Society is in the gutter

there was a time when we didn't throw the new york times in the garbage, though i nobody can remember it.

Wall st journals lay folded and unread on the street

papers or diapers. you tell me.

https://twitter.com/censusAmericans

I am hard of hearing. I was widowed. I moved last year. I got married in 1977. I have never served in the military.

I work in newspaper publishers. I got married in 1996. I have a bachelor's degree. I studied accounting. I am married. I drive by myself.

I take the bus to work. I get to work around 11:00am. I got married in 1981. I had less than 2 weeks off last year. I am married.

Wouldn't happen today.

i think that twitter account would be useful for novelists and screenwriters

love the idea of turning forms into voices

i think that twitter account would be useful for novelists and screenwriters

Reads a bit like Alan Burns tbh.

might help folks generate characters beyond "20something urbanite who works in the culture industries"

Would that something could stop life generating em eh

I love that census Americans account, though I haven't followed it. I actually think I prefer to read it as a long list in one spell, rather than one at a time, periodically. the repetitive effect combined with the great number of individuals really gives you a feeling of the paltry insignificance of a person

Sociology is on the twitter

i also enjoy that when presented that way it seems discursive and confessional rather than what it is, which is purely quantitative data

i think that twitter account would be useful for novelists and screenwriters

definitely. this is part of the reason i love it.

I love that census Americans account, though I haven't followed it. I actually think I prefer to read it as a long list in one spell, rather than one at a time, periodically. the repetitive effect combined with the great number of individuals really gives you a feeling of the paltry insignificance of a person

this is the other reason. i was tweeting about this last night so apologies to repeat myself to some of you, but i get a weird feeling from these kind of information abysses. like, there's such a sense of depth to them, it feels like standing on a height, almost dizzying. so while it does make me think of human irrelevance, it also kind of wows me at the collective force of that irrelevance, or the quantity of it, the number of us.

the other two things like this, that i can think of.

1. the wikipedia random button. actually terrifying to just bounce through everything that has ever been deemed to have existed. like simultaneously humbling and sort of ridiculous.

2. at work, there's a big tv screen which has a live ticker of every search that people are doing on gov.uk (basically a site where people look up how to apply for a passport or take their dog on holiday or whatever million other things covered by british law) - everytime i walk past i can't help but crane my head towards it for as long as possible, then again on the way back. it's just like boggling - "holiday safety", "visa for chinese student", "form 210k", "how to set up limited company" etc etc etc. the other day i was walking past and "when a child dies" appeared and just flew by in a hail of other search results, some in caps, some badly spelled, some long, some short, some definitely done by people without a lot of computer skill who think they're googling.

it's

oops, meant to say, it's really interesting. if anyone has any more stuff like this then please pass it on.

http://gizmodo.com/this-nsfw-live-scroll-shows-global-porn-search-terms-in-1530061824

lol ty

Its like an Oulipo writing exercise.

was just learning about oulipo recently, pretty interesting.

I quite fancy doing a really pointlessly difficult oulipo exercise just to see how shit my writing will be. like writing a story with no Es or something.

i did one where the words had to to ascend and descend in syllables from 1-5. they are pretty cool, i can imagine writing a story based on the outcome of one. they stop you thinking too much and correcting yourself as you go along. a blank page is much more scary than an oulipo exercise.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cfwz4OZWIAAqrOe.jpg:large

makin u think

i have mostly good will towards howard marks but that seems a bold claim

these people are right to say that society is in the gutter. the problem is, they use the past as a benchmark, when really society was if anything deeper in the gutter back then. society only comes up short when we measure it against human potential.

so what you're saying is: the gutter is actually in society???

these days it's hard to tell which is society and which is the gutter. and of course we're not allowed to speculate.

we're the gutter. society is the sewage.

or vice versa.

either way, the metaphor works.

https://undergroundherald.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/human-brain-facts.jpg?w=350&h=200&crop=1
http://www.pjfarmer.com/bimages/blown.jpg

http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Power-of-metaphors.jpg

;-)

A sharp blow to the head is worth 1000 metaphors.

TS: figurative language vs. the cleansing power of violence

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Philip_Sousa#Hostility_to_recording

https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13096112_10156771991695702_4916796237005775438_n.jpg?oh=59de1a05407f66dd3659a7ef9802ab13&oe=579E212B

the fast food metaphor is a lynchpin in "society is in the gutter" rhetoric.

some nice condescension to women in that one

tbf if a guy is hitting on u while ur in the voting booth, that's grounds enough to kick him to the kerb

recently moved to a new place and there are flies when i open the window. like 4/5 different ones flew in today. big fat house flies. bold as brass. in my old place i barely saw a fly. what attracts them? nearby water or parks?

i was actually going to post this in a thread called "flies" but nobody has read that thread for a long time, seems the rest of you have no need for a thread about flies.

how to kill them humanely? everything humane today of course.

most humane way to kill a fly is to swat it, as opposed to pulling off its wings and legs then dropping it on a hot griddle or anything of that nature

yeah i suppose i don't actually want to kill them.

Just escort them off the premises.

give them a bit of a beatin'

I am mates with my house spiders because they're mint and they deal with the flies

Send them away with a flea in their ear... if they've got ears.

You need to identify the alpha fly and let it know you will liquidate it's whole family if it doesn't buzz off.