Dubai is a place for the shallow and fickle. Tabloid celebrities and worn out sports stars are sponsored by swollen faced, botox injected, perma-tanned European property developers to encourage the type of people who are impressed by fame itself, rather than what originated it, to inhabit pastiche Mediterranean villas on fake islands. Its a grotesquely leveraged version of time-share where people are sold a life in the same way as being peddled a set of steak knives.

—David Galbraith hasn’t much good to say about Dubai [via kottke]

Here’s the thing though. This kid “camped out” for months for that ticket, for the opportunity to get painted up, to cheer on the might Blue Devils in their heated rivalry. He’ll cherish the memory of that one night, in mid January, when he took down, like, half a pint of Goldschläger and totally almost hooked up with that one girl. You remember - the one, from that class. At least he thinks she was a girl - it is Duke, after all.

The Kindle’s text-to-speech feature is illegal according to the Authors Guild

Just when you thought asinine applications of stupid copyright laws couldn’t get any dumber.

Geoff Barnes accidentally started a meme trying to make a joke about Buddhism. Kind of a koan in itself. I love these kinds of stories.

Cessna. Because only pussies are fiscally responsible.

Word

Awwww

The only part of the Grammys worth watching, with less Jonas Brothers

Christian Bale-gerant + Songsmith = pure gold [via thedailywhat]

The importance of religion, a state-by-state look. Or, another thing to overlay on top of that map of slavery and per capita distributions of Waffle Houses and Wal-Marts. For the record, I was born in the most religious state (Mississippi), spent my formative years in two, four, five and nine (Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and Texas) and now live in one of the least religious (Washington). You?