Quotes

Erin McKean, frock star and lexicographer, offers some wisdom:

You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked "female".

Synaesthesia makes for the best web conversations, even on Ask MetaFilter:

My calendar is a bit like a teardrop-shaped clock going counterclockwise. If you took a clock with a rubbery outer rim, grabbed it with a hook at one o'clock and pulled it a little bit up and to the right, you'd have my calendar. The rounded point of the teardrop is January 1, with the months running counter clockwise from there, although somehow 12 o'clock is only mid-January. June starts around 8 o'clock, and the summer takes up the whole bottom, with 4 o'clock being about mid-September. My birthday, in late July, is at six o'clock. Christmas is around 2 o'clock. I experience January and February as cold, dull months which drag on far too long, but this doesn't seem to be reflected spacially in my calendar.

What happens when a gaming site pauses from fawning over the latest lame sequel and does some actual journalism? Game Revolution:

First off, I have absolute proof that video games are not the cause of this epidemic of youth violence in America. No, really, I do. Ready?

There is no epidemic of youth violence in America.

Lonnae O'Neal Parker, genuine b-girl:

When those of us who grew up with rap saw signs that it was turning ugly, we turned away. We premised our denial on a sort of good-black-girl exceptionalism: They came for the skeezers but I didn't speak up because I'm no skeezer, they came for the freaks, but I said nothing because I'm not a freak. They came for the bitches and the hos and the tricks. And by the time we realized they were talking about bitches from 8 to 80, our daughters and our mommas and their own damn mommas, rap music had earned the imprimatur of MTV and Martha Stewart and even the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Kingsley Jegan Joseph:

In an effort to help further the stereotyped humor popular in these modern times, I have compiled a web 2.0 compliant, clustered stereotype tag soup for India:

1. Call center, outsourcing, BPO, fake accents, difficult accents, cheat, incompetent, insincere, fake names
2. Hindu, animal worship, vegetarian, unpronounceable name, orthodox, culturally backwards, caste, social oppression, bride burning, mama’s boys
3. Muslim, terrorist, violent
4. Sissy, Apu, 7-11, K-mart