July 2010
1 post
June 2010
3 posts
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Some Like It Hod
oh man, so I was away for a while going on a mystical journey through Kabbalah’s ‘tree of life’ ala Alan Moore’s fantastic comic series “Promethea”, and you guys, it’s totally crazy. It’s way crazier than just Madonna and celebrities and Judaism, it’s like proper D&D, Gary Gygax/ Ursula LeGuin-type crazy.
Let me start by stating that...
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Keanu Agonistes
Hey, so you know the whole Sad Keanu meme going around? Well I was fucking off at work today and I learned, that hooooooooly mothballs, Keanu Reeves has had a kinda sad and tough life:
His father, Samuel Nowlin Reeves Jr., abandoned him and his mother when he was 3, and has never reconnected with him since. His mother, Patricia Bond, became a costume designer and showgirl who constantly...
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What Diggy Learned in May
or Live Together/Die Alone
May, May, transglorious May was coloured, nay dominated by two major overarching thematic story-lines…
(…SQUAW! Your crippling loneliness and inability to come to equiostasis with the cosmos?! SQUAW!)
Shut up, subconscious! No instead I’m speaking of the ending of the television show Lost, and the ascension of my favorite basketball team, the Boston...
May 2010
14 posts
Be Ignored by the Stiff and the Bored
I feel like the guy that’s stumbled into his favorite bar and realized there’s no one else there. Free to drink as much as a I want and slur and scream as loud as I want with only my own intonations of “going too far” to keep me at bay.
Fuck it. Hi, I’m Diggy, and this is my blog. Shit’s probably about to get hectic, I kinda feel like I don’t need...
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How I Cure Hangovers
Today I learned that a group of chickadees are collectively known as a banditry.
-diggy
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Roland's Twirly Gesture
I know I’ve written it before, but hell son:
Your heart might break but the show goes on because if it stops, you starve.
…and that’s all I have to say about what happened tonight
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Moving on, I’m taking some temporal liberties in saying that ‘Today’ I learned about it, but the new Janelle Monae album is...
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Losing LOST
SPOILER ALERT: This is gonna be one of those articles that is much much more about me sifting through various interesting thoughts going on in my head right now than it is about learning. If you want a post about actual *learning* learning, click on the random button at the top of the page about 5 or 6 times until you come to an article that satisfies you.
SECOND SPOILER ALERT: This posting is...
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What Diggy Learned in April
or “PMA + KBO = Blood for Frogs!”
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May! What a month!…
Sorry, April! What a month! (Obviously the first thing to do is to apologize for this post’s tardiness, but no one’s interested in my apologies [APPARENTLY!] , so we’ll just move on and watch as the end-of-month posts move further and further into...
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Slot machines are always tuned to C-major
I’m going to Vegas this weekend.
I don’t know anything about gambling, except that I like to do it and shouldn’t. I play roulette, because it’s easy to understand. Roulette isn’t a game of odds. It’s a game of expectation management. I like to spread out my bets so I lose slowly — I can bet a bunch on every spin, and there’s almost always money...
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I Got Them Black Robe Blues
Today I learned about the policies and politics of (presumed) Supreme Court-nominee Elena Kagan. Usually at this point, I’d write about how unfortunate it is that I (we [you]) hear about a new previously-unknown Justice and think “well, lemme go look up a couple things on the internet to determine whether I ‘like’ this or not,” which is really just a pompous excuse to...
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Using Every Part of the Buffalo, pt. 2
Today I learned that the following is a grammatically valid sentence:
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
Yup. Go ahead, try to wrap your head around it, or just look it up. English is weird.
-diggy
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Fear
Today I learned about the phobias of several world leaders.
I think we give people too much crap for their fears. Kim Jong Il is afraid of flying, which…sure, it’s annoying that the lady next to me keeps clutching the armrest and gasping every time the plane dips, but this guy’s fear was “triggered by a 1976 helicopter crash in which he was seriously injured.” I...
