March 19, 2017
An intellectual disguised as a barroom primitive
Your Favorite Fictional Band or Fictional Athlete Sucks!
Who's in the Fictitious Athlete Hall of Fame? The Hanson Brothers sure as %!*& are, and so is Harry Doyle. But what about Amanda Whurlitzer? and Dukes? Maybe not yet, but you can vote for them!
Same with the Fictitious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Spinal Tap, The Monkees, and the Blues Brothers were shoo-ins for the inaugrural year – but Wyld Stallyns, The Rutles, The Banana Splits and The Richie Cunningham Experience are waiting for you to seal their place in fake rock-n-roll history!
Same with the Fictitious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Spinal Tap, The Monkees, and the Blues Brothers were shoo-ins for the inaugrural year – but Wyld Stallyns, The Rutles, The Banana Splits and The Richie Cunningham Experience are waiting for you to seal their place in fake rock-n-roll history!
Welcome to the Grosh
User "Mazdeuce" on the Grassroot Motorsports forums bought a house near Houston with his wife thirteen years ago, and it included a somewhat collapsing detached garage. Being a stay-at-home dad, the time finally came that he tackled the menace in 2013. [more inside]
Myron Rolle Will Open Your Mind
What happens when a player chooses academics over immediate NFL success? (Mefi previously) In the case of Myron Rolle, dreams come true- after four years of medical school, he learned Friday
he had been matched for his long-dreamed of residency in neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard.
3,6-dichloro-2-methoxybenzoic acid
There's something in the air in the Missouri bootheel, and it's the auxinic herbicide dicamba. Dicamba has been around since the 1940s, but it's increasingly in the news thanks to Xtend, Monsanto's "crop system" comprising (a) genetically-modified dicamba- (and glyphosate-) resistant broadleaf crops and (b) a dicamba formulation resistant to drifting away on the wind. With the EPA only approving the reduced-volatility dicamba last November, farmers who planted the already-approved Xtend crops sprayed existing (volatile) dicamba formulations anyway last year, harming adjacent non-resistant plants. In the aftermath, Missouri's largest peach farm is suing Monsanto for millions, and a dicamba drift dispute seems to have driven one farmer to murder. [more inside]
Rebellion has its roots in government's indifference and incompetence.
The Big Deal this week is Neil Gorsuch's nomination hearings. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has trouble understanding why its revised immigration ban was blocked (it also has trouble distinguishing praise from satire). [more inside]
IT'S TOO BIG
A lazy Sunday passes on social media and all the people want to know is : WHY IS THE CHICKEN SO BIG?
“The terror threat is significant"
“We are going to be having an increase in the movements of weapons in coming years and we should be worried,” said Robert Alvarez, a former deputy assistant Energy secretary who now focuses on nuclear and energy issues for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. “We always have to assume the worst-case scenario when we are hauling nuclear weapons around the country.”
And so it went.
NBC News Overnight, a live one-hour news program, aired for about seventeen months starting on July 5, 1982. Its debut coincided with a lunar eclipse, and despite science reporter Robert Bizel’s disappearance during the live broadcast (he went for some coffee), it was a success from the first night. It was probably the best-written, best-executed news program ever produced. It never talked down to its viewers because, from day one, it never assumed that the lowest common denominator was the way to go. Entirely the opposite, in fact. The writing was crisp, witty, and smart. Overnight closed its doors in the first week of December 1983, after NBC management dropped it because of low ratings. -- Never mind Jon Stewart, I still miss NBC News Overnight [more inside]
Gene-mapping Dreamtime
Over the last decade, bearing out what archeological evidence already implied, several DNA studies (previously) have established that Australian Aboriginal peoples belonged to a single migrant group who departed Africa around 72,000 years ago, arriving in Sahul about twenty millenia later. Now a new study of mitochondrial DNA maps out the philogeography of this first peopling of Australia, showing the group rapidly encircling the continent - and then essentially staying put, each subgroup in their area... for fifty thousand years. [more inside]
“See if I’m wrong.”
“The first few hours of Mass Effect: Andromeda are… well they aren’t good.” [Rock, Papers, Shotgun] “The first few hours of Andromeda are a gruesome trudge through the most trite bilge of the previous three games, smeared out in a setting that’s horribly familiar, burdened with some outstandingly awful writing, buried beneath a UI that appears to have been designed to infuriate in every possible way. I had gone in assuming this would be more BioWare pleasure. So far – and let’s be clear, there’s lots of room and time for it to pick up and turn things around – the first few hours have been just awful.” [more inside]
ooOOOoohheeeerrrrRRrrRrrrRRah aha ha hannnnnnngg
Make some weird noises through manual speech synthesis, with the utterly goddam wonderful Pink Trombone. (via waxy.)
A Modern Prometheus
Comics artist and illustrator Bernie Wrightson has passed away after a struggle with cancer. Best known as the co-creator of Swamp Thing and for his astounding illustrated version of Frankenstein, he was a huge influence of many artists and will be sorely missed.
Irony doesn’t negate sexism, it just helps it dodge accountability.
Emma Pittman's article, Ironic Sexism: the Male Gaze of Hipster Spaces, discusses the ways that hipster spaces try to rebrand sexism as ironic and therefore acceptable.
Shrink your waste.
Zero Waste: coming soon (hopefully) to a grocery near you. Valérie Leloup, a French-born 45-year-old was an executive with food giant Danone for several years in Germany and then in Montreal. Inspired by Bea Johnson's book Zero Waste Home, a gift from her mother last Christmas, she set out to start NU, a zero waste bulk grocery store in Ottawa. [more inside]
... but Baseball is pretty good too (dogfilter)
ESPN's E:60 series tells the story of The Trenton Thunder's family of Bat Dogs. From the perspective of one of the dogs. [more inside]
home is wherever I'm with you
Charlie Peck records a duet cover of Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros: between himself on the first day of testosterone treatment and himself 9 months later.
"The future is here, it just hasn't finished melting yet."
Utopia in the Time of Trump - "Written before Trump's election and released just after his inauguration, [Kim Stanley Robinson's] New York 2140 stands as the first major science fictional artifact of the Trump era, anticipating even in its articulation of the conditions of victory the fragility of progress and the likelihood of reversal." (via) [previously] [more inside]
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