Posts tagged june 2011
What will happen when the next earthquake devastates a city and the OCHA is called upon to act and mobilize resources? Will Byrs or one of her successors have to claim an even more historic, more unprecedented disaster in order to get the world’s attention?
Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.
Talk to any Cuban under 35 and you’ll find someone less politicised than they are frustrated, especially if they’ve had a drink and feel they can trust you. Their reaction to talk of the revolution is most likely to be boredom or discomfort—not necessarily because they fear the authorities might overhear them, but simply because they want to get on, and this stuff is just so old.
… we can thank the scores of Dust Bowl and southern migrants, who in the 1930s brought their fulsome musical traditions to the Golden State. To accommodate these newcomers and the impulses of those who already lived here, dance halls and honky-tonks blossomed like California poppies.
Landis sees his Twitter hijinx as an appropriately humorous response to the absurd state of professional cycling. “I started it just as a joke,” he says. “It was never meant to be Floyd Landis speaking through this thing. I never made statements on there that were of any serious nature.”
The library still lends books, but over the past year, the NYPL has established itself as a beacon in the carcass-strewn content landscape with smart e-publications, crowdsourcing projects, and an overall digital strategy that shows a far greater understanding of the power of the Internet than most traditional media companies show.
“Something happened.” That’s the way Nate has summed up, after a beat, what happened. Gul bowled the ball, something kind of happened with Sehwag, someone yelled something, people milled around, and we have no idea what has just occurred. (Settle in, people. This is going to take a while.)
You may tumble out of bed in the morning and go straight to work, do not pass go. You may, as I have come to think of it, pull a Franzen, and have a dedicated computer, stripped down of all bells and whistles until it resembles a Smith Corona in the limited nature of its possible functions. You may put on ear muffs. A blindfold. You may work in a room with blackout shades. A writing studio in the woods with nothing more than a rickety desk, a pad (the old-fashioned paper kind) and a pen. Well, good for you.
… there’s a sense in the Pentagon that the improvised bomb has now become a permanent threat. Over the last six months, there’s been an average of 245 jury-rigged explosives found or detonated — outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. The IED has gone global.
My goal: Stop the Internet from frequently showing me ads for products I don’t care about or need, such as Preparation H or Gillette’s new Venus Bikini Trimmer, which sounds positively terrifying and totally useless to me because, among other reasons better left unsaid, I only buy swimsuits that reach my knees.
And unlike many pastimes that quickly descend into cutthroat competitiveness, Settlers of Catan is not a zero-sum game. A single roll generally produces resources for multiple players, and trades are almost always mutually beneficial. Because Settlers is a unique game that rewards cooperation as much (if not more) as confrontation, Weisberg argues that it “brings out competitive spirits in a positive way.”
