October 30, 2013
We think about the positioning of our legs, the position of our hair...
Caroline Heldman on The Sexy Lie
In the 5 minutes that I've been giving this talk, on average the women in this audience have engaged in habitual body monitoring 10 times. That is every 30 seconds...It simply takes up mental space that can be better used completing math tests, completing your homework. It just sucks our cognitive functioning.[more inside]
The pizza is aggressive.
It's the Jimmy Neutron Happy Family Happy Hour! [slyt; nsfl]
Virgin-American ailines safty video rap
Prepare for Take-Off Virgin-American airlines has a informational show that's better than an in-flight movie
Cisco going to pay H264 licensing fees to provide free codec
CIsco has decided to pay MPEG LA licensing fees for EVERYONE! Cisco has decided to pay the MPEG LA licensing cap fee and will be open sourcing, as well as providing free binary blobs to browser providers, for H.264 in order to push it's adoption in WebRTC. [more inside]
"As always, they are published without Medvedev’s permission."
Ringo takes a shot. And Again.
A steady spiral into one core truth
The Trouble with "Carrie": Strong Female Characters and Onscreen Violence.
Whether she's volunteering to take her sister's place in the arena or grooming her son to lead the resistance; gunning down the gangsters who sell drugs to the kids in her neighborhood or swinging swords to avenge her daughter, the "strong female character" is often stirred by a maternal concern, a quintessential desire to preserve her community, to protect the weak and vulnerable. Her bad-assery must be in the service of a greater good. Even when she's more ethically complex (like the Bride, who begrudgingly admits that all the people she killed to get to her daughter, "felt good"), she never takes a place at the table of Walter White's grand epiphany: "I did it for me."
Carrie does what Beatrix Kiddo and Ellen Ripley and Katniss Everdeen don't: She does it for herself. Her vengeance, her violence, is in service to no one, no noble good. She doesn't kill because her family and friends have been threatened. There are no friends, no fellow outcasts, to protect from the bullies. No little sister to shield from Mama's wrath. Only her. And she is enough. Carrie kills because she was wronged.
Magic, Monsters and Movies: The Rise and Fall of the Midnight Ghost Show
Placing a bag over the boy‘s head, Dr. Silkini proceeded to cut if off with a knife. The girls in the audience squealed and screamed as blood dripped over the white tablecloth. Just after this decapitation, the Frankenstein monster seized the newly-severed head and started down the steps into the audience. At that precise moment, the house lights went off. Enthralled onlookers thought the rampaging creature was loose in the dark.
During the blackout, girls shrieked and boys shouted as ghosts, bats, and eerie faces zoomed about overhead and up and down the aisles. On the stage a chorus line of glowing skeletons danced in front of tombstones and vanished as they floated skyward. After three minutes of special effects and imaginative terror, there was a flash explosion and then the lights came on.
The above description of a sequence from "Dr. Silkini‘s Asylum of Horrors" conveys what an audience might have experienced at a typical midnight ghost show around 1941, as excerpted from Beth A. Kattelman's paper from 2010, Magic, Monsters, and Movies: America’s Midnight Ghost Shows (PDF), and covered in additional detail on the Paleofuture blog post The Rise and Fall of the Midnight Ghost Shows.
During the blackout, girls shrieked and boys shouted as ghosts, bats, and eerie faces zoomed about overhead and up and down the aisles. On the stage a chorus line of glowing skeletons danced in front of tombstones and vanished as they floated skyward. After three minutes of special effects and imaginative terror, there was a flash explosion and then the lights came on.
The above description of a sequence from "Dr. Silkini‘s Asylum of Horrors" conveys what an audience might have experienced at a typical midnight ghost show around 1941, as excerpted from Beth A. Kattelman's paper from 2010, Magic, Monsters, and Movies: America’s Midnight Ghost Shows (PDF), and covered in additional detail on the Paleofuture blog post The Rise and Fall of the Midnight Ghost Shows.
You have slumbered in the dark
The guestlist is for friends, family & people you might want to fuck.
