oh indeed

I’VE ALWAYS FELT KIND OF INDIAN!

I had my DNA genotyped by 23 and Me because a. I love ancestry/history type stuff and b. a bunch of work friends did it and I am easily influenced. You deposit about one mL of spit into a little tube, send it to the good folks at 23 and Me, and six weeks later they give you a bunch of ancestry and health information, both useful and frivolous (and potentially serious), depending on your genome.

Personally, after recovering from the panic of learning what terrible diseases my genes predispose me to, I was way more interested in the ancestral composition portion of the results. Admittedly, the ancestry information will be way more extensive if you are of European descent, even down to the country. Case in point, my DNA is 99.2% East Asian (hmph, couldn’t even get the country breakdown, guys?), but apparently also 0.3% South Asian and 0.5% Alien/Mutant/Reticulan/whathaveyou. But for $99, I’m fairly satisfied, which is good because I would probably not pay more than that.

Alas, Google is a heavy investor, so if you are super paranoid about large global conglomerations accessing your health information, then I suppose this is not for you.

Also may not be recommended for raging hypochondriacs; I know this because I am one.

flavorpill:

Joseph Heller’s chart outline for Catch-22. Check out the full gallery of Famous Authors’ Handwritten Outlines.

bookshelfporn:

‘tsundoku’ - the Japanese word for buying books & not reading them, leaving them to pile up.

Yup.

betterbooktitles:

If you’re not following @betterbooktitle (me) on Twitter, then you’re missing out on stupidity like this.

There are so many books I am in the middle of right now (and a to-read pile that is growing alarmingly fast) that I am getting slightly panicky about whether I’ll finish anything at this point. And my Goodreads challenge status bar is mocking me every step of the way. New strategy:

1. Start book.

2. Finish book.

3. Do not repeat (1) until completing (2).

(Pic courtesy of Hyperbole and a Half and also people on the internet who can manipulate stuff with their computers so people like me who have no such skills don’t have to.)

awesomepeoplereading:

RIP Roger Ebert

I am surprisingly super bummed about this. :( I always liked reading his reviews and he was a great writer.

nprfreshair:

Umm, gorgeous-ITY.

The Cannes Film Festival just released their poster for this year’s festival and it is utterly beautiful, isn’t it? A remastered photo of Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, it was taken during the shooting of A New Kind of Love, by Melville Shavelson (1963).

You can read more about the poster here.

- Heidi

(Source: sea-hag)