10 Gadgets You’d Be a Fool to Buy Right Now

The problem with buying gadgets is that they're bound to be obsolete at some point. But, as Laptop Mag's Avram Piltch explains, that point is way sooner for some things than others. Here are 10 gadgets you should avoid like the plague right now, however tempting they might seem:

They say patience is a virtue, but like temperance and chastity, it's not much fun. Unfortunately, if you want to reach a state of true techstasy, you may need to repress your desire to buy a new gadget today and wait for the next version to come out.

To be fair, sometimes now is the best time to buy a particular device and sometimes you drop your phone into a public toilet and have to replace it right away. But when you buy that 3G phone a month before its hot new 4G replacement comes out, you might as well buy an "I'm with stupid" t-shirt for your friends to wear when you go out together.

Here are 10 products you'd be a fool to buy today.

by Avram Piltch, Gizmodo |  Read more:
Top Image via Shutterstock/WilleeCole

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How to Destroy the Internet

Remember when Anonymous threatened to destroy the entire internet? We laughed, and ultimately their words were just hacker hubris. But it got us thinking—could someone actually destroy the Internet?

We did some digging, and guess what: With enough effort, the entire thing can be shattered. Physically. Completely. Here's how to kill the net.

Before we destroy mankind's greatest, vastest machine, let's get something polite out of the way: don't. Destroying the Internet's core infrastructure would constitute the greatest act of global terrorism in history and/or a declaration of war against every sovereign nation in existence—to say nothing of the danger it would put both you and others in. This is a thought exercise.

So put on your thought exercise caps and come with us on a journey across the world. Let's figure out how this could possibly be done. Let's figure out exactly what it would take, what cords to rip—because the Internet under attack is an oft-invoked idea. What would true defeat really mean? What would the web's downfall even look like? Where would it happen? Core parts of the Internet have been (digitally) assaulted before—and there's no reason to believe it won't happen again.

The first step on this trip is mental. We need to begin by no longer treating the Internet like a ghost. It's made of more metal, plastic, and fiber than you can fathom—and it's spread across the whole world, a monster machine that hugs the entire globe. So we hunted down the web's physical foundation, across land and sea, to pinpoint exactly what you'd need to take out. Hypothetically. It turns out, Anonymous' threat isn't insane—just the way they talked about doing it. You can't destroy a signal while using it; the Internet's destruction requires analog violence, not some beefed up DDoS strike.

We always think of threats agains the Internet as cyberwarfare or some abstraction, virtual to the point of meaningless. But this is mostly bluster and software-mongering. The enormous, invisible truth of the Internet is that it's enormously strong. There's no main switch, no self-destruct button, no wire to be snipped for an easy blackout. The Internet, through a mix of chaotic serendipity and brilliant planning, is redundant to the point of near invincibility. Like a fiber optic hydra, you can hack off great expanses of it, and the thing will keep chugging. It's smart—almost self—sustaining, able to repair and reroute its paths from one continent and country to another, making up detours on the fly. This happens from time to time. Alan Mauldin, an expert with Internet infrastructure analysis firm TeleGeography, rattles off a few recent instances:


In February, two of the three cables serving East Africa were cut in the Red Sea. It impaired connectivity for some customers in a few Eastern African countries, but most folks were smart enough to have capacity on multiple cables on both coasts. There have been many cases of multiple cables damaged in the Med., Red Sea, and South China Sea in the past 5 to 6 years. The Japanese tsunami last year damaged a lot of cables - yet, the Internet connectivity to Japan was relatively unaffected due to multiple restoration options.

The internet: tsunami proof.

