October 3, 2012
Electronic surveillance skyrockets in the US
The Justice Department, after a legal battle with the ACLU to avoid having to admit it, recently released documents showing that the federal government’s use of warrantless “pen register” and “tap and trace” surveillance has multiplied over the past decade. But the Justice Department is small potatoes. Every day, the NSA intercepts and stores 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, texts, and other electronic communications. [more inside]
Sleeves designed by Peter Saville
It was the equivalent of comparing milk and Elmer’s glue on the basis of whiteness.
Like too many studies, the Stanford study dangerously isolates a finding from its larger context. It significantly plays down the disparity in pesticides...and neglects to mention that 10,000 to 20,000 United States agricultural workers get a pesticide-poisoning diagnosis each year. And while the study concedes that “the risk for isolating bacteria resistant to three or more antibiotics was 33 percent higher among conventional chicken and pork than organic alternatives,” it apparently didn’t seek to explore how consuming antibiotic-resistant bacteria might be considered “non-nutritious.”....
That the authors of the study chose to focus on a trivial aspect of the organic versus conventional comparison is regrettable. That they published a study that would so obviously be construed as a blanket knock against organic agriculture is willfully misleading and dangerous. That so many leading news agencies fall for this stuff is scary. Mark Bittman - That Flawed Stanford Study (SL NYTimes)
da Bomb x5
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy
How Philip K Dick transformed Hollywood, who could be Hollywood's next PKD and how PKD could change your life.
If you want to call it bad luck
With a new baby and wife to support, out-of-work filmmaker Matt Gallagher tries his hand - and some would say “luck” - at playing poker for a living. Grinders is the director’s inside journey into the unconventional, often bizarre, underground world of illegal poker clubs.
Your daily intake of beedogs has been critically low. Click here or you will die.
Imagine that a genie grants you three wishes. You wish first for unlimited money, natch. Next, you ask for x-ray vision. Your third and final wish is to be unencumbered by the consequences of your irresponsible actions. After living a life of fun and frivolity, you realize that your existence has been empty and completely without meaning or purpose. On your deathbed it finally hits you that redemption of your immortal soul can only be brought about by more beedogs. But will you click the link? [more inside]
The FPP
An Ideal Boy
Blast from the past: scans of posters from schools in India. That's all.
The sweater _is_ cursed
Knitters say that you should never knit your boyfriend a sweater. But what if you just knit your boyfriend? Artist Noortje de Keijer decided to try to avert the curse. [more inside]
"...it's supposed to be this way."
Expedia's latest and ongoing ad campaign, "Find Your..." offers 'personal journey' stories from travelers who have used their site, with footage from their trip. Their latest entry: "Find Your Understanding," tells the story of a father traveling to his daughter's wedding. Via.
Pure black and white sex
Scandals of Classic Hollywood* is a fantastic series of articles exploring the careers and private lives of old Hollywood's most legendary performers, written by self-styled "doctor of celebrity gossip" Anne Helen Petersen. [more inside]
Great White Wonder: Bob Dylan and the birth of Rock Bootlegs and Album Leaks
In the summer of 1969, two guys pressed a few thousand records with white label stickers, and packaged them in nondescript white sleeves. They didn't have their own cars to deliver the records so they borrowed friends' cars, and the record ended up throughout California, with copies getting airplay at 5 southern California radio stations. The music wasn't their own recordings, but unreleased material from Bob Dylan. The recording became known as the Great White Wonder, "the entertainment industry's first truly hip situation comedy" (in other words, the first bootleg ever to be produced in the rock-and-roll era). [more inside]
the intersection of social media and sharing political opinions
I Want To Talk About Politics On Facebook vs. Get Out Of My Facebook, Politics: two arguments for and against using social media to share political opinions (presented on Thought Catalog) [more inside]
You got your type annotations in my javascript!
Allelujah! A new album!
After a ten year break, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have announced a new album, Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
Listen.
Listen.
...one day right there in Alabama little blue squares and green squares will be able to line up with little white squares and yellow squares as sides of a cube.
Thrilla or Vanilla?
It's D-Day: Governor Mitt Romney debates President Barack Obama in Denver, Colorado. Will we see an epic game-changer or an airless, pre-orchestrated zinger-swap? [more inside]
Voter Suppression Rages On
The history of voter's rights in America is treacherous. In this upcoming election, voter suppression continues and as before, it is racialized, and targets traditionally marginalized & left-leaning individuals. The ACLU's Laura Murphy on voter suppression this year. The NAACP and Project South both have a hand in the fight to be counted.
Brilliantly Bad Books
There has never been another literary figure remotely comparable to “the divine Amanda” (whose real name was Anna Margaret Ross, née McKittrick). She was, many discriminating readers believe, at once the single most atrocious writer who ever lived and also one of the most mesmerizingly delightful. She was supremely talentless—she was wholly incapable of producing a single intelligent or well-formed sentence—and yet her incompetence was so sui generis that it constituted a kind of genius. [more inside]
27.5 years of gameplay
A study-based analysis of UK gaming magazines in the 1980s and 90s argues that the analysis of computer games, independent of attributes such as the platform or narrative, becomes more evident after March 1985 when the term 'gameplay' begins to be used in this media.
Hate Superboy. Hate Legion. Hate Hate Hate.
Comics critics groupblog The Hooded Utilitarian ("a pundit in every panopticon") turned five in September and to celebrate ran a month long festival of hate, "in which contributors will write about what they believe is the worst comic ever — or the most overrated, or the one they personally hate the most, as the case may be." [more inside]
Real life Gamma World
Imagine a lake so polluted and contaminated that spending just an hour on its shores would result in certain death, and the only way seen fit to deal with it is to fill the entire water body with concrete blocks to keep the toxic soil underneath from moving onshore. That lake is Lake Karachay in Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast, and it is considered by many to be the most polluted place on the planet.
The Krew Kats
The Krew Kats were an instrumental surf-rock act out of England in the very early 60s. Cut from the same cloth, you might say, as the much more well known stateside crew The Ventures. But the Krew Kats had a playful, surprising, inventive and gloriously dopey sound all their own. As far as I can tell, their total recorded output consists of seven songs, all of which are available for your listening pleasure here.
September was Historic, astronomically
For the first time ever, a meteor has grazed in and out of Earth's atmosphere, slowing enough to become a temporary satellite that lasted a full orbit. In other astronomical news, a comet was discovered by a couple of Russian
astronomers that appears to have all of the ingredients to be one of
the greatest comets in our lifetimes, and maybe one of the greatest in
human civilization's history.
New comet might blaze brighter than the full Moon This will be the second great comet of 2013.
BFI set to open its catalogue of 10,000 archive films to stream online
BFI set to open its catalogue of 10,000 archive films to stream online Yesterday, the BFI released its five year plan 'film forever' . One of the key points is the development and launch of a BFIPlayer in 2013 which will stream the 10,000 films they aim to digitise by 2017.
Other objectives are also outlined in the full plan, such as the money available for British film production rising to £24 milllion p/a.
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