Monday, November 20, 2006

All Aboard the Monday Aggregator Cleanup

Like burdocks to a sock! Like lollipop drool to the shirt of a tyke! Like tongue to a frigid steel flagpole on the playground! Like the gunk trail left by that Kerry-Edwards bumper decal! Here's some stuff that sticks. Monday Aggregator Cleanup is the solvent.

Crayola Figures (via). Diem Chau carves crayons. An aesthetics of the wax museum merged with vibrant colors and the pure-seeming materiality of the crayon. This prompts me to think back to the rabid crayon-shaving in some (hurry up! just 45 minutes) elementary school art class so that we could create a wax-paper-ooze greeting card (is that right?). In the mixed detritus of bright flakes was an accidental melt: a kaleidoscope of it doesn't matter. We overlooked that the crayons could be carved into miniatures.

Yranoitcid (via). The OneLook Reverse Dictionary works from definition, even hazy approximations and phrasal guesses, to come up with a list of possibilities. The counterlookup. Includes wildc?rd features for those times you can remember only part of a word.

Draft Reinstatement (via). Support the war; support the draft? Rangel's logic: Let's reinstate the draft so that the politician-parents will sit up, feel more personally involved. Oy. And check this from Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.: "Graham said he believes the all-voluntary military 'represents the country pretty well in terms of ethnic makeup, economic background.'" Also, gone to the ether are two minutes of my life I wasted glancing here.

Frontal Lobe Junction, or The Renewed Tie Between Brain and Train (via). Japan-based Hitachi Corp. has developed a brain-machine conduction system, using brain scans ("optical topography") and indications of blood flows ("hemoglobin concentrations"), subjects wearing a wig-of-nodes were able to turn on and off a toy train. The future of telekinesis, on the market in five years. Which reminds me: In the fourth grade, the teacher riffed on dimwitted comments by saying something like, "When they formed the line for brains, he thought they said 'trains', and he left on the next one." Clever the first time, but gradually more unsettling each of the eight thousand times he repeated it that year (the same year I passed out one day from holding my breath too long?). Just saying that one-line haunt from childhood won't be the same from now on.

Bookmark and Share Posted by at November 20, 2006 9:50 AM to Unspecified
Comments

I'd always heard it as "When they were handing out brains, he thought they said trains and he missed his." And then there's the one that goes "When they were handing out noses, he thought they said roses and asked for a big, red one."

P.S. Don't try the "holding your breath too long" when you are sitting for the timed part of the qualifying exam. :)

Posted by: Jo at November 21, 2006 3:51 PM

Heh, big red one. Wait, is that a joke about my nose?

I'll try to remember to breath deeply before the timed exams. I'm sure to need all the air I can get what with my persistent inspirational sighing (one sigh per sentence?).

Posted by: Derek at November 21, 2006 11:58 PM