But for all its durability, the Internet isn't immortal. It's strong because it was built to be strong. And because it was built, like you'd build a monument or bench, it can be destroyed. Just like every other physical thing on the planet. We think of it as a crystal cloud, an inexorable force of the cosmos that runs on its own, as susceptible to destruction as gravity. But let's get one thing straight: With enough effort, you could destroy the internet as thoroughly as a tree chopped straight through. The thousand-headed beast can be decapitated in full, not just hindering it, but slaying it. You just need to know where to start slicing.

by Sam Biddle, Gizmodo |  Read more:
Photo: Clay Irving

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Diplomatic Barnacles

It’s well known that the barnacle compensates for its lack of mobility – once it is clinging to a ship – by being prodigiously well-endowed in the mating department. What is much less well known is how barnacles attach themselves to ships in the first place. This is one of nature’s miracles. Barnacles have special echo-sensing membranes which detect ships from miles away. As a ship approaches the barnacles detach themselves from the rocks on the ocean bed below. Using unique internal sacs which extract oxygen from the water and turn it into compressed air, they swarm upwards in huge flocks and finally flip themselves round to lock onto the ship’s underside. This prodigious feat almost always happens at night, so it has never been captured on film.

The point about barnacles is that once they are locked on to the bottom of ships in vast numbers they slow down the vessel and are impossible to remove without a tedious dry-dock scraping operation. As with ships, so with the Diplomatic Corps. Each capital city has its own serene group of ambassadors. And each serene group of ambassadors has its barnacles, people who attach themselves to the Corps and intend to stay firmly attached.

New ambassadors in town are especially vulnerable. After presenting credentials you arrive at one of your first national day receptions. Scarcely are you armed with your first drink before an Unctuous Barnacle tracks you down. ‘Your Excellency, welcome to Transylvania. My name is Sasha Limpit. Allow me to present my card and the DVD of my latest exhibition which opens next week – I do hope you be able to join us!’

Having no idea who this fellow is, you politely accept the card and DVD, and are thereby well and truly barnacled. Mr and Mrs Limpit are now your best friends. They pester you for invitations to your own receptions, and more often than not you will promise to invite them just to get some peace. Now duly reaffirmed as prestigious guests at prestigious dramatic occasions, the Barnacle is poised to pounce on the next sucker who comes to town. (...)

However, ambassadors know that entertaining a few eccentric barnacles now and then comes with the job – they are a harmless part of the local landscape. However, on one posting I encountered the Great-Grandmother of all Diplomatic Barnacles, a barnacle who operated on a truly European if not international scale. This is her story.

by Charles Crawford, Diplomat Magazine |  Read more:
h/t The Browser

A User’s Guide to Finding Storage Space in the Cloud

One day, you’ll gather the grandchildren around you and tell them wondrous tales of life before cloud computing: how you used to put information, photos and music on a floppy disk, a memory card or a USB fob to carry it from one device to another. You’ll tell them how it was called sneakernet because you had to physically move the data.

They will look at you funny, pat your hand and continue to take personal cloud storage for granted.

Now, however, you can be forgiven for thinking it is a bit of a marvel. A number of companies store your data free and make it accessible to whatever device you are using, wherever you are, as long as you have Internet connection.

For those using thumb drives and external hard drives, think of cloud storage as just another way to back up data, but on a remote server. Add in the ability to synchronize and the service becomes even more appealing.

What is different now is the ability to synchronize seamlessly across multiple devices: computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets. And of course, as Google, Microsoft, Dropbox and others compete for your business, the sheer amount of data to be shared and stored continues to expand.

Here is how to start using it right now.

GOOGLE DRIVE Google Drive, which can be downloaded at www.drive.google.com, should appeal to people who use Gmail and Google Docs online. Instead of e-mailing documents back and forth (and to yourself) on Gmail, you can share large files via Google Drive. (Photos can be shared via Google’s Picasa photo platform or through the Google Plus social media community).

As with Google Docs, you must be online to share and collaborate (though, you can make a file available offline). Still, you can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations online, and numerous people can edit the same document at the same time. It stores every change made and you can look back as far as 30 days to earlier versions.

Google Drive can recognize multiple formats — over 30 file types — on your Web browser, even if you don’t have the program that created the file installed, and the service will convert the files to a Google Docs format.

by Mickey Meece, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Mark Shaver

Patrick Fitzgerald, Transcendent Federal Prosecutor, Steps Down

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who announced Wednesday that he will soon leave the Justice Department after 24 years of remarkable service to his country, is a transcendent figure in contemporary American law. He could -- and should -- be the next attorney general of the United States. He could -- and should -- be the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He could -- and should -- be the next justice of the United States Supreme Court. He would excel in each of these offices. And each, frankly, could use a dose of him right about now.

