April 16, 2014
When asked to describe his style he said "warm."
Chinatown Sartorialist. "We saw them at Portsmouth Square and frantically made a beeline for them, both in a brown, earthy palette with matching cheetah sweaters and furry hats."
King of the Ludicrous Lucrative
The Ket had seven souls, unlike animals, who had only one.
The Ket from the Lake Munduiskoye (2008, 30 min.) The Ket people are an indigenous group in central Siberia whose population has numbered less than two thousand during the past century. Although mostly assimilated into the dominant Russian culture at this point, a couple hundred of them are still able to speak the Ket language, the last remaining member of the Yeniseian language group. Recent scholarship has proposed a link between Ket and some Native American language groups.
SLYT * 85000
British Pathe releases 85K videos to YouTube. An archive of film from the late 1800s onward is now available on YouTube.
Mysterious Siberian mummies plated in copper
"Academics restart work to unlock secrets of mystery medieval civilization with links to Persia on edge of the Siberian Arctic. The 34 shallow graves excavated by archeologists at Zeleniy Yar throw up many more questions than answers. But one thing seems clear: this remote spot, 29 km shy of the Arctic Circle, was a trading crossroads of some importance around one millennium ago."
Dust and Echoes
The world of video game music has blossomed in recent years, enough to support live concert tours and bestselling albums. But while most such work is licensed or contracted out to third-party composers, a rare breed make their living at a single company, imbuing entire franchises with their unique sound. And apart from Nintendo's venerable Koji Kondo, there is perhaps no dedicated gaming composer more renowned than Martin O'Donnell. From humble beginnings writing the jingle for Flintstones Vitamins, O'Donnell and longtime collaborator Michael Salvatori joined developer Bungie in 1997, penning music for Myth, Oni, and most notably the Halo trilogy -- an iconic blend of sweeping orchestral bombast, haunting choirs, and electronic ambience that became one of the most acclaimed and successful gaming soundtracks of all time. O'Donnell also helmed Bungie's audio department, managing voice actors, sound effects, and an innovative dynamic music engine, and was most recently working with Paul McCartney on the score for the upcoming Destiny. So it came as a surprise today when it was announced MartyTheElder was being terminated without cause (flabbergasted reaction: HBO/DBO - NeoGAF - Reddit). With O'Donnell following Joseph Staten, Frank O'Connor, Marcus Lehto, and other Bungie veterans out the door, what might this mean for the company and its decade-long plan for Destiny? [more inside]
There's Nothing in the World Like Action Park!
Action Park was an amusement park located in Vernon, New Jersey, (in)famous for its dangerous rides. "You'd see a kid in the summer cover in friction burns, and you'd be like 'How was Action Park?' " (13 minute documentary on DailyMotion.) Relive some of those memories with 9 minutes of commercials from 1979-80, including an actual record of people on Cannonball Loop, and almost six minutes of rides and attractions from 1991.
"I got locked into the eyes of this woman and could not get out."
Not for scopophobes
Try to win a staring game against Dali (or a campbell's soup can or a giraffe) in this free staring game on the iPhone.
Or have characters from The Office stare at you instead, in The Office Stare Machine.
I hate this. I look like a superhero.
At least they're not juggling baby geese
What my autism classes didn't teach me
“Right before I went into high school, my parents enrolled me in a couple of social skills classes to prepare me for the change,” she tells me. “They taught me how to behave in certain social situations, like when girls go into the washroom together, or how to behave when you get invited to a party, or when you want to ask someone on a date. That’s where I think the classes switched from being useful to being controlling.”
Apparently, "Whatever" happens one time out of five
Last month, Beverage Industry published their 2014 US Beer Category Report, and Dylan Matthews at Vox.com has compiled the numbers into their favorite thing: charts! There's a few interesting details, but the biggest one is that not only is Bud Light one out of every five beers purchased in America, but sells more than all import, craft, cider and malt beverage sales combined.
Happy trees? Not all 381 times.
When it's time for some mellow craftiness it's time for Bob Ross. But what if you want to know how many times his paintings included palm trees? Cumulus clouds? What if it's time to apply some good ol' fashioned conditional probability to his oeuvre? Then this is the place to go.
"It’s possible I have bitten off more than I can chew"
"This is the petty tyranny of inconvenience — just as the heroine believes that her individual comfort somehow justifies the enslavement of roughly a hundred other human beings, romance readers feel it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable to reflect on the ways the genre not only has marginalized but continues to marginalize not only characters, but also readers and authors of color. This book was not written by an obscure self-published writer with a small niche audience. Sandra Hill is a New York Times bestselling author, a genre mainstay for the past two decades; she is still writing books set in the contemporary South, though I am certainly not going to read them." -- Romance author Olivia Waite reviews Sandra Hill's Frankly My Dear, set on a sugar plantation in 1845 Louisiana, as part of the blogging from A to Z challenge. [more inside]
"We're gonna need a bigger boat."
That Time The CIA And Howard Hughes Tried To Steal A Soviet Submarine | You may recall this (previously) epic post about this subject, but it is time to update the story with recently declassified documents (PDF: Search it for the term "Azorian" and you'll find some 200 pages of info.) Or just read the first link for the Cliff's Notes.
"Boxing is a business."
Honey, we're gonna need a load of quarters
These machines were always too darn hard .... a 3-year-old boy feared missing by his mother was found safe and sound inside an arcade claw machine in Nebraska on Tuesday.
Ferry with 470 Passengers Sinks off Korea
Ferry with 470 Passengers Sinks off Korea Scores still missing, many of them high school students on an excursion. According to comments on the Marmot's Hole Korea blog, passengers were told to wait in their cabins rather than gather on deck. Video from Japanese Fuji television.
keep his top half movies, he would blow everyone else out of the water
Behind the Stall Door
The Private Lives of Public Bathrooms "The public collides uncomfortably with the private in the bathroom as it does nowhere else, and the unique behaviors we perform stem from a complex psychological stew of shame, self-awareness, design, and gender roles. "
Une agreable surprise!
Victorian Prudes and their Bizarre Beachside Bathing Machines. If you were a beachgoer in Georgian or Victorian times, more specifically, a female beachgoer, your day at the seaside would’ve likely had all the fun sucked out of it by a little invention known as the bathing machine.
It's all one ghetto man, a giant gutter in outer space.
10 signs you're a buzzfeed clone
"They wanted to kill it and at some point they wanted to fire me"
Woodward is Elmore’s ‘Heart of Darkness’
A Magical Miniature World Of Snails
Talented Ukrainian nature photographer Vyacheslav Mishchenko has an eye for taking photos that bring small natural worlds up to our level, showing us how the world might look if we could see it through the eyes of an ant, snail or lizard. [more inside]
Women, submit!
Project ROSE is a Phoenix city programme that arrests sex workers in the name of saving them. In five two-day stings, more than 100 police officers targeted alleged sex workers on the street and online. They brought them in handcuffs to the Bethany Bible Church. There, the sex workers were forced to meet with prosecutors, detectives, and representatives of Project ROSE, who offered a diversion programme to those who qualified. Those who did not may face months or years in jail.
Did they call my birthday?
Waiting for your lottery number. James, Oklahoma, 1969, No. 365.
I arrived at the dorm and went to my friend’s room where 12 of us were watching the lottery. I remember we had cases of beers to help us through. We knew this day could forever change our lives. When I came into the room I could feel the tension and see that the lottery had already started. It wasn't a big show on TV; it was just a series of numbers scrolling across the bottom of the screen while “I Love Lucy” played above. [more inside]
...not a neutral exercise.
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