Ennealogic 2012: Week 17

Our nine favorite things from the week. Pick and choose.

2. Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Great collection of essays here. All punchy, all a little ‘off,’ all with some excellent pop-culture insight. This is good non-fiction.

3. Satellites by Jonas Bendiksen. National Geographic photographer explores eastern Europe, photographs crashed satellites, tufts of cotton floating in the light of the mid-August sun. Someone spend $300 a send us a copy.

4. Lawsonomy. “He also developed his own highly unusual theories of physics, according to which such concepts as “penetrability”, “suction and pressure” and “zig-zag-and-swirl” were discoveries on par with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.[2] He published numerous books on these concepts, all set in a distinctive typography. Lawson repeatedly predicted the worldwide adoption of Lawsonian principles by the year 2000.”

5. Discordianism. “It was founded circa 1958–1959 after the publication of its (first) holy book the Principia Discordia, written by Malaclypse the Younger and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst after a series of shared hallucinations at a bowling alley.”

6. Office Girl by Joe Meno. We just got a review copy of this book this week, and we’re super pumped about it. The release party is coming up soon (June 28!)

7. Magic Fly by Space.

8. This list of the stinkiest places on Earth. “Tourists brave the stench in order to see not just the pooping pinipeds, but also the great white sharks that feed on them. Sharks in the area are famous for attacking the seals from below. The great whites frequently launch themselves out of the water with the squirming seals clenched in its jaws. The airborne sharks are poster boy predators for the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week.”

9. Great blog post about Serbian cusswords. “For example: “Jebem ti mater” (“I (will) fuck/shit on your mother”) or “Jebem ti Boga” (“I (will) fuck/shit on your God”) can get you beaten up, knifed, or shot in certain rural places if you aim it at someone. It’s the kind of thing people used to deliberately start a fight. On the other hand “Jebem ti juvu od čavala Isusovih” (Fuck the soup made with the nails Jesus was crucified with) is sometihng you might yell if you drop a tray you were carrying, hit yourself on the thumb with a hammer, or are just frustrated because you can’t seem to expalin sometihing to someone. The embelished ones are more like a contest of experssing frustration, agony or exasperation and are surprisingly common but, as a rule, if it includes God or someone’s Mother and “Jebem ti” – them’s fighting words.”