January 13, 2012
This is why Jakob Ander won't hire you
This is why I don't give you a job. Hungarian blogger Jakab Andor breaks down the numbers and explains why taxes and regulations make it highly unappealing for him to start a small business employing people in Hungary. He also argues that these same factors make women and older people particularly unappealing prospects. His comments generated quite a bit of controversy (warning: most comments in Hungarian), to which he responded with an offer.
Sarah Orne Jewett
... [Sarah Orne] Jewett's gifts have always been recognized by a select few, and continue to be. [The Country of the] Pointed Firs, especially, was immediately recognized as a major achievement. Henry James called it, perfectly, “a beautiful little quantum of achievement.” Willa Cather listed it as one of her three great American novels...
Pan-sexual Portauthoriparty
New York Yelp's hotest reviewer is Stefon K. Founded by an unknown Manhattanite, this user's got everything: Mother Theresa on a ketamine binge, live-action Furbies, Laotian children in birdcages and a connection to one of Saturday Night Live's favorite characters.
Friday the 13th by Thelonious Monk and everybody else
For Friday the 13th of January, WFMU DJ Kurt Gottschalk played about 20 different versions of Thelonious Monk's Friday the 13th, including quite a few sent in by his listeners. Here's the playlist and 3 hour mp3 stream (below the blinky picture of Monk), including listeners' comments. Good luck!
Do, Do, Do The Funky Gibbon
Marching Band For Geese. Beethoven For Elephants. Mariachi For A Beluga Whale (previously). Heavy Metal For Parrots. Jazz For Horses.
We're eating less meat. Why?
Promising TV Series That Weren't Picked Up
The Internet often discusses shows that died before their time. Splitsider looked at "10 Promising TV Series That Weren't Picked Up". Television Without Pity also has its "Brilliant But Cancelled" blog, taken over from the original site. [more inside]
The Earth and its Peoples, over 100 years ago
Take a photographic journey into the past with Illustrated Past, which offers glimpses of life in Brittany, a trip to Tunis and Algiers, scenes of Dutch daily life. These examples are excerpts from the Dutch book, De Aarde en haar Volken (Project Gutenberg), or The Earth and its Peoples (Google auto-translation). Where the 1906 edition featured photos from around the world, the 1877 edition featured etchings (Gutenberg; Google translation).
The only winning move is not to play, or to watch these first.
Game Theory 101 has a selection of video and text lectures covering such topics as How to Fly on an Airplane with an Empty Seat Next to You for Free, Why You Should NOT Maximize Your Score in Words With Friends and How to Catch a Ball at a Baseball Game. It's not all light and fluffy, though. Some other topics include Why You Should Support International Aid, How the United States Debt Crisis Will End and Why the Intervention in Libya Was a Bargain. If you're new to game theory, start with The Prisoner's Dilemma.
Mapstalgia - video game maps drawn from memory
"Once upon a time there was an elephant who did nothing all day." - E. E. Cummings
Did you know James Joyce wrote a children's book (sort of)? Patricia Highsmith wrote one too. So did James Baldwin (not to be confused with James Baldwin the children's book author). Eugène Ionesco wrote four stories for young kids. Graham Greene also wrote at the very least four children's books (and possibly more). Other unlikely children's book authors are Aldous Huxley, E. E. Cummings, Chinua Achebe (2, 3, 4), Eleanor Roosevelt and Gertrude Stein. Author Ariel S. Winter has written about all these books on his excellent blog We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie. On his Flickr page you can look at scans from these books, sometimes even the whole book.
'Speeders, we call them.'
Who Pinched My Ride? "Stolen bicycles have become a solvent in America’s underground economy, a currency in the world of drug addicts and petty thieves." Outside's Patrick Symmes tells his story of loss(es), frustration and the failures of modern technology. [more inside]
Israeli intelligence agents are alleged to have posed as CIA agents to recruit members of a terrorist group.
Foreign Policy is reporting that Israeli intelligence agents posed as CIA officers to recruit members of Jundallah, a designated terrorist group, in its covert fight against the Iranian effort to acquire nuclear capability.
