February 8, 2016
CoCo Avenue and Black Musicians in Kpop
When Jenny and Jenna, two Black singers regularly posting Kpop covers on YouTube, found that they were often confused for each other, they decided to band together and form CoCo Avenue, currently the world's first all-Black Kpop group. Other Black Kpop performers include RaNia's Alex, Insooni, Lee Michelle, and Tasha a.k.a. Yoon Mi Rae.
That sthmahts
More kids more math
"You wouldn’t see it in most classrooms, you wouldn’t know it by looking at slumping national test-score averages, but a cadre of American teenagers are reaching world-class heights in math—more of them, more regularly, than ever before." Peg Tyre in The Atlantic covers the new wave of deeper, faster, and hopefully broader math education. [more inside]
"I am grateful."
Daniel Bryan is arguably the most beloved professional wrestler in the entire world; he is also widely considered to be one of the best professional wrestlers of all time. He has not wrestled a match since April of 2015, when injuries forced him out of action - after they had previously cost him much of 2014 as well. He spent 2015 training regularly and going to doctors hoping to learn that he could continue to be a professional wrestler, and finally, last week, learned conclusively that he could not.
This is his retirement speech.
Wolverine, bring me a cheese pizza
"Skirt the rules but don’t break them."
People who move to New York always make the same mistake. They can’t see the place. This is true of Manhattan, but even the outer boroughs too. Whether Flushing Meadows in Queens or Red Hook in Brooklyn. They come looking for magic, whether evil or good, and nothing will convince them it isn’t here. This wasn’t all bad though. Some New Yorkers had learned how to make a living from this error in thinking. Charles Thomas Tester for one.an excerpt, The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle
A Questionable Business Plan
Buymeonce.com is a website that sells things you should only have to buy once, because they have a lifetime guarantee, lifetime repairs, or are just very well made.
Does what it says on the tin
After logging onto their computers today, staff here at the MERL were greeted by an unusual email from the Assistant Curator:
155-year old mouse trap claims its latest victim
and
How a mouse died in our Victorian mouse trap [more inside]
There appears to be a dead mouse in this mousetrap,it began,
…which is not described as being there on the database.
155-year old mouse trap claims its latest victim
and
How a mouse died in our Victorian mouse trap [more inside]
L.A. Dreamers
Wookit da bunneh!
The Scottish SPCA is looking for a new home for Atlas, a continental giant rabbit. "Giant rabbit?" you ask, "How big could a-- Oh dear lord will you look at that." The 7-month old, nearly 6-kilogram Atlas is still growing, and the SSPCA wants you to know that "A standard rabbit hutch won’t do so his new owner will need plenty of space for him."
Murray Perahia on Bach
Murray Perahia on Bach - a 28 minute chat at the piano.
as government-funded science dwindles
Meet the "rented white coats" who defend toxic chemicals: How corporate-funded research corrupts America's courts and regulatory agencies. [more inside]
This will tide me over until the Olympics.
Some of the most exciting gymnastics routines are happening at the college level. UCLA Senior Sophina DeJesus helped lead her team to victory with a hiphop-flavored floor routine that included a whip, a nae nae, and a tumbling pass that landed in a split. The Internet is rightly losing its collective mind. The whole Bruins squad seems pretty amazing (Sophina at 1:31). But if that wasn't impressive enough for you, she can also moonwalk on the balance beam.
Disrupt this!
one weird trick that makes a novel addictive
Some things might break
How To Survive A Nuclear Bomb an 'interactive survival experience' from the channel that brought you Threads.
That's what she [redacted]
That'swhatshesaid, a one-person play by Courtney Meaker and Erin Pike, consists entirely of lines and stage directions for female characters in the top 11 most-produced plays of the 2014-15 season. The play opened Thursday night for a four-night run at Seattle's Gay City Calamus Auditorium. An hour before curtain on the show's second night, the publisher of Joshua Harmon's play Bad Jews, which is featured in the production, served Gay City Arts a cease and desist order , and the publisher's VP left Pike a voicemail claiming they'd "go after" Gay City Arts if the show continued. Instead, That'swhatshesaid went on as planned--but with a few last-minute changes. Among them: every time a line from Bad Jews came up, Pike merely mimed the stage directions as someone offstage shouted, "Redacted!" Today, according to Meaker, another cease and desist has been delivered--for a play that was not included in That'swhatshesaid because it featured no women. [more inside]
The Trouble With Superman
He’s boring; he’s unrelatable. He wears his underwear on the outside. But is that the real problem of Superman? It’s a problem that has less to do with the character himself and more to with DC Comics, which found itself stuck with a flagship character it thought needed fixing. In trying, it broke him nearly beyond repair. [more inside]
"...preferably under the wheels of an M103 bus."
