Stultitia Delenda Est

…but even cooler and more useless. This is professional stunt man Damien Walters’ 2011 show reel. He’s currently running stunts for the next James Bond movie. It’s insane what the human body is capable of, and this many certainly puts it through its paces:

“Ten or twelve years ago, being engaged in a bombastic discussion with what was then known as an intellectual Socialist … I was greatly belabored and incommoded by his long quotations from a certain Prof. Dr. Thorstein Veblen, then quite unknown to me. My antagonist manifestly attached a great deal of importance to these borrowed sagacities, for he often heaved them at me in lengths of a column or two, and urged me to read every word of them. I tried hard enough but found it impossible going. The more I read them, in fact, the less I could make of them, and so in the end, growing impatient and impolite, I denounced this Prof. Veblen as a geyser of pish-posh, refused to waste any more time upon his incomprehensible syllogisms, and applied myself to the other Socialist witnesses in the case, seeking to set fire to their shirts.”
-H. L. Mencken, Prejudices – First Series

Vis.

We found out why your shipment was delayed:

Disclosure Notice

There by plague in these here parts. The downside of living with someone who works with sick kids all the time is that she brings home all manner of nasty bugs, which means I get sick more often than usual. The upside is that she tends to get sick slightly sooner, so at least I can see it coming.

So long story short, my girlfriend and I are both sick. I’m having a hard time concentrating through the Dayquil haze, so important bloggings today.

In place of deep thoughts or groovy music, I offer you the following Public Service Announcement:

Click for source

And previously.

And right now, South Korean shoppers have a little more of it than we do:

A new virtual store developed by Euro grocery giant Tesco for its line of South Korean Home Plus supermarkets lets customers browse store shelves for the products they want just as if they were in a physical store. But they’re not. They’re on a subway platform. …

Tesco has simply plastered the walls of a subway station with visual recreations of grocery aisles. Each item has a QR code emblazoned on it. Snap that code with the Home Plus smartphone app, and it goes straight into the virtual shopping cart.

Customers can then check out via their smartphones as they step onto their morning trains. The groceries are delivered to their homes that evening at a specified time, saving office drones the added hassle of braving a crowded supermarket during the late-day rush.

…here’s a video of a blind kitten figuring out how to play with toys he can’t see:

I stumbled across this incredible interview with H. L. Mencken not long ago. Mencken is as quick-witted, well-spoken, and cantankerous in person as one would expect. Start with the video below and then click through the whole series. (Each part is helpfully posted as a response to its prior part.)

I’m thrilled we live in an era when this is available for anyone to enjoy. Mencken is one of the greatest writers and greatest minds that America has ever produced. It’s fascinating, after having read many hundreds of thousands of words that he’s written, to hear his voice and the way he composed his thoughts while speaking. His wit is just as evident in his speech as in was in his writing.

He was truly a national treasure, and I don’t know that America has ever produced a literary writer or thinker that was his equal.

“Milton [Friedman] argued that a society with more wealth can better pursue its transcendent goals, and more wealth is produced by maximizing profits. THat’s right, and is one crucial argument for capitalism. He further argued that a hired manager for Boeing who improves his social standing in Chicago by getting the corporation to give to the Lyric Opera is stealing money from the stockholders. That’s right, too, though there is a contrary economic argument, namely that the ability to play the noble lord with the stockholders’ money is part of executive compensation. The stockholders would have to pay the manager more in cash than they do if they insisted that he not be allowed to give away the corporation’s money to worthy causes.”

-Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues

She then goes on to note that Milton Friedman advocated maximizing value within ethical constraints, something that often gets missed by his detractors.

Just because I hadn’t seen it in awhile and stumbled across it again:

(Neither Safe for Work Nor For Sanity [NSFWNS])