July 5, 2015
Rossetti and the wombat
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (/ˈdænti ˈɡeɪbriəl rəˈzɛti/;[1] 12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882) was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator and wombat enthusiast. He celebrated it in poetry and image; others have since done so with baking. [more inside]
How to Not Be a Bullying Mob
Are you angry on the internet? That's ok! Perhaps, though, this would be an excellent time for you, angry person on the internet, to review (MeFi's own) Andrea Phillips's helpful flow chart of how not to be a bullying mob.
[via mefi projects]
"Cars 2 always comes in last in Pixar rankings, and justifiably so."
Pixar's 15 movies, ranked: Vulture | Collider | ET | EW [slideshow] | TV Guide [slideshow] | The Wrap | Washington Post, which disagrees on methodology: "My way to rank the Pixar canon is simple: How much did the film give you the feels?" [more inside]
Watching Women Want
"[W]hat moves me [about women's soccer] is not a beautiful pass, or a bad refereeing call, or even the players’ backstories. What moves me is the players’ faces, and watching women want. ... And we need to see this, because when you’re in the act of wanting something badly enough, there isn’t room for self-consciousness. How you look, your stance, your hair, your makeup, whether you appear pretty, your sex appeal: all of these things that coalesce in my brain, and maybe yours, to form a hum so low and so constant that I take it as a state of being—and when you want, they disappear. When you want, the want goes to the fore. The you can take a backseat."
"This verbal tic makes them sound like pompous bullshitters"
Just don't do it:
What this advice boils down to is ‘talk like a man’. The writer doesn’t even try to argue that there’s some inherent reason to prefer ‘less body language’ (whatever that means) to more. It’s preferable simply because it’s what men are said to do. Men are more successful in the workplace, so if women want to emulate their success, the trick is to mimic their behaviour.[more inside]
Where is Google taking us?
I listen to one of the two or three key brains behind the Search algorithm itself, Ben Gomes, who speaks 10 to the dozen of “natural language generation” and “deep learning networks” (and, inevitably, of the “holy grail” of answering users’ questions before they have been asked). [more inside]
Not due to legalization
While California's water shortage continues, Cascadia has been suffering its own drought conditions, to the extent that expanding wildfires have lent the skies of Vancouver, B.C. a Mars-like orange hue.
Oxi!
For every season, there is a meal
"You learn to cook so that you don't have to be a slave to recipes. You get what's in season and you know what to do with it." ~ Julia Child
In North America, summer is peak time for fruits and not bad for vegetables, but not all states are the same, so you can also browse Epicurious' seasonal ingredient map for a view of seasonal selections, month by month for any state. In the UK, you can visit Eat the Seasons to get an idea of what's fresh now, and La Cuisine in Paris has a list for seasonal food shopping in France. If you're in India, there are five seasons to consider, with the addition of monsoon season, and seasonal foods are an important part of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), as summarized on The Kitchn. Zipmec has a very general list of seasonal foods in South America, but for some real local flavor, Epicurious has a visual guide to Latin American and Carribean produce (though no mention of seasonal availability). And if you want to take a culinary tour of the world, Food By Country is a great place to start, with geography, history and food, plus recipes for each country (previously). And while shopping for produce, it's good to know how to pick the right vegetables and fruit, from The Kitchn, with additional suggestions in the comments. [more inside]
In North America, summer is peak time for fruits and not bad for vegetables, but not all states are the same, so you can also browse Epicurious' seasonal ingredient map for a view of seasonal selections, month by month for any state. In the UK, you can visit Eat the Seasons to get an idea of what's fresh now, and La Cuisine in Paris has a list for seasonal food shopping in France. If you're in India, there are five seasons to consider, with the addition of monsoon season, and seasonal foods are an important part of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), as summarized on The Kitchn. Zipmec has a very general list of seasonal foods in South America, but for some real local flavor, Epicurious has a visual guide to Latin American and Carribean produce (though no mention of seasonal availability). And if you want to take a culinary tour of the world, Food By Country is a great place to start, with geography, history and food, plus recipes for each country (previously). And while shopping for produce, it's good to know how to pick the right vegetables and fruit, from The Kitchn, with additional suggestions in the comments. [more inside]
"they quickly learn that their lives are the cost of doing business."
Alexander Chee asks:
Future Queer: Where is Gay America going next?
Flippin' the Bird
Sure, musical fundamentals are important, but there's also a place for techniques that look cool. Peter Forrest explains Three Tricks for Ukulele Showboating. [more inside]
Dvorak's Ninth Symphony ("From the New World")
Leonard Bernstein conducts the New York Philharmonic in Antonin Dvorak's Ninth Symphony ("From the New World"). Second movement. Third movement. Fourth movement. Bernstein talks about the piece for a Book of the Month Club "appreciation record." Tom Service writes about it in the Guardian. [more inside]
The Suwa Lake New Fireworks Contest
Each year two fireworks festivals are held at Suwa Lake in Nagano, Japan. The first, in August, is one of the largest in Japan. The second, in September, features a contest for the best new fireworks. Some of the effects are stunning: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014. [more inside]
"No, it's not fake."
The Grass Ceiling
The Grass Ceiling: How to Conquer Inequality in Women's Soccer [Atlantic link] An attorney who helped players file a gender-discrimination lawsuit over artificial turf in the World Cup proposes a way forward for the sport. [more inside]
Tory Budget to cut 'housing subsidies' for higher earners
BBC: "A clampdown on "taxpayer-funded subsidies" for "higher earners" living in social housing is to be announced by the chancellor in Wednesday's Budget.
Local authority and housing association tenants in England who earn more than £30,000 - or £40,000 in London - will have to pay up to the market rent, George Osborne will say.
The move is expected to raise up to £250m a year by 2018-19.
It is thought that this could affect 340,000 households." George Osborne said: "the Budget would "reward work over welfare" and allow people to keep more of the money they earned."
The Los Angeles Dollhouse
But yes, definitely, I acknowledge that Joss Whedon, despite being one of my faves, is problematic and that in general yes Your Fave is Problematic. I’d even say that the particular idiosyncratic tics and hypocrisies and contradictions in Joss Whedon’s brand of feminism bear examination, that if we can be mean enough to make a Hollywood in-joke out of parodying the characteristic style of Michael Bay and James Cameron someone by now should’ve done it to Joss Whedon.
Someone did. It was Joss Whedon.
Someone did. It was Joss Whedon.
Grand Theft Arthur
YouTube user Merfish has recreated some popular TV show theme intros in the video game Grand Theft Auto V [NSFW]:
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Full House Arthur Family Matters
Letter to My Son
Letter to My Son, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, July 4, 2015: "I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not... And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape."
“street-level, real-world kinds of stories.”
In Hawkeye, narrative strategies like the in media res opening, the flashbacks, and the flashforwards are complimented by Fraction and Aja’s use of motifs to thicken individual issues and stories. In #3, two different lists—the “nine terrible ideas” Clint has on the day the story takes place (featured in first-person captions), and a catalog of the trick arrows in Clint’s quiver (featured in inset panels with labels like “Explosive-tip Arrow”)—offer running commentaries on the dominant story. Sometimes Hawkeye’s echoes and callbacks can be very on-the-nose, as in the small panels of Clint praising his boomerang arrow that appear early and late in the story.For The Comics Journal, Craig Fischer examines Matt Fraction/David Aja's Hawkeye. Warning: spoilers.
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