"Ed Koch once said that "to be a New Yorker you have to live here for six months, and if at the end of the six months you find you walk faster, talk faster, think faster, you're a New Yorker." On the search to find the realest answer (is it "until you cry on the subway"?), we decided to hit the pavement to ask locals to finish the sentence for us. "
Take the honey and run
Robbing of bees has become an increasingly problematic crime as bee populations dwindle due to Colony Collapse Disorder and the price of a healthy hive rises. A swarm of thefts occur around this season every year in California as cells of thieves extract hives from almond orchards in the Central Valley, where 90% of all managed bees are brought every year. [more inside]
I still haven't told you about the dream.
Toormina Video- a short comic by Pat Grant
“There are a lot of pieces in this puzzle.”
In the Fractal Jigsaw Puzzle, each piece of the jigsaw (subsequent to the first) is made of a smaller, constituent puzzle. Confused? Watch the video, or just give it a whirl. Don’t worry about finishing it all in one go: the game saves your progress. [via mefi projects]
Kurt Didn't Know
In Quentin Tarantino's recent Western, The Hateful Eight, one scene involves Kurt Russell's character, John Ruth, snatching a guitar away from Jennifer Jason Leigh's character, Daisy Domergue, and promptly smashing it to pieces. The only problem? The guitar was a 140 year old original Martin on loan from the Martin Guitar Museum and was supposed to have been swapped out for a replica before being said smashed. [more inside]
Super supercuts
Vimeo user somersetVII has created 10 beautiful, masterful supercut videos. Coens | 30 celebrates 30 years of Coen Bros movies while Stanley Kubrick gets an appropriately moody and atmospheric tribute. Other standouts include Baseball on Film and Cinema: A Space Odyssey, which only a true fan of the genres could make.
Are You Poor, or Just Broke?
There’s a big difference between sharing a Netflix account and struggling to make ends meet. There’s a big difference between not being able to order a pizza or go out with your friends and not being able to pay the bills. And there’s a huge difference between being destitute and being strapped for cash. (slEverydayFeminism) [more inside]
Who Tells Your Story? Historical Fiction as Resistance
What my favourite historical fiction has done for me, besides make me happy in the way that good books do, is teach me more about justice, and silence, and perspective. These are the questions I want to spend my time examining and writing about. The limits placed on many women’s lives are the very reason they are conveniently written out of the dominant historical narrative, in a circular argument as old as misogyny itself: “Women do not appear in the record because they didn’t do anything of note, and they didn’t do anything of note because they don’t appear in the record.”
4-19-1775 NEVAR FORGET
"It Started Here." With great excitement, living history attraction Colonial Williamsburg spent more than a million dollars to put out its first-ever TV ad during the Super Bowl. The splurge may have backfired, as its use of footage of the World Trade Center towers falling on 9/11 to a Tom Brokaw voice-over angered and upset many in its target markets and puzzled plenty of others. Takes from Daily News, Esquire, Gothamist, USA Today, NY Post, Slate, HuffPo. [more inside]
You're Gonna Carry That Weight
Like to apply for the position of the head of an organization dedicated to advocating for the disabled? Better not be disabled yourself. [more inside]
On some evenings, I don't want to deny the indulgence
How Hollywood's Favorite Juice Bar Owner Eats Every Day. Come for the pretty zucchini ribbons. Stay for the magic activated cashews. via Kottke.
Ziphius, rumored to slice boats in half with its dorsal fin
Toronto-based artist Bailey Henderson sculpts the fearsome sea creatures depicted on medieval and Renaissance-era maps. [more inside]
“...we shed light on the scale of the role we play in killing...”
Hard Numbers Reveal Scale of America’s Trophy-Hunting Habit by Rachael Bale [National Geographic]
Sport hunters, those who kill animals for recreation rather than out of necessity, imported more than 1.26 million trophies to the U.S. in the decade from 2005 through 2014, according to a new analysis of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s import data by Humane Society International and the Humane Society of United States. That’s an average of 126,000 trophy imports a year, or 345 a day.[more inside]
The Cuban Money Crisis
Supercommuters
Website of the Day
Monday Punday - try to figure out the pun illustrated in the cartoon. No scoring. No prizes. And no "I don't get it, tell me" button. (Hint: If you can't figure out the first three, don't torture yourself further.) [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »