October 7, 2014
Safely crossing solid centerlines
Crossing the Double Yellow Line
If you are like most motorists, you take the first opportunity to pass the cyclist safely, regardless of the stripe. After all, the purpose of the solid yellow line is to indicate where it is unsafe to pass, and the purpose of prohibiting drivers from crossing a solid yellow line to pass another driver is to prevent unsafe passing. So if it is safe to pass, then why is the solid yellow line there in the first place?[more inside]
"Socialism Is Our Launching Pad!"
Russiatrek.org's blog has a nice collection of Soviet propaganda posters. Soviet space program 1958-1963 Part 1. Part 2. International Workers' Day. Soviet Patriotism. Soviet propaganda - the beginning 1917-1923. Stalin's Soviet Union tourism posters. Socialism vs. Capitalism. WWII Part 1. Part 2. Soviet posters of the 1970's. The blog's art category.
What The Fuck Was That?
Just in time for Halloween, the original 2003 Toronto production of Evil Dead: The Musical is online, in a glorious multi-cam VHS YouTube transcription. You can Do The Necromonicon and doubt your holiday weekend companions while singing out a strong broadway melody, and do it all without having to get stage blood on your outfit.
Blondie Is a Group!
Dazed by the recent Blondie retrospective at the (former) Chelsea Hotel? Celebrate Blondie at 40 with some music videos : = Dreaming Union City Blues Hanging on the Telephone Rip Her to Shreds Heart Of Glass (modern retake) Denis X Offender Atomic Rapture The Tide Is High One Way Or Another
knot just a scarf
Arietta Yin lists over 120 ways to wear a silk scarf with tutorials and photographs.
"What do we say to the dead?"
On the fiftieth anniversary of its theatrical release, Slate is taking a look back at the Cold War thriller Fail Safe (trailer), which stars Henry Fonda as a U.S. President who has to deal with a computational accident that risks nuclear war. The film was preceded at the box office by Dr. Strangelove, a film very similar in plot but drastically different in tone. Fail Safe bombed as a result of the comparison with Kubrick's masterpiece, but the story itself would have a second chance at reaching audiences come the year 2000. [more inside]
If it ain't broke, break it: the unspoken motto of The Kinks
"HH [Henry Hauser]: Ryan and Nina are right on target. The Ray-Dave sibling rivalry sparked many of The Kinks' most spontaneous (and brilliant) musical moments. The Storyteller, Ray's riveting account of early life in the Davies household and his band’s rise to prominence, has him describing how he and Dave exchanged scornful looks while recording "You Really Got Me". The elder Davies swears that if you listen closely, you can actually hear Dave yelling "Fuckkkoffff" right before his guitar solo. Ray salvaged the track by covering up Dave's profane exclamation with his own unscripted outburst ("Owwwww noooooo!"), and the impromptu rock scream turned into one of the most memorable quirks in Kinks history. It perfectly captures the animalistic agony that accompanies hopeless infatuation. Without the Ray-Dave rivalry, it would never have happened."
Henry Hauser, Ryan Bray, Nina Corcoran, and Stevie Dunbar at Consequence of Sound hold a round-table discussion in "Dusting 'Em Off: The Kinks – The Kinks". [more inside]
Henry Hauser, Ryan Bray, Nina Corcoran, and Stevie Dunbar at Consequence of Sound hold a round-table discussion in "Dusting 'Em Off: The Kinks – The Kinks". [more inside]
Return of the Avant-Garde
This summer Kino Lorber's Redemption Films released the final of six French avant-garde films in their series The Cinema of Alain Robbe-Grillet (link is to a promotional short, possibly NSFW. Potential triggers include scenes of bondage, domination, and an unrepentant Gallic male gaze). [more inside]
The One Crime the Media Won't Blame on Black Men
Among other common myths and misconceptions regarding serial murder in America, one curious myth bears closer examination: the idea, propagated heavily in the media, that serial killers are almost always white men. This fascinating (though weirdly formatted) essay discusses this phenomenon, and suggests possible reasons for the anonymity of African-American serial killers, including historical racial bias, stereotypical media portrayals of African-Americans, and the FBI’s promotion of static ethnocentric criminal profiling. [more inside]
100% NZ Wool
For ye said, that he said, that I said, wote ye what?