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The Chinese Military-Issue Shovel
Today, I learned about the Chinese Military-Issue Shovel, which, well-
…yeah, it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. I am prone to hyperbole, so take that previous sentence with a whole heaping truckload of salt, but it’s still the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. Look at it! LOOK AT THE SHOVEL! OBSERVE WHAT IT CAN DO!
It’s not just that it’s...
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A Response to Andy's Question from the Previous...
or More Things We Could’ve Done Privately, But Then They Wouldn’t Be Proper Cries for Attention, Would They?
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I have always written because of women. There’s no women in my life. I have no one to impress, no one to turn to for any kind of validation. The cat thinks everything I do is fantastic and boring.
Also, life’s kinda sad. Ya...
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What Andy Learned In April
Hey, Diggy: Do you think we didn’t learn much in April, or do you think we were just lazy about writing?
That’s not just the standard boring “post about not posting much” motif. I’m actually curious to know if this blyrg has run its course, or if it’s the idea of continual learning that’s gotten old.
Or maybe it’s the self-analysis that...
April 2010
14 posts
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I Have No Excuse
I have a bad habit with music… okay two bad habits with music; the first that I’ll illegally download (three bad habits) tons of music that invariably gets lost in the shuffle and I never really get around to giving it enough time; the other is that when there’s some kind of seminal band that everyone else has heard of/adored and I never got around to listening to, I’m to...
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Can't Tell Me Nothing (...by K. West)
It started with “nothing in particular”. I like that expression because it’s actually used in the complete opposite way than it would seem to indicate. We typically use it to mean “nothing specific”, when the words themselves seem to indicate “nothing specifically”. When you speak about Nothing In Particular, you should be talking about the vast spectrum...
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What I Learned at a Lovely Wedding in Florida
There we go: listen, not much happened in the way of smarts-learnin’. If you want to talk about the kind of larger, life-experience, “endurance of pain as a means of soulful self-analysis”, stuff-that-I-usually-cover type of learning, then you can buy me a beer and I’ll sing you a song. There’s ups and downs, and the chorus is the same as ten you’ve heard...
What I Learned While Actively Trying Not to...
…Uh, no. No that’s not it either. Little bit farther back.
What I Learned While Someone was Puking Next to Me...
Wait, that can’t be it…
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My pee smells funny
I ate a lot of asparagus last night, which I do from time to time because a) it’s delicious and b) it’s hilarious.
It’s a total mystery to me why people object to eating produce. Nearly every fruit or vegetable has some property or potential that makes it well worth eating. Come on, how could you not want to eat something that makes your pee smell funny?
And I’ve always...
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KBO
Today I learned that Winston “Fucking” Churchill was a huge fan of the expression ‘Keep Buggering On’, which he later shortened to KBO. He used it to the point of ending every telephone conversation with it, which is either a sign of neurosis or (looking it up) Being Fucking Awesome.
Churchill was like that; kind of a fat, blubbering sod who had seen too much and knew...
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O RLY!
Way back when I was living in Minnesota, I wrote this terrible series of sci-fi/comedy shorts with my writing partner lover ROOMMATE at the time. One of them was about the notion of fatalism, and it had one character explaining to the other character that magic died out (no, really) because it was ACTUALLY part of a larger arcane structure of understanding causality paradigms and logarithms which...
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What Diggy Learned in March
or the Shark vs. the Sheep
Oh, hi!
Alright, lemme explain what happened: …me and Andy had completely different reasons for starting this blog up. For me it’s that I sincerely love and enjoy the process of writing, and I wanted not only to get better at it, but to have more discipline and more faith in (capital p) Process. That’s why I liked the daily format, it would force me...
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What Andy Learned In March
It was not exactly a banner month for learning.
There were a few interesting items — the NASA movie posters, the Brigham Young University beard policy, some stuff about farts.
There was some stuff I liked, and some stuff I didn’t.
But, looking back at the few meaningful exercises in bluggery, it seemed like if February was about exploring the world around me, March involved a lot of...
