May 24, 2011
NY-26 special congressional election won by Kathy Hochul
Media outlets are declaring a winner in NY-26 as Democratic candidate Kathy Hochul has a 6% lead (with 91% reporting) over Republican Jane Corwin (previously) in Tuesday's special election. [more inside]
David Foster Wallace: Portrait Of An Infinitely Limited Mind
Don't you treat them like no low down dogs
They began as a folk duo on the lower east side, doing irreverent versions of songs from the Harry Smith anthology. They became the backing band for The Fugs, had a brush with fame on the soundtrack to Easy Rider, briefly featured playwright Sam Shepard on drums, moved to Oregon and became the uber bar band. After carrying on for more than 40 years, they are still the most underrated band in history, The Holy Modal Rounders. [more inside]
A place on earth
Safe Ground is an organization of Sacramento's homeless population to claim a secure location in order to live decently. While resistance to tent cities (previously, 2, 3) has largely been due to political expediency (criminalizing homelessness is easier than ending it), a spot on Oprah brought media attention to the plight of the homeless and made it more difficult for police to bully them from place to place with the threat of jail. In response to this, Costa Mantis(of He Knows You're Alone fame [uncredited on the wiki]) started filming the personal stories of the homeless along the American River in Sacramento. This led to Searching for Safe Ground, a miniseries concerning the struggle of Sacramento's homeless for a place to exist.
Incidentally, a federal jury ruled tonight that the city of Sacramento has been violating homeless people's constitutional rights by moving them from public property and confiscating their property. Stay tuned.
"Mommy tracked" and loving it?
In-sourcing the legal business: America's biggest law firms are "creating a second tier of workers, stripping pay and prestige from one of the most coveted jobs in the business world." [more inside]
Flashlight worthy - Really good books
FlashlightWorthy: handpicked book recommendations on hundreds of topics. Lists of books are easy to come by. Thoughtful lists of good books are harder to find. FlashlightWorthy does a fine job of mixing classic greats along with more obscure treasures. Plain vanilla lists (e.g. Best Cooking Books, 33 Best Books on Writing Fiction, Best Graphic Novels of 2009 and 2010) are well-represented but there's also quirkier and specialized fare like... [more inside]
Henriette Coulouvrat
There's really not much to find out on early '80s pop chanteuse, Henriette Coulouvrat. Not even a wiki. Just a long neglected web site. She's French, and she's dance and she's synth-pop, and seems to be remembered for these two songs, Rockin' On The Red Book and Paddy Field, along with several appearances on French tv.
Rustic Hinge
It wasn't like we were playing any kind of conventional music, it was outrageous, nasty, bad trip music... If ever there was a missing link in the history and development of British psychedelic music it is Rustic Hinge. [more inside]
The Boston Globe's Newspaper Row storefront
Long before the Web, The Boston Globe had a “homepage” of sorts – its old storefront downtown. Taking advantage of its location in a heavily trafficked block of Newspaper Row, the young daily brought the news to Bostonians in a whole new way: handwritten signs.
The Most Sensible Site You Will Ever See
The lemon is evil.
"Remember, you’re the first little girl who’s ever made a game at TOJam. And everyone’s worried you’re going to run around screaming and making noise and wrecking things. […] If you’re very well behaved, then next year if another little girl wants to come and make a game, the TOJam people will say 'the little girl who made a game last year was SO wonderful, we’d LOVE to see more little girls making games.'" Ryan Creighton takes his five-year-old daughter Cassie to an indie game jam in Toronto, and together they make Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure.
I had a dream last night, that I built a universe.
Selling doctors on patient gag orders
"It's completely unethical for doctors to force their patients to sign away their rights in order to get medical care." Ars Technica dissects doctor "privacy" agreements that seek to limit patients' ability to post online reviews by making them sign the copyright of any future reviews over to the doctor, in exchange for vague (and possibly illusory) extra privacy protection. Doctored Reviews offers info and tools for fighting "anti-review contracts," whose language comes primarily from an "anti-defamation protection program" sold by a company called Medical Justice. Sources quoted in the article express doubts that this kind of "privacy blackmail" would hold up in court, with some wondering if Medical Justice is actively deceiving doctors by selling them a product that won't work as advertised. [more inside]
An Exploration of the Typeface Everyone Loves to Hate
He's Got Everything He Needs, He's An Artist He Don't Look back
Bob Dylan is 70 today.
Bradley Manning's Facebook Page
Last year U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning allegedly provided thousands of secret U.S. documents to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He allegedly leaked the secret cables — "along with a controversial video — in the hope of inciting 'worldwide discussion, debates and reforms.' In preparing for its new investigative report, WikiSecrets (airing tonight), PBS Frontline "obtained access" to his Facebook account. "Manning's Facebook postings are a vivid, if partial, portrait of his life in the military and of the political and social issues that he followed closely. They reflect his commitment to gay rights and defiance of the military's ban on openly gay or lesbian soldiers. They track the anguish in his personal life. And they conclude with an entry, put up in Manning’s name by his aunt, explaining his arrest with a link to a WikiLeaks website."
