October 17, 2012
Being the second-best horseshoe pitcher in the world is not a profit-making enterprise
Having his colon removed was one of the best things that ever happened to him, Simmons says. It stopped his Crohn’s symptoms, which allowed him pitch horseshoes competitively again. So having his colon removed was easy and nothing compared to the long list of troubles he would face in the 2000s, after he had become a world champion.
Lego recreation of Felix Baumgartner's record breaking skydive
The vanishing groves
"If I Could Go Back In Time, I Wouldn't Report My Rape"
Gay In The South: Uncle Poodle Speaks Out
It all started on Sept 27, when Honey Boo Boo's Uncle Lee "Poodle" Thompson made his first appearance on the show. Not a week had passed before Karen Cox's October 3rd op-ed for the New York Times using him as an example for the encouraging state of being gay in the South. October 8th, Jonathan Capehart wrote his own op-ed column for the Washington Post taking Cox to task for painting too rosy a picture of what GLBT life is like in the South, and calling for Uncle Poodle to speak out. Finally, October 10, Lee Thompson did speak out, in a profile column with the GA Voice, Georgia's gay newspaper. And what he had to say is getting positive attention.
Money is Speech
A short musical explanation of campaign finance.
the Tactical Adventure Medical Preparedness Outdoors Necessity (T.A.M.P.O.N.)
The Swiss Army Tampon - a life-saving wilderness survival tool
What is the biggest rock?
Last week, The Onion revealed it is taking on TED with Onion Talks. The first episode is up: Compost-Fuelled Cars: Wouldn't That Be Great?
A Stroll Down Comic Book Memory Lane
Mike's Amazing World of Comics has a section called The Newsstand that lets you select a year/date/publisher and then view a collection of cover images from that time period. [more inside]
The Pirate Bay moves to the cloud
As of yesterday, The Pirate Bay - which has described itself as "the world's most resilient BitTorrent site" - is now hosted by multiple cloud computing services in two countries who are unaware of the identity of their notorious customer. The pirates boast, "If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images. They have to be quick about it too, if the servers have been out of communication with the load balancer for 8 hours they automatically shut down. When the servers are booted up, access is only granted to those who have the encryption password.” [more inside]
Behold, she is Grace Kelly.
Omaha schoolgirl dresses as a different historical figure every day. "The Dundee Elementary School third-grader comes to school dressed as a different historical figure or character — Every. Single. Day. And she's done that since the second day of second grade, when this all started."
If you've seen Babe, you wouldn't be able to eat this!
The Jim J. and Tammy Faye Show was a short-run syndicated talk show from 1996. Staring the eccentric duo of Jim Bullock and Tammy Faye Bakker Messner (replaced by Ann Abernathy due to Tammy Faye's initial cancer diagnosis that ultimately took her). Some off-beat guests included Hula-Hooper Mat Plendl, Sweepstakes King Steve Ledoux, Handwriting Expert Bart Baggett, and in this insane, hot-dog waving intro from episode 6 features sword swallower Zamora The Torture King.
Branding the US Presidents: USG - The Butcher
from the mightiest pharaohs to the lowliest peasants
Sitting is hazardous to your health. "The research, published in separate medical journals this month, adds to a growing scientific consensus that the more time someone spends sitting, especially in front of the television, the shorter and less robust his or her life may be." [more inside]
Visualizing the Euro crisis
The Absurd Quest for Euro Crisis Images: The Greeks aren't the only ones sick of the euro crisis. Photographers are reaching the end of their tether too, struggling to shoot images of euro coins in various states of distress to illustrate the story. Though some of the photos are absurd, they still get published -- because news outlets are equally desperate. Gallery. [via]
"I would not choose to be any one else, or any place else."
"Look, goddamn it, I’m homosexual, and most of my friends are Jewish homosexuals, and some of my best friends are black homosexuals, and I am sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends." - Merle Miller.In 1970, two years after Stonewall, Joseph Epstein wrote a cover story for Harper’s Magazine, Homo/hetero: The struggle for sexual identity, that came to chilling conclusions: "I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth." His incendiary language prompted author/journalist/writer Merle Miller to come out of the closet in the New York Times Magazine, with an angry and poignant plea for dignity, understanding and respect: "What It Means to Be a Homosexual." 40 years later, that essay helped inspire the launch of the "It Gets Better" campaign. Via [more inside]
Hellaflops
This is what the internet looks like. Google hired photographer Connie Zhou to photograph its data centers for the first time ever, from enormous warehouses in Iowa to color-coded pipes in Georgia. You can even check out their security team on Street View.
FATTY BOOM BOOM
Die Antwoord's new video FATTY BOOM BOOM is a bright and colourful African adventure, complete with wild animals, zef savages singing and dancing in the streets, and a special guest appearance by a sneaky little prawn star. (warning: contains ironic blackface)
We can stop it
The usual rape prevention campaigns often focus on the victims and what they can do to minimise the risk of being attacked (as discussed previously) but in Scotland they're now doing things differently. [more inside]
Much more satisfying than watching yet another in-flight movie
"Thanks to extra fuel left on their plane and a pair of binoculars from a passenger, the crew of [an] Air Canada jetliner was credited Monday with assisting in the rescue of an Australian yacht adrift in the South Pacific." [more inside]
Benn Jordan tries using the DMCA
“These companies are willing to shove 1,000 attorneys down your throat if you share music, but won’t even respond to a legal order about actual music theft and piracy.” -Benn Jordan [via] [more inside]
Today, I'm going to tell you about the time my grandfather shot a man in the ass
Rockstar's open-world police procedural is set in 1947. Dad was born in 1943, and he spent his early years in Crenshaw, a district in the south-west of the city. (It's close to where the body of the Black Dahlia was found.) Best of all, his dad was a beat cop - a beat cop who, as we've already discovered, once shot a guilty man in the ass. The game world was the world of dad's childhood, then. Would he recognise it?
"The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion"
Wet your whistle on these
What ho, dearest cousins in the Western Colonies. You appear to be increasingly using the vernacular of the mother country. Splendid! [more inside]
Mad scientist in your own basement?
The Genome Compiler is an IDE for DNA projects for all you DIYbio enthusiasts. Previously. Previously.
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