chatarra
All posts tagged "culture"
“Soldiers from the U.S. Army First Battalion, 26th Infantry take defensive positions at firebase Restrepo after receiving fire from Taliban positions in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, in this May 11, 2009 file photo. Spc. Zachery Boyd of Fort Worth, TX, far left was wearing “I love NY” boxer shorts after rushing from his sleeping quarters to join his fellow platoon members.”
Big Picture’s 2009 in Photos (part 1/3).
Las leyes fundamentales de la estupidez humana »
Esto es un clásico, pero lo mismo queda por ahí alguien que no lo ha leído. Sabiduría y risas, todo en el mismo pack.
“Los estúpidos son peligrosos y funestos porque a las personas razonables les resulta difícil imaginar y entender un comportamiento estúpido. Una persona inteligente puede entender la lógica de un bandido. Las acciones de un bandido siguen un modelo de racionalidad. El bandido quiere obtener beneficios. Puesto que no es suficientemente inteligente como para imaginar métodos con que obtener beneficios para sí procurando también beneficios a los demás, deberá obtener su beneficio causando pérdidas a su prójimo. Ciertamente, esto no es justo, pero es racional, y siendo racional, puede preverse. En definitiva, las relaciones con un bandido son posibles puesto que sus sucias maniobras y sus deplorables aspiraciones pueden preverse y, en la mayoría de los casos, se puede preparar la oportuna defensa.
Con una persona estúpida todo esto es absolutamente imposible. Tal como está implícito en la Tercera Ley Fundamental, una criatura estúpida nos perseguirá sin razón, sin un plan preciso, en los momentos y lugares más improbables y más impensables. No existe modo racional de prever si, cuando, cómo y por qué, una criatura estúpida llevará a cabo su ataque. Frente a un individuo estúpido, uno está completamente desarmado.”
(via obsidianobelisk)
The Referendum »
“The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.”
A must read for anybody between 25 and 35. Particularly if they’re not married. Particularly if they feel they’re standing in the middle of some kind of existential crossroad. I insist.
(via Tiffamander)
Just be nice (bitch) »
“I am one of the most selfish bitches anyone will ever meet, but that does not mean I think - or act like - I am the only person in the world. I was raised by the last generation that worked to instill manners and social niceties in its children, and fulfilling your part of the social contract was a big part of that. Say “please” and “thank you”, be polite, and treat people how you want to be treated. JUST BE NICE. I’m not sure when it happened, but people now seem to believe that they are the only ones who have a right to behave any way they goddamn well please. “I can do what I want and you just have to deal with it, but when you do it, you’re a rude asshole”. Being polite and respectful is the price you pay for living in a functioning society. If you don’t like it, take your spoiled, immature, self-absorbed ass into the mountains and see how long you last on your own.”
En el blog de Tiffany, la borracha misántropa, siempre te partes el ojete y vuelves con algo nuevo.
Where The Wild Things Are »
“It is a guarantee that whenever it is announced that a popular book is being turned into a movie, white people will get upset. This is partly due to their fear that something they love will be made accessible to more people and thus enjoyed by more people which immediately decreases the amount of joy a white person can feel towards the original property. Yes, it’s complicated.
The other problem is that these announcements create a ticking time bomb where by a white person must read the book in ADVANCE of the release of the movie. This is done partly so that they can engage in the popular activity of complaining about how the movie failed to capture the essence of the book. But more importantly, once a book has been made into a movie, a white person can no longer read that book. To have read the book after the movie is one of the great crimes in white culture, and under no circumstances should you ever admit to doing this. Literally dozens of white friendships have imploded when it was revealed that someone read Fight Club after 1999.”
Things that are common some places, but seem completely crazy to outsiders »
Ask mefi question:
I’m curious to know about other … occurances that, to an outsider, seem completely crazy but are common in daily life in certain places in the world.Many interesting answers, such as:
More than once in the middle of downtown Mexico City (a 10-million person, high-tech metropolis) I’ve walked out of a glass-and-steel skyscraper and almost collided with a donkey.When I was in Tokyo many years ago, I wondered at the audacity of their crows. I saw a few of them using a drinking fountain, with one of them holding down the button and the other drinking from it, then switch and again. But that was minor compared to what Japanese crows are reputed to do… steal food from open windows, outwit the crow patrols trying to prevent them from nesting on electric lines and shorting out the grid, even exploiting crosswalks and car traffic to open nuts for them. To quote from the NYTImes article, one expert believes “We are not sure sometimes who is smarter, us or the crows.” I find this all totally crazy, and yet totally magical.When I was living in rural-ish Spain, leaving the dog’s bowl out on the porch overnight during the winter would result in an army of tiny field mice bivouacked behind the porch sofa. When we went to the local Everything Store (part gas can dealer, part local bar, part supermarket, part butcher shop) to pick up some mousetraps, the little old lady proprietress laughed and said, in the local dialect, what amounted to “mousetraps? pshaw, those are for the tourists!”