WHO NEEDS CRITICAL THEORY
How to make an Art-- a tutorial [with Addendum] by HennesyYoungman...via the amazing Victory Light blog [more inside]
Camp Cranky is all about periods.
Camp Cranky is a virtual sleepaway camp intended by its creators, actors Liane Balaban and Vanessa Matsui, to be a safe space for young girls to hear personal stories about first periods, learn about the biology of menstruation, read poems about periods (musician Leslie Feist and actress Emma Thompson each contribute), and learn about various menstrual products. Readers can also donate to Huru International, which sends menstrual supplies to girls in need in Kenya. Camp Cranky is the first phase in what will eventually be Crankytown [the name comes from a Feist poem], a site where women of all ages can discuss menstruation and menopause. The project is a part of the National Film Board and Studio XX's First Person Digital Program. [more inside]
Buck The Trend
Make your Franklin is a site which accepts submissions of recreated 100 USD banknotes.
"Faster! Faster, Bambi! Don't look back! Keep running! Keep running!"
Bambi Rescued By the Jaws of Life! [SLYT] What do you do when you find a baby deer trapped underneath a pile of rocks? Call your local firefighters, who extract the poor creature using the largest power tool they could find—the Jaws of Life. Via Gizmodo
Save the Beach, Drink the Ice
Sonar
Sonar is a cool music visualization. (SLYT)
Cooking should be fun
There is Much More to Say
It might be instructive to ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic (after proper burial rites, of course). Uncontroversially, he is not a “suspect” but the “decider” who gave the orders to invade Iraq -- that is, to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country and the national heritage, and the murderous sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. Equally uncontroversially, these crimes vastly exceed anything attributed to bin Laden.There is Much More to Say by Noam Chomsky.
Huguette Clark dies, many questions remain
The reclusive 104-year-old heiress has died, but the recent public fascination with her has led to an investigation into the handling of her money. You may remember last year's MeFi post dedicated to Huguette Clark. The hospital in which she lived for the past 22 years confirmed that she died Tuesday morning, just shy of her 105th birthday. The investigation of the people handling her fortune continues.
The End of the World Is (still) At Hand!
Harold Camping refines his end of the world prediction. When the world didn't end this past Saturday at 6 pm Harold Camping went into seclusion for a bit to think about that. [more inside]
Color films can simply be illuminated. Black and white films have to be lighted.
For the past year, director Stephen Soderbergh has been recording and sharing a list of the books that he has read, and films that he has watched. The writers at Flavorwire noted Soderbergh's decision to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark in black & white three times, and have compiled a list of color films that work better in monochrome. [more inside]
Kickstarting a City
Cities as Software is an article by Marcus Westbury about Renew Newcastle's low-budget, DIY model for renewing urban spaces. "...You need to start by rewriting – or hacking – the software to change not what the city is but how it behaves." [more inside]
The Girls Next Door
I’d always dismissed the idea of human trafficking in the United States. I’m Indian, and when I went to Mumbai and saw children sold openly, I wondered, Why isn’t anything being done about it? But now I know—it’s no different here. I never would have believed it, but I’ve seen it.
Study finds many white people view racism as a zero-sum game
Whites believe they are victims of racism more often than blacks. Researchers at Harvard Business School and Tufts University have published a study (PDF) that concludes that "many Whites believe ... the pendulum has now swung beyond
equality in the direction of anti-White discrimination."
I'm Not Worth A Damn
An oldie but a goodie: Don Reese, then of the San Diego Chargers, talks about his own problems with cocaine and the widespread drug use in the NFL at the time. [more inside]
"This is the last song I'll write about you"
I Feel Better: A brief rotoscoped video for the song by the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit, in which a real-life HUD and an infinite number of parallel universes conspire to help our hero get motivated. [SLYT]
Short Films Against Global and Social Injustice
In 2009, Ctrl.Alt.Shift, the "youth initiative of Christian Aid," held a national competition in the UK for aspiring filmmakers aged 18 to 25. Their mission: create a short film treatment based around three key issues: "War + Peace," "Gender + Power" and "HIV + Stigma." The results were then screened to an audience at the 2009 Raindance Film Festival. The films: 1000 Voices, HIV: The Musical, Man Made, No Way Through and War School. (All YouTube links. Vimeo links and descriptions of each film are inside this post.) These films deal with adult subject matter and may be disturbing for some viewers. Some may also be nsfw. [more inside]
Let's play spot the game
Here's an awesome music video recently released by the band Goldfish, which includes a staggering number of video game references. [more inside]
From Live Journal to Life
Starting from a proposal by vito_excalibur, the Back Up Project tries to intervene in sexual harassment at fan conferences. [more inside]
Pimp my Ride
The world's slowest Porsche. Johannes L. built a Porsche GT3 RS out of a recumbent bicycle, wood stripping, pvc, and tape. The Flickr set covering construction.
Nitto of Japan
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