Work(ing Title)

Eric has found a brilliant bit in Bruce Tog’s iPhone impressions. Hardened-steel indeed.

“To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity.” –Wade Davis on Amazonian hallucinagens for TED2003

Update: He just trumped himself:

“The Canadian government has not always been kind to the Inuit people, and during the 1950’s, to establish her sovereignty, we forced them into settlements. This old man’s grandfather refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his weapons, all of his tools.

Now you must understand that the Inuit did not fear the cold they took advantage of it. The runners of their sleds were originally made of fish wrapped in caribou hide. So this man’s grandfather was not intimidated by the arctic night or the blizzard that was blowing.

He simply slipped outside, pulled down his seal-skin trousers, and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze, he shaped it in the form of a blade. He put a stray of saliva on the edge of the shit knife, and as it finally froze solid he butchered a dog with it. He skinned the dog and improvised a harness, took the ribcage of the dog and improvised a sled, harnessed up an adjacent dog, and disappeared over the ice flows, shit knife in belt.

Talk about getting by with nothing.”

Every time, and I mean no matter how often I listen to it, it gets me. The Zoo TV version of Mysterious Ways, right at the end when Edge lets one last burst of white-hot energy and Bono’s voice goes interstellar, makes all the hair on my body stand up.

And tears come to my eyes.

While it hasn’t been the case recently, that’s normally an exceedingly rare sensation for me. It’s amazing.

“If you did something terrible like take a disk interrupt that took five milliseconds to process, you will hear an ear-rending glitch in the output audio…you can drop an entire 17ms frame in 60fps video and it’s usually pretty hard to notice.”

“An item one year in the past is visually lighter than an item posted today. That same item will be even lighter in two years and lighter still in five.”