The Greatest News Ever.
“A newly released study shows that regular drinkers are less likely to die prematurely than people who have never indulged in alcohol. You read that right: Time reports that abstaining from alcohol altogether can lead to a shorter life than consistent, moderate drinking.”
Yeah, bitches!
ordinarywonder said: *cough* points to the word “moderate”.
On the contrary, the article said even heavy drinkers did better. WHERE IS YOU GOD NOW! BWAHAHAHA!
She sees the room in high resolution, he sees it in schematic. The world around her is close and dense with detail, colors clustered in a patch of a canvas painted by Seurat. He is looking at the blueprint, the four corners, the window, the exit. She sees the story of a man in the details of his apartment. He has bare walls and she would like to fill them, but he might never notice her marks on his blueprint. He hears the cars in the street and a passing train. She sees he is not paying attention to her. Her world is a collection of personal connections and moods about them, so she is easily distracted. She only wants his attention when she does not have it. He doles it out sparingly to keep her focussed because when he looks at her, all the world folds up like a map and there is nothing but her face.
There should be a law against all these giant ants.
If you spend your whole life crawling, looking through magnifying glasses, you might think the whole world is being invaded by giant ants.
Dirty cops, broken down houses and chaos in Africa. Politicians ripping each other apart and rich bitches being bitches. Immigrants and races and terrorism. Murder and robbery and rape. American bombs plowing into foreign fields, with a side of conspiracies calling in favors from several Senators. Class war, Wall Street and dead cheerleaders. If you watch the news and scour the internets, it happens all the time. But it doesn’t.
The box is selling you something, which is just a way of getting your ass in the seat. Millions of years taught us to listen to a certain kind of story. It’s all about fucking and food. People want to hear the story about the guy who got eaten by a lion, or the one about the woman who fucked her best friend’s husband. Who the hell cares about the human which had a normal day? Lions and whores get you in the seat.
You know it’s not your life. The normal day is the way of the life for most people. Still you rage for laws against the exception, anyway. The one that never effects you. You can’t see that you’re just another warm ass scared into a seat for sale to an advertiser. You live in fear and anger. You are just another class clown crawling along the sidewalk thinking you are being threatened by giant ants.
World’s Languages Traced Back to Single African Mother Tongue: Scientists
New Zealand researchers have traced every human language — from English to Mandarin — back to an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.
Scientists say they have traced the world’s 6,000 modern languages — from English to Mandarin — back to a single “mother tongue,” an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.
New research, published in the journal Science, suggests this single ancient language resulted in human civilization — a Diaspora — as well as advances in art and hunting tool technology, and laid the groundwork for all the world’s cultures.
The research, by Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, also found that speech evolved far earlier than previously thought. And the findings implied, though did not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of controversy among linguists, according to the New York Times.
What was that about Genesis 11 and the origin of language? Science has silenced you yet again.
(Source: nok-ind)
Care package creators come to your door. They either want to talk to you about Jesus, or get a beer. Do you give them a beer, or do you stab them?
Maybe it is me, but every time I see one of these kinds of tow trucks, I picture someone crucified on it and paraded around before a mad crowd in some post-apocalyptic sci-fi scenario.
Anonymous asked: How does someone get past being heartbroken, in your opinion?
I hate to say this but, time. Some things, you get perspective, you take the good and let go of the bad. What did you learn? What can you take with you? Was the person who broke your heart vital to a change in the course of your life, which you would not want undone? A girl who broke my heart introduced me to my family, so I can’t regret that I met her. Another girl who broke my heart got me into college, so I can’t regret that I met her.
Still, sometimes you can’t take away enough good to outweigh the bad. Then it’s just time and distance. One thing that you should always carry with you is that you are not defined by another. Shit happens, it is what it is, people can be mean and cruel, but in the end you still have you. Take the good in you, throw away the bad. Keep learning through every experience and you will only become more you, stronger. You will love yourself in a way that you can’t be so crushed, or so controlled by another that getting your heart broken will threaten to break you.
On a more personal note, I strongly advise anyone who wants to be a writer to go out and get their heart broken right now if you haven’t already. Heartbreak is probably the most common element of human life, so naturally you are going to be dealing with it a lot in writing. I hang my heart out to be stabbed every chance I get. It’s kind of fucked up. It’s fun before that happens, and at least I know I’m alive when it does.
Conflict between rich and poor now eclipses racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born as the greatest source of tension in American society, according to a survey released Wednesday.
About two-thirds of Americans now believe there are “strong conflicts” between rich and poor in the United States, a survey by the Pew Research Center found, a sign that the message of income inequality brandished by the Occupy Wall Street movement and pressed by Democrats may be seeping into the national consciousness.
The share was the largest since 1992, and represented about a 50 percent increase from the 2009 survey, when immigration was seen as the greatest source of tension. In that survey, 47 percent of those polled said there were strong conflicts between classes.