Jacksons Silmarillion would be somewhere between 1200 - 1500 minutes
"reading into poems nasty little messages that aren't there"
Joyce Carol Oates's new story about an imagined interview with Robert Frost has been called outrageous, even an attack on the poet. [note: story link opens a print dialog]
"I Quit" Lit
"I Quit Academia" -- An Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays
Point Here If ...
Living In The U.X.A.
"At the height of the Great Depression, a group of unemployed Oakland workers decided to take matters into their own hands. The system wasn’t working, so they set up their own system. Money was nearly worthless, so they decided to live by barter. They called themselves the Unemployed Exchange Association and they soon went on to write a remarkable chapter in American economic history. This is their story."
Setting the record straight on the flu vaccine
That is not an exhaustive list, but it’s exhausting.
A collective narrative of trying to make it on $17,000 a year: bargaining testimony from a UCSC student-worker
We make only $17,000 a year. We make only $17,000 a year in a town where almost that entire paycheck goes to rent. So today I’m going to talk about how academic workers try to get by on $17,000 a year.
We make only $17,000 a year. We make only $17,000 a year in a town where almost that entire paycheck goes to rent. So today I’m going to talk about how academic workers try to get by on $17,000 a year.
I love the smell of cat urine in the morning
BBC: A number of Dell users have complained that their Latitude 6430u Ultrabooks "smell of cat urine" ... Another customer, Hoteca, said: "I thought for sure one of my cats sprayed it, but there was something faulty with it so I had it replaced. The next one had the same exact issue. It's embarrassing taking it to clients because it smells so bad." Other users said they had blamed their cats for the smell. [more inside]
A Very Spooky Episode
A WEEK OF KINDNESS: a novel in collage
SUNDAY. Element: Mud. Exemplar: The Lion of Belfort.
MONDAY. Element: Water. Exemplar: Water.
TUESDAY. Element: Fire. Exemplar: The Court of Dragons.
WEDNESDAY. Element: Blood. Exemplar: Œdipus. [Certain images NSFW on account of Victorian prurience] [more inside]
MONDAY. Element: Water. Exemplar: Water.
TUESDAY. Element: Fire. Exemplar: The Court of Dragons.
WEDNESDAY. Element: Blood. Exemplar: Œdipus. [Certain images NSFW on account of Victorian prurience] [more inside]
going to the next level
Snow White in Auschwitz
"Knowing of Dina's artistic ability, Freddy asked her to paint a mural on the wall of the barracks to cheer up the children. She agreed, although she expected she would be executed if the Germans caught her. This was some time if February 1944. Using paints that were smuggled from various sources, Dina set to work painting a scene of Snow White looking out over the Swiss countryside. Dina knew that some of the children had seen the movie and would recognize the character. She had seen the movie 'seven times in a row' back in Czechoslovakia."
The amazing, sad, triumphant story of Dina Babbitt (née Gottliebová)—artist, animator, concentration camp survivor. [more inside]
The amazing, sad, triumphant story of Dina Babbitt (née Gottliebová)—artist, animator, concentration camp survivor. [more inside]
We Saw Nothing
"We have entered the new millennium and yet we still have no idea what 95% of the universe is made of." The Large Underground Xenon experiment has failed to see a single particle of Dark Matter. Will the Lux Zeplin have better luck?
The Day the Martians Came
Seventyfive years ago today, a broadcast of light music was interrupted for a special bulletin from Intercontinental news.
I don't wanna go but I gotta go.
After 13 years, the Best Show on WFMU will sign off for good December 17. Tom Scharpling (previously, previously) announced on last night's broadcast that WFMU's weekly 3 hours of mirth, music, and mayhem are coming to an end. Friends of Tom stormed Twitter in grief and praise, and some concern about what the Best Show's departure will mean for fundraising at free-form, listener-supported station WFMU. [more inside]
Aviator
The Science of a Great Subway Map
Researchers at an MIT lab have devised a way to determine how well straphangers can comprehend a subway map in a single glance. Massimo Vignelli really DID know what he was doing.
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