March 22, 2018
Scritches not stitches
Please enjoy these videos of animals enjoying scritches:
A tiger quoll |
A birb |
Jeddah the bat |
A blind horse (reciprocal scritches!) |
RonRon the fox |
A teeny kitten |
Marble the chinchilla |
A cow |
Max Lynx |
and no post is complete without A dog.
Happy 50th Birthday, Damon Albarn, collaborator extraordinare!
Today is Damon Albarn's 50th birthday. You may know Damon from such bands as Blur and Gorillaz. Recently, Noel Gallagher has said that he wants Albarn to do a guest appearance on his next album, which isn't as odd as it might sound... [more inside]
The Cheers conspiracy
Before there was the place where everybody knows your name, there was Park St. Under, an eerily similar local sitcom. Did it quietly serve as the basis for the most famous TV show about Boston ever made?
"... but the price, we think the price is worth it"
This week marks the 15th anniversary of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. But the U.S. has been waging war against the Iraqi people over the past six decades.
Look inside your heart, I'll look inside mine
Steve Winwood's 1986 album Back In The High Life [full album, 45m] is one of those rare albums (in a family perhaps with Rumours) where every track is basically perfect (if you like this sort of thing). It won 3 Grammys, hit the top 20 (or higher) in 10 countries, and even hit slot 46 on the US R&B Hip-Hop Album chart. Side A>: Higher Love [video, DM link], Take It As It Comes, Freedom Overspill, Back In The High Life Again [video] [more inside]
New Orleans, debunked
poppies! poppies!
Inside the Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction
This Isn't the First U.S. Opiate-Addiction Crisis - How drug companies triggered an opioid crisis a century ago [more inside]
This Isn't the First U.S. Opiate-Addiction Crisis - How drug companies triggered an opioid crisis a century ago [more inside]
Three Percent of the Population Own Half the Country's Firearms
These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears… In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes."Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns?"
Sony World Photo Winners 2018
Seven pages of fabulous photos. The Bored Panda link gives you seven pages of large-scale photos. This next link is to the official Sony page which has galleries of the winners, but not as large as the BP ones. However, Sony has the info on the exhibition opening in April in London. Sony Photo Page
And Justice For All
“If you are seeking a sentence of 3 years incarceration, state on the record that the cost to the taxpayer will be $126,000.00 (3 x $42,000.00) if not more and explain why you believe the cost is justified.” Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner Leading A Criminal Justice Revolution (The Intercept). Inside The Fight Against Cash Bail, Meet The Advocates Working To End The Predatory Practice (Pacific Standard). A Billionare And A Nurse Shouldn't Pay The Same Fine For Speeding (NYT Opinion).
Drolatique
"...these are the most curious pictures that can be found in the whole world..." A fascinating and discursive essay on Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, a 16th-century collection of enigmatic monsters.
Near, far, wherever you are, I believe that the hot dogs go on
Join standup legend Peter Kay as he presents all the lyrics you thought you heard, but possibly didn't. [SLYT] [NSFW] Today's chat powered post, thanks winterhill
Choose Life
Wham!'s cover of The Sisters of Mercy's This Corrosion is perfectly wrong in every way. (slyt)
Tojo never made it to Darwin.
'Stoneage Romeos' was the debut album for the Hoodoo Gurus. An homage of sorts to Hammer's ridiculously camp caveman b-movie One Million Years BC, it hinted towards the elemental joys contained within: day-glo colours, menacing Tyrannosaurus rex, cowering cavewoman, and a band logo that looked as if it had been drawn on the back of an exercise book during a particularly dull double maths session on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Its cover was alluring and a statement all in itself.
“Fortnite is eating PUBG's lunch,”
How Fortnite became more popular than PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds [PCGamesN] “...the game’s true strength was found when Epic announced Fortnite Battle Royale in September 2017 - hot on the heels of the massively popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The Battle Royale mode has become so popular since then that it is now the most streamed game on Twitch and the newly launched mobile version topped the iOS charts across 13 countries. Given the extraordinary success of Fortnite the fact that it is now attracting celebrities from outside of games towards its shrinking battle arenas is to be expected. It is not just Drake, either: international rugby players have imitated animations from the game during matches, and even Roseanne from the TV series Roseanne (yes, her) has caught the Fortnite fever.” [more inside]
A tale of two modern Chinas: omnipotent cities and criminal villages
The Atlantic recently published two very different tales of China: China’s New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech, where Facial-recognition technologies are proliferating, from airports to bathrooms, an article by Rami Niemi on how biometric identification is being used to shame jaywalkers and linking to the still-developing citizen scores (ACLU, 2015). Meanwhile, Murder Villages and Scam Towns are a reality in some rural areas, where crime has become a cottage industry. Robert Foyle Hunwick documents grim examples of corruption far from the big cities, including rural towns where individuals are murdered at work sites but made to look like industrial accidents, and other locals pose as grieving family members to get companies to pay out hush money.
"Their basic approach seemed to be: how dumb can we make this?"
"In 1993, the makers of The Killing Fields and Chariots of Fire bought the film rights to the world’s biggest video game. The result was a commercial disaster. But that’s only part of the story." The Stench Of It Stays With Everybody: Inside the Super Mario Bros Movie
Wilson, Keppel and their Betties
Wilson, Keppel and their Betties: an article by Luke McKernan, about the once-renowned British music hall trio, including a number of video clips showing them in action. Elsewhere, Christopher Fowler writes that they "sounded like a firm of solicitors and looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs brought to life. They were the epitome of the bizarre speciality act..." Please note the videos linked from these pieces include potentially offensive content ranging from confusingly weird cultural misappropriation up to outright old-time racism. [more inside]
“There have been about six first pregnant men,” Barker notes wryly.
So Barker stopped taking testosterone. He delayed an appointment to discuss a hysterectomy. Well, it was just a short film. Not too disruptive. But the filming went on and on – and Barker ended up telling a very different story to the one he planned. The pregnancy he chronicled was not Tracey’s, but his own. And it changed his sense of who he was.The story of one man’s pregnancy: ‘It felt joyous, amazing and brilliant’.
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