This tweet

Sparked an eruption of sarcastic responses trending under #RacismEndedWhen, a hashtag coined by @FeministaJones

https://twitter.com/attackerman/statuses/407189904288804864

https://twitter.com/mat_johnson/statuses/407209453344153600

https://twitter.com/desusnice/statuses/407188687173468160

https://twitter.com/backr0nym/statuses/410858068998496256

You can read more over at…wait for it…BUZZFEED!

I listened to The Tipping Point on a long car ride once. Maybe if I find myself on another long car ride, with no company, no cell phone, no snacks, no scenery, no radio reception, and nothing else to listen to but The Tipping Point, I’ll listen again. Or maybe I’ll just visualize this and skip the monotone:

The Movie is Do the Right Thing, and the director is Spike Lee, which we will find out in a few paragraphs. But Scocca resists naming specifics at this point for a few reasons:

1. He is situating us in 1989, when Spike Lee was a young filmmaker without the name recognition he enjoys today.

2. By not mentioning the director he lends a certain allegorical power to the example–it is more salient, for example, that the movie was directed by a young black man, than that it was directed by the individual Spike Lee.

3. He expects the audience to recognize the allusion. Not mentioning specifics establishes a bond between writer and reader–they share a set of associations and don’t need proper nouns to get on the same page.

Spike Lee as Mookie in Do The Right Thing

Scocca’s primary targets:

• Buzzfeed, the viral content aggregator list machine (“15 Heartbreaking Ways To Increase Your Advertising Revenue”). He takes aim at the sites “No Haters” policy, paying special attention to Book Editor Isaac Fitzgerald’s avowed commitment to the policy, “Why waste breath talking smack about something?..The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”

• Dave Eggers, and other established/establishment authors who respond to their critics' motivations rather than the substance of their critiques: Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy

• David Denby, whose book Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation is one long endorsement of a “no haters” policy. Denby’s lamentation of snark is the efficient cause of “On Smarm.”

Sperm whales have been found with what appear to be circular scars left by Giant Squid suckers, which likely means that Sperm Whales do sometimes hunt that big calamari. In general though, they like to eat smaller squids.

Sucker scars on a piece of Sperm Whale skin

Like the squid, octopus and nautilus (and presumedly, the kraken), the cuttlefish is a cephalopod.

Anak was a giant, according to the bible.

Here, Melville posits that the legendary kraken may actually be the giant squid, perennial natural antagonist of Moby Dick’s species, the sperm whale.

Like the biblical Leviathan, the kraken is a mythical sea monster. It is said to resemble a squid or octopus, and lurk in the waters around Norway and Greenland. References to such a beast date back to the ancient Icelandic saga Örvar-Oddr, and have captured the modern imagination to such an extent that it has appeared in modern poetry, literature and popular culture. Perhaps most famously, the kraken lent its name to the sea monster in the Greek myth of Perseus as depicted in the Clash of the Titans films, inspiring a series of memes.

Erik Pontoppidan was a Danish Bishop and Historian who wrote about Krakken in his Natural History of Norway

Indeed. Until 2002, when a live Giant Squid was captured near the surface of the water off the coast of Japan, a live specimen of the creature had never been definitively observed by a human being.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCWop491Q9Y