That’s how iTunes showed the description for this week’s episode of This American Life. Stupidly funny.
For the record, the full description reads, “The story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.”
In the aftermath of the Super Bowl, it’s time to revisit this “Men on Football” sketch from 1992’s In Living Color:
“The books has been read, and the library is closed!”
(h/t: Joe. My. God.)
“I mean, rather than campaigning for the right to serve in the military, I am going to organize a gang of faggots to extend the right to be ineligible for military service to all of humanity.” So sayeth IOZ, and I heartily concur!
No really, it IS. As long as you have a megaphone and plenty of hugs.
Okay, so maybe referring to The Obama as specious is a bit of a stretch, but, dammit, I wanted that pun! And, really, it was just a setup for this awesome graphic by artist Mike Rosulek:
What did people daydream about before popular culture? History? Religion? Geneology? Was I suffering from some sort of condition exacerbated by the internet culture of link and remix?
Author James Lileks explores how his own brain works. He travels associatively from Camptown Races to Foghorn Leghorn to Lou Grant to Singin’ in the Rain to Twitter to the Simpsons, and concludes, “I, for one, welcome the day when people no longer say ‘I, for one’.”
Read it and laugh and smile and shake your head.
Christine Smallwood, writing at the Baffler blog, examines the question, “What Does the Internet Look Like?” It’s a long way from the question to the answer, and the journey is well worth it.
After noting that many visions of the Internet rely on images of connectedness, she explores the essentially solitary nature of the Internet search:
We are born alone, we die alone, and we use the Internet alone. You may gather round the screen with friends to watch a video clip (turning the Internet into a television), or hang out while you play music on Pandora (turning the Internet into a radio), or post to your blog, or “comment” on someone else’s blog (turning the Internet into a roundtable, or a bathroom wall, depending). But these are subsidiary Internet uses. The essence of the Internet, the thing it does that nothing else can do, its Internet-ness, is the search. Comedian Dave Chappelle captured this with the skit “If the Internet Were a Real Place,” in which he loitered in a seedy mall like a modern Odysseus, ransacking CD stores, ducking into curtained rooms to indulge various temptations, and running away from spammers. Wandering around the Internet, the thing we are always searching for is the door—the exit ramp off the superhighway, the way home. But it’s hard to find. How do you know when you’re done doing nothing?
Please, read the whole thing.
(h/t to Dr. Hoo for noting that Thomas Frank is one again producing The Baffler in print!)
The chart above is a lovely info-graphic showing the introduction of colors into the Crayola crayon box over time. The creator of the chart derived from the data Crayola’s Law: the number of crayon colors doubles every 28 years.
