This world, he thinks, contains only one masterpiece, and that is itself.
– David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
I’m back at my desk. 48 hours ago, I was in the midst of a roughly eight-mile walk along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. It is a beautiful thing. It is not something I can readily describe, and posting any of the few iPhone photos I took would be a hilarious injustice. More posts coming as soon as I unbury myself from the pile of work that built up in my absence.
Things are going to slow down here for a short while. I’m going away for a few days starting tomorrow afternoon and I need to take care of a bunch of non-blog stuff before I do. There’ll be a few more posts before then, especially if you send in a question using the form below. Usually I solicit questions on Twitter, but that limits questions to 140 characters and ignores readers who have managed to save sanity by avoiding Twitter.
Depending on Internet access, I’ll probably check in from vacation a couple of times. I’ll be back up and running on Thursday — perhaps with a few minor programming changes that I hope will make this site better for the both of us — and ideally, feeling refreshed.
Anyway, ask me stuff and maybe I’ll answer it:
Yeah… yeah. Much more at the Huffington Post.
This is a busy day of meetings and podcast recording and conference rooms and booking travel and more meetings, with a Mets game sandwiched in the middle in there somewhere. There’ll be more here at some point, but for now enjoy this Kids in the Hall classic. I feel like I may have posted this before but it’s never not funny.
This is out of context, but I don’t even want to know what happened before it. I just want to dream on it.
I spent a good portion of my afternoon down a Wikipedia wormhole trying to wrap my head around what this all means and how it works. No dice.
Canada geese are no joke. Mess you up, man:
If you’re not a myrmecologist, you might have missed last year’s news that a fungus attacking carpenter ants in the Brazilian rainforest was infecting their brains, prompting them to walk to someplace where the fungus can grow, and killing them. It’s widely known as “the zombie-ant fungus,” because people who study insects in rainforests get slaphappy after a while.
Now it turns out the zombie-ant fungus is itself being attacked by a fungus, only unfortunately this fungus does not turn the zombie-ant fungus into a zombie-zombie-ant-fungus.
Ant researchers say this is evidence we should be doing way more ant research.
I’ve mentioned this before: For some reason that never seemed strange in middle school, there was a petting zoo in the basement and courtyard of my middle school. Nothing seems strange in middle school because everything is strange in middle school. You don’t even notice that half of your teachers are certifiably insane, driven mad by years of dealing with jackass middle schoolers. You just show up and suffer or enjoy their peculiarities because it’s middle school and everything sucks and you have no other option.
Anyway, there were goats in the courtyard and one time after football practice, my friend set them loose. My locker was across from the courtyard entrance, and I saw him right before he did it. I think the conversation went like this:
“Yo Berg, I’m going to free the goats.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“OK.”
And then he did. My other friend showed up for a basketball practice later that evening and saw a rooster in the boys’ bathroom. Before the custodians could round up the goats, they had eaten an entire art project off a wall. The goats, that is, not the custodians.
Bear story via Gothamist.
Tedquarters 