July 14, 2012
"Gosh, another oversight"
Banksters this story stretches far beyond Britain. Barclays is the first bank in the spotlight because it offered to co-operate fully with regulators. It will not be the last. Investigations into the fixing of LIBOR and other rates are also under way in America, Canada and the EU. Between them, these probes cover many of the biggest names in finance: the likes of Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Deutsche Bank and HSBC. Employees, from New York to Tokyo, are implicated.
The rotten heart of finance. A scandal over key interest rates is about to go global.
Naomi Wolf: The media's 'bad apple' thesis no longer works. This global financial fraud and its gatekeepers.
The rotten heart of finance. A scandal over key interest rates is about to go global.
Naomi Wolf: The media's 'bad apple' thesis no longer works. This global financial fraud and its gatekeepers.
A link to the past
Offline: One Year Without the Internet
Offline: Paul Miller, writing for The Verge, is taking a year off from the internet. Among other things, he can't install modern video games and he must figure out how to pay his bills.
"The only real depression is a depression of individual ingenuity" George Daynor's Palace of Depression
"As the story goes, [George] Daynor was a former gold prospector who’d lost his fortune in the Wall Street crash of 1929. Hitchhiking through Alaska, he was visited by an angel who told him to make his way to New Jersey without further delay. Divine providence had dictated that Daynor was to wait out the Great Depression there, building a castle with his bare hands. Daynor had only four dollars in his pocket when he arrived in Vineland, NJ.... For years he slept in an abandoned car on the mosquito-infested property, living off a steady diet of frogs, fish and squirrels while he built his elaborate eighteen-spired, pastel-hued Palace of Depression out of auto parts and mud. His primary objective? To encourage his downtrodden countrymen to hold onto their hope and stay resourceful, no matter what." [more inside]
Single M dictator seeks lady. Must be: excellent, horse-like
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has been appearing in public lately with a mysterious female companion. Speculation (and apparently gambling) continues to surround the matter of her identity, but the prevailing theory at present seems to be that she is one Hyon Song-wol, of Bochonbo Electronic Music Band fame. The internet presents us with her 2005 single "Excellent Horse-like Lady", offering a rare glimpse into the world of North Korean pop music.
Making Love in 1982
How Making Love Changed Us. Screenwriter Barry Sandler discusses the legacy of the 1982 gay-themed drama with "The Advocate".
Willis Earl Beal
Willis Earl Beal first found fame when one of his flyers advertising his availability as a potential boyfriend appeared on the cover of Found Magazine in 2007. Over the next couple of years, unemployed and living in his Grandmother's spare room, he recorded an album with cheap and sometimes homemade equipment on a broken karaoke tape machine, which (after a convoluted tale recounted in this article from last year) came to be released, first by Found Magazine themselves in a limited release of 200, and eventually by XL Recordings.
Willis Earl Beal performing Evening's Kiss (which is very different from the extremely lo-fi album version) and Swing On Low (album version) on Later With Jools Holland in April 2012.
What divorced readers did with their wedding rings
A Magazine article on when to take off a wedding ring after a marriage fails generated a large response from readers. The feature asked when it was appropriate to remove the band, and explored the symbolism of doing so. Here, readers share their stories about the dilemma of what to do with a symbol of marriage once the relationship has broken down.
O'er the land of the free...
The latest record from Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Americana (released June 5, 2012), is a surprising collection of grungy covers of classic American folk songs, many of which are better known for their contemporary use as children's songs or camp songs. Of the record, Neil Young said:
Every one of these songs has verses that have been ignored. And those are the key verses, those are the things that make these songs live. They’re a little heavy for kindergarteners to be singing. The originals are much darker, there’s more protest in them...[cite]Nevertheless, many of NY&CH's renditions skip some of the juicier bits from the history of these songs' performance. Read on for a listing of tracks with some of their darkest verses. [more inside]
Russian Pussy Riot
Pussy Riot is a free-floating (except when jailed) band of punk rockers and activists in Russia. Their punk protest issues include LGBT and gender rights, as well as opposition to Putin and the government. They’re usually anonymous, and they change their assumed and actual names and personnel on a whim. They perform in balaclavas that hide their features, and wear bright-colored tights and plain, skimpy dresses, so anyone can easily don Pussy Riot gear. Hair, makeup, even gender — doesn’t matter. This is not rock star territory. Men can be members of Pussy Riot; so can anyone on the spectrum. They do not perform in clubs or theaters or at music events. Every performance is a guerrilla one. Vice interviews Pussy Riot (before the arrests). Salon reports on the recent detention of three members. Amnesty International page.
hell pray for us
The amazing gif compilations of artist Uno Moralez. (previously) NSFW • satanday nite • enlight your conus • lustopsy • z-box • glitter feed • jagged holes • hell pray for us • HolySmoke • Red_Right_Hand • horriblethings • Olle gutS • GlitS • pearlspit • Que Sera •
flowers on venus • echosign • blackglow • random frequency • starvation • ... • * • clrd • † •
Escape The Red Giant
Escape The Red Giant is a Flash game that is both incredibly relaxing and incredibly addictive. [more inside]
Dispatch from San Serriffe
The semicolon sat there in my literary utensil drawer like a cherry pitter, theoretically functional, but fussy and unloved and probably destined for the yard-sale table. Semicolons: A Love Story [NYT]
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
Like that rectangular shape I got patents for.
BrainTripping is an "open-ended internet game of storytelling, parody, personality and poetry" in which one writes sentences (and has conversations) in the voices of famous people through the help of a text generator initialized with a database of their writings.
Another banner year for scanning cats and filtering metas
Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
Pop Philosophy
But Can He Sweep with It?
It was a dark and pixellated night.
8-bit illustrations of opening lines to classic short stories by Kafka, Bukowski, Barthelme, and others. Oliver Miller, the creator of the series, writes: I... love short stories. I was an English major, and then I got an MFA in writing. Before that, I was a nerd who huddled in a basement, with his nerd friends, clicking with a mouse to play Bard’s Tale II. So basically, making 8-bit drawings of short stories encapsulates my whole life and, I hope, yours as well.
Raccoonacaturday!
In the future, everyone will be fashionable for a millenium
The Girl With The Golden Hair
Before Kristina från Duvemåla, before Chess, certainly long before Mamma Mia, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of ABBA were experimenting with storytelling through music. As part of their 1977 world tour, ABBA closed out their shows with the mini-musical The Girl With The Golden Hair [~25m, illustrative video (not a live filming), 1977 bootleg-quality audio] (full lyrics). [more inside]
A Short and Violent Movement in 20th Century Art
35 full-length Viennese Actionist films 1957-1969. *NSFW* (Extreme graphic & scatological situations.) "The term Viennese Actionism describes a short and violent movement in 20th century art that can be regarded as part of the many independent efforts of the 1960s to develop 'action art' (Fluxus, Happening, Performance, Body Art, etc.)." Previously: 1, 2. [more inside]
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