UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
|
||
|
Universal Donor
We can ill afford another Klendathu  feed it up!
| UD email
You are just a number to me! And that number is: PAGES UD MADE: My Books Page My Reviews Page My Reference Page My Music Page My Pictures My Store UD-RELATED PAGES: My LiveJournal My MySpace music page My Flickr page My del.icio.us page My Last.fm page My Amazon Wishlist HEAVY ROTATION TV on the Radio: Dear Science Walkmen: You & Me Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes Ratatat: LP3 Beach House: Devotion BLOGS ETC claude le monde nuncstans rock 'em stock 'em tomato nation postmodern drunkard tuckova 22 ghastly mess constintina total virility fuzzysquid drunken bee stacey nightmare elyse from ANTM stereolabrat dark side points jf_franklin 123 i love you READ NOW brotherhood 2.0 NOT BLOGS ETC qwantz (dinosaur comix) go fug yourself the burg cat and girl book of ratings married to the sea icanhascheezburger fire joe morgan fivethirtyeight.com READ NOW hospitality on parade WEIRD LOVE dead amusement pks craters! all content © 2002-2008 Jeremy Broomfield 
Hosted by: HostRocket.Com Comments by: YACCS PRAISE & REVIEWS "[UD] is a genius." --Christian Oates "[Claudia] is fucking awesome, and [UD] is a genius. And vice versa. You should all buy Fear Not." --Tricia Howey MOTTO egeo huic vigorum MY WRESTLING NAME Titan Gently MY PUNK NAME Razor Ection 
WHO LINKS TO UD? • from Technorati • from Google • from Yahoo and here's something weird: my place in Humor 3-space |
Thursday, April 27, 2006
School is full of lies that even kids can tell are lies. They tell kids lies because they think the truth is too complicated, harsh, or just plain anti-American for young brains to handle, or more to the point, because school is not really about truth, or even education in its purest sense. Kids may not be able to figure out the whole truth, and they may not even care, but the effect of lying to kids is that you lose their trust, and they start to disengage. Maybe that's the point?
One thing that always bothered me as a child was the story of how Louis Braille went blind. Do you remember the bullshit story? It goes: young Louis Braille is hanging around the early 19th century equivalent of the garage (come to think of it, I suppose it might have been the garage) and long story short he pokes out both of his eyes with an awl. Maybe he doesn't poke them out, but the implication is that of serial ruination, of sequential awl-putting-in-eyes. I don't care how young you are. That shit doesn't sound right. Who can continue to hold an awl after putting it in one of their eyes, let alone use it to fuck up their other eye? Well. I waited a long time to check the wikipedia about this, but I just did. Turns out he fucked up one eye and the other one went blind out of sympathy. See for yourself. Heh. Well, that makes a lot more sense now, doesn't it? He only poked out one of his eyes. Still, it seems kinda weird to be putting an awl in your eye, even if you're very bored. The kid was three years old, which makes it a little more believable. God, I remember the power the word "awl" had for me after I heard that story for the first time. And the actual object was like forget it. Whenever I got within five feet of an awl, I got very wary, because here was a tool that could make you do dangerous things. Was it like fleeting urges I used to have to fling myself from high places? They weren't suicidal, these urges, just curious, but they definitely gave the momentary sensation that I was not fully in control of my actions. I imagined awls doing something like that, hypnotizing children into hurting themselves against their will, like a haunted kitchen knife in a bad horror movie, infused with the angry ghost of its first victim. Maybe you weren't responsible for violent acts committed with an awl. Like your parents could burst into your room, see you standing over the corpse of your obviously awled-to-death little brother, and give you a horrified face like "what did you do?!?!" until their vision falls on the bloody awl in your hand and they go "Ohhhh," with resigned comprehension, Mom pointing it out to Dad: "Awl." Well whatever. I wrote this because even though the Braille story always bothered me, I have found myself -- as an adult, and while sober -- putting very sharp things near my eyes for various reasons that couldn't possibly good enough. Do you ever do this? I'll find myself looking very closely into the mirror with the sharpest tweezers ever made, and think "If a car backfired right now, or if somebody just said 'Boo' real loud, I could perforate this fucking eye. Maybe I should get this thing away from my peepers." But I persist with whatever cockamamie task I believe is being accomplished. Would you trim your eyelashes with a double-edged razor pinched between your fingers? I'm not quite that ridiculous, but the difference is scant. Stupid is. Tuesday, April 11, 2006
After all the press about Ambien causing people to sleepwalk, sleepeat, sleepdrive, and do on, I was proud to report that all I'd ever really done under the influence was sleepbabble, sleepcomposesongsaboutgoats, and sleeptalkaboutHarryPotter. Oh, and I have a tendency to turn on the light so I can write down ideas that seem like utter genius at 3am but in the light of day turn out to be really boring (you should be glad (or rather, I'm really glad) that I don't try to sleepblog.) But! I wasn't gaining weight and I wasn't endangering nocturnal animals.
But last Saturday morning at 6:30am, about three hours after taking my sleeping pill, I got up, went to the kitchen, and made myself a rather involved snack. I had no memory of doing so until I found the recipe I had transcribed during the creation of this unique dish, which I will reprint here verbatim, straight from the index card that bears the unmistakable handwriting of Sleepy-Time Jer. All errors are sic, faithfully and embarrassingly reproduced. The tautologically superfluous first line is not a part of the recipe, but rather an optimistic exhortation to the housemates -- STJ is nothing if not generous: Eat while there is Sigh. First of all, I urge those of you now reaching for your boiling bowls and dragon sauce to reconsider. Even if you could decipher the shouty part of the instructions -- which you can't -- the result, while technically made of food products, falls well short of the minimal culinary goal of edibility. In terms of presentation, it suffers from a problem master chefs refer to as "looking like vomit." Second of all, [insert joke about having to reconsider my claim that I have not endangered nocturnal animals while on Ambien]. Finally, I'd like to offer an improved version of the recipe: --------------------------- Saturday, April 08, 2006
I've been AWOL for a long time, and I'm sorry. Aside from the several exciting and time-consuming real-life problems that have occupied my attention lately, the main culprit has been recoding the reviews page so that you can leave comments there. This is not a particularly interesting problem, but working on it took forever (as all work had to be done in 20-minute spurts, and it's really the kind of problem that requires hour-long focus) and I didn't feel like posting here until I made the stupid reviews page work (oh, and I haven't got comments coming any time soon on the book review page, so don't bug me about it). I think it's working okay now, even though I plan to tweak the layout of the comments section of each individual post page.
<boring details>One irritating thing about using Blogger's native comment function instead of an outsider program (like Yaccs, which I use for comments here): when you click the "comments" link, you are taken to Blogger's Leave Your Comment page, which is ugly and more complicated than it needs to be. My advice is: unless you're already a registered Blogger user and logged in at the time you want to leave a comment, use the "Other" option, which lets you type whatever name you want and allows you to enter your website address (though it ignored a bogus one I entered, which is no fun at all). But the "Post Page" format, with which you're all familiar from reading LiveJournals, is a nice way to see comments in the context of the post. Anyway, I hope you feel it was worth the wait. I just realized that without your comments, I have less taste for writing reviews. I hate shouting into a vacuum.</boring details> I'm going to a wedding on the Brooklyn Bridge tomorrow, and the forecast calls for rain. |
OTHER REVIEWS: John from Cincinnati Menomena LATEST BOOK REVIEWS: The Game Moneyball One-Upsmanship Siddhartha You need the Fear Not Guide to Life. Buy it already. ($4) Now available! The Broomfield Variations CD ($10) or go to The UD Store 
MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" |