HA.

3E approves

On the death day of Timothy Leary, one of the few UAT alums whose most common trips didn't involve Walmart or an IHOP...

The Criterion Collection

The Criterion Contraption: an effort to watch every single movie in the Criterion Collection (according to Wikipedia, there are currently 485 Criterion Collection films out on DVD).

A portal into the 3E world

Later this afternoon, if nothing disastrous happens, 3E unites. As a regular reader, you're probably drooling to get your grubby little peepers on what such a confluence of hardcore dudes looks like. Drool no more, perverts:

wow that thing is huge

That's what -- no. No.

Life sized blue whale

Video games

VIDEO games get a bad press. Many are unquestionably violent and, as has been the way with new media from novels to comic books to television, they have been accused of corrupting the moral fabric of youth. Nor are such accusations without merit. There is a body of research suggesting that violent games can lead to aggressive thoughts, if not to violence itself. But not all games are shoot-’em-ups, and what is less examined is whether those that reward more constructive behaviour also have lingering impacts. That, however, is starting to change. Two studies showing that video games have a bright side as well as a dark one have been carried out recently.

One, to be published in June by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, was conducted by Douglas Gentile, of Iowa State University’s media research laboratory. He and his colleagues tested the effects of playing so-called “pro-social” games on children and young adults in three countries.

Good game?

why are you being mean to me?

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns

Watch all five, then try to deny that if John was shorter and fat and had a beard and was a famous person, he would be Zach Galifianakis. I am not sure which is my favorite.

Moutain Dew Throwback: REVIEWED!

I drank one last night. More like Mountain Dew Throw-Up! Am I right? It's like they mixed regular Mountain Dew with Diet Mountain Dew. This was obviously a ploy by the corn racket to convince us that we need HFCS. And it worked.

Scott Meets Family Circus

I am not sure why I am so fascinated with bad comic strips being adjusted on the internet.

Scott Meets Family Circus

science poster

from here

I allò és com es fan criatures!

Guanyadors de Lliga de Campions: Barcelona!

Fins ara pròxima estació, admiradors d'esports!*

*Learn Catalan.

with my mind she runs

faces

Face in Places

Ough

There are seven ways to pronounce the four letters "ough":

* dough
* tough
* hiccough
* bough
* ought
* cough
* through

So, there you go.

oh, be rational!

toothpastefordinner.com

thanks, Arthur

It's important to have a good sense of humor.

I'm Bill Cosby and you're Theo Huxtable....?

Me and your mom Claire just found a joint in your school book & want some answers.

What do you have to say for yourself Theo?

(studio audience goes "oOOooOOOOOOoh!")

[Yahoo! Answers]

Small fish, meet big pond: Burnley

Promotion: wrestled from the jaws of bigger, better teams. Your 2009 Promotion Playoff winners. Good luck with that.

Location: Burnley, Lancashire. As the center of the cotton cloth industry in England, it's where all that slave-picked southern cotton went.

Nickname: The Clarets.

Stately, Non-Commercial Stadium Name: Turf Moor.

Crest: Not as jarbled as Wigan's old crest, but it's getting close.

What they'll bring to the table (metaphorically speaking!): As far as I can tell, they play pleasant, attacking soccer. However, there's already a billion teams from the northwest in the EPL, plus they're the third team with the claret-and-blue color scheme.

What they'll bring to the table (literally!): This could be fugly. They DID knock off several big teams in cup competitions this year but let's be reasonable. Winning more than three games Not being relegated would be a sizable achievement.

...

So, a quick summary of the end-of-season movements:


Newcastle (after 16 years in the EPL)
Middlesbrough (after 11 years)
West Bromwich (after this one, underwhelming year)



Wolverhampton (5 years gone)
Birmingham City (just one year gone)
Burnley (first time up in 33 years)


3E officially endorses Birmingham City. This will end in disappointment. But moving on, it's less than three months until next season! We'll have EPL soccer again a good two weeks before any college football.

Not as popular for office pools.

2009 NCAA baseball tournament.

Good to see another sport that the SEC is actually good at. 8 teams in the field. Interesting factoid: Auburn, deservedly left out as the SEC's 9th best team, had a not-at-all-shitty RPI of 30th.

The Boston Molasses Disaster really is fascinating

I’m going to pause here, right at the beginning of my riveting article about attention, and ask you to please get all of your precious 21st-century distractions out of your system now. Check the score of the Mets game; text your sister that pun you just thought of about her roommate’s new pet lizard (“iguana hold yr hand LOL get it like Beatles”); refresh your work e-mail, your home e-mail, your school e-mail; upload pictures of yourself reading this paragraph to your “me reading magazine articles” Flickr photostream; and alert the fellow citizens of whatever Twittertopia you happen to frequent that you will be suspending your digital presence for the next twenty minutes or so (I know that seems drastic: Tell them you’re having an appendectomy or something and are about to lose consciousness). Good. Now: Count your breaths. Close your eyes. Do whatever it takes to get all of your neurons lined up in one direction. Above all, resist the urge to fixate on the picture, right over there, of that weird scrambled guy typing. Do not speculate on his ethnicity (German-Venezuelan?) or his backstory (Witness Protection Program?) or the size of his monitor. Go ahead and cover him with your hand if you need to. There. Doesn’t that feel better? Now it’s just you and me, tucked like fourteenth-century Zen masters into this sweet little nook of pure mental focus. (Seriously, stop looking at him. I’m over here.)

Over the last several years, the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention. We hunt it in neurology labs, lament its decline on op-ed pages, fetishize it in grassroots quality-of-life movements, diagnose its absence in more and more of our children every year, cultivate it in yoga class twice a week, harness it as the engine of self-help empires, and pump it up to superhuman levels with drugs originally intended to treat Alzheimer’s and narcolepsy. Everyone still pays some form of attention all the time, of course—it’s basically impossible for humans not to—but the currency in which we pay it, and the goods we get in exchange, have changed dramatically.

In defense of distraction