Well, conceptually.

“You can just come out and proclaim it ‘National Rabbit Day’ or something and make a bunch of rabbit lovers very happy very easily.”

October 9th was also Curious Events Day, Fire Prevention Day, Moldy Cheese Day, and World Egg Day. Way to do your reporting, jerks.

jubilee ex machina.

That's some nice work, Stampy

We all appreciate elephants, sure, unless we’re pachydermophobes. But how often do we really do so actively? Probably not that often, unless we’re pachydermophiles, which is unsanitary and ethically dubious. Here are some ways to register your approval of our betrunked brethren today, from a safe distance:

• Watch The Elephant Man or “Bart Gets An Elephant” or that Gus Van Sant movie about Columbine or Ong Bak 2 (dubbed into Hindi, if possible)

• Listen to Pele’s Elephant, or the White Stripes’ Elephant, or Deer Tick’s War Elephant, or Tokyo Police Club’s Elephant Shell, or, best of all, Why?’s Elephant Eyelash, one of the best albums of our young century, and on the release date of a new (and a forteriori inferior but still very good) Why? album to boot

• Sidestep a controversial issue, preferably in a room of some kind

• Fail to dispose of a valuable possession whose cost of upkeep is disproportionate to its usefulness

• Somehow be awarded an honorary medal by the government of Thailand or Denmark

• Tell “an absurd riddle or conundrum and often a sequence of such that involves an elephant”

• Start a blog

• Remember stuff

This lovely tortoiseshell number, for instance.
(Earflaps are a little scratchy for some reason, but for warmth it can’t be beat.)

The cat is the hat

If you’re anything like me, the first crackling chill of autumn makes you wistful for the heady mixture of reverence and dread you once felt at the prospect of a new school year. The dwindling caress of the summer breeze, the imperious desire to toast one last Chipwich around the campfire, the long and ponderous process of soul-searching by which you selected a Trapper Keeper that said “I went to math camp, but so help me God I will whomp your ass if you so much as look at me askance.”

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This one is pretty valid. Camera Day couldn’t come at a much better time; there’s a lot of intense and harrowing stuff going on right now in parts of the world I’ve never been to, and photographic recording technology is the single biggest reason I’m using words like “intense” and “harrowing” instead of words like “unimaginable” and “unbelievable.” I can see Moussavi supporters being brutalized by the Basij in Tehran; I can see angry Hondurans watching over the president’s house in Tegucigalpa; I can see people keeping vigil outside Jacko’s childhood home in Gary, Indiana (okay, I’ve been to that part of the world). That’s amazing.

It’s not amazing in a new way, of course, nor in a way that’s any freer of bias and manipulation and 21st-century identity crisis than journalism itself, but in a way whose importance is self-renewing.* Just like everything else, photography as a medium has been democratized, and probably to excess, but that’s the beauty of the thing: for all the LOLcats and porn and pointless wall photos weighing it down, the internet has made a safe place in which grainy images snapped on shitty Nokias might just speak to the rest of the world.

Or at least, in my case, teach it to spell.

Dethrone King Kong!

* Peep my boy Niko et al over at Lens for a précis of what’s good in photojournalism.

More where this came from.

Bitte, baby

Server seems to be down. I fear the worst.

I’ll be honest, Sewing Machine Day kind of snuck up on me.   I didn’t plan any elaborate costume alterations or “as ye sew so shall ye reap”-type puns, the better to embroider them seamlessly into my repartee. But I did do some research about the origins of Sewing machines. According to Wikipedia:

Sewing machines are basic abstract symbol-manipulating devices which, despite their simplicity, can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm. They were described in 1936 by Alan Sewing. Sewing machines are not intended as a practical computing technology, but a thought experiment about the limits of mechanical computation. Thus they were not actually constructed. Studying their abstract properties yields many insights into computer science and sweater theory.

A Sewing machine that is able to simulate any other Sewing machine is called a Universal Sewing machine (USM, or simply a universal machine). A more mathematically-oriented definition with a similar “universal” nature was introduced by Alonzo Church, whose work on lambda calculus intertwined with Sewing’s in a formal theory of knee-patch attachment known as the Church–Sewing thesis. The thesis states that Sewing machines indeed capture the informal notion of effective method in pants and small flags, and provide a precise definition of an algorithm or ‘mechanical procedure’.

Fun!

There you have it: Sewing machines are a stitch. Please don’t let your cats eat thread, though.

Beautiful, shall I call her?--or inexpressibly terrible?

In this time of epidemiologico-nomenclatorial foofaraw, let’s take a moment to appreciate what an exciting, albeit inaccurate and fearmongering, name “Swine Flu” is. The lessons of Name Your Poison Day, whatever they actually are, might have been taken to heart many centuries ago: most poisons known to man have really boring names. “Arsenic” comes from the Persian word for “yellow orpiment,” “cyanide” from the Greek for “dark blue” (or Prussian blue, for the holocaust-denying neo-fascist nymphets in all of us); “strychnine” is no more than the compound extracted from certain trees in the strychnos genus.

The poisonous matter of popular fiction isn’t much better: Red Dwarf gives us “despair squid venom,” Spongebob Squarepants gives us “spongy patties,” and the animated Spaceballs spinoff gives us “ecola soda” (”a poisoned soda, made with the diseases Ecoli and Ebola, that President Skroob and Dark Helmet used to kill their enemies, so that they’ll be dead”). Even those badass glowing green balls of death from The Rock are called VX gas. Where’s the creativity? What happened to belladonna? To doll’s eyes? To monkshood and mother of millions and yellow jessamine?

If I had a poison of my own, I know what I’d name it: Beatrice.