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why i heart scully

Many thanks to Salon’s Rebecca Traister who wrote this great ode to Dana Scully, saving me the trouble of doing it myself:

Scully was a leading lady to fall for, a smart-girl icon who was (and would still be, alas) a rare television bird: professional, independent, unsentimental. She liked boys’ things: Her favorite movie was “The Exorcist,” her favorite book the phallic classic “Moby-Dick”; her nickname from her father was Starbuck; she wrote her thesis on Einstein’s twin paradox. She was the opposite of squeamish. In possibly the best “X-Files” episode of all time, the vampire farce “Bad Blood,” there is an ur-Scully scene: She is doing an autopsy after a long day of chasing the undead through a small Texas town. Annoyed, she sighingly hoists the departed’s heart, lung and intestines onto the scale, reading their weights into a tape recorder. Then she opens up the victim’s stomach and starts poking around with her scalpel to determine his last meal. “Pizza, topped with pepperoni, green peppers, mushrooms.” Here she pauses, looks up briefly from the bloody innards. “Mushrooms. That sounds good.” She orders a pizza.

The new X-Files movie opens this Friday—I’m terribly excited to see it, despite the stupid subtitle (“I Want to Believe”). If you’re a) in the city and b) not creepy, ping if you’d like to come with. Oh, and because it really is great, here’s a clip of that autopsy:

“your twenties are torture”

Helen Mirren, on the perils of youth: “Your twenties are torture, really, because you don’t know what you are going to be or whether it’s all going to work out, and you are supposedly an adult but you haven’t really learnt anything. You’re always looking for your own place in the world, but you’re insecure – you think you’re wonderful one minute and you think you’re a disaster the next. I think your thirties are a wonderful time.”

why does sf hate delicious things?

New York City has a quota of 3,000 street food licenses with a years-long waiting list and the Vendy Awards, an annual cook-off to celebrate the city’s best food carts. Meanwhile San Francisco, by all accounts an equally food-obsessed city, only has 120 licensed pushcarts—and 71 of them are inside a ballpark. Why so few carts on the streets?

Rules include leaving 10 unobstructed feet of pedestrian passage, not being within 18 inches of a curb, not stopping on sidewalks with colored curbs, not being within 12 feet of a building’s entrance, and not selling food available in restaurants within 600 feet. Entrepreneurs complain that year-round licenses forbid cooking on the carts, so food can’t be fresh but must be prepared ahead and reheated.

Also: no carts within 1,500 of a school. Oh SF, you nanny state, you!
Previously: my town can take your town.

the power of pacquiao

It’s not surprising at all that Manny Pacquiao completely demolished David Diaz to win his fourth world title in four different weight classes—he’s widely considered the best pound-for-pound fighter in boxing—but what is pretty amazing is that apparently so many Filipinos were glued to their screens during the bout that there were zero major crimes reported in Metro Manila during Pacquiao vs Diaz, and 30% less cars on the road than usual Sundays. [ via angry asian man ]