December 4, 2014
UK's Premier Foods accused over 'pay and stay' practice
Premier Foods, one of the UK's biggest manufacturers, has been asking its suppliers for payments to continue doing business with the firm.
Strange Fruit
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze (graphic)
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin' flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze (graphic)
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin' flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
i like the way / you know / that i / like / how you look
"Every Night" by Hannah Diamond is a perfect piece of 21st Century Twee. The song is the first official, find-it-in-shops single from PC Music (previously, previouslier and thoroughlier), and an ideal example of the sound. Diamond is a key member of the (small) music collective and a designer for LOGO Magazine. She has previously dropped two tracks: Attachment and Pink and Blue, and was featured featured on label founder A.G. Cook's Keri Baby ). All four songs are delicious. [more inside]
JokeFilter
Hillary, Voldemort 2016! You know it makes sense!
It is definitely not US election season, which means only one thing - Unauthorised superPAC ads for Hillary Clinton 2016!!! (Are you excited? I am excited!) Leading off this year - StandWithHillary - a SuperPAC targeting white men in rural swing states. But can it beat 2008's "as seen on metafilter" classic Hillary4U&Me [more inside]
Useless Toilet Paper Machine
The Fall of The New Republic?
Today, The New Republic's editor-in-chief Franklin Foer and literary editor (and thirty-year veteran of the magazine) Leon Wieseltier both resigned in a shake-up that also includes moving the magazine to New York from Washington and reducing its number of print issues from 20 to 10 per year. Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker reports that "the top editors are gone & mass resignations are imminent." The impetus for the resignations, according to Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine, is apparently that Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder who purchased the magazine in 2012 at age 28, and Guy Vidra, its new CEO, "are afflicted with the belief that they can copy the formula that transformed the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed into economic successes, which is probably wrong, and that this formula can be applied to The New Republic, which is certainly wrong." [more inside]
Residents here decline emailed requests: Kensington Palace Gardens
"The signs on the doors are excessively polite, and use outmoded words such as 'kindly' and 'residing'. 'Kindly do not deliver items for Mr and Mrs [...] to this address as they are no longer residing here.' But it is the doorbell etiquette that is most enraging, and instructions that 'for all collections and deliveries please press the housekeeper's button only' incite a sudden surge of anarchic rage and a desire to ring all the other bells simultaneously – summoning the chef/kitchen, the residence and the caretaker." [SLTheGuardian]
Canadian government continues valiant fight in the war against science
"It’s absurd to be forced to make an argument in 2014 about why a country needs to invest in long term basic science" [more inside]
How big is space? Interactive views of the universe in varying scales
We know space is big, but trying to understand how big is tricky. Say you stare up at the sky and identify stars and constellations in a virtual planetarium, you can't quite fathom how far away all those stars are (previously, twice). Even if you could change your point of view and zoom around in space to really see 100,000 nearby stars (autoplaying ambient music, and there are actually 119,617 stars mapped in 3D space), it's still difficult to get a sense of scale. There's this static image of various items mapped on a log scale from XKCD (previously), and an interactive horizontal journey down from the sun to the heliosphere with OMG Space (previously). You can get a bit more dynamic with this interactive Scale of the Universe webpage (also available in with some variants, if you want the sequel [ previously, twice], the swirly, gravity-optional version that takes some time to load, and the wrong version [previously]), but that's just for the scale of objects, not of space itself. If you want to get spaced out, imagine if If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel, and travel from there (previously). This past March, BBC Future put out a really big infographic, which also takes a moment to load, but then you can see all sorts of things, from the surface of Earth out to the edge of our solar system.
Fancy while it lasted
Cat Fancy & Dog Fancy Magazine going to the big food bowl up in the sky The print magazines will be replaced by Dogster and Catster, which until recently were only digital publications. [more inside]
Kevin, Portrait of a Serial Killer
all women's bodies weren't created equal
Irish Glass Guitars
The Dublin Guitar Quartet performs 4 Philip Glass string quartets (in their own original arrangements) at an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. [11m45s] Brilliant!
Real Valor
"Not all anxiety is created equal."
Paddington’s story is that of the modern migrant.
Paddington stows away and deliberately avoids the immigration authorities on arrival. He is in formal legal terms an illegal entrant and as such commits a criminal offence under section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971. It is an offence punishable by up to six months in prison. If or when detected by the authorities it is more likely he would simply be removed back to Peru than that he would be prosecuted, though. To avoid that fate he would need to make out a legal basis to stay.An immigrant lawyer reviews the case of Paddington Bear.
What Would Sam Fucking Adams Say
The death of Eric Garner is a rare subject that conservatives and liberals seem to agree on. Since the decision not to indict , the conservative blogosphere has been filling with outrage– not at protesting hippies, but at the police. The right-wing site Hot Air described it as a moment that "unites left and right" and collected angry tweets from conservatives, some comparing Garner to the Founding Fathers. National Review, which was unsupportive of the Michael Brown protests, is now running pieces by multiple conservative pundits suggesting an "Enough!" moment. Even torture apologist Andrew McCarthy has ventured to suggest that "I thus cannot in good conscience say there was insufficient probable cause to indict Officer Pantaleo for involuntary manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide." Libertarians have long been active and highly effective critics of police violence, but Reason magazine's support for a federal investigation is unusual.
Hunting Task Wabbits
Neither Lost Nor Found: On the Trail of an Elusive Icon’s Rarest Film
"Screening rats and bootleg-swappers always have a holy grail. It sits at the top of a list of titles, on a folded sheet of notebook paper or in a Word document, bolded, underlined, or marked with a little squiggly star. ... These lists never get smaller; they only grow more obscure until they are filled with titles the list-maker has only a slim chance of ever seeing." Ignatiy Vishnevetsky [previously, previously] on rare movies, Jean-Luc Godard, and the life of the obsessive film fan.
Never Get Comfortable
“Just two months ago, Detroit native Dej Loaf was a janitor at a Chrysler plant in the suburbs. She often tackled dirty bathrooms, floors and overflowing trash cans. Now she's slaying tracks as one of the rap game's rising stars.” Interview with a local newspaper, plus YouTube link to one of her videos.
There are no legitimate authorities anywhere.
Meet the most frightening author of the twentieth century. And I don't mean Stephen King or Clive Barker. Who needs Pennywise the Clown or Mamoulian when all you have to do is look in the mirror and realize that under the right circumstances, you'd make a good Nazi? All you need is an authority you trust to give you the right orders. [more inside]
Rarer than hitting for the cycle...
Here's a list of baseball players who have stolen second, third and home in the same inning. [more inside]
Aesop Waits - Tom Shall Pass
Tom Shall Pass - Tom Waits x Aesop Rock. Someone using the name Aesop Waits released Tom Shall Pass this year, with remixed Tom Waits music beds underpinning vocal tracks from rapper Aesop Rock’s acclaimed 2007 album None Shall Pass, and I’ll be damned if it ain’t half bad at all. Since Waits’ old-timey rhythms and timbres don’t easily lend themselves to hip-hop treatment, the DJ here had to go to some effort to make this combination work, and to my reckoning, he (she?) did a good bit better than 50/50—the demented circus-falling-down-a-flight-of-stairs stylings of Waits’ music complements Aesop’s complex and impressionistic lyrics better than I’d have guessed. [more inside]
Humankind has been stagnant for 40 years.
Michael Hanlon on the lack of true invention like what we saw between 1945 and 1971. Technology is booming, but it seems we are basically just making smaller and faster versions of things that were already invented 40 years ago. Most of what is happening in medicine, technology, civil rights, etc. seems to be expansion rather than innovation.
The Truly Final Countdown
Britain's Co-Operative Funeralcare keeps records of their clients' requests and occasionally reports on “what's popular” at UK funerals. And their latest survey of “most requested music” (based on over 30,000 funerals) has a few surprises, starting with the song at #1: Eric Idle/Monty Python's “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, beating out Psalm 23 and “Abide With Me”. Also in the top ten: Frank Sinatra's “My Way” (although it may include the Elvis and Sid Vicious versions) and the theme from “Match of the Day”. There are also breakdowns by musical genre/style including Hymns, Classical, Film/TV, Sports and 'Humor', a category that includes the Python song as well as “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Don't Worry Be Happy”. [more inside]
High Frame Rate movies
HFR (High Frame Rate) movies: why do they look fake?
Walter Benjamin for Children
Walter Benjamin presented "True Dog Stories" on September 27, 1930, as part of Radio Berlin's youth programming. Thoughtful but sometimes oblique commentaries on human society, Benjamin's radio shows have been called "Enlightenment for Children" and "NPR for weirdos," but an interview with the editor of their recent translations into English gives much greater context. Some essays have been re-recorded in German (including the dog episode, track 16), and Börne's original poodle letter is also online.
Dürer's polyhedron: 5 theories that explain Melencolia's crazy cube
Dürer's polyhedron: 5 theories that explain Melencolia's crazy cube
The distinctive three-dimensional shape in Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia I has been the subject of innumerous analyses and still no one is sure what it is or what it means. On the occasion of its 500th birthday, mathematician Günter M Ziegler looks again at art history’s most infamous truncated triangular trapezohedron
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