Goodle Good News.
Oh yes.
Month: February 2004
Painless
This story gets more gruesome as it goes on. A little girl is born without the ability to feel pain. Sounds “cool” eh? Right, Mr. 2,000 piercings, Jim-Rose-Sideshow person? Howabout the fact that she scratched out her eyeball, quite unawares? Brrrr.
The Girl Who Feels No Pain
Gabby Gingras has a disease so rare she’s the only person her parents and doctors can find in the U.S. suffering from it. Like any other three-year-old, Gabby takes her share of slips and falls. Her reaction to each is predictable — at least for her family.
For no matter how hard Gabby hits the ground, she will not shed a single tear. Hard as it is to fathom Gabby Gingras feels no pain. There is no cure, nor will she outgrow it.
“She fell down the stairs the other day in the garage,” her dad says. “She just picked herself up and started climbing up the stairs again like nothing had happened.”
“She never cried,” her mother adds.
By way of Metafilter.
Jack the Ripper Parts 2-16
Funny found-tape of some kid riffing in and out of (presumably) his parents’ spirituality tape as he tapes over it. I used to make tapes like this but not so, um, clean. Go to the page here and search for the Jack the Ripper link or go straight to the RealAudio.
Most vegetables are not vegetables
Steve Cook, who does somethingorother in the Biology department at the Imperial College of London wants you to know exactly what vegetable-looking-things are vegetables and what are not…I guess. I find these things fascinating.
Most of the time, actually. I was recently horrified when my flatmate was surprised to find out that aubergine (eggplant) is actually a fruit, and not a ‘vegetable’, whatever that means. Here, for the greater good and knowledge of humankind, is an exhaustive (well, it exhausted me) list of all the things made from plants you’re ever likely to meet and eat, and what they actually are.
The first thing I’ll clear up is that ‘vegetable’ is pretty much meaningless: it’s not the opposite of fruit (as the aubergine thing clearly demonstrates), and it’s not the opposite of plants you eat for pudding (carrot cake, courgette cake, rocket and raspberry salad, etc.), and it’s not savoury plant products either (sweetcorn, anybody?). Vegetable doesn’t really seem to mean anything, so unfortunately, we will have to leave the cosy world of fruit and vegetables, and get our heads round some nasty botanical concepts, like the difference between a leaf and a flower, and some even nastier words. Nevermind, on we plough regardless…
A Closer Look at John Currin
Slate looks at the work of painter John Currin. The writer finds him ironic. I find him incredibly creepy, like that infamous cover of the Amok book catalog. (wish I could find an image to link to…)
I Did It for Science: Sex Doll
“Real Dolls” are the next generation of sex dolls–very lifelife pieces of plastic that for thousands of bucks you can customize and shag in the privacy of your own basement. Nerve’s Grant Stoddard does the right, investigative-reporter thing and tells us what it’s really like to stick your pee-pee in one. Hilarity.
It’s a computer! It’s a PDA! It’s an unwatchable ad!
Admittedly the new OQO computer is one of the smallest 20GB PCs I’ve ever seen, and the keyboard should bring back memories of the ZX Spectrum. But OQO’s Promotional Quicktime has to contain the most annoying use of motion graphics I’ve seen in some time. My eyes hurt after watching it, and not because the screen is small.
Enki Bilal’s IMMORTEL
Enki Bilal should be familiar to all fans of early Heavy Metal comics, sci-fi tales full of sex, machinery, and ancient gods. You can now watch a HUGE (32 meg) trailer for the film version of Immortel, which opened today in France. Directed by Bilal himself, it looks pretty faithful to his look.
Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal
A nicely organized online version of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. All four editions are here, along with censored poems, in French and in an assortment of English translations. Goodness gracious me.
Book Club Confidential: Free books! The only cost is word of mouth
Things are heating up over here in Book Club Confidential land, in their own particular way. Why, I’ve got people with books in their hands beating down my door!
Author Robert P. Johnson has written me a nice long letter telling me that he owes his success in writing to our local book clubs. Last year, he says, 14 clubs took his recent book “Thirteen Moons: A Year in the Wilderness” as assigned reading, and those are the clubs he knows about. If not for the clubs, his book would have disappeared when his publisher Capra Press went out of business.
In fact, Mr. Johnson’s book was the last off the press of the 52-year-old company before it closed its doors. And that meant no promotion, not even enough money to send galley proofs to reviewers, he says.