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What I Learned About America While Being Seriously...
Okay, a couple of quick hits courtesy of Amanda, who really should have her own blog.
I learned why shower curtains billow and stick to you.
I learned that, well, in Amanda’s words, “mallard ducks will occasionally practice homosexual necrophilia.”
But, really, I can’t fucking think straight at all this week. You see, it’s tourist season here in DC, the time of...
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No Man is an Isle of Lemnos
Today I learned about Philoctetes, a Greek archer circa Heracles’ time. In fact, Philoctetes was kinda like besties with Heracles, and when it came time for Heracles to die, his buddy was the only one with the stones to light Heracles’ funeral pyre. I’m sure it was wicked sad, but he understood that no one else was gonna do it, so he offered to pull the trigger and was rewarded...
March 2010
27 posts
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Fuckers
Last night I learned that ABC has absolutely no respect for its viewing audience.
Seriously, I hope someone gets fired for that, and I hope that someone has like two kids in college and a third in high school and spends the rest of his or her (but, come on, his) life regretting the fact that he fucked with “Lost” on behalf of a show no one likes or cares about.
-andy
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Hiatus Alert
Today I learned to never say “love” or “never”.
And on that note, I’m going to be taking a retroactive hiatus from the blog until April 12th at the latest. Sorry: slammed, working, avoiding; take your pick, they’re all viable excuses. Until that date, please enjoy Andy’s contributions, and failing that, this picture of a Paul Blart-inspired photoshopped...
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What Other Kids Were Reading While I Was Reading...
Tonight I learned that I should have been paying way more attention to Kurt Vonnegut.
Read the whole thing while I try to figure out why, for a reasonably bright kid, I’m so culturally illiterate.
-andy
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What I’m Listening To, Pt. 5
“Fields Shorelines...
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Sorry, but I did learn this stuff today
At least one of us is keeping with the blog’s original intent: recording things we learned so we don’t forget that we learned them.
-andy
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What I’m Listening To, Pt. 4
“Wave a White Flag...
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There are no more heroes
Today I learned that Texas Rangers manager Ron Washington tested positive for cocaine last season.
The more time you spend in whatever world you inhabit — politics, sports, music, business — the more you realize that there are no heroes, at least not in the Ancient Greek sense. You wind up meeting the people you knew before you actually knew them, and you realize they’re just...
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What I’m Listening To, Pt. 2
“Lion Eats the...
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What I’m Listening To, Pt. 1
“It Was...
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More like DayFRIGHT SLAVings CRIME
Tonight I learned that daylight savings time is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of unborn babies.
Or whatever. I didn’t read the linked article. I’m too cranky. It’s 1:11 AM, I slept late this morning, I may never get to bed, I have to go to work in like 45 minutes, I forgot to do my laundry and therefore have a limited selection of clean socks, etc. etc. I...
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Crab Canon in H-Exploding Minor
Today’s post is going to require patience and alcohol. Be prepared. You need to view the whole thing the same way you need to relax your brain if you want to make those Magic Eye 3D things work (remember those?!). I swear, having written this paragraph first and being completely unable to make promises, the whole thing is best viewed from afar. Afar, afar, avast! I say!
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...
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Today I checked out my bank account and learned...
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Ask me about my mortality panic
This happened last Saturday.
Frank and I were going to the Diner to get lunch. This is the sort of thing I like to do on Saturdays. Didn’t really have any plans for the day, didn’t really have any concerns, didn’t really have much on my mind. Sunny day, pleasant.
I walked out of my house with a load of dry cleaning, dropped it off at the place around the corner, and we...
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When People Stop Being Polite
Today I learned that in rural China, the primary cause of death in women between the ages of 15 and 34 is suicide.
I know that what we write here trends towards whimsy (if not outright comedy), and self-discovery. In an attempt to pad the stats, I’m guilty of taking even mundane facts and spinning them into essays of, again either personal relevance or the quirks of the universe.
The...