April 2009
18 posts
The MIT Blackjack Team →
I knew there was something wrong with my life, now I know what it is. Last night I met a bona fide ex member of the MIT Blackjack Team. Which made me realise that the fundamental thing wrong with my life is that I am not a pimped out baller geek scamming casinos, living it up to the nth degree and walking round with hundreds of thousands of dollars strapped to my pants. It’s a tough life.
Budget →
Deloitte’s budget report. Yes, we are screwed. I can’t help but feel that we stared into the abyss and managed to pull back. Fiscal pain, sure, but the great precipice this isn’t. People keep talking of WWII- but this is nothing like that, nothing to compare to the total re-calibration and decimation of an economy and an infrastructure.
Yet.
“the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez
and Salman Rushdie; the...”
– From Notes on Conceptual Fiction by Ted Goioia. This neatly defines for me a genre dear to my heart, a sort of amorphous literary slipstream kind of thing.
Frankenstory: Experiment 1 →
Via Nick and Antonio. Frankenstory is a frankenly genius website that lets you write a mini collaborative story with a friend, the main proviso being you only see the last few words they have written. Humourousness ensues. Explaining it like that doesn’t quite convey who fun this process actually is. The writing could be onerous, but you are limited to 40 words a go which makes the whole...
"Bankers: I shit'em": Merve
Do you read the Daily Mash? No? Well you should.This is a quote from Mervyn King, according to the Daily Mash- Merve is a bit of a c u next tuesday, according to the mash.
But he speaks from the rotten and wise core of the country at large.
Performance vs ideology. Return vs a value, a sense of what should be happening, and a sense of the buy in we should be have.
Ideology won, and then somehow...
Snuff / Wetlands
Two novels, both slim, both published by high end literary imprints and both, so they might like to think, shockingly filthy.
Snuff by Chuck Palanuick is about a world record porn shag fest with an ending implied by the title. Wetlands by Charlotte Roche is about a teenage girl exploring parts of her anatomy, also implied by the title.
Both of these books annoyed me for the precise reason that...
Glue Book Sites
http://getglue.com/42/sites.php
Stuff White People Like →
I had forgotten about this website but stumbled on it again the other day, with lots of new stuff that white people like. My first thought was hoho, this is funny, and true! Then I thought, damnit, it’s possibly be a bit racist. You couldn’t do it within any other race but white people etc etc. Then I realised.
I am a caricature. Take the front page: liking Madmen. Check. Liking Sea...
G20
Watching footage from the riots today in the City I was struck by the predominance of media in the crowds. The BBC zoned in on a line of riot police surging against a mass of dreadlocked protesters.
But wait, whats that. Half of them are holding cameras, big cameras, big press pap cameras, and they’re waving and clicking them.
The line of rioters has more cameramen in it than rioters. The...