Somewhere between Wilmington and Baltimore. It’s a depressingly beautiful Stockholm kind of day.
Thank you, baby, for making it so far this year and surviving the impossible.
The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything,
—
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain. [via Sullivan, the stubborn Catholic]
From an atheist’s perspective, this is a sublimely ironic statement.
Not quite as filled with holiday cheer, this one. But true, nonetheless!
Wall-E World.
This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for dumb local news producers.
I seriously cannot stop laughing at this. No wonder Republicans think they are still relevant - they represent 193% of the country!
Until about the middle of the last century, most of the turkeys eaten on Thanksgiving would have been what we now call “heritage breeds,” including the Standard Bronze, Bourbon Red, White Holland, Naragansett, and Jersey Buff varieties. These turkeys are gorgeous, hardy creatures, developed in Europe and America over hundreds of years and rich in flavor. Though they are the ancestors to the Broad-Breasted White, a sort of made-up breed that arose in the 1960s with the advent of industrial turkey farms (the Broad-Breasted Bronze was mostly abandoned because its dark pinfeathers put off consumers), they bear little resemblance to that now ubiquitous bird in taste or texture. Today more than 99 percent of turkeys sold in America come from the roughly 270 million raised on factory farms each year. These birds are bred to be so literally broad-breasted that by the time they are 8 weeks old, they are too fat to walk, much less procreate—every Broad-Breasted White on the market is the product of artificial insemination. They are kept in giant barns, given antibiotics to prevent disease, and fed constantly so that they reach maturity in almost half the time it takes a heritage turkey. The result is bland, mushy meat that we have come to equate with tenderness, but in reality processors inject the dressed birds with saline solutions and vegetable oils to improve “mouth feel” and keep the oversize breasts from drying out.
—
Julia Reed’s history of the Thanksgiving turkey is like a fine meal. (via newsweek)
Gobble Gobble!
You will be unable to use your device or make emergency calls for up to 2 hours.
Because of a firmware update, Blackberry? Seriously? This update damn well better be worth it.
I have no idea what firmware is (bad nerd!), but I couldn’t help but notice that our huge law firm has been very busy fighting malware recently, deploying new computers to desks with a speed and frequency that is unheard of usually. Are the computers finally making their move? Is this the part where we realize that we don’t really have control anymore?
I, for one, welcome our new virtual overlords.
I don't want to be a donor when I die;
but if you do, then you give someone like me a second chance.the idea of my body getting cut up after I’m dead. I don’t like the idea. I just want to be buried under a nice grave.
i hate the idea of being cut open, but the thought of possibly saving someones life just seems better to me.
i just don’t want them to take my heart.
i know that sounds selfish. but it’s my heart, i don’t want anyone to have it.y’see i don’t care what happens to me after i die. i’m dead i’m not going to know am i? and like anna said, the thought of saving someone would be so much better than me going to waste.
My family has said that they will fight every attempt to donate my body when I die. I would just like to donate them while they’re alive.
When I die I hope they take every usable part of me, burn the rest, and toss it in the ocean. I think organ donation is amazing, and if my organs are diseased and un-transplantable I want medical students to be able to study them or do whatever with them.
(Important text bolded for emphasis.)
I’m not going to pretend that having that cute little heart on my driver’s license wasn’t a motivating factor in my decision to be an organ donor, but really. When I’m dead, I won’t need my body, nor will I have the ability to be grossed out by anything. So harvest away!
This kind of corporeal sentimentality is so medieval. Even if you’re a religious sort, there’s no reason to cling to a fetishistic attachment to the physical form. If “you” is your soul, then what reason do you have to worry about this mortal coil when you go to purgatory, or the great big Wal-Mart in the sky, or whatever it is you believe?
And if, like me, you don’t cling to fairy tales about what happens to “you” when you die (here’s a hint, energy always returns to the universe as energy! That’s all we are, folks! Isn’t it amazing?) then it’s obviously a no-brainer to help those, like Spontaneous Love, who need your physical bits a lot more than you do once you’re gone.
In short, people who make the conscious decision to not help those in need after they die because it feels “icky” need to grow up. Be an organ donor!
There isn’t any reason why we couldn’t have a lot more of these around. Let’s do it.
“The structure generates 130 kilowatts of solar power, enough to offset 145,000 lbs of greenhouse gas emissions annually.”
Gizmodo - Dell’s New Solar Parking Lot
This is genius. Where these panels make many buildings look funny, they actually make a parking lot look better.
More, please.
The hospital followed me to the local sushi joint tonight.
An 88 year old man passed out tonight after my visit with Jeff during a family meal after getting some tests here at Sloan Kettering, and now this place is swarming with EMS and police. The amazing thing is that this doesn’t faze me at all. It feels normal. Eating raw fish and watching triage should not feel normal. I can’t wait until this doesn’t feel normal again.
I like bloggers who write something knowing full well that they may be wrong, but the thrill is in that risk of being outlandish and later being proved wrong. I mean all writing regardless of genre should be steeped in some risk. It’s also why I want to like EW.com’s bloggers, but they’re just so sterile.
Blogging used to be dangerous. Gawker used to be dangerous. Hip Hop used to be dangerous! (That memory is dimming with every Black Eyed Peas release.) Tumblr is (for how long?) still a bit dangerous. Asking EW to take risks, at this point, may be a fool’s errand. Even Jarvis seems like an old newmedia fogie at this point.
Writing, however, will always be dangerous. It’s not a risk/no risk situation, but merely a “how much risk?” one. Someone will always find a way to channel that kind of risk.
Word.
