October 17, 2014
Friends With Siri
What if The Decemberists put out an album where nobody died?
“Society Is Functioning Pretty Well (Here In The Past Where We Live)”. Shared by the band on facebook, both comment sections have (of course) extended the list far beyond the original.
Buy now, pay forever
Continuing the exposure of how "being poor is expensive," the Washington Post takes a look at rent-to-own purchases in its article, Rental America: Why the poor pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa. [more inside]
Vrooooom!
Your secret pneumatic tube fantasy just got a little more real
A couple of Norweigians put a GoPro camera in a pneumatic tube and sent it on its way. Things get tubular around 01:00. [SLYT]
It's like the movie Drumline, in real life.
Ladies and Gentlemen: Power Coffee
"I am seldom considered liberal, but happily so when regarding the quantity of healthy fat in my coffee. " [more inside]
Miss Aloha Hula 2011 Farewell Performance
"Provocative" Christmas tree rasing eyebrows in Paris
“We’re all smart. Distinguish yourself by being kind.”
Philosopher Brian Leiter announced that he will be stepping down as editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report, a highly influential reputational ranking of philosophy Ph.D. programs he created in 1989 while he was a graduate student, and which has been published on the Internet since 1996. [more inside]
The Big 'E'
You can read on Buddy Emmons' Wikipedia page how by the age of 19, he had already mastered and redesigned the pedal steel guitar, slowly turning it into the instrument whose sound we are all familiar with, in one form or another. You can read on his website how his peers revere him, and how he gives back to the community whom he's profoundly influenced. (Or, watch a 100-minute concert and tribute.) But perhaps it's just best to marvel at The Big E as he backs up legends in their own right; on television in 1965; how he destroys the world in a 1970's Redneck Jazz Explosion (with Danny Gatton, previously); in the mid-'80's with the Lawton Jazz Kicks Ensemble; at the 1988 British Steel Guitar convention; at the at the 1997 International Steel Guitar Convention; and in 2007, the year he retired. Or just messin' around with Nashville's top session musicians or reinterpreting the classics. There's also a great AskMe thread of Pedal Steel Guitar recommendations, if you want to hear more.
Tory Peer: "Pay disabled people £2 per hour"
A Conservative welfare minster has apologised after suggesting that disabled people are "not worth" the national minimum wage and some could only be paid "£2 an hour".
Lord Freud, the Welfare Reform minister admitted the comments were "offensive” after they were disclosed by Ed Miliband during Prime Minister's Questions this afternoon. The Labour leader has called on the Tory peer to resign.
The "How Does Stephen Colbert Work" Edition
In its inaugural episode, Slate's Working podcast spends ~35m talking to Stephen Colbert (not the character Stephen Colbert) about exactly what a work day is like for him. [more inside]
The Common Cold Unit: 1946-1989
‘Free 10 Day Autumn or Winter Break: You may not win a Nobel Prize, but you could help find a cure for the common cold.’
Mmm, Tastes like...Sunshine
Computer-brain interface device aims to help blind people 'see' Mark Pappas, who has been blind for 14 years, searched for a packet of sugar on the table in front of him by running his tongue across the 400 electrodes in his mouth... he was able to locate the sugar, a white plastic spoon and a white paper cup that had been placed on a black cloth. [more inside]
scientists are finally opening the black box of parasite mind control
The Board Would Like To Cringe Its Nose At....
Writer/Actor Justin Elizabeth Sayre hosts The Meeting Of The International Order Of Sodomites - a monthly show honoring LGBTQ figures and idols. The Meeting includes a signature segment "The Rulings Of The Board" featuring Justin as Chairman delivering a caustic and revealing monologue on current issues in gay culture and politics - highlights include "Rufus Wainwright Is An Idiot." "Returning Shame To Gay Culture." "The New Hanky Code." "Resetting The Gay Agenda." "The 20-year Olds Hate Us." and oh so many more. (NSFW language) [more inside]
The Troller System
Here's the last ideo-political-philosophico-temperamental spectrum chart you'll ever need.
Arizona gay marriage legal; couples to marry immediately
"...there is no 'gay exception' to our U.S. Constitution's guarantees of liberty and equality for all, including the freedom to celebrate love, commitment, and family with the person of one's choice in marriage."
"It was like getting slapped in the face with a giant wang." SLYT
Mango is back. Aging SNL character gets called up for a video. Warning: assorted stereotypes.
