July 21, 2018

"When it's done properly, taco should be a verb"

Jonathan Gold, Food Critic Who Celebrated L.A.’s Cornucopia, Dies at 57
posted by lalochezia at 8:29 PM PST - 50 comments

Okay guys 🐥 I'm over here, look 🐥 this way, here I 🐥 am, right here 🐥

Ever wonder what it's like to teach kindergarteners? Perhaps it's like teaching chicks about magnets.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:15 PM PST - 22 comments

The new Fallas line

The pretty-dresses portion of a traditional festival.
posted by clew at 5:48 PM PST - 6 comments

Emily Carr, a Canadian artist of stunning originality and strength

Emily Carr (December 13, 1871 – March 2, 1945) was a Canadian artist and writer, documenting life and locations in and around British Columbia before others. She began painting in an era when women didn’t, at an age when most people shouldn’t, traveling to remote locations that few professional adventurers chose to go. Not only did she adopt the painting techniques of modernism, when such ideas were considered dangerous, Carr chronicled the extraordinary art and culture of native peoples, who were invisible to the dominant culture, as described in the documentary Winds of Heaven (documentary trailer). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 5:40 PM PST - 26 comments

Spaaaaace... laaaaaab...

Kraftwerk's live shows are known for being fairly regimented affairs, but at the Jazz Open Festival in Stuttgart, the band was joined by a special guest for a performance of "Spacelab": ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst, who is currently stationed about the ISS. (SLYT)
posted by SansPoint at 5:23 PM PST - 9 comments

Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran

This is the greatest thing you will see today: a group portrait of Ismat al-Muluk, granddaughter of the King of Persia Nasir al-Din Shah, and her relatives, circa 1900. This photograph is part of Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran, an archive exploring the lives of women during the Qajar Dynasty (1796-1925) through a wide array of photographs and materials from private family holdings. Other pictures of Ismat al-Muluk include this funny/strange one featuring her dad, her sister and a chair and this tender one, with her husband and a goat. Also: her sister Fakhr al-Taj (seated) with her mom Ismat al-Dawlah (lying). [more inside]
posted by elgilito at 4:46 PM PST - 9 comments

Very medium. Just straight-up meh.

"The Good Place" season 2 gag reel has been released. [more inside]
posted by rewil at 3:22 PM PST - 22 comments

The Tyrant and His Enablers

Long excerpt from Stephen Greenblatt's new book: Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics It's about Richard III of Shakespeare's telling, not the "real" Richard. After all, he was writing for the Tudors, and we all know that victors write the history. But what he has to say about tyranny is as trenchant today as it was then.
posted by MovableBookLady at 3:18 PM PST - 6 comments

What 24 Hours in Prison is Really Like

A Day in the Life of a Prisoner People are constantly asking me: What’s a day in prison like? Is it boring? Or are you busy? So the other day, I toted a pocket-sized notebook with me everywhere I went, scribbling down every single thing I did. I thought I’d share my findings with you to show you that we prisoners aren’t deadbeats — our days are, in fact, incredibly full.
posted by strelitzia at 12:37 PM PST - 14 comments

“Long live the king”

The first trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the 35th film, scheduled for the summer of 2019. Stars "Godzilla, who collides with Mothra, Rodan, and his ultimate nemesis, the three-headed King Ghidorah", plus some humans including Millie Bobby Brown, Sally Hawkins, Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Ken Watanabe and Charles Dance. Godzilla vs. Kong is scheduled to follow up in 2020. [Twitter][InterWeb]
posted by Wordshore at 12:19 PM PST - 58 comments

At the Living Heart: Translating Aimé Césaire

we sing of poisonous flowers [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 11:54 AM PST - 4 comments

Smooches!

The best on-screen kisses of 2018, according to Proma Khosla at Mashable. Rewatch some lovely kisses from your favorite tv shows and movies and get spoilers for a few you don't watch with utter sweetness. [more inside]
posted by Margalo Epps at 11:39 AM PST - 4 comments

White Fragility

"I think you’re racist. I think I am, too." (full talk) Dr. Robin DiAngelo coined the term "white fragility" to describe "a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable." She has just published a book on the subject and in this talk for the KUOW Speakers Forum she has particularly pointed words for the fragility of white progressives. [more inside]
posted by Anonymous at 10:39 AM PST - 130 comments

What’s the collective noun for hermits?

