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Inspired by a series of posters, I wondered what did my favorite books look like without words. Can you tell them apart or are they all a-mush? In fact, they can be quite distinct. Take my all-time favorite book, Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. It is dense prose stuffed with parentheticals. When placed next to a novel with more simplified prose — Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy — it is a stark difference (see above).
When Adrienne LaFrance cancelled her subscription to Harper’s magazine she received a letter – a begging letter. Read it and weep (with annotations by Adrienne):
On Facebook people are sharing things Overheard In Waitrose. And it’s great. Here are five crackers:
“I can’t find anything here, we should have really gone to Selfridges” – Overheard in Waitrose Marylebone
Two people having a heated argument at the front of local store. -One said ‘I know I am right, I’m a solicitor’ .To which the second calmly said ‘So am I’
Overheard in Waitrose Twickenham… “Lysander put the papaya down!”
“I suppose we could have a coffee. I’ve just spoken to Susan and she’s still doing the ironing and there’s nothing worse than being in your own house when the cleaner is still there.”
“Jemima, you’ll have to take the Rosemary off the Focaccia before we feed the ducks, Darling…. They can’t digest it!”
What does a 74-year-old politician taste of? Given the usual sexual kinks of the great and learned, we’d say hot wax, orange rind and dry-cleaning. But Ben Cohen (co-founder and half the namesake of Ben & Jerry’s) says Bernie Sanders tastes of mint ice cream with a milk chocolate disc on the top.
“The chocolate disc represents the huge majority of economic gains that have gone to the top 1% since the end of the recession,” the carton to Bernie’s Yearning reads. “Beneath it, the rest of us.”
This packet of Aldi British ham contains an impressive “110% pork”. That stuffs got more pig in it than pregnant sow.
Della Farzads says: “I checked the label because I don’t eat meat, and I wondered how much was in it. When I saw it I burst out laughing, even though I was on my own.”
To Wellingborough, U.K., where amidst the fat, cardboard, grease and batter, Cassandra Perkins, 22, has found something exciting and newsworthy in her KFC dinner
“It looked disgusting and pink, I didn’t want to touch it,” she tells the Northampton Chronicle. “I first thought that it may have been brain or lung, it certainly wasn’t chicken. My burger had a hair in it as well.”
Beef? Fish? Tortoise? No. It was chicken. As KFC explains:
“Sometimes mistakes can happen and unfortunately on rare occasions, giblets are not removed when they should have been. We have reminded our team members to take extra care in future, and if a customer is ever unhappy with their food we encourage them to let our team know, who will always be happy to help.”
Do you love cheese? How much? Iceland have taken to securing cheese inside plastic boxes. This is not done to keep the cheese fresh, rather to prevent shoplifting.
To Austria, where hunters are guaranteed a “happy ending”on return to camp. A business has been offering hunters in the Neustift-Innermanzing municipality lots of killing in Lower Austria’s Alpine foothills followed by an evening of human skin. The advert trills:
“After an exciting day’s hunting what could be better than a cosy night for two, or even three, in a remote mountain cabin. Everything is possible. The hunter’s return will be welcomed back by a lovely companion, and of course absolute discretion and confidentiality are guaranteed.”
Anyone eating at a restaurant in smoggy Zhangjiagang city, Jiangsu Province, was charged one yuan (10p, $0.15) to cover the cost of breathing air fit for human consumption.
Diners complained to the local council. Why should they pay extra to breathe filtered air? A city official ruled that with no alternative offered, the eatery could not charge for its air.
Of course, anyone not keen on paying the tax can bring their own oxygen supply, or grab a takeaway and hope they made it back home alive to eat it.
You can buy cheese and meat shaped into thin, square slices to slap between two pieces of bread. Now you can buy sliced chocolate for your sarnie. Japanese company Bourbon is selling packets of five two-millimetre thick slices of “nama chocolate”. Time to up your game, Nutella.