“Income inequality is no longer just for economists,” said Richard Morin, a senior editor at Pew Social & Demographic Trends, which conducted the latest survey. “It has moved off the business pages into the front page.”
The survey, which polled 2,048 adults from Dec. 6 to 19, found that perception of class conflict surged the most among white people, middle-income earners and independent voters. But it also increased substantially among Republicans, to 55 percent of those polled, up from 38 percent in 2009, even as the party leadership has railed against the concept of class divisions.
The change in perception is the result of a confluence of factors, Mr. Morin said, probably including the Occupy Wall Street movement, which put the issue of undeserved wealth and fairness in American society at the top of the news throughout most of the fall.
” The New York Times, “Survey Finds Rising Perception of Class Tension” (via inothernews)The Quantum Moment
The smallest moments are the largest, yet least recorded, least understood. What is the smallest moment when something huge begins, the quantum moment when an idea, a relationship or a disaster begins? The birth of ideas is so complicated that we are often compelled to come up with a fable like Newton and the apple, where everything comes together. But the idea had existed beforehand, in a million notes, observations and contemplations. The apple is just a way of simplifying the introduction.
In relationships, the introduction between two people is usually given as the quantum moment where it began. The trope of love at first sight is often trotted out, but was that really the apple? Did both parties instantly feel that lasting connection in that moment? It is hard to say since this is the least recorded event in any relationship. A person does not go into it expecting a life-changing event. It is just another introduction until it is not. What exact words were exchanged afterward to kindle the first spark into a flame? Was one party instantly in love and another on the fence until a moment fifty-seven days, six hours, twenty-seven minutes and three seconds later, while sitting on a couch watching a movie with a friend—the moment of certainty arising in the brain randomly, with the sting of a vinegar-and-onion Dorito on the tongue? By the time the relationship is widely celebrated and recorded at a wedding, all of the key moments that had led to it are left to the slipshod recording methods of human memory.
And human memory can be a challenge. At my graduation, I had no friends or family attending because they were all in another state. I felt so anxious to go up and get my diploma because I was terrified that there would be this awful silence. As my name was announced, and I started to cross the stage, I heard someone shout my name. I cherished that one little piece of support for many months until a video arrived and I heard that my name had not been shouted at all, and that the cheering was standard. Even now, though, some part of me insists on believing that that shout was real, from someone in the audience that cared about me personally, but somehow it was just not recorded. The fact that the memory of an event and how one’s feelings relate to it can alter it, even when the event is recorded, is a problem.
Consider Frenchman, Jules Naudet. He and his brother were filming a documentary about a rookie firefighter in lower Manhattan. He was on a truck heading toward a routine call, when the thunder of a low-flying plane caused him to turn his camera into the beautiful, ignorant sky of a Tuesday morning and record a quantum moment, which would explode into the most heavily recorded event in the history of mankind. What he recorded was the first plane, Flight 11, crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Although it was recorded by at least two others (interestingly, both of them born in Europe as well) he would also have the only footage of men who would die because of that day, at a time when they were not supposed to be a part of history at all, just a small film project. Compare that to Pearl Harbor, where there is little but pictures of burning ships long after the planes were gone, or the assassination of JFK, which is nothing but a grainy home movie. Even the broader event of 9/11 is useful, here. We can easily forget the plane which crashed unseen in a rural, Pennsylvania field, leaving nothing but a charred hole, or a few frames of Flight 77 taken by a security camera as it plowed into the Pentagon.
Osama bin Laden had a stroke of genius in New York, striking a monumental milestone in a densly-populated tourist and media center, where the event was guaranteed to be recorded by residents, sightseers and news cameras from all over the world. The confusion, the panic, the horror—all of it from beginning to end was recorded, but this did not stop the conspiracy theorists, people so desperate to avoid stomaching the idea of a universe so chaotic that they would try to erase the experiences of that day, claiming everything was faked. Worse, it was seized on by opportunists in the Bush administration as a pretext for a pre-existing idea to invade Iraq, until the whole reason why the United States had invaded Afghanistan in the first place was lost and is currently equated with the Iraq skullduggery.
This points to the futility of recording any event, whether the birth of an idea, a relationship or a historical disaster, where humans and the way they want to see something, in spite of all evidence, arises. It points to the idea in physics, where an observed phenomenon is altered simply by the means of its observation and how it is recorded. This is the ghost that haunts the house of my mind. Sometimes it is in the front yard for all to see and other times it is in the basement, but it dwells in everything I write. I am haunted by the notion that in every nanosecond is a potential singularity, which could go big bang at any moment. If fiction is a lie that tells the truth, to paraphrase Picasso about art, then my fiction is a lie where I pretend I can catch a singularity, a small moment, and slowly track its inexorable expansion, its big bang into another universe, whether in the mind of a single character, or into the world around him or her, or both.
I love this video. Shaun Tan is awesome :D
This is incredible. Shaun Tan. ♡