Fitzgerald leaves his Illinois post with a peerless record as a federal prosecutor. He prosecuted al Qaeda figures in the African Embassy bombing trial -- and won. He prosecuted Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik, for the first World Trade Center bombing -- and won. He prosecuted Lewis "Scooter" Libby in the CIA leak case -- and won. He prosecuted Rod Blagojevich -- and won. Unaffected by the U.S. attorney scandal, unassuming in his private life, he is precisely what we fantasize our federal prosecutors to be: a blend of Elliot Ness, Atticus Finch, and Gregory House.

From a press release announcing Fitzgerald's resignation (effective June 30):

Mr. Fitzgerald has overseen thousands of criminal prosecutions, as well as taking a hands-on role in many significant cases involving public corruption, international terrorism and terrorism financing, corporate fraud, organized crime, and violent crime (including narcotics and gang prosecutions). These cases have included trials of traditional organized crime bosses who were responsible for notorious murders, corporate executives who cheated public shareholders, former Chicago officials who rigged city hiring, and defendants who supported foreign terrorism.

The guy's got stones. Major stones. Think the sunshine patriots in Congress would think twice before telling Attorney General Fitzgerald that America's federal civilian courts can't handle terror trials? Think those odious bank executives would tremble a little more over their bonus checks if they knew that FBI Director Fitzgerald was investigating fraud and greed on Wall Street? Think the Supreme Court -- eight of whose justices never even served as trial judges -- would benefit from Fitzgerald's real-world perspective? After nearly a quarter of a century, he is still a breath of fresh air. And who else in the law can you say that about?

by Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Photo: Reuters

Paresh Maity, found at jamaatart.com
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The Web Gets Smarter

Last Wednesday, with relatively little fanfare, Google introduced a new technology called Google Knowledge Graph. Type in “François Hollande,” and you are offered a capsule history (with links) to his children, partner, birthday, education, and so forth. In the short-term, Knowledge Graph will not make a big difference in your world—you might get much the same information by visiting Hollande’s Wikipedia page, and a lot of people might still prefer to ask their friends. But what’s under the hood represents a significant change in engineering for the world’s largest search-engine company. And more than that, in a decade or two, scientists and journalists may well look back at this moment as the dividing line between machines that dredged massive amounts of data—with no clue what that data meant—and machines that started to think, just a little bit, like people.

Since its beginning, Google has used brute force as its main strategy to organize the Internet’s knowledge, and not without reason. Google has one of the largest collections of computers in the world, wired up in parallel, housing some of the largest databases in the world. Your search queries can be answered so quickly because they are outsourced to immense data farms, which then draw upon enormous amounts of precompiled data, accumulated every second by millions of virtual Google “spiders” that crawl the Web. In many ways, Google’s operation has been reminiscent of I.B.M.’s Deep Blue chess-playing machine, which conquered all human challengers not by playing smarter but by computing faster. Deep Blue won through brute force and not by thinking like humans do. The computer was all power, no finesse.  (...)

For the last decade, most work in artificial intelligence has been dominated by approaches similar to Google’s: bigger and faster machines with larger and larger databases. Alas, no matter how capacious your database is, the world is complicated, and data dredging alone is not enough. Deep Blue may have conquered the chess world, but humans can still trounce computers in the ancient game of Go, which has a larger board and more possible moves. Even in a Web search, Google’s bread and butter, brute force is defeated often, and annoyingly, by the problem of homonyms. The word “Boston,” for instance, can refer to a city in Massachusetts or to a band; “Paris” can refer to the city or to an exhibitionist socialite.

