January 10, 2014
30 three-minute films
Thirty directors--Morgan Spurlock, Alex Gibney, and others--create three minute short films about an innovator or world-changing idea. Warning: corporate sponsorship.
what would the yellow ranger do?
Tired of being constantly asked "Where are you from?", Shing Yin Kor looks to the Yellow Ranger for advice.
Now that's what I call terrorism
A thermal image of a fart... is it science? Is it art? The TSA will do its part, to document each airport fart.
Winston Churchill interviewed in January 1939.
"The essential aspects of democracy are the freedom of the individual, within the framework of laws passed by Parliament, to order his life as he pleases, and the uniform enforcement of tribunals independent of the executive. The laws are based on Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, the Petition of Right and others. Without this foundation there can be no freedom or civilisation, anyone being at the mercy of officials and liable to be spied upon and betrayed even in his own home. As long as these rights are defended, the foundations of freedom are secure. I see no reason why democracies should not be able to defend themselves without sacrificing these fundamental values."
Danger: Humans
The Great Columbia J-School Email Mishap of 2014
They still shoot film, don't they?
I Still Shoot Film is a photography site with beginners guides to film photography, photography help and how to's, and even more resources. Oh, and an enjoyable/ inspirational archive of photos captured on film, some part of spotlights on photographers.
Killing is my business, and business is acoustic
This is the weirdest job interview you've ever heard of.
The Ask A Manager advice blog received an e-mail asking if the interview shenanigans the poster had just gone through were a good way to find a candidate. Then it got worse. As advice blogger Allison Green continued to correspond with the letter writer, the letter writer proceeded to tell her about the final interview process, in which 20 candidates had to spend all day and night interviewing. [more inside]
The sweder must awaken!
Synonyms, paraphrases, equivalents, restatements, poecilonyms.
A thesaurus only lists adjectives. English Synonyms and Antonyms takes the time to explain the small distinctions of meaning and usage between, for example, example, archetype, ideal, prototype, type, ensample, model, sample, warning, exemplar, pattern, specimen, exemplification, precedent, and standard--or, at least, such distinctions as author James C. Fernald, L.H.D., perceived in 1896.
a licorice smell
Tractor-trailers full of bottled water are headed to affected counties in West Virginia after public authorities told residents to "refrain from using the water for drinking, cooking, cleaning, bathing and washing” following the Elk River's contamination with 4-methylcyclohexane methanol. [more inside]
Male fans made Bettie Page a star, but female fans made her an icon
“To me, Bettie was a gateway into subcultures like rockabilly and burlesque, which are very body-positive environments to women with ample curves who want to celebrate their bodies,” Pumphrey says. Her interest in Bettie led her to discover other pinup models, and then burlesque stars and showgirls. “I surround myself with images of powerful women and try my best to ignore what the standard of beauty is that other people or entities try to push on me.” -- Tori Rodriguez examines why fifties bondage icon Bettie Page has such a huge appeal to women even today, as a new movie about Bettie Page is released, which finally tells her story in her own words.
Miami Tax Vice
Beware of Gangsters Filing Tax Returns. Florida gangbangers have found a new path to illicit riches: tax refund fraud.
I wanted something nobody wanted, something that was impossible.
Why I Bought A House In Detroit For $500
Detroit is the true 20th-century boomtown, the most American of stories. In 100 years, we went from a backwater hamlet to one of the richest cities in the United States. Referred to as the “Paris of the Midwest,” it was the city with the most theater seats in the U.S. outside of Broadway, the silicon valley of the ’60s, the highest rate of homeownership in the nation. We boomed and we busted, hard and early, and like an alcoholic drunk on 20th-century capitalism, we hit rock bottom first and hardest.
"I wasn't afraid because I was too angry to be afraid."
Franklin McCain, one of the Greensboro Four, has died. McCain was a freshman at North Carolina A&T College when he, along with fellow students Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr. (later Jibreel Khazan), and David Richmond (who died in 1990), walked into their local Woolworth's on February 1, 1960, and sat down at a whites-only lunch counter. This spontaneous act of civil disobedience (previously) sparked what would come to be known as the sit-in movement to dismantle Jim Crow.
