She would appear from nowhere, always standing a little apart, always barefoot, rubbing her left instep against her right calf or scratching with her fourth finger the parting in her light brown hair, and always leaning against things — against the stable door while my horse was being saddled, against the trunk of a tree when the whole array of country servitors would be seeing us off to town for the winter on a crisp September morning

Angela Chase, My So Called Life

I just like how he’s always leaning. Against stuff. He leans great.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR CIVILIZATION? Hat tip to NYTimes’ Papercuts for bringing the Nabokov passage to my notice.

A paving stone at short range is more effective than a club or sabre. The disappearance of cobble and paving stones has been more of a deterrent to the overthrowing of governments than machine guns, tear bombs and automatic pistols. For it is in the clashes when the government does not want to kill its citizens but to club, ride down and beat them into submission with the flat of a sabre that a government is overthrown. Any government that uses machine guns once too often on its citizens will fall automatically. Regimes are kept in with the club and the blackjack, not the machine gun or bayonet, and while there were paving stones there was never an unarmed mob to club.

Hemingway’s solution to help out the populace is to breed police-hating bulls.

Brought to mind by this quote from a NYT article about Iranian police vs. protestors

Some of the protesters turned and ran, but others stood their ground, grabbing anything they could find — sticks and rocks and bricks — to throw at the militia.

I’m sure they would have appreciated some ready-made cobblestone projectiles.

Triptrop NYC! Feed it an address and it spits back all sorts of wonderful colored data at you. I talked too much on the page itself so I won’t take up too much space here.

new project! Tokyo Tuesday is some infoporn I made using some data from the amazing amazing amazing Japanese census and streamgraphs. It pretty much tells you who is doing what at every point of the day. There’s a Japanese version, too!

i figure hey, the next 6 months i’m going to be a busy internet bee, might as well give the maddening crowd a place where they can grab a feed from so they know when i make something completely new and completely awesome.

completely new and completely awesome: i present thee unmarrieds with the best singles map on earth!

it’s only been 20 minutes but god do i hate wordpress.