John Skelton's "Speke, Parott" is a poem in Middle English. More about the poem. More about the Skelton Project. More about John Skelton. More about Skeltonics.
One name for this place is “The Land the Gods Refuse to See.”
The Best Monster: Playing Dungeons and Dragons with Zak Smith "Once below the lake, things go south. There are multiple floors of ogres, 50-foot-tall colorless rooks with swimming pool heads full of floating vampires, chanting evil clerics — the phantasms of Zak’s mind. Each time we need to go down a level or into a room, Tyler, least likely to survive, goes in first. We get attacked by giant green boars, throw fireballs, and now have flaming giant angry wild boars. Laney manages to charm one. She likes pigs, she tells me, and shows me a tattoo she has of a flying pig on her back."
What the Garbageman Knows
On a different floor, we picked our way across a landing covered with rotting food; a pile of trash bags had been ripped apart by stray cats. “This one’s a foreigner,” Sayyid explained. “I’m not supposed to touch her garbage. The landlord isn’t happy with her; there’s some kind of fight. He told me not to remove her trash.” (SLNewYorker) [more inside]
But baby, it just won't feel as good.
The American Dream has really good PR.
Guernica: In propagating a vision of life that's about wealth in the individual, perhaps the influence of these churches lies in what they obscure.Meara Sharma at Guernica talks to Anthony Pinn about the ongoing embrace of prosperity gospel by preachers and parishioners at black megachurches across America: Divine Acquisition. [more inside]
Anthony Pinn: Right. It hides the larger problem. The problem is poverty. And it hides the problem. We often associate black churches with a history of protest. But prosperity gospel and megachurches tend to be rather soft on political issues. T.D. Jakes doesn't take a major stand on political issues. Creflo Dollar certainly doesn't.
But it's the American way. So it seems to me that what they are doing is training black people to be even more American. To buy into this system rather than critique it. And if you're not gaining from it, to assume that the problem's with you. It provides a spiritual lesson that's very similar to the idea of "poor people want to be poor; if they just worked harder they could have more." Here, spiritual people could have more if they were just more spiritual and lived out scripture more authentically. So the prosperity preachers are training people to be better US citizens [laughs].
Oh no they didn't!
On the way to infamy, some believe, [Oh No They Didn't] lost its original mission, becoming infamous more for its trolls than for its vision of a celebrity-gossip utopia. Today, few users even know three black girls founded the site.
Dinner tonight: four containers of gravy and a Diet Sprite
Imagine you're hungry for dinner, stuck at home and don't really want to cook. But you're also deeply ambivalent about what to order--Chinese? Pizza? Sushi? Well, Mike Lacher has you covered. Give his new web app Seamless Roulette your Seamless.com account details and a maximum cost, and it places an order for you at a random nearby restaurant, for something it randomly selects from the menu. If you like surprises and giving up the power to choose your own meal, this might just be for you.
Meet the Mumbles Train, the very first fare-based passenger train
Mumbles Railway, the first public railway On 25 March 1807, the very same day that the British Parliament passed a Bill to outlaw the transatlantic trade in slaves, Swansea took its place in history with the inauguration of the world’s first passenger railway. [more inside]
Adobe Digital Editions 4 spying on users
Adobe's Digital Editions 4 Epub app is spying on users by collecting data on all of the epub books on a users system and transmitting that data in plain text. Adobe's index of epub data includes title, publisher, and other metadata about the book. Digital Editions 4 also collects and transmits if the ebook has been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. [more inside]
The insane conspiracy theories of Naomi Wolf
Max Fisher of Vox describes how Naomi Wolf has turned to rather outré conspiracy theories. Via Ayelet Waldman on Twitter, who commented "I think maybe we need not to condemn Naomi Wolf but to consider the possibility that she's having a psychotic break."
clickety clack
It's Not Unusual
Alfonso Ribeiro, best known as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air's Carlton Banks, brings back his character's famous dance on Dancing with the Stars.
Runnin' with the Sympathy for the Meat Puppet the Beatles
~tildemash is a dada mashup generator that grabs isolated vox and instrument tracks out of youtube's hat to create random sonic soup, courtesy of waxy's brain.
"Where ignorant armies clash by night."
Sea of Faith: a six-part documentary television series, presented on BBC television in 1984 by Don Cupitt. [youtube]
"The programme dealt with the history of Christianity in the modern world, focussing especially on how Christianity has responded to challenges such as scientific advances, political atheism and secularisation in general"[more inside]
Oral Histories/United States Foreign Service
The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training has an extensive archive of oral histories by and about individuals in the foreign service and also about countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
I don't mind stealin' bloop
8-bit Hunger Strike [SLYT]
Accidental robot impacts: elaborations on the first law of robotics
Though we're not (yet) to the point of actually implementing any strict laws of robotics, the limits for how much workplace robots can accidentally harm their human co-workers are now being discussed by standards-setting agencies. It's easy enough to say robots and humans cannot work in the same space, but once robots start collaborating with people (aka: COBOTS), large companies look to standards for safety measures and risk assessment. That's where the Institute for Occupational Safety and Health of the German Social Accident Insurance (German: Institut für Arbeitsschutz der Deutschen Gesetzlichen Unfallversicherung, IFA) come in, with BG/BGIA risk assessment recommendations according to machinery directive (36 page PDF), based on real-world tests with robots on human subjects.
When Martian war machines hit the Western Front
This may be the best War of the Worlds movie ever made, and it's barely three minutes long. And it's not exactly doing HG Wells per se. It's a trailer for or clip from The Great Martian War 1913-17, which concerns "the catastrophic events and unimaginable horrors of 1913-17, when Humankind was pitted against a savage Alien invasion."
The video seems to use a mix of reenactors, period film, and f/x.
(SLVimeo) [more inside]
The rural school to prison pipeline
On the awards for 'exceptional creativity'
A cliché almost as common as the Parable of the Phone Call in genius journalism is what we might call the Delirious Apprehension of the Eclectic, in which the writer is simply amazed by the overwhelming diversity of the fields that have been honored. “They’re historians and scientists and one of them is a stringed-instrument bow maker,” as a gee-whiz NPR story from 2012 had it. “A neurologist who studies dementia. A jazz drummer who celebrates Latin rhythm. A remedial-reading teacher who writes poetry,” begins a Chicago Tribune account from 2011. And were those geniuses somehow to get together in one place—wow! Thomas Frank on the MacArthur "genius" grants.
"Montaigne was Montaigne, a mountain in more than name."
It's said that even a century and a half after Montaigne's death, when the marquis d'Argenson subtitled a book with that word, Essays, he was shouted down for impertinence. Not a context in which many people would find themselves tempted to self-identify as "essayists." When the French do finally start using the word, in the early nineteenth century, it's solely in reference to English writers who've taken up the banner, and more specifically to those who write for magazines and newspapers. "The authors of periodical essays," wrote a French critic in 1834, "or as they're commonly known, essayists, represent in English letters a class every bit as distinct as the Novellieri in Italy." A curiosity, then: the essay is French, but essayists are English. What can it mean?—The Ill-defined Plot is an essay about the history of essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan.
Settling is not how Marvel fights usually end
Marvel and the Kirbys’ eleventh-hour settlement—just as SCOTUS was poised to decide whether to take up the case—has been interpreted by some as an admission on Marvel’s part that the Kirbys’ case was stronger than they first allowed. It does seem reasonable to infer that Marvel was incented to settle before things got more complicated, or hazardous, for them. Yet the fact that the case never came to trial (the original 2011 decision was a summary judgment, not a trial verdict) makes it hard to know just what the calculations were on both sides. Interpreting the result as an unalloyed triumph or affirmation for either side would probably be too big a leap. Again, nothing is yet known publicly beyond the official joint statement: a single sentence.The long running lawsuit Marvel had undertaken against the estate of Jack Kirby was recently settled. Kirby scholar Charles Hatfield examines what this settlement might mean for the Kirby estate and comics in general. [more inside]
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