Birth Control
Will having kids soon be out of reach economically for many American families? 'Parenthood should be affordable in this country, but the cost of raising a child from birth to adulthood is now a quarter of a million dollars and projected to double by the time today's toddlers reach their teens.' 'For evidence to suggest that middle-class parents might already be getting priced out of parenthood, look to the national birthrate. It fell sharply in the recession but, unlike in previous economic rebounds, has continued to drop. This makes sense in financial context, given that most families haven't seen their incomes grow since the recovery began and the median net worth of households has actually fallen below what it was 15 years ago. Most families today don't have enough saved to meet basic needs for three months, let alone save for college or retirement.' [more inside]
Opera On Demand
Top hat at the cleaners? Opera glasses broke? Lost your box? Watch The Metropolitan Opera, the Bavarian State Opera (Deutsch, English) Vienna State Opera, or concerts from the Berlin Philharmonic and a variety of options from medici.tv and The Young Vic, The Globe, The Royal Opera House, The Royal Shakespeare Company, and more. [more inside]
Félix le Chat
Surprisingly, Atillas are fairly liberal; Adolfs less so
How Liberal or Conservative is your name? A rare "what x are you?" online tool which is apparently based on real data. There is no need to search for the most liberal of all (past and present) MeFi moderator names, I've already done that for you.
There are no new ideas
Stop me if you've seen this one before. A desperate man on the run, fleeing a squad of hired killers, all for the entertainment of the audience of the country's most popular television show. No, of course it's not The Running Man, that would be too easy, nor is it Le Prix du Danger, the 1983 French-Yugoslav movie with the same theme, but it is based on the same 1958 Robert Sheckley story, The Prize of Peril, as Le Prix du Danger was. It's Das Millionenspiel, the 1970 West German movie which is now available on youtube in its entirety, with English subtitles.
This exhibition... has ushered ecstatic experience back into the world.
Thrown by Kerry Howley chronicles the author's exploits as a philosophy grad student turned devoted follower of a succession of MMA fighters; the connection is less odd than it sounds. The Paris Review has an excerpt from the book (parts one and two), detailing the weigh-in process for fighter Erik Koch before his victory over Cisco Rivera in 2010 in Las Vegas. At Salon, Lydia Kiesling writes that Thrown recalls the best of literary fiction: The nearly hysterical circumlocutory gymnastics of the narrator, and her dual position as a predator and supplicant to her fighters, reminded me of nothing so much as Humbert Humbert, with immense cauliflower-eared men in the startling role of Lolita. More reviews of Thrown at Time (paywalled) and Oxford American.
Superhero costumes are still not allowed
The Day Care center in Los Feliz, Los Angeles is tweeting announcements and news. Updates include weddings, slacktivism, billing, sunscreen and the Special Person Of The Week. It alleges to be a real day care center. [more inside]
cooking.nytimes.com
As hinted in the leaked digital innovation report which outlined how the venerable newspaper could leverage a substantial archive to compete with clickbait, The New York Times has been developing cooking.nytimes.com, a beautifully searchable repository of every recipe ever published in the newspaper. [more inside]
Comics from Flynn Gleason: Zombie Apawcalypse and George and his Pencil
If you're looking for a zombie webcomics with a bit of gore and a lot of kitties, you may enjoy Flynn Gleason's Zombie Apawcalypse. Flynn's work may be vaguely familiar to you if you remember a Calvin and Hobbes type comic from the mid- to late-1990s, called George and his Pencil, with archived comics still in their rough pencil-drawn form. [more inside]
Taking the '70s more seriously
Style Gone Wild: Why We Can't Shake the 1970s
Collectors Weekly: What prompted such radical changes in popular fashion?[more inside]
Lutyens: One reason was that people in the West were becoming increasingly affluent, and this gave young people the confidence to question their parents’ values. Because they had money, they could be more independent. Society was also becoming much more liberal as well because you had things like the legalization of homosexuality and the legalization of divorce. People were allowed to be themselves more without being judged by other people.
Then the three main minority movements — feminism, black civil rights, and gay liberation — all these minorities had been marginalized until the late ’60s. In the ’70s they began to assert themselves more and become more visible. So their style became more visible, and it influenced mainstream fashion.
"There's progress in imperfection."
ohhno ima barfed onna shoes
Drunk JCrew. Ever notice how drunk the models for J. Crew are? (Single link Tumblr)
Daschle, Frank, Lott, Livingston; they fight gridlock...
A bipartisan commission convened by Esquire magazine has reported its findings on how to make Congress work better. [more inside]
NASA sounds
Here's a collection of NASA sounds from historic spaceflights and current missions.
"Like lost children we live our unfinshed adventures."
Excerpts from Guy Debord’s “The Muppets.” "Though the name 'Guy Debord' is now synonymous with two things: Situationist philosophy and The Muppets, this pairing of passions was not as easily reconciled as you might think. 'I had to fight really hard not to be pigeon-holed as a Marxist theorist in the puppeteering community,' Debord once said. 'They told me 'Kids don't want to hear about how the concrete life of everyone has been degraded to a speculative universe, Guy.' I said 'How about we let the children decide that?' Decide they did..." [Previously, Via]
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