My Mother's Lover
What we knew of Angus was this: Angus—the only name we had for him—was a flight surgeon our mother had fallen in love with during World War II, planned to marry after the war, but lost when the Japanese shot him down over the Pacific. Once, long ago, she had mentioned to me that he was part of the reason she decided to be a doctor. That was all we knew. She had confided those things in the 1970s, in the years just after she and my father divorced. I can remember sitting in a big easy chair my dad had left behind in her bedroom, listening to her reminisce about Angus as she sat with her knitting. I remember being embarrassed, and not terribly interested. I was interested now. Even 30 years before, her affair with Angus had been three decades old. Now, 60 years after he had fallen into the sea, she wanted to follow him.[more inside]
Chino Otsuka's Imagine Finding Me
Chino Otsuka uses photography and video to explore the fluid relationship between the memory, time and photography. Her series Imagine Finding Me consists of double self-portraits, with images of her present self beside her past self in various places she has visited. (via)
Good alternatives for an ethical secular family
Is your family looking for an inclusive alternative to the Boy Scouts of America? Lance Finney posts a rundown on the Skepchick parenting blog Grounded Parents. The list is based on research he did when working to start a group with families from the Ethical Society of St. Louis that was “fully inclusive of religious belief, ethnic background, sexual orientation, and gender.” [more inside]
Space shots from a space station
Other People Make Mistakes, Slow Down
AskMe would have provided better advice
OK, Cupid: giving your love life to Google Glass and the hive mind. Artist Lauren McCarthy "went on sixteen first dates. For each date, she streamed audio and video of the proceedings to Ustream, and paid workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a market for crowdsourcing tasks) to watch, comment, and send her instructions."
If you're 50, please, buy a painting.
John Waters: Subversive Success When I was young there were beatniks. Hippies. Punks. Gangsters. Now you're a hacktivist. Which I would probably be if I was 20. Shuttin' down MasterCard. But there's no look to that lifestyle! Besides just wearing a bad outfit with bad posture. Has WikiLeaks caused a look? No! I'm mad about that. If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.
One Hundred Songs a Day
On The Media meets Matt Farley, who earns around $23k per year thanks to the 14,000 songs he has has composed, performed and uploaded to Spotify.
The Greatest Music Producer You’ve Never Heard of
Texas Monthly profiles Tom Wilson, a Harvard-educated Republican from Waco who helped launch the careers of Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Lou Reed, and a few other musicians you might have heard of.
Previously.
Hippies in the Boardroom
How Silicon Valley Became The Man The Harvard Business Review's Justin Fox interviews Stanford historian Fred Turner about how the New Communalists molded the Valley in their image.
The Architecture Of The Incredibles
At first glance, you might think The Incredibles is just a fun superhero movie. But remove the capes and tights and you're left with an in-depth architectural narrative with its own beginning and end.
Behind the scenes of Star Wars filming
London, Paris, NY, Copenhagen, everyone's talkin' 'bout gentrification
A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
Adam Gorightly's Historia Discordia: "Documenting the Origins, History & Chaos of the Discordian Society". Features bios of the early Discordians, Greg "Malaclypse the Younger" Hill's Discordian newsletter, information on forthcoming books detailing the history of Discordianism and the contents of Greg Hill's collection of Discordian works and writings, and a running blog with tons of information on the early days of Discordianism.
Rain, An Occupational Hazard
I wallow on my knees in thick mud, hoedag in hand slogging up a near vertical hillside, napalmed bare... rain whistling sideways so hard it bores through my hermetic, vulcanized head-to-toe rainsuit. I look like an astronaut traversing across an eerie, silent moon crater rhythmically bending over to scrape the ground every 6-9 steps... That was 1978 when I was a migrant treeplanter; a job the Oregon State Employment Service lists as the hardest physical work known to this office.., one person in fifty succeeds the three week training period. Like thousands of other college grads that year, I was the product of a liberal education promising an exciting, good job as reward for four years of costly training. So what the hell was I doing planting trees and eating mud for a living? Well I'll tell ya, being a rowdy forest worker in a self-managed collective of modern gypsies traveling the beautiful hinterlands of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, and northern California made career pursuits or regular employment look awfully dull. Hoedad's Stories and Poems - the rise and fall of an American reforestation cooperative. [more inside]
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