Friday, September 18

Monday, August 3

The Hunter (excerpt)

From Richard Stark's THE HUNTER, the first novel about cold-blooded criminal Parker:

Office women in passing cars looked at him and felt vibrations above their nylons. He was big and shaggy, with flat square shoulders and arms too long in sleeves too short. He wore a gray suit, limp with age and no pressing. His shoes and socks were both black and both holey. The shoes were holey on the bottom, the socks were holey at heel and toe.

His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. His hair was brown and dry and dead, blowing around his head like a poor toupee about to fly loose. His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless. His suit coat fluttered behind him, and his arms swung easily as he walked.

The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they knew his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree.

Friday, July 24

Affluenza: July 24

Beautiful! (Those dinks in Vampire Weekend will be SO JEALOUS...)

Gizmodo gets in the Affluenza business...

Affluenza Approves:

It's A Branch You Idiots

It's A Plank You Idiots

It's A Stump You...whoa, these are actually really breathtakingly beautiful. (Four large, though.)

Gorgeous, of course. And note the blogger's intriguing coining of the adjective "shitful."

I know I've written before about the interesting life span these things have had--from goofy joke to useful accessory--and here's a place to get one. Forty bucks for a solid, good-sounding headset sounds like a STEAL to me.

The "Is this Time Cube or NotCot?" NotCot caption of the week:
"The transparent platelets have been planned in order to uniform diffuse the punctual bundle of the LED, that they represent between the more fascinating sources than light of the future, designed by Massimo Iosa Ghini." Of course.

Winner of this installment's prestigious Nacho Carbonell Award

The Onion gets into the Affluenza business...

Keep Diluting That Brand Presence! 

Genius!

Leave it to French hipsters. (The original caption for this entry was "Tres sexy!" but I didn't trust some of you guys to realize I was being sarcastic...)

An Open Flame Is The New Bowl Of Rocks

I love the idea of upper-middles lining up to buy bedsheets that look like cardboard. (Also: the designer goes by the name "Snurk.")

I guarantee 85% of the people who saw this thought to themselves "Weekend project!" (Including myself.)

Affluenza's favorite new blog.

Two utterly gorgeous pieces of jewelry. (Be sure to click on Other Views at the Bubble Necklace link to see how great it looks in person.)

LINK OF THE WEEK


Sunday, July 12

The Law Of Fail

"Once a web community has decided to dislike a person, topic, or idea, the conversation will shift from criticizing the idea to become a competition about who can be most scathing in their condemnation." -Anil Dash

Friday, July 3

from DOG OF THE SOUTH, by Charles Portis

"The kind of people I know now don't have barbecues, Mama. They stand
up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called
friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B.
and use dirty language. Some of them can even move their ears. They're
wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends.
They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal.
They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and
watch for chances."

Friday, June 12

How I would live without the human delicacy to which I am witness?

For one day, an Israeli newspaper replaced its journalists with novelists and poets:


Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: "Everything's okay. Everything's like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything's okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again…." And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled "Summer Sonnet." ("Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons' pencil case.") News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won't be soaring anytime soon, and that "hot" is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who's to say these articles aren't factual?

Wednesday, June 10

Momma

Your mom has probably already sent you this video, and sure, it's cute, but what strikes me about it is how urgently the baby is trying to communicate something, and how frustrated she gets when her dad starts laughing at her. Look how serious she is!

Wednesday, June 3

Steampunk Cake was Blatantly Copied.

Steampunk Cake was Blatantly Copied. Bride fights are almost as funny as Wikipedia editor fights. (thanks, Molly!)

Wednesday, May 27

Kanye West

"Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-
absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's
autograph. . . . I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get
information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and
living real life."