March 22, 2011
The Outfielder Was a Poet
Chicago Cubs outfielder Fernando Perez has published his poems in Poetry and The Southern Review. He studied creative writing at Columbia, just like James Franco. He is into Robert Creeley. He has a twitter feed. His career batting average is .234 but he's hitting only .161 in the Cactus League and might not make the big league club. Spring Training is the cruelest month.
Google Goes Gaga
Musicians@Google Presents: Google Goes Gaga. A 1h13m video interview with Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, mostly fan-submitted questions. [more inside]
April 2011 cover girls
A first? This month's Linux Journal cover features Angela Byron, co-maintainer of Drupal 7, while Wired's cover features Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries.
the future of food and farming
How to feed 9 billion people: The global food supply is starting to get tight, with increasing sensitivity to droughts and floods causing price spikes and food shortages. The UK commissioned a report to examine how to feed a planet with a population that is set to increase to 9 billion by 2050. [more inside]
Brit Writer Goes Pro-Nuke.
Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power Brit writer raises interesting points.
Hypnotic Tesselations
Topologies is an audiovisual work led by artist Quayola in collaboration with software artist Mauritius Seeger and musician Matthias Kispert, in which high-resolution photographs of Velazquez' Las Meninas and Tiepolo's L’ Immacolata Concezione are reduced to triangular meshes and transformed by sound, made into hypnotic ambient works: Excerpt I (Velazquez) | Excerpt II (Tiepolo). [more inside]
Just A Simplified Oscilloscope
Let the children use it
The Great American Counterterrorism Memo
Employed as a Counterterrorism Analyst, But Think Your Bosses Are Misunderstanding the Problem? Quit your DoD post and write a book! Offer it for free, on the Web. Oh, and do it anonymously. Reddit AMA here.
More Truths to Handle
German news magazine Der Spiegel has published trophy photos taken by a U.S. Army "kill team" in Afghanistan. [more inside]
Opting out rejected, Opting in suggested
Only weeks after Judge Denny Chin extended the filing deadline, and presumably a final decision, and reflecting the Department of Justice’s own opinion, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected the landmark class-action lawsuit settlement between the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and Google. And offers some advice for a revised resubmission.
The Fog Of War
Libya: Six injured as US team botches rescue of downed airmen. 'US forces sent into Libya to rescue two downed American airmen botched the mission by shooting and wounding friendly villagers who had come to help, witnesses have said. Libyans who went to investigate the US warplane's crash site said that a US helicopter had come in with guns firing, creating panic and wounding onlookers, some of whom had to be taken to hospital; one 20-year-old man is expected to have his leg amputated.' [more inside]
South Dakota House Bill 1217 signed into law
South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard has signed into law bill 1217 [pdf], which requires a three-day waiting period and mandatory counseling from a "pregnancy help center" before a woman may obtain an abortion. [more inside]
"I ought to warn you, if you haven't read any of my stories, that you may be a little disturbed by some of the things that happen."
Though Roald Dahl is better known in this day as the author of stories for children, he had a parallel career as the author of short stories with more adult, macabre sensibilities. Some of those stories became part of a short-run series to fill the slot of to not one but two ill-fated Jackie Gleason shows. But instead of another game show or talk show, CBS wanted something to pair with the Twilight Zone. That show was Way Out, though it didn't rate well and only ran for 14 episodes (and 5 episodes are on Archive.org). 18 years later, Dahl returned to TV with his sinister stories, but this time it was in the UK, where Tales of the Unexpected lasted 9 seasons, 112 episodes in total. You can view 23 or so episodes online, split into parts (YT Playlist). [more inside]
Command and control
Yakuza To The Rescue
Even Japan’s infamous mafia groups are helping out with the relief efforts and showing a strain of civic duty. "The Kanagawa Block of the Inagawa-kai, has sent 70 trucks to the Ibaraki and Fukushima areas to drop off supplies in areas with high radiations levels. They didn't keep track of how many tons of supplies they moved. The Inagawa-kai as a whole has moved over 100 tons of supplies to the Tohoku region. They have been going into radiated areas without any protection or potassium iodide."
Want to explaind the Solar System to someone?
"Welcome It's Elf's World"
"A Adept Arranging For Mother Volcano Bakemeat" [SLYT] Horribly-translated Pokemon bootleg makes "All Your Base" intelligible. Walkthrough: Part 1 of 18
Julian Assange: Bad Houseguest
Julian Assange is apparently a bad houseguest.
Do Something Funny for Money
Ell Bee Gee Tee reppin fo my faggot family
Imma Homo - Rainbow Noise Entertainment [SLYT, NSFW, has "rape" in the lyrics]
Chris Ware Interview
An interview with Chris Ware from May 2010 at the international Copenhagen comics festival. Ware is the creator of Acme Novelty Library and Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. (via kottke)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
“I had reached the point of no return. You finally get fed up … I finally wanted to speak the truth.”
Last year, the unofficial Dean of the White House Press Corps, Helen Thomas, spoke about the State of Israel on camera. (Previously) Her replies: "Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," and that the Jews "can go home" to "Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else," sparked media outrage, prompted her to issue an apology and retire. After months of being out of the the public spotlight, she has now given her first long-form interview, which will appear in the April issue of Playboy Magazine. In it, she explains what she meant, tells us how she would like to be remembered and expands upon her positions regarding Israel, Jewish political influence, Presidents Bush and Obama, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Jeeves, I’d Like Some Mood Music
There are days that your MP3 player has died, searching YouTube for music feels like too much work, and you just want some sounds to mask the world. A few options:
8Tracks has playlists to suit your mood (having a one-person dance party, gaming, sad, and many more); if you want something a little more ambient, SimplyNoise provides white, pink and brown noise; RainyMood, the sounds of an endless rainy day. [more inside]
8Tracks has playlists to suit your mood (having a one-person dance party, gaming, sad, and many more); if you want something a little more ambient, SimplyNoise provides white, pink and brown noise; RainyMood, the sounds of an endless rainy day. [more inside]
If you ask the wrong question, the right answer to that question isn’t going to help you
"Eisler’s decision is a key benchmark on the road to wherever it is we’re going" Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin: I wasnt planning to write a post this past weekend for Monday morning publication. But then Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler contacted me on Saturday to tell me what Barry is up to. Ive read their lengthy conversation about Barrys decision to turn down a $500,000 contract (apparently for two books) and join Joe (and many others, but none who have turned down half-a-million bucks) as a self-published author. [more inside]
WTH, retro style!
50 Unexplainable Black & White Photos. That is all.
(Mildly NSFW.)
Limpia, fija y da esplendor
"cleans, sets, and casts splendour" is the motto of the Real Academia Española, the 300-year-old institution tasked with keeping the natural evolution of the Spanish language both coherent and true to its character, reflected in print through the publication of the Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española (online). [more inside]
Timeline of Middle East protests
R.I.P. Loleatta Holloway
"A love smack"
The Duke Nukem series is certainly not known for its positive portrayal of women. In the previous game, (NSFW) women were either strippers, prostitutes, or trapped in alien cocoons, begging you to end their pain. The new game starts off showing Duke getting an implied blowjob from twins in school uniforms. The strippers and clubs are back. But when a multiplayer mode called "Capture the Babe" requires you to abduct women and lets you give them a "reassuring slap" on their buttocks if they "freak out", have the developers simply gone too far?
This is a song I wrote about 'brownness'
King Pong
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