To deal with the “Paris” problem, Google Knowledge Search revives an idea first developed in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, known as semantic networks, that was a first guess at how the human mind might encode information in the brain. In place of simple associations between words, these networks encode relationships between unique entities. Paris the place and Paris the person get different unique I.D.s—sort of like bar codes or Social Security numbers—and simple associations are replaced by (or supplemented by) annotated taxonomies that encode relationships between entities. So, “Paris1” (the city) is connected to the Eiffel tower by a “contains” relationship, while “Paris2” (the person) is connected to various reality shows by a “cancelled” relationship. As all the places, persons, and relationships get connected to each other, these networks start to resemble vast spiderwebs. In essence, Google is now attempting to reshape the Internet and provide its spiders with a smarter Web to crawl.

by Gary Marcus, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration by Arnold Roth

New and Frozen Frontier Awaits Offshore Oil Drilling

Shortly before Thanksgiving in 2010, the leaders of the commission President Obama had appointed to investigate the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico sat down in the Oval Office to brief him.

After listening to their findings about the BP accident and the safety of deepwater drilling, the president abruptly changed the subject.

“Where are you coming out on the offshore Arctic?” he asked.

William K. Reilly, a former chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and a commission co-chairman, was startled, as was Carol M. Browner, the president’s top adviser at the time on energy and climate change. Although a proposal by Shell to drill in the Arctic had been a source of dissension, it was not a major focus of the panel’s work.

“It’s not deep water, right?” the president said, noting that Shell’s proposal involved low-pressure wells in 150 feet of water, nothing like BP’s 5,000-foot high-pressure well that blew out in the gulf.

“What that told me,” Mr. Reilly later recounted, “was that the president had already gotten deeply into this issue and was prepared to go forward.”

The president’s preoccupation with the Arctic proposal, even as the nation was still reeling from the BP spill, was the first hint that Shell’s audacious plan to drill in waters previously considered untouchable had gone from improbable to inevitable.

Barring a successful last-minute legal challenge by environmental groups, Shell will begin drilling test wells off the coast of northern Alaska in July, opening a new frontier in domestic oil exploration and accelerating a global rush to tap the untold resources beneath the frozen ocean.

It is a moment of major promise and considerable danger.

by John M. Broder and Clifford Krauss, NY Times |  Read more: 
Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Henri Matissse, Creole Dance, 1951. Nice, Matisse Museum.
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Not a Creature Was Stirring

The preview screening of the studio’s new comic blockbuster, calculated to jump-start buzz among Manhattan’s movers and shakers, evoked the kind of silence one associates with outer space. When the credits rolled, heralding the evaporation of a hundred and eighty million smackeroos, the audience rose and shuffled toward the exits like the brethren en route to their factory in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” While the assorted opinion-makers regained consciousness in the cold air of Broadway, I found myself vis-à-vis none other than Nestor Grossnose, a porky nudnik I knew from our years frequenting the great wheat-germ dispensaries of Sunset Boulevard. Grossnose was a Hollywood producer who had mastered the knack of creating insolvency from the most promising projects. Less vigilant fressers in our golden years, we now repaired to the Carnegie Deli to deconstruct some pickled meat and eviscerate what we’d just seen.

“It’s all schlock,” the impresario railed. “Chazerai for pubescent sub-mentals.” Producing a clipping from his pants pocket, he said, “Lamp this. I culled it from a little magazine called The Week. Is this or is this not our open sesame to Fort Knox?” The kernel of the Grossnose squib centered on Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, where it seemed that a pizzeria owner was charged by police with planting mice in rival pizza shops. “We never had anything like this,” the Police Superintendent said, “where mice have been used as an instrument of crime.”

Grossnose looked for my reaction to the tabloid snippet, smiling like a man with aces back to back.

“The minute I eyeballed this I started working on my acceptance speech,” he said, knocking back his Dr. Brown’s.

“What are you saying?” I asked, realizing that his latest film, “Holiday for Cretins,” had garnered just two Oscar nods, and not from the Academy but from inmates at Bellevue.

Nothing short of mace could have prevented him from pitching his new scenario, which I succumbed to while vaguely discerning the Hindenburg floating into view.

by Woody Allen, The New Yorker |  Read more:
iStockphoto via: Discover Magazine

Circle of Presence

Most of us have been annoyed by someone who was unable to give another human being their undivided attention for more than seconds at a time. And perhaps more significantly, most of us have felt the pull to do the same: We have struggled to keep our attention focused on the person talking to us as we know we ought to because some shred of our humanity remains intact. We know very well that the person in front of us is more significant in the moment than the text that just made our phone vibrate in our pocket. We have been on both ends of the kind of distractedness that the mere presence of a smartphone can occasion, and we are alive enough to be troubled by it. We begin to feel the force of Simone Weil’s judgment: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

So Turkle’s piece, and others like it, resonate despite the theoretical shortcomings that make some scholars cringe. What difference does it make that some study showed that a statistically significant portion of the population reports feeling less lonely when using social media if I can’t get the person standing two feet away from me to treat me with the barest level of decency?

