Happy birthday, Chuck Taylor!
WaPo: "It is not an angry shoe. It was never that kind of rebellion. It's the shoe of slacker ambivalence, indecision."

Jezebel: "This is getting indulgent, even for me, which I guess explains my reluctance to discuss Chuck Taylors, a three-year-old pair of which I happened to be wearing a minute ago before I realized I was wearing shoes while blogging. And that I would be more comfortable without them on. This thought does not occur to me nearly enough; the night before last I passed out still wearing them. Not that they are particularly comfortable. They are just not uncomfortable."

Y'know who rules? Brown University president Ruth Simmons. Back in 1992, when we were taking over buildings for need-blind admssions, then-president Vartan Gregorian was like, "We don't have the money," and we were all like, "It's a question of priorities!" and he was like "People give money for specific shit, like buildings with their names on them, and nobody wants to give money to let poor people in! You can't stick someone's name on the poor people!"

And then Ruth comes in and does need-blind admissions her first year as president. And does she stop there? The fact that you even ask that question demonstrates that you don't know Ruth Simmons very well. Now she's eliminated tuition for families making less than $60K.

What does she have to say about this? “Since 2001, Brown has made financial aid for our students one of our highest priorities."

Ruth Simmons, you totally rule.

This is what the internet is for: photos of Kanye West and Beyonce playing Connect Four.

Remember the first time you saw The Office (the British version)? Remember how Ricky Gervais's portrayal of David Brent made you feel physically uncomfortable, like you squirmed around in your seat and covered your eyes?

Well, check this dude out.

Can you spot the item that doesn't belong in this series?

And with Hillary's presidential bid, Condi as secretary of state, and an updated ass-kicking Bionic Woman on the air waves, one cannot say we are experiencing a "silencing of women's voices."

How can it be wrong when it feels so right?

Now available for the Wii: the legendary sequel to Super Mario Bros., never before released outside of Japan. A Nintendo spokesman once suggested that Shigeru Miyamoto might have been depressed when he created it, a claim also made about Shakespeare at the time of King Lear. Chris Suellentrop in Slate:

Again and again, the game uses your familiarity with Super Mario Bros. to subvert the playing experience.... In most games, you trust that the designer is guiding you, through the usual signposts and landmarks, in the direction that you ought to go. In the Real Super Mario Bros. 2, you have no such faith. Here, Miyamoto is not God but the devil. Maybe he really was depressed while making it—I kept wanting to ask him, Why have you forsaken me?

That sadistic torment, however, is central to the game's appeal.... The Real Super Mario Bros. 2 isn't just hard—it's "difficult," like a book or a movie that initially rebuffs you but becomes rewarding as you unlock its secrets.

Or this, from a review on a gaming site:

You must stay alert, concentrated, and you absolutely have to be open to the forced evolution of your style of play. The game designers are out to screw with your head and if you keep the right attitude about you, you’ll find yourself entering a hilariously intimate unspoken conversation with them.... What the game does expertly is lull us into a platformer complacency where we’ll speed along at top clip expecting the game to provide openings and landings for our jumps. Just when you’re at your most comfortable and you’re straddling that controller and spanking its side like you own the world, it’ll slam your face into a brilliantly placed yet avoidable enemy. It shows you the aporias in your game playing philosophy that you didn’t even know existed.

Apparently no one has ever asked the Internet this, so let me be the first: are more black people skateboarding these days? Or is it just in my neighborhood?

Your questions about those two creepy-looking people on the box of Mastermind, answered at last.

The Pear Cable company is offering a new line of 12-foot audio cables for $7,250. Dave Clark, editor of audiophile site Positive Feedback Online, describes them as "way better than anything I have heard ... very danceable cables." Professional skeptic James Randi offers Clark one million dollars if he can identify the cables in a blind test. Clark hasn't responded.

Butler, desnarked

Pulitzer-winning oversharer Robert Olen Butler has sent a lengthy response to Gawker about his loony e-mail re: his wife and Ted Turner. Gawker posted Butler's e-mail sliced into little chunks, with funny/snarky commentary in between. For those who want the soap opera without the commentary, I've put the pieces back together below.

Subject: Can you please give voice to this at your site?

I am sure there are a number of your followers who actually might want to understand this intense letter which was written in an extreme emotional circumstance. They encountered the email with no knowledge of two of the three principal players in the drama. They have only a sound-bite-and-media-spun understanding of the third. I can well see how a first reaction to the email by someone for whom it was not intended might be that it is only a bizarre and inappropriate document worthy of scorn.

But to begin to see the email in a fair way, you must understand this premise: I loved Elizabeth deeply for 13 years. I did not stop loving her when she told me what was happening between her and Ted. I love her still in an altered but sincere way. She loved me. She loves me still, but no longer as her husband. I'm sure many, if not all, of your readers have gone through their own dramas of love and loss. Love is not easily relinquished and it can shift its shape.

My drama of love and loss was particularly intense and had some strikingly unique characteristics. And it presented only a small range of choices, none of them good. In terms of the inevitable news of all this, my primary concern, of course, was with the community she and I lived in. If I had said nothing, the naked facts of the events would have meant that Elizabeth would be savaged by the rumor mill.

Even with the facts of her terrible childhood before them, some of the commenters on this and other forums are saying terrible and cruelly untrue things about her character. With no mitigating interpretation at all offered about what happened in our lives and in our marriage, you can well imagine how much worse the reaction would have been. It's just human nature. Nor would very simple, broad-outline public pronouncements have made any difference. If I had simply said something to the effect of "they're marrying for love and she and I will remain friends and I wish them well," it would not have been believed and the very same false assessment of her would have occurred. The explanation vacuum--even a partial one--especially given Ted Turner's involvement--would have been filled in a way that would have been unfairly critical of Elizabeth. Remember, I'm talking about the circle of our friends and acquaintances and colleagues here. Those were the people I had to focus on, not the wide general public. I never dreamed you all would get this intimately involved.

Either of those two choices--silence or vagueness--would have been the easy way out for me. I had nothing to gain from the letter I wrote unless it was a covert act of rage, an act of passive aggression. It was not. Your readers may not believe that. But my wife and I have warmly and lovingly spoken on the phone virtually every day since the breakup. We are going through this crisis of publicity together in a loving way. She is the one person in the world--the only one other than myself--who can judge if I am raging and aggressive over her. When I said in the email that she knew about, endorsed, and even encouraged the email, that was literally true. I showed the entire email to her before I sent it. She could have said not to do it. She could have significantly altered it. She did not. She made a few suggestions, which I implemented.

And the email was never a mass email. I chose five trusted grad students who know us both the best. I chose half a dozen faculty members who know us both the best. And they were asked, when the rumors reached them, to tell the appropriately nuanced story. Or to tell the fuller story on their own initiative--because everyone would soon know anyway. Yes, I sanctioned the use of the email I sent them in order to explain the circumstances to the people in our community who were hearing about this. Why should I avoid vagueness myself and then force them to be vague? Without that sanction to use the email, the explanation vacuum would have continued to form and be filled with lies. And this process worked exactly as I had hoped. That email went out six weeks ago. And faculty members and students alike have told me that all of the talk around campus and around town has been sympathetic and generous about both of us.

Now as to the intimate nature of the email, this is crucial to understand: there is not a single fact of Elizabeth's or Ted's or my personal lives that the intended audience could not easily have already known. Elizabeth has spoken and written openly, publicly, about everything in her childhood. Ted's persona and the details of the pattern of his love life are widely known (just read Jane Fonda's memoir). I do connect some dots to try to explain why Elizabeth has been drawn to him. But it was not meant to be a judgment against either of them. Ted's own difficult childhood is also public knowledge. We all of us often--some psychologists would say pretty much always--form adult relationships as an acting out of the basic love patterns of childhood relationships. There is nothing unseemly or wrong about this. It is the human condition.

And I tell you absolutely that Elizabeth did not do this for money and Ted did not do it lightly as conquest. They love each other deeply. And given what they've both been through in their lives, I expect them to be very good for each other. I love Elizabeth and her remarkable writing talent. I admire the wide-ranging good works Ted does to preserve the earth and prevent nuclear war. These are admirable people doing important work in the culture and in the world. I sincerely hope they have the rich happiness they deserve.

In spite of my previous chiding of you and your readers, I wish that happiness for all of you, as well. It's dangerous to live too deeply in a world of glib judgmentalism. And man, there is some truly legitimate short-burst writing talent among you all. But I hope at least some of you come to realize that vituperation, no matter how funny or elegantly expressed, is not an art form. Because some of you may well be capable of turning your talent with language--and your ferocious sense of right and wrong--to a more enduring purpose: to exploring, with courage and frankness and humor and compassion and moral insight, the truths of the human heart.

What do you do if you're a Pulitzer-winning novelist and your wife leaves you to join Ted Turner's stable of girlfriends? If you're Robert Olen Butler, you write a fucking batshit-insane e-mail to your grad students telling them about it. I don't usually hard-sell stuff, but you must read this right now.

Update: Butler tells the Post that his wife, Elizabeth Dewberry, read the e-mail before he sent it, and "she was weepingly grateful to me for it. It's full of love and compassion."

Update 2: NPR has an interview with Butler, which doesn't add much. At the end, there's this about Dewberry, who wouldn't talk on-air:

She said she had read Bob's e-mail but had not approved it. "There are inaccuracies in it," she said, but would not go into detail.

So, so true.

Vintage LOLcats!

Bored? Excellent logic problem here. Satisfying, legitimate, non-trick solution here. (The solution's in white type; select it with your cursor to read it.)

According to sources, Zack has posted some very minor spoilers for The Wire below. (They are properly flagged and everything.) While I think it's great that Zack is posting again, I am a total spoilerphobe and am thus unable to look at my own blog while his post is at the top. So here, to take up space, is a picture of a loldog. Borrowed from icanhascheezburger.com, obviously. By the way: am I the only one who thinks loldogs are way better than lolcats?

The hat problem:

Three players enter a room and a red or blue hat is placed on each person's head. The color of each hat is determined by a coin toss, with the outcome of one coin toss having no effect on the others. Each person can see the other players' hats but not his own.

No communication of any sort is allowed, except for an initial strategy session before the game begins. Once they have had a chance to look at the other hats, the players must simultaneously guess the color of their own hats or pass. The group shares a hypothetical $3 million prize if at least one player guesses correctly and no players guess incorrectly.

Can you figure out how to win more than 50 percent of the time? A Berkeley math professor did.

Weirdly, this does not appear to be a joke:

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. - Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

Everyone agrees that the New York subway map is impossible to read. Eddie Jabour is trying to do something about it. Check out his maps here.

Curious about how Zack and I used to spend our time c. 1984? Click here.