his best, I think - using the easy comedy of stereotypes, sure, but also subverting them and turning the focus back on the viewer’s own prejudices.

NEWS: Seemingly Ancient Beast Turns Out to be Only 35 Today

Wed, 02 May 2012 12:27:59 -0400

NEWS: Seemingly Ancient Beast Turns Out to be Only 35 Today:

The incomparable Dan Tallarico wrote a special press release for my birthday and it’s hilarious.

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Tue, 01 May 2012 17:55:48 -0400

"It’s funny to someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible how..."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:33:00 -0400

“It’s funny to someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible how pansyassed people react when you push back.”

- Columnist Dan Savage stands by comments on ‘bullshit in the Bible’

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Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:06:41 -0400

This is a scene that exemplifies my love for the moment of...

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 23:15:23 -0400

This is a scene that exemplifies my love for the moment of clarity - the climactic, transformative point around which the whole narrative pivots.

This is from the movie Signs, which predated the dimming of both the director and the star’s bright futures. This is Shyamalan at his best.

NYC, 1914.

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:00:13 -0400

NYC, 1914.

thepittsburghhistoryjournal: Pittsburgh, 1941 [Shorpy] From...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:34:17 -0400

thepittsburghhistoryjournal:

Pittsburgh, 1941 [Shorpy]

From the comments:

This is the corner of Madison and Lockhart, looking west. The church with the onion domes is St. Mary’s — Bavarian Catholic, believe it or not.

You can’t go and see this intersection anymore since it was destroyed in the 1980s so that the Parkway North could be built. The church is still there, although now it’s a hotel.

"A GERMAN POLICE BATTALION arrived at the shtetl of Sudilkov, in the Ukraine. The policemen led..."

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 14:19:17 -0400

“A GERMAN POLICE BATTALION arrived at the shtetl of Sudilkov, in the Ukraine. The policemen led several hundred people to a bomb crater outside the town and shot them. The victims fell into the crater. A woman, unharmed, climbed out and sat on the edge, crying. A soldier shot her, and she fell back in.”

- Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.