How the war on pot fed the crack epidemic
The color of our galaxy
The best description I can give
Would be that if you looked at new spring snow
Which has a fine grain size
About an hour after dawn or an hour before sunset
You'd see the same spectrum of light
That an alien astronomer in another galaxy would see
Looking at the Milky Way [more inside]
Would be that if you looked at new spring snow
Which has a fine grain size
About an hour after dawn or an hour before sunset
You'd see the same spectrum of light
That an alien astronomer in another galaxy would see
Looking at the Milky Way [more inside]
Things that will haunt you
Do you like creepy things? Lucia Peters has written an amazing series on "Creepy Things That Seem Real But Aren’t" exploring Internet-age urban legends and carefully constructed hoaxes. From the world of underground video games that drive you mad, there is Killswitch and Majora's Mask. If you like modern takes on monsters, there is The Slender Man (who appears in Marble Hornets and EverymanHybrid), The Rake, and This Man. Horrible conspiracies can be found in the Indian Lake Project, the Montauk Project, and the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Haunted objects can be found in The Hands Resist Him and the Dybbuk Box. And, if you like little bits of creepypasta horror stories, check out Candle Cove and the Dionaea House. Be warned, even though this stuff isn't real (right?) there are often unsettling pictures and videos in these links. Now, I think I am going to go take a walk in the sun....
The drop
Hanging With Frank - a 1997 short film portrait of a Glasgow prison's execution chamber and a man that worked there in the 50's.
They were all Clad in the Moorish habite Cassocks of Colourd Cloth or silk with buttons and loopes
The Anglo-Moroccan connection originates in the quarrels between the two half-sisters Queen Elizabeth i and Queen Mary i. Elizabeth suspected that Mary's husband, Philip ii of Spain, had designs on England, and she was consequently interested in an ally who could join in attacking Spain. On the Moroccan side, there was considerable enthusiasm for expelling the Spanish and Portuguese from the several Moroccan coastal cities they had conquered. The Moroccans also wanted naval support in case of further encroachment by the Ottoman Turks, who were eager to extend their empire west from Algiers into Morocco. It was for this last reason that the Moroccan sultan Ahmad al-Mansur was unwilling to collaborate with the Ottomans despite Ottoman consideration of an invasion of Spain: He preferred instead an alliance with the English.
An 'Extreamly Civile' Diplomacy: a short history of early Anglo-Moroccan relations
via the always wonderful @bintbattuta
An 'Extreamly Civile' Diplomacy: a short history of early Anglo-Moroccan relations
via the always wonderful @bintbattuta
Do Not Much Evil
"Google, what were you thinking?" Kenyan startup, Mocality use an online sting, and cunning detective work, to apparently find Google fraudulently stealing their customers.
And if sturgeon is of the second freshness, that means it is simply rotten.
Every once in a while you just want to know an obscure word in a foreign language just to show off to your friends, so today's word is вымя, which means udder. [more inside]
The Pyramids of Washington DC
According to the National Building Museum's new exhibit on unbuilt DC, there have been lots of proposed pyramids on the National Mall that were never built, including memorials for Washington and Lincoln. Also, a proposed National Sofa. [more inside]
Alan Moore's Masks: A Face to Face
Alan Moore and David Lloyd designed it 30 years ago. The V for Vendetta mask appropriated by Occupy protesters the world over. The Guardian recently asked Alan what he thought about the masks. Now Channel 4 news takes him into Occupy territory to face that face. But who is the true anarchist?
tonight! AT THE JUNGLE CLUB
This is why we can't have nice things.
Unanimous SCOTUS ruling: Anti-discrimination laws (such as the ADA) do not apply to church employees with religious duties. Full ruling: PDF, HTML
Obvious Post Title
Start here. Billionaire Matty Moroun Ordered to Jail
The billionaire became inmate No. 12-981.
Matty Moroun is a Detroit businessman and the owner of Centra Inc, the holding company which controls the Ambassador Bridge -a the only privately managed U.S. / Canada Border crossing, and the #1 busiest North American border crossing.
He was sent to jail early yesterday for defying a judge's ruling that he comply with a court order compelling him to complete his company's portion of The Gateway project, a joint construction project he agreed to in 2008 designed to ease border traffic. Instead of working on the ramps to ease congestion, his crews built built a roadway that took traffic past the company's lucrative duty-free store and fuel pumps, and that kept thousands of trucks bound for expressways lined up on surface streets in the area. [more inside]
Matty Moroun is a Detroit businessman and the owner of Centra Inc, the holding company which controls the Ambassador Bridge -
G.D.B.P.W.S.N.B.D.G. for short
Giraffes Drawn By People Who Should Not Be Drawing Giraffes, the only website "dedicated exclusively to giraffes drawn by people who should not be drawing giraffes." It features a pithy giraffe by Philip Glass, and aims to acquire drawings from both a sitting world leader and Lady Gaga (neither of whom should be drawing giraffes). (Previously)
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen
I'll go as the Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor
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