So, I've made Melancholy Monsters, and then I made their cousins, the Small Sadness. Now, to finish it all off, I've started making these. Get ready - the Tiny Teardrops. o_O This guy is just about 4" high. Any excuse to use those tiny black eyes I got in Tokyo, itellyou.
( a new small sadness under here )
They never listen—watch, it’s gonna arrive with broccoli on it.
Sorry about your Bunday, Annie T.
Posted in Uncategorized
It's been one of those crazy weekends, and tonight I plan on unwinding with this deliciousness. It's a Bumblebee, and I have Cocktailnerd to thank.
Read this article | Comment on this article“after being kicked out of the apartment for numerous horrible acts,” says s. in sioux falls, south dakota, “our roommate for the summer sent us this with her last rent check…which was later edited a bit by one angry roommate.” s. leaves us to wonder exactly what kinds of “horrible acts” were committed by k., but i’m going to assume they were pretty “atroecious.”
related: the patron(izing) saint of roommates
My Christmas Carol story
It is 1980. I'm in college. I'm taking a drama class. The class is taught by a guy in the drama department. When he's not teaching drama, he designs sets for the productions of whatever play the school is doing. Which means, in addition to attending classes, the class is required to attend all productions, so that they may then praise the instructor's work the following Monday.
I suffer through well-mounted, boring-as-all-get-out productions of The Shadow Box, The Country Wife and What the Butler Saw. The last production of the semester is an adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
( Read more... )
The folks at Spoonflower show how you don't need Photoshop or other expensive graphic editing programs to create designs for printing on fabric. Their video tutorial walks you through gathering fall leaves and scanning them and editing them with free tools to create a lovely autumn inspired fabric.
Read this article | Comment on this article- 20:09 Perusing Tobin's Spirit Guide, Spates Catalog, and the Roylance Guide to Secret Societies and Sects #
BEFORE!
AFTER!
HOW COULD YOU LET THIS HAPPEN Marissa Q.!?
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: Kittens
This thing is really getting in the way of my alfalfa nomming.
Des M., you might want to try an apple a day, as a precaution.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: Farm Animals
This week in the CRAFT Flickr pool we saw:
MAKE Senior Editor Gareth Branwyn's Chia Head Halloween costume,
Monster banana split by dkoss2,
Tiny Toothpaste by Mochimochi Land,
Halloween 2009 in Brooklyn by hine,
and these Fair Isle fingerless mittens by apricot_says.
[chipmonnk voice] “Oh, were you gonna eat this?”
Surely you can spare one, Julia G.?
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: Pocket Pets
1. Photos from inside a Colombian prison.
2. How to increase altruism in toddlers?
3. Soviet mathematics as pure status competition.
4. How people count money, across culture (video).
5. Real vs. placebo coffee: people don't know if it's decaf.
From the Chronicle Books blog, make this floral cocktail coaster, an excerpt from one of my favorite sewing books, Home Sewn by Kaari Meng who's also the proprietor of the cool LA-based shop, French General.
From the excerpt:
Using remnants from some printed linen, cut out large flowers, back them with hemp fabric, and stitch both fabrics together using your sewing machine's zigzag stitch. Homespun or heavier linen works well for the coasters backs, as both will absorb liquid and dry quite fast. Pair this project with a nice bottle of wine as a gift for your favorite hostess.Read this article | Comment on this article
Was Baby Cookie Monster ever on Sesame Street? More importantly, when the cake is this adorable, does it matter? :)
Robyn and her mom made this adorable number for little Miller:
And here's our fondant-free cake of the week:
(By The Whole Cake and Caboodle)
Awesome. This was Mike's Amazing Cakes entry for the Food Network Sesame Street challenge. (Well, technically, this was their practice cake. Here's the final entry:)
(photo by Lauren Kitchens)- Similar Sweets: Sweets to Make Henson Proud
American Intercity rail service is slower today than it was in the 1940s.
Here is the full article, by train expert Mark Reutter. It is a good look at some of the obstacles facing a successful high-speed rail program.
A few centuries ago, the ratio between the per capita income of the richest country and poorest country was maybe five to one. Today it is maybe one hundred to one.
The classic example of economic catch-up is given by East Asia in the mid-twentieth century, starting with Japan. In those days it was possible to obtain near-parity with the West in about thirty to thirty-five years. In other words, as a young man you could see near-parity before you retired and you could see near-parity for your grandchildren. You could see your children making it halfway there, even before they are entering the workforce.
What if, in the future, for the remaining poor countries, the West (and East Asia) is so rich that catch-up takes seventy years? One hundred years? Will any poor country be bothered? Won't it all seem too far off to be worth the trouble? (Catch-up growth takes lots of hard work and savings and sacrifices of previous social norms.) Or do you believe in a technology-transfer Solow model where the maximum possible rate of catch-up growth keeps on growing? One hundred years from now, will it be plausible to imagine catch-up growth of twenty or thirty percent a year?