Hermitcraft is a private, whitelisted, vanilla Minecraft server, supporting a number of YouTube Let’s Players and streamers, which is now entering its sixth season. Founded by Generikb - who describes himself as a “gaming hermit” - in April 2012, the server had a rocky start, including losing the first map only a few episodes in. Regrouping, the Hermits started over, but “genny” would leave after a year to focus his time on the older Mindcrack server, to which he’d been invited half-way through the first Hermitcraft season (and which had been the impetus for starting his own survival multiplayer server). The rest of the Hermits carried on, before deciding to reset the map for an official “Season 2” in June of 2013 as Minecraft’s “Horse Update” was approaching a proper release… [more inside]
posted by Auz at 10:30 AM PST - 9 comments

What makes Yes's Roundabout so f***ing great?

An in depth breakdown of the multi-track master tape of Yes's Roundabout, one of the most complex, adventurous, innovative, progressive records to ever get played (almost) to death on classic rock radio. Thank you, Rick Beato, all purpose everything music guy (previously). [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 10:10 AM PST - 41 comments

A Porous Reality In The Government Communications Office

The UK's Civil Service has a high opinion of itself and is proud of its history. It publishes a periodical, Civil Service Quarterly, so that its bureaucrats may read about themselves, and the latest edition included a long, illustrated article about the history of public communication. But all was not as it seemed. [more inside]
posted by Devonian at 9:37 AM PST - 13 comments

Die With Me

The chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery. The app itself is an art project that reflects on how dependent we are on our phones. But people have actually been using it. On average, 17 people are in the chatroom at once.
posted by adept256 at 9:08 AM PST - 9 comments

gadzooks

$800 Million Says a Self-Driving Car Looks Like This - "It's in the city, though, where Zoox really shines. The screens inside the vehicle show an overwhelming amount of information, as the computer vision software keeps tracks of cars, people, stoplights, and road markers all at the same time. Unlike many self-driving cars, it glides to stops. At an intersection with a left turn, it allows oncoming traffic to pass and then waits for some slow pedestrians. Overall, the vehicle performs so well that you forget no one is driving."
posted by kliuless at 8:08 AM PST - 83 comments

We ban it immediately

Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
posted by eirias at 4:36 AM PST - 51 comments

He tapped the shutter, freezing a moment of hope, of promise.

"Late one night inside an art-filled home on a tranquil parkway in Silver Spring, Md., a woman decided to take her laptop to bed with her. She clicked on a story about an old picture. Her eyes widened. “No,” Michele Holzman thought to herself. “That couldn’t be me. Could it?”" How a Washington Post story about the two unidentified people in a beautiful old photograph leads to a reunion of one of them and the photographer.
posted by Stanczyk at 4:23 AM PST - 8 comments

The Conscience Pile

"The fossilized remains of an ancient forest, dazzling with glints of opal and amethyst, have tempted many a visitor to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Some who pocketed a rock were later guilt-stricken into sending them back, and some even included letters of lamentation and curses. Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest, published in November by the Ice Plant, is a photography and archive project by artists Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr to document these stolen fossils and their woeful apologies." [more inside]
posted by lesser weasel at 4:19 AM PST - 7 comments

All you need is "to have an infinite amount of intelligence".

I am going to give what I will call an elementary demonstration. But elementary does not mean easy to understand. Elementary means that very little is required to know ahead of time in order to understand it, except to have an infinite amount of intelligence. There may be a large number of steps that hard to follow, but to each does not require already knowing the calculus or Fourier transforms. -- Richard P. Feynman
This video recounts a lecture by Richard Feynman giving an elementary demonstration of why planets orbit in ellipses. See the excellent book by Judith and David Goodstein, "Feynman's lost lecture”, for the full story behind this lecture, and a deeper dive into its content. minutephysics takes some time off and lets 3Blue1Brown tell the story of Feynman's Lost Lecture. Orbital mechanics the Elementary way...
posted by zengargoyle at 1:21 AM PST - 5 comments

With knobs on

There are 93 penises in the Bayeux Tapestry What do they tell us? [more inside]
posted by Helga-woo at 1:19 AM PST - 24 comments

When I wear a lot of black... you can’t see the tomato sauce stains

Helena Hauff is a German techno and electro DJ and record producer. She has released a 'short film' / music video Qualm as a teaser for her coming second album of the same name. 'Every woman who DJs and is visible helps to make a change'. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:57 AM PST - 2 comments

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