FunctionalAmbivalent

Coincidence Photography

Cool.

Hillbilly Highrise

Click here.

The Last Time Pictures Made Me Feel This Good, the Berlin Wall Was Coming Down

Andrew Sullivan is posting pictures of gay couples getting married in California. Some of them have been couples for decades, and their joy is not just love made manifest, but freedom as well. Anyone who can look at these pictures and not know absolutely that God intends love for all of us has a heart of stone. We should pray for those who see these pictures and feel threatened.

Your SUV Isn't Worth As Much This Afternoon As It Was This Morning

NewMexiKen does the math.

What I'm Here For: Mandatory Photography Edition

One link, 21 great mugshots.

If You're Not Reading PostSecret, You're Missing the Best Site on the Web

One of Those Rare Moments

There are experiences that are perfect, experiences in which context and concept and execution and happenstance come together to take whatever one is doing to the Platonic Ideal level. We toss "perfection" around too easily; in life, there are really very few moments that merit the word, and one of the keys to a fulfilling life is identifying and cherishing those experiences: looking toward the heavens in the Sistine Chapel, or inhaling deeply the aroma of well-aged Premier Cru, or even doing something as simple as watching the wind rustle the branches of tree on a warm summer day. It's hard to explain, but I know you know what I'm talking about: experiences that couldn't possibly be any more than what they are, that any change would diminish.

I had one of those yesterday, one of those experiences that was the absolute apotheosis of that particular experience, that could simply not have been any more of what it was than what it was.

I went to WalMart. There, I bought sweat pants for $7.99. The check-out lady was in need of emergency othodontia and had the yellowish complexion of a three-pack-a-day smoker. She called me "honey." The greeter at the door was a hundred years old and thanked me for shopping. Outside, I was confronted by a retirement-age WalMart employee collecting carts from the parking lot using an Isaac-Asimov-class robotic cart-pusher that enabled the frail old man to gather hundreds of carts at a time, weaving a long snake of carts back into the store to anxious consumers. My car was covered with the evidence of the passage of an apparently large flock of geese.

It was the perfect experience. I wouldn't change a thing.

Punctuation Is My Life

Those of us who can't spell, punctuate obsessively. So: Wikipedia has a discussion about serial commas.

Next up: The Semi-Colon: Friend or Foe?

What I'm Here For, Celebrity Quotes Edition

One link, 37 stupid celebrity quotes. Including this Joe Theisman classic:

“The word ‘genius’ isn’t applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.”

Better In Concept Than Execution

Things that are younger than John McCain.