Newley Purnell

Speaking of Matt Gross/the Frugal Traveler, let’s give it up for another peripatetic Matt. I speak of Matt Hoffman, a dude who visited some 39 countries and did his goofy (yet oddly infectious) dance in each of them. Check out the video above or visit his site.

(Via.)

Tim Kreider had an amusing op-ed in yesterday’s NY Times regarding the recent controversy surrounding Pluto’s classification as a planet.

Pluto is what my old astronomy textbook rather judgmentally called a “deviant,” and I’ve always felt a little defensive on its behalf.

I’ve long regarded Saturn’s misty tantalizing moon Titan as the Homecoming Queen of the solar system, courted and fawned over, stringing us along with teasing glimpses under her atmosphere, while Pluto was more like the chubby Goth chick who wrote weird poems about dead birds and never talked to anybody. Still, I just can’t stand by and watch as the solar system’s Fat Girl gets pushed down into ever-more ignominious substrata of social ostracism.

All I really wanted was a little velvet-rope treatment for Pluto. I didn’t expect them to throw open the doors to all this Kuiper Belt riffraff.

It’s like that point when your party’s grown out of control and you look around and ask: Who are these people? Sedna? Xena? Ceres? Ceres is an asteroid, for God’s sake. Why not just make 1997 XF11 or Greenland or Harriet Meiers a planet?

Thanks to A for the link.

While I admit that I don’t read much about basketball generally or the NBA specifically, this just might be the most amusing — and incisive — thing I’ve ever read about the sport.

And speaking of dogs, let’s just be thankful that there’re no devious little simians in Bangkok to tease hapless soi pooches.

I am very conspicuous in Thailand. I’m very tall. I’m white. And I constantly do silly farang (foreigner) things — like sit on the ground and eat my lunch.

A captured this excellent 30-second video of me today at an outdoor market about 500 meters from my apartment. (Click on the image above or go here to watch it.) I’d bought some chicken with roti and decided to sit on the ground to consume my snack. Unfortunately for me, a gaggle of Thai ladies saw me do this and were consumed with laughter — why would I sit on the dirty street when there were tables nearby? They found this to be hilarious. They guffawed and pointed at me, which I quite enjoyed. Then, with characteristic courtesy, they directed me to a table to sit down.

Indeed, making a fool of myself in Thailand is something of an inadvertent past time. Longtime newley.com readers will recall that I did this for the first time way back in 2001. And I wrote about it in an essay called “Soup to Nuts.”

Garrison Keillor:

Times have changed, and I know this because I have children, two of them, one born in the old days and one in modern times. One was born back before seat belts, when a child might ride standing up in the front seat next to Daddy as he drove 75 mph across North Dakota, and nobody said boo, though nowadays Daddy would do jail time for that and be condemned by all decent people. My younger child rides in a pod-like car seat, belted in like a little test pilot. She likes it.

The older child grew up inhaling clouds of secondary smoke, and the younger one lives in a house in which nobody ever thinks about smoking, though sometimes a guest has lurked in the backyard like a convicted sex offender, and consumed a cigarette. The elder child was raised on hamburgers and hot dogs; ground meat was our friend; melted cheese made everything taste better. The younger one lives in the House of Organic Leaves, where beef is viewed with suspicion, as if it might contain heroin. The younger one’s rearing was guided by a ten-foot shelf of books by psychologists. The older one was raised by pure chance.

I don’t miss the old days. Well, actually I do, sometimes. I miss the jolliness. We had lovely illusions in the old days. We felt giddy and free in that speeding car. The cigarette was a token of our immortality. We chowed down on whatever tasted good. We thrived on ignorance. We all were a little jiggly around the waist and didn’t worry about it. My in-laws were suburban Republicans who kicked off family dinners with hefty Manhattans, which eased the social strain considerably. After two, my father-in-law and I got almost chummy. He knew I was a Democrat and a heretic in suburbia; in the gentle mist of bourbon, it began to matter less and less. They won’t tell you this at Hazelden, but alcohol can be a real mercy sometimes.

Read the whole thing.

This year’s sleeper hit: Brokeback Top Gun. You saw it here first.

Let your freak flags fly, is what I say. When in Bahrain, as the saying goes. Perhaps his burka was at the cleaner?

Kids, it’s time, once again, for the 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005 edition. I think #1 is right-on. (Though, if you ask me, #50 gets a bad rap.)

– Brangelina are with child!

– New gadgets from Apple! Drool!

– Chuck Norris responds to the Facts About Chuck Norris Spoof Site. My brother has some commentary. (Via BB.)

Last night Faye and Jake and Chad and I launched into a discussion Chris D. and I have had occasionally in the past: How many cats would it take to pull a dog sled*?

I find this conundrum to be an especially intriguing thought experiment. How many cats does it take to pull what a typical dog can pull? 50? 100? I argue that a direct ratio of cat to dog pulling power is problematic, as my feeling is that cats cannot pull with as much torque compared to body weight as dogs can.

Anywho, we had a laugh about it last night and then Faye posed the question to Google this morning. She emailed me the following incredible Web site on which the above photo can be found: SledKitty.com.

Quoth the anonymous Northern Virginia resident who I admire for his/her sense of humor and desire to see a ridiculous project through to its absurd end:

One day, reading about how even small dogs can pull sleds, I got an idea. Sled cats! More specifically, sled cat. One of my cats, Socky, is a very special animal. He, unlike most cats, has been trained to do a variety of activities…Anyway, if small dogs can do it, I thought, why can’t Socky? So I set about training the world’s first sled cat.

Don’t miss the site, which contains additional hilarious photos of Socky competing in the “Hallditarod.”

*I am well aware that felines are much less obedient than canines. To those who say, “But Newley, you dumbass, cats would never pull a dog sled like pooches would — they’d all take off in different directions,” I respond thusly: The question is not if they’d be willing to pull the sled, but rather how much power they’d generate if they did. Besides, I believe cats might be made to all head in the same direction if you implemented a sort of catnip-and-stick apparatus, which would be, like, a big long stick with a sack of catnip hanging off the end.

The most recent Saturday Night Live was largely lame, but it did feature a fantastic Chronicles of Narnia rap video.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Mars and Venus meet in a creative writing class.

How come no one told me that the entire “Big Lebowski” screenplay is available online as a text file?! I need to know these things.

Big+Lebowski

Jim Anchower’s real-world simulacrum pays Defective Yeti a visit. Hilarity ensues.