The recurring question remains, however, “Are smartphones at fault?” Is Google making us stupid? Is Facebook making us lonely? But that’s not the best way of stating the question. Rather than begin with a loaded question, perhaps it’s better to try to clarify the situation. What is happening when cell phones become part of an environment that also consists of two people in conversation?

Of the many possible approaches to this question, I want to take up philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “intentional arc.” (...)

The “intentional arc” describes the manner in which our experience and perception is shaped by what we intend. Intending here means something more than what we mean when we say “I intended to get up early” or “I intend to go to the store later.” Intention in this sense refers in large measure to a mostly nonconscious work of perceiving the world that is shaped by what we are doing or aim to do. Our perception, in other words, is always already interpreting reality rather than simply registering it as a pure fact or objective reality.

This work of perception-as-interpretation builds up over time as an assortment of “I cans” that are carried or remembered by our bodies. This assortment becomes part of the background, or pre-understanding, that we bring to bear on new situations. And this is how our intentional arc “projects round about us our past, our future.”

The insertion of a tool like a cell phone into our experience reconfigures the “intentional arc.” The phenomenon is neatly captured by the expression, “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.” How we perceive our environment is shaped by the mere presence of a tool in hand. And this effect is registered even before the tool is used.

Merleau-Ponty might analyze the situation as follows: The feel of a hammer in hand, especially given prior use of a hammer, transforms how the environment presents itself to us. Aspects of the environment that would not have presented themselves as things-to-be-struck now do. Our interpretive perception interprets differently. Our seeing-as is altered. New possibilities suggest themselves. The affordances presented to us by our environment are reordered.

Try this at home: go pick up a hammer or, for that matter, any object you can hold in hand that is weighted on one end. See what you feel. Hold it and look around you and pay really close attention to the way your perceive these objects. Actually, on second thought, don’t try this at home.

by Michael Sacasas, The New Inquiry |  Read more:
Altered photograph of Murray Kempton, via

Ron Zakrin, Beauty With Synthesizer
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Time to Rise

In Paris, the 9th arrondissement is popular, hip even, dotted with wine shops, boutiques, and boulangeries, but still has the close-knit feel of a residential neighborhood. The streets are lined with old apartment buildings that seem to lean onto the sidewalks. Inside intimate bistros on these quiet, narrow lanes, maître d’s chat with locals as they arrive. One Sunday afternoon last winter, when I visited, the streets were crowded with couples and families out for a leisurely stroll. By 3 a.m. the next day, however, Rue des Martyrs, a main artery in the district, was empty, the stores dark except for a slit of light coming out of the side entrance of the Boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel. Everyone was still asleep. Everyone, that is, except for the bakers—whose ranks I was about to join.

Over the centuries, how many bakers have walked Paris’s dark avenues at night, heading to the fournils—baking rooms—to provide the city’s daily bread? In the 18th and 19th centuries, les geindres (the groaners) began before midnight, each laboring over hundreds of pounds of dough that they kneaded by hand and baked in basement wood-fired ovens. The poorest slept by the hearth, inhaling flour and often suffering from tuberculosis. Yet many did their jobs superbly, faithful to the demanding task of coaxing bread out of levain, or sourdough—a process that took days. As I walked toward the bakery that morning, I felt as if I were following in the footsteps of ghosts.

As an avid home baker with a decade of experience slapping around dough, I had come to Paris to learn how to make a stellar baguette. I wanted one with a crisp crust, an uneven bubbly interior (called the crumb), and a distinctive flavor that would make my friends at home in Washington, D.C., ooh and aah. I figured Arnaud Delmontel was the one to teach me: A master baker, he had won the award for best baguette in Paris in 2007.

