Contact
Subscribe


More Than Human

Jul 8, 2009
By .
Art, Books, Culture, Irksome, Life, Television

Following up on an earlier post by Ken, we present more notes on the strange creatures we call "humans."

  1. One might think that the memoirs of highly educated strippers, discussing their careers, methods, and insights into the psychology of the aroused men who throw money at them would be informative, or at least sexy and titillating.  One might be wrong.
  2. We've written previously about Television Tropes, but for some reason it is still not the most popular site on the web among people between the ages of 25 and 45 who watch television, meaning the entire internet.  It should be.  If you've ever wanted to know why it is entirely logical that time travelers can defeat the star-spanning Dalek Empire to avert a cataclysmic future, but cannot kill an infant boy named Adolf who is defended only by an old Austrian drunk and a woman who suffers tuberculosis, TV Tropes explains.
  3. From high to low, the Police Blotter of the Flathead Beacon, Flathead County Montana, dissects the annals of crime in a place so sparsely populated that criminals have to walk ten miles, uphill in the snow, to find others against whom to commit their offenses.  Dry, humorous, and recommended.
  4. Is nuclear beer in our future?  One might think so from watching this ad for Taedonggang, North Korea's flagship premium lager, so expensive that only foreigners and people named "Kim" can afford it.  A North Korean news story on the beer (Taedonggang is the only product advertised on North Korean television) is striking as it depicts the beautiful freeways surrounding Pyongyang, the most peaceful highways in the world, unsullied by traffic because no one owns a car.
  5. Packratt (not his real name) in Seattle had a very bad experience with the police.  Fortunately the web provides a novel form of revenge.  He compiles and disseminates data about crimes and misconduct committed by police officers.  In meticulous, exhausting detail.  Visit the news feed at Injustice Everywhere, and be horrified.
  6. The Vatican Library has made its secret archives available online.  As any seeker of hidden knowledge would expect, there is a catch.
  7. Eye of the beholder?  Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid took a worldwide poll as to what people find appealing in art, and created the results.  The answer?  Everyone, except for the Dutch, likes studies of solitary trees standing on a lonely northern beach. Everyone, except for the Dutch, hates abstraction.

What's wrong with the Dutch?

Last 5 posts by Patrick

4 Comments
Tags

4 Comments

  1. Mark  •  Jul 8, 2009 @2:05 pm

    Hey, asshole – I live in the Flathead, and I'll have you know that, tranquil appearance aside, they are some mean streets .

    Whitefish. North side.

  2. Steve H  •  Jul 8, 2009 @3:39 pm

    Uh, yeah, Flathead County is hardly the middle of nowhere (That would be Meagher County) and the crime rate is not particularly higher than one would expect for the population and the income level. It covers a LOT of ground.

    I lived near there for much of my early life. My grandmother used to cook at the jail in Polson, the county seat of adjacent Lake County. The same kind of thing would appear on the police blotter, there. Really, it's typical for any largely-rural area anywhere in America.

    In this case the online police blotter transcription seems to be from a number of different parts of the county and they appear to have removed the names to protect themselves from lawsuits, which enhances the dry style.

  3. Patrick  •  Jul 8, 2009 @3:45 pm

    Dudes (I apologize to Mark if he's one of two frequent commenters we have named Mark, because if he is I know he got the joke) but…

    It was a joke. But I live in a metropolitan area, not the largest in my small state, which has a higher population than the entire state of Montana. Lighten up. Go fish for trout in an unspoiled stream while singing John Denver songs, or whatever it is you barbarians do.

    The site is still hilarious, written by someone who has an extremely dry sense of humor. I wrote this because I love your newspaper's funny crime writer, not because you're hicks. If more newspaper writers wrote with that sense of humor and style, rather than pomposity, industry wouldn't be dying.

  4. Mark  •  Jul 8, 2009 @5:48 pm

    Dude (Patrick)…

    My comment was also a joke.

    BTW, John Denver songs? I would take offense at the trout crack, but, uh….I'm working as a flyfishing guide this summer. Nonetheless, the John Denver comment, besides being cruel and ad hominem, ignores the area's increasingly metropolitan appeal – we now have a 14-screen movie theater, and our espresso stand per resident ratio has risen dramatically in the last 5 years!

    ….John fucking Denver.