28 September 2012

Weekend linkage

"Aww, do you feel as bad as you look?"
-Jared

(I did. My response was something like "urrrghmmph.")

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How to identify a hipster wedding. Now, all these things are wonderful-- who doesn't like fishtail braids and letterpress?-- but really. I think we can all acknowledge that they are No Longer Original.

This wallpaper, on the other hand, is very original. And very cool.

Speaking of coolness and hipsters and suchlike, Dinosaur Comics has its own spin on the gluten-free craze. I don't eat gluten myself, and I still laughed my head off.

Best word ever?

This NYT article on cheating in high schools. Two thoughts after reading it: one, though the impulse to cheat won't disappear by changing the environment, I agree that we put too much weight on test scores these days. (Jared and I were just talking about this. Though we both excelled grade-wise in school, we don't consider ourselves to be all that smart, just good at learning things and even better at regurgitating them. Also we don't procrastinate. We had classmates who earned lower numerical grades but who have far better ideas and are much more interesting conversationalists than either of us. So test scores = meh.) Two, these high-achieving kids are obsessed with getting into a "good college," which to them is Ivy League, and they'll do anything to get there. That is all kinds of wrong. At the risk of losing all my Hillsdale cred, I'm going to posit that you don't need a college degree to be a fully actualized, successful, and thoughtful human being. Let alone a degree from Harvard.

2 comments:

  1. Matthew and I vote for perambulator and brouhaha over diphthong.

    (kerfuffle is good too)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Defenestrate is currently my favorite word...It's a pretty hard one to beat for being fun to say and having a cool meaning.

    ReplyDelete