I also wanted to investigate a cultural question: Why had bread, which held a commanding place at the French table, crumbled into mediocrity in the decades following World War II? By the 1980s, it was an open secret in the baking trade that truly great French bread was a rarity, as speed and efficiency increasingly trumped the slow fermentation necessary for an outstanding loaf.

In 1987 a cultural critic writing in the French newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur proclaimed that the baguette had become “horribly disgusting.” It was “bloated, hollow, dead white,” he said. “Soggy or else stiff. Its crusts come off in sheets like diseased skin.” Renowned French baking professor Raymond Calvel mused that the best baguette might soon be made in Tokyo. What had brought this on? And how was quality bread revived in the 1990s? The answers to these questions lay in Paris, which is what brought me to the door of Boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel at three that morning last February.

by Samuel Fromartz, AFAR Magazine |  Read more:
Photo: Brian Doben

The Facebook Fallacy

Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.

Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy.

The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of people's behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command real attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising's impact.

At the same time, network technology allows advertisers to more precisely locate and assemble audiences outside of branded channels. Instead of having to go to CNN for your audience, a generic CNN-like audience can be assembled outside CNN's walls and without the CNN-brand markup. This has resulted in the now famous and cruelly accurate formulation that $10 of offline advertising becomes $1 online.

I don't know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn't engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn't manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value. (...)

Facebook currently derives 82 percent of its revenue from advertising. Most of that is the desultory ticky-tacky kind that litters the right side of people's Facebook profiles. Some is the kind of sponsorship that promises users further social relationships with companies: a kind of marketing that General Motors just announced it would no longer buy.

Facebook's answer to its critics is: pay no attention to the carping. Sure, grunt-like advertising produces the overwhelming portion of our $4 billion in revenues; and, yes, on a per-user basis, these revenues are in pretty constant decline, but this stuff is really not what we have in mind. Just wait.

It's quite a juxtaposition of realities. On the one hand, Facebook is mired in the same relentless downward pressure of falling per-user revenues as the rest of Web-based media. The company makes a pitiful and shrinking $5 per customer per year, which puts it somewhat ahead of the Huffington Post and somewhat behind the New York Times' digital business. (Here's the heartbreaking truth about the difference between new media and old: even in the New York Times' declining traditional business, a subscriber is still worth more than $1,000 a year.) Facebook's business only grows on the unsustainable basis that it can add new customers at a faster rate than the value of individual customers declines. It is peddling as fast as it can. And the present scenario gets much worse as its users increasingly interact with the social service on mobile devices, because it is vastly harder, on a small screen, to sell ads and profitably monetize users.

On the other hand, Facebook is, everyone has come to agree, profoundly different from the Web. First of all, it exerts a new level of hegemonic control over users' experiences. And it has its vast scale: 900 million, soon a billion, eventually two billion (one of the problems with the logic of constant growth at this scale and speed, of course, is that eventually it runs out of humans with computers or smart phones). And then it is social. Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined something. Relationships? Media? Communications? Communities? Something big, anyway. 

by Michael Wolff, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:
Photo: Flickr Creative Commons Tanaka Juuyoh and Cambodia4kids.org Beth Kanter

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

Epic dumps, recalled

A Reddit thread called "Did you ever think you were going to die from a shit?" sparked a lyrical/scatological series of reminisces of epic dumps, including a two part series by ErikPDX recalling a storied moment of colonic glory following a period of post-surgical bedrest during which he consumed enormous amounts of painkillers and protein shakes without bestirring himself to relieve himself, until such time as his body could stand no more. Mr PDX included a picture of the result. I beg you not to click the link in his post which leads to it.

My entire body tingled. I felt lighter. I was covered in sweat, and breathing heavily. I felt high, delirious, in shock and awe. Great waves of increasing euphoria washed over me. Feelings of amazing pleasure I simply cannot describe. I felt as if I was bathing in a golden light of goodness. This was a transcending event. I felt like I had just touched the universe itself.

Did you ever think you were going to die from a shit? (self.AskReddit)

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing 

Marko Köppe
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