“Surround her with the strength of your love!”

  12:14 pm  |   February 1 2011  

“John Frum (or Jon Frum, or John From) is a figure associated with cargo cults on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu. He is often depicted as an American World War II serviceman, who will bring wealth and prosperity to the people if they follow him. He is sometimes portrayed as black, sometimes as white; from David Attenborough’s report of an encounter: ’ ‘E look like you. ‘E got white face. ‘E tall man. ‘E live ‘long South America.’ “

  4:45 pm  |   November 8 2010  

“Isabelline, sometimes called Isabella, is a colour, variously described as pale grey-yellow, pale fawn, pale cream-brown or parchment.

“According to popular legend, the name comes from Isabella, Archduchess of Austria (1566–1633), daughter of Philip II of Spain (1527–1598). Her husband, Albert VII, Archduke of Austria (1559–1621) laid siege to Ostend in July 1601 and Isabella, expecting a quick victory, vowed not to change her underwear until the city was taken. The siege lasted a little over three years (ending in September 1604) and her underwear understandably became discoloured in the interval.”

  7:50 pm  |   May 1 2010  

Squid.

  8:07 pm  |   April 3 2010  

I love the idea of having to carry nothing with me, or at least what counts as nothing in our times — keys, cash, MetroCard, mobile device-cum-camera-cum-MP3 player-cum-phone. But how to reconcile this with the problem of lunch?

My practical desire to have nothing weighing me down wars with equally practical desire to not be forced to shell out ten dollars for a sandwich that might as well be a collection of food pellets. But even the cutest, most minimal, direct from Nippon lunch packaging, so adorable your first impulse would be to give it a pat on the head, not eat it, would ruin my attempted feckless freedom from handbags. And that’s both coming and going, unless you’re indulging in evil disposables.

Wish there really were such a thing as food pellets for people.

  4:43 pm  |   February 4 2010  

“Earlier this summer, flying home to Manchester from the Greek island of Kos, a pair of drunken women yelling ‘I need some fresh air’ attacked the flight attendants with a vodka bottle and tried to wrestle the airplane’s emergency door open at 30,000 feet. The plane diverted hastily to Frankfurt, and the women were arrested.

“In Laganas, on the Greek island of Zakinthos, where a teenager from Sheffield died after a drinking binge this summer, more than a dozen British women were charged in July with prostitution after taking part, the authorities said, in an alfresco oral sex contest.”

  8:21 pm  |   August 25 2008  

Comedian Dave Coulier has admitted for the first time that Alanis Morissette’s angst-ridden hit song “You Outta Know” is about their rocky former relationship.

The “Full House” funnyman, 48, told the Calgary Herald that he first heard the hit song, which features lyrics such as “And I’m here to remind you / Of the mess you left when you went away,” was when he was driving.

“I said, ‘Wow, this girl is angry.’ And then I said, ‘Oh man, I think it’s Alanis,’” Coulier revealed. “I listened to the song over and over again, and I said, ‘I think I have really hurt this person.’”

  2:36 pm  |   August 14 2008  

“Around the turn of the millennium, residents of the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia, started to express concern to environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht about the extensive coal mining in their home environment. Albrecht, who visited the region to confirm the destruction, realized that these people were experiencing a specific kind of distress: a homesickness felt at home. Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ — a mash-up of ‘solace,’ ‘desolation,’ and ‘nostalgia’ — to describe the inability to derive comfort from one’s home environment due to negative environmental change.”

  11:03 am  |   August 4 2008  

“In past summers, the pool’s concerts, dodgeball competitions and Slip N’ Slide activities have been a helpful distraction for the entire North Brooklyn partygoing population from the Sunday scaries (that feeling of doom come Sunday when one reviews the drunken, drug-riddled debauchery of the weekend and starts freaking out about one’s pathetic, directionless existence).”

  10:53 am  |   August 4 2008  

“The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks. While punk, disco and hip hop all had immersive, intimate and energetic dance styles that liberated the dancer from his/her mental states – be it the head-spinning b-boy or violent thrashings of a live punk show – the hipster has more of a joke dance. A faux shrug shuffle that mocks the very idea of dancing or, at its best, illustrates a non-committal fear of expression typified in a weird twitch/ironic twist. The dancers are too self-aware to let themselves feel any form of liberation; they shuffle along, shrugging themselves into oblivion.”

  11:04 am  |   July 31 2008