Scare story of the day is found in the Daily Mail (natch.), wherein we learn of “caffeine-use disorder”.
Sophie Freeman asks:
But how do you know when your love of coffee has gone too far?
When you’re on a coffee drip? The answer is with boffins at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the American University in Washington D.C.
Despite being the “most widely used psychoactive drug in the world”, caffeine can make you jittery, anxious and tense. A cup of coffee is the Daily Mail in liquid form.
As for the study behind the news of a new disorder to be treated by a new kind of therapy, the researchers surveyed 67 people. The coffee drinker were put on a “caffeine-fading scheme”, seeing their consumption reduced. They were given a booklet to “use between counsellor sessions”.
They were then locked alone inside their mum’s stuffy downstairs toilet for five days and invited to work through their delusions, nightmares and back copies of Readers’ Digest magazine.
In this advert professional skydiver Jeff Provenzano show us that so hip are Nvidia Shield tablet computers that anyone owning one can experience the thrill of skydiving with their cat by simply turning one on.
The deeply unfashionable cardigan wort by Kurt Cobain on MTV: Unplugged in 1993 has been bought at auction for $140,800. The seller was a “friend” of the Cobain family.
Four months after the show, Cobain committed suicide.
Julien’s “Icons and Idols: Rock N Roll” auction advertised it thus:
A blend of acrylic, mohair and Lycra with five-button closure (one button absent), with two exterior pockets, a burn hole and discoloration near left pocket and discoloration on right pocket.
To Poland, where coffin company Lindner is seducing stiffs to its product range with a calendar full of topless babes.
“We enjoy showing our beautiful coffins, and what better way than including beautiful girls?” says company owner Zbigniew Lindner. Before you shout ‘Got wood?’ he continues?
“We wanted to show that a coffin shouldn’t be a sacred object – it’s furniture, it’s the last bed you’ll ever sleep in. It isn’t a religious symbol. It’s a product.”
Sex sells. But the idea of a coffin as furniture is one that Linder should develop. Why not full the thing with aspic, cut away the sides and create novelty pole dancing podiums for the lounge, nursing home or cellar? Pour in dead uncle Bojan, roll him on his side, cut a hole and you’ve got somewhere for grandma to hang her fur coat.
Bargain.
![A mom got a little crafty and decided to make her own wine glasses, complete with the pithy phrase, “friends are therapists you can drink with” written on them. What started as a fun experiment quickly turned unintentionally creepy. “My mom made wine glasses to give to her friends for the holiday,” explained redditor Shagen34. “Her spacing was a little off on the first one.” With the correct spacing, they look a little more innocent. The handwritten font is still pretty creepy, though. But hey, it’s a fairly common mistake, at least according to various buffoons on TV. [h/t Tech Insider | Reddit]](http://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/friend-rape-wine-glass.png)
![A mom got a little crafty and decided to make her own wine glasses, complete with the pithy phrase, “friends are therapists you can drink with” written on them. What started as a fun experiment quickly turned unintentionally creepy. “My mom made wine glasses to give to her friends for the holiday,” explained redditor Shagen34. “Her spacing was a little off on the first one.” With the correct spacing, they look a little more innocent. The handwritten font is still pretty creepy, though. But hey, it’s a fairly common mistake, at least according to various buffoons on TV. [h/t Tech Insider | Reddit]](http://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/wine-glass-full.jpg)
![A mom got a little crafty and decided to make her own wine glasses, complete with the pithy phrase, “friends are therapists you can drink with” written on them. What started as a fun experiment quickly turned unintentionally creepy. “My mom made wine glasses to give to her friends for the holiday,” explained redditor Shagen34. “Her spacing was a little off on the first one.” With the correct spacing, they look a little more innocent. The handwritten font is still pretty creepy, though. But hey, it’s a fairly common mistake, at least according to various buffoons on TV. [h/t Tech Insider | Reddit]](http://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/wine-glass-correct.jpg)