She gave us a kitten instead. It was the most bizarre retail experience of my entire life. But when I mentioned it to a couple of friends & neighbors, they thought only notable part of the whole story was that I’d got the kitten for free.
When I lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia, my host father took me to the family’s Dacha (summer cottage), a tiny, dingy little house with no electricity outside the city. After dinner, we went into the Banya, stripped naked, and then he told me to lie down on a bench in the sweltering heat. I was terrified of this man, by the way. He started whacking me aggressively with birch leaves stringed together, whacking me everywhere to “open up the pores.” Then, he laid down and asked me to whack him. It was thus that I ended up whacking a Russian police captain, naked, with birch leaves.
Which is a totally normal thing in Russia.
In Thailand they have an official National Elephant Day. City officials fill the streets with buffets of bananas and other assorted fruits for the elephants to feast on. What you would see if you happened upon in would be a bunch of decked-out elephants perching elephant-style on the ground with their trunks in a mountain of fruit! And it’s not just one or two cursory elephant feasts, no; it happens all over the country!I’m sure there are many things around here that must seem really strange or stupid or wonderful to strangers, but, not being an outsider, I can’t really picture what they might be. I know many tourists find road signs with moose warnings so wonderful that they occasionally steal them off their poles. I can’t imagine how exotic it must seen to them, but I suppose it does.
Last year, vacationing in Croatia, we rented a car for a day. I don’t know if it was local custom or a personal quirk on the part of the owner of the car rental agency, but they had taken the time and effort to remove the seat belts in the back seat. I’m so used to seat belts that even the thought of not wearing them seems odd to me (why would you not, it takes two seconds to put them on and increases your safety tenfold), but to spend extra effort to make it impossible to wear them? I can’t even imagine a bad reason why someone would do that.
Those two quirks are pretty lame compared to the examples from metafilter, though. What’s totally normal where you live, but must seem very strange to outsiders?
Revolutionary Iranian women, risking their life to post about the protests on Twitter, meet Google contextual ads (Link)
No sólo dice un montón de verdades como puños cósmicos. No sólo me ha ayudado a ordenar de golpe un montón de ideas que bullían desordenadas en mi cabeza. No sólo te partes el culo con los chistes que se marca de vez en cuando. No sólo se me han pasado volando los 20 minutos que dura. No. Es que, además de eso, me lo puedo poner otra vez.
Internet está lleno de Top 10, Best 50 Whatevers y 25 Somethings You Must See Before You Die. ¿No hay ninguna lista ordenada de Mejores Speechs Que Entretienen, Te Hacen Más Sabio y Mejor Persona?
(via @horasperdidas, que es una especie de Ferrán Adriá de los enlaces)
Music: readers recommend »
“This is the place to check how many times Kris Kristofferson has made it onto a playlist (clue: the answer is once).”
Nueva web de referencia.
“No matter how much you learn, no matter how many fundamentals you know, an education that kills off the students’ love of learning is a wasted education. That’s not to say that students must only learn what they enjoy learning — but absolutely everything must be subordinate to maintaining the interest in learning. Not learning anything in school is preferrable to learning to hate learning.”
On women, men, sex and customs »
“Not only are our desires wrong, they are also risible. To start at the bottom of the moral chain, in a trade which knows precisely what people want, a porn film of a woman masturbating is considered both erotic and inherently beautiful; a man wanking is risible and vile, conjuring images of the unsprung sofa, the scattered pizza cartons, the solitary sock for afterwards. Almost every woman knows what it is to be desired, in a way that hardly any men ever do. I remember talking to the actress Kathleen Turner about this; on a good day, she said, she knew she could have nine out of 10 men in the room. I pointed out that there are only a few men who could say that, on a good day, they could have one out 10 women. And, of course, most of them are gay, and don’t want to have any.”
Via Syntheticpubes, the erotic blog beyond the erotic blog.
