This is one of those stories where . . .

. . . you sit in the car long after you’ve arrived at your destination, listening because you can’t turn off the radio.

The astounding and tragic story of Fritz Haber, who had a hand in both feeding and murdering millions.

How do you solve a problem like Fritz Haber? from Radiolab

Cell Phone Crashing at the Airport

From Mediocre Films:

Your Christmas Shopping Guide

Sorry I’ve been AWOL – here’s something to help guide your shopping.

“. . . but they were two things that I thought were very important in my life—the ice cream and the Creature”

Guillermo del Toro talking to the Onion A/V Club about his early love for the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Still, to this day, I think it’s the perfect creature suit. In the history of film, there are two perfect creature suits: that and the Xenomorph in Alien.

Looking forward to reading his notebook as soon as someone gets it for me for Christmas.

Photo: Dr. Macro’s High Quality Photo Scans

Wake me up before you go go

This one hits close to home. Redditor imdrunkn posted this picture of his roommate’s increasingly drunken pleas to make sure he is woken up for class, including a forward-thinking reminder to “Look down, wind may have blown notes away.” My favorite is “ignore any and all excuses I say please PLEASE for why I cant come to class”

Spoiler alert: according to the imdrunkn, roommate made it to class for a pop quiz but was still drunk. So: college. 

“Most of what is celebrated as “country” these days is simply bad rock and roll played by people who look like they flunked the audition for a Night Ranger tribute band.”

Charles Pierce on the Country Music Awards.

These were on when I was at the gym last night and the aw-shucks, jes-folks bullshit was so deep I was grateful to be on a treadmill.

Anyway, not one person on stage last night could hold a candle to this dude:

What’s love got to do with it?

Over at Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford offers a tonic for those craven types who continually extol the virtues of “traditional marriage” without having the foggiest idea of what they’re actually referring to.

Though the murky concept known as “love” has been recorded for all of human history, it was almost never a justification for marriage. “Love was considered a reason not to get married,” says Abbott. “It was seen as lust, as something that would dissipate. You could have love or lust for your mistress, if you’re a man, but if you’re a woman, you had to suppress it. It was condemned as a factor in marriage.”

In fact, for thousands of years, love was mostly seen as a hindrance to marriage, something that would inevitably cause problems. “Most societies have had romantic love, this combination of sexual passion, infatuation, and the romanticization of the partner,” says Coontz. “But very often, those things were seen as inappropriate when attached to marriage. The southern French aristocracy believed that true romantic love was only possible in an adulterous relationship, because marriage was a political, economic, and mercenary event. True love could only exist without it.”

Don’t call it ‘random’

Charles Pierce was at LAX when the shooting occurred and had this to say about the coverage:

There already is some talk about this event being a “random” one. But it is not. These things are becoming as regular as rain, as predictable as the summer heat. The only thing “random” about it is the shooter. He could be anyone, and that’s the point. There are people who spend money making sure that he could be anyone, and there’s nothing “random” about how they do that. There is nothing “random” about this country’s ludicrous disinclination to regulate its firearms. There is nothing “random” about the millions of dollars that the NRA spends to convince people that they should have the right to carry their assault weapon anywhere they want to carry it, including into an airport terminal, if they so desire. There is nothing “random” about the politicians who truckle and bow to this lucrative monetization of bloody mayhem. These are all deliberate acts with predictable consequences. There is nothing “random” about how we have armed ourselves, and there is nothing “random” about the filigree of high-flown rhetoric with which we justify arming ourselves, and there is nothing “random” about how we learn nothing every time someone who could be anyone decides to exercise his Second Amendment rights by opening fire. There is nothing random about how we got where we are today, here in Terminal 7, where people have sought refuge from the bloodshed, four terminals over. There is nothing “random” at all. We have chosen insanity over reason. We have done it with our eyes open. It is time for me to walk out of the airport now. I am leaving behind a terrible event. But I am not leaving behind something accidental. I am leaving behind what America has determined must happen from time to time, if we are to be a free people. I am leaving behind what America has determined is part of the cost of being an American. I am leaving behind the blood that I am told I must accept as part of the price of being a member of a free society. I am leaving behind a place of death, and I am joining my fellow citizens, as we make an odd pilgrimage out of a place that is now another altar of the blood sacrifice that I am told we must make, regularly, in order to be truly free. I am a free citizen, I am told, of the Republic of Murder, my rights guaranteed by the Constitution of Moloch. I am leaving.

Animations of classic paintings . . .

from The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting, an Australian sketch show.

These answer the question of what you get if you cross Terry Gilliam with ASDF.

If you don’t care for the first several, keep going; they get much funnier.

James Webb on that Russell Brand nonsense: “Read some fucking Orwell”

James Webb of That Mitchell and Webb Look and Peep Show wrote a great response to that Russell Brand interview that was all the rage on Facebook for about 17 seconds last week.

What were the chances, in the course of human history, that you and I should be born into an advanced liberal democracy? That we don’t die aged 27 because we can’t eat because nobody has invented fluoride toothpaste? That we can say what we like, read what we like, love whom we want; that nobody is going to kick the door down in the middle of the night and take us or our children away to be tortured? The odds were vanishingly small. Do I wake up every day and thank God that I live in 21st-century Britain? Of course not. But from time to time I recognise it as an unfathomable privilege. On Remembrance Sunday, for a start. And again when I read an intelligent fellow citizen ready to toss away the hard-won liberties of his brothers and sisters because he’s bored.

I understand your ache for the luminous, for a connection beyond yourself. Russell, we all feel like that. Some find it in music or literature, some in the wonders of science and others in religion. But it isn’t available any more in revolution. We tried that again and again, and we know that it ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder. In brief, and I say this with the greatest respect, please read some fucking Orwell.