March 6, 2013
Beauty is