I’ve had Katamari on the brain lately, and these scarves just add fuel to the fire:
They were made by Keita Takahashi, the creator of Katamari Damacy, and offered as the first and second prizes for a contest on Penny Arcade. Unfortunately the contest is closed, but I can still drool, can’t I?
via [Penny Arcade]
When I was growing up, the brides and grooms on cake toppers all looked alike. Tiny plastic people. All the women wore the same shape of gown, all the men wore identical tuxedos. For the longest time, pretty much the only difference was what color flip hairdo the woman wore.
Cake toppers have come a long way since then. Now you can even get sets of bride and bride or groom and groom. And Magical Day carries some even more specialized toppers like this:
…and this:
…and this:
Am I wild about them as art? Not in particular. On the other hand, I love that it’s now possible to get toppers for couples who don’t fit the mold.
Just be very sure of your crowd before you order one that looks like this:
These conclusions seemed dubious to me on their face. Several years ago, at my old consulting job, I participated in a project for the State of Ohio's public schools which involved sitting down in a third or fifth grade classroom for the better part of a day and seeing how the students were learning. Most of these observations took place in poor, post-industrial towns, which were still suffering the effects of the steel mill or the axle plant that had long ago left town. What struck me, most of all, was how smart the kids were, relative to my expectations. These kids might not have been the highest achievers -- but I'm pretty sure that more than 90 percent of them would have known who George Washington was. And these were third and fifth graders.
There were other hints too, that Strategic Vision's poll may have been fake. The scores that Strategic Vision claimed the kids had gotten, for instance, were strangely underdispersed. And they seemed to contradict results from Oklahoma's own standardized testing, which asked much more difficult citizenship questions and found most of the students doing just fine.
It turns out that I was not the only person who had doubts about the survey. So did Ed Cannaday, the State Representative from Oklahoma's 15 House District.
In a telephone interview yesterday, Cannaday told me he was shocked when he heard of the results, which had received widespread media attention. "When I saw the statistics, I was just flabbergasted and said it cannot be true," he told me.
There were two items in particular that sent up warning flags for him: the one claiming that only 23 percent of the students knew the identity of George Washington, and another that claimed that about one in every ten students had listed the two major political parties as "Republican and Communist".
"Given the dialog of today, if they had said Republican and socialist, then maybe," Cannaday told me. "But communist -- that's just not something that you throw out there any more. I don't think Sarah Palin even used that term."
Cannaday, age 69, would be in a position to know. Before entering the State Legislature three years ago, he had spent decades in education, first as a teacher in a large public school in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and then in Oklahoma where he set up an alternative school. After a stint in private business, Cannaday returned to classroom, first as a teacher and then as a principal, and then -- finding he missed the one-on-one interaction with his students -- as a teaching principal at a small school in House District 15. He now serves on the House's education committee in Oklahoma City, and continues to pay regular visits to the schools in his district. "Most schools like to have me once a month," he says, to talk about legislation pending before the state.
Cannaday therefore had little difficulty setting up an experiment: he arranged to have all the seniors in the 10 secondary schools in his district take the Strategic Vision/OCPA survey. Cannaday tried to replicate the Strategic Vision survey to the greatest extent possible. The same exact questions were used, and as in the case of the original survey, the answers were open-ended rather than multiple choice. The survey was administered to a total of 325 seniors, including special education students.
Cannaday's survey however, found his students doing just fine: They answered an average of 7.8 out of the 10 questions correctly. By comparison, the high school students that were purportedly surveyed by Strategic Vision had gotten just 2.8 out of the items correct. 98 percent of the students on Cannaday's survey -- not 23 percent -- knew that George Washington was the first President. 81 percent -- not 14 percent -- knew that Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence. 95 percent -- not 43 percent -- knew that the Democrats and Republicans are the major political parties. There was just no comparison between the two.
Cannaday distributed his results via e-mail to the constituents on his mailing list, including Karina Henderson, who published his findings in a dairy at Daily Kos. He also sent hard copies to each of the schools in his district, as well as all of Oklahoma's state legislators. The reaction so far has been entirely positive -- "even from the Republicans," said Cannaday, a Democrat.
Cannaday also sent his results to OCPA, the thinktank that had commissioned the survey, but has yet to receive a response. In October, before the results of Cannaday's survey had surfaced, OCPA had told the Oklahoma Gazzette that they were taking "a closer look at the raw data and the methodology,” behind the Strategic Vision survey but were not yet ready to "toss out" the results.
House District 15 is generally quite representative of Oklahoma, especially its Eastern portion, but is somewhat poorer than the state as a whole. "Rural" was the first adjective that came to mind when I asked Cannaday to describe his district -- no town has more than 3,000 people. Most of the residents make their living in the natural gas industry, commute to service-sector jobs in the comparatively large towns of Muskogee, Oklahoma or Fort Smith, Arkansas, or are engaged in what Cannaday calls "cow/calf operations". The five counties that make up the district range from middle-class to impoverished. Haskell County, for instance, where the town of Stigler is located, has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state and one of the largest proportions of its students on free and reduced lunch programs, the preferred benchmark of socioeconomic status in public education. House District 15 has no private schools.
Cannaday is proud of the achievements of his students -- particularly their low drop-out rate, which is about five percent, and their success in the state's mock trial tournaments, where they've frequently finished in the top 5 in the state competing against much larger schools. He has seen his students become doctors, attorneys, optometrists and accountants, he told me. "Any time you can have one of your former students in your district who's on speed dial in Oklahoma City as a physician, that's not too bad," he said.
But the schools in House District 15, which sends 40-50 percent of its students to college and sees 20-25 percent compete it -- are not exceptional in any obvious way. The students at Haskell High School, for instance, received below-average scores in 5 of the 7 categories tested by Oklahoma's standard exam, including in U.S. History.
There is no reason to think, in other words, that the students in House District 15 should have gotten such profoundly superior results to the "students" in Strategic Vision's survey. Nor could Strategic Vision's results have been the result of any sort of mathematical or methodological oddity. Consider their claim that literally none of the 1,000 students they surveyed were able to answer more than 7 of the 10 questions correctly -- lower than the average score achieved in Cannaday's test.
There are, rather, only two possibilities. Either the Strategic Vision survey was entirely fabricated -- or Cannaday's was.
I would put every dollar to my name on Cannaday, who has kept the surveys and is happy to show them to them to anyone who comes asking.
Next week is Celebrate Freedom Week in Oklahoma, with public schools students to be taught from a special curriculum highlighting the Declaration of Independence. "If were going to be pass education reform then we need to be out in the classroom demonstrating it," Cannaday said of his fellow legislators. "I will be in a classroom Friday," he told me. "I enjoy it."
I e-mailed to David E. Johnson, the CEO of Strategic Vision, a draft of this article and asked for any comments. The entirety of his comments were as follows:
"Thank you for the opportunity to respond. Our company did survey the Oklahoma students grades 9-12 for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. Our client has all of the raw data, cross tabs, methodology from the survey."
Johnson did not reply to a second e-mail asking for his interpretation of the substantial difference between his results and those found by Cannaday.
Venture Bros: Blood of the Father, Heart of Steel
As the title suggests, "Blood of the Father, Heart of Steel" is about, well, searching for fathers and steeling your heart. What does it mean to be a man? Are you a man when you kill your father, or when you find him? Does a father hold you back or complete you? Does a father make his son a man by nurturing him or making him fight on his own? And, in a moment of truth, can a man act? Is that what it means to be a man? Can you steel your heart enough to act? And, where do our notions of manhood, or action, come from?
( Read more... )
Also, I live in Abbotsford, so the farthest I would probably go would be Langley or Surrey to get a cart.
- Mood:awake
- 10:33 @QXZ It is my kind of internet video. I saw it a few days ago on my usual route. I am inside the machine. #
- 10:38 @QXZ This is also my kind of internet video: bit.ly/1aS30M #
- 11:52 How did I not post this weeks ago? I forgot. This is for y'all who want to take someone to the movies: bit.ly/3VWbUJ #
- 15:49 Waiting to get tattooed. Reading V., in which a character is getting a nose job. Makes sense. #
- 15:55 Mid-50s woman is getting a NYY logo tattoo. She's a Sox fan and lost a bet. What #
- 15:59 @cbarrett I've already done DeLillo and love his books to death. Pynchon is my last modern master - I've been saving him. #
- 16:00 @cbarrett re: DeLillo - except The Body Artist, that was a piece of shit #
- 16:10 More on the NYY woman: she showed me where she's getting the logo. "So I can piss on 'em!" #
- 17:31 Freshly tattooed, left forearm. Also have an idea for filling in the right shoulder. Write-off: "metal expenses" #
- 17:34 @cbarrett the big four are DeLillo, Pynchon, McCarthy, Roth, but I'm down with everyone you mentioned. #
- 17:35 @z_ph_s let's just say there was a lot of shaving involved. #
- 19:45 Tattoo: of my own design, incorporating ancient alchemical symbols for divinity, water, and the renewal of cities. #
- 19:45 @cbarrett Hadn't heard of either! Thanks homes. #
- 01:12 @bloodinmystool It's on you and @crux. Otherwise I'm catching up. #
A senior thesis idea for communications major Peter Vadala has turned into a campus-wide "Culture of Life" project that will soon evolve into "College Musical," a movie intended to spread the message of God's grace to secular audiences.( That Guy Isn't Me )
The project started out simply as a script that Vadala was writing for his thesis. When Vadala chose to actually create the movie, the project grew to include nearly 30 musicians, vocalists, actors and technical crew.
At first Vadala's script focused on abortion, but as he revised, he decided to focus on an anti-pornography message. Vadala said he can understand the issue, since he has met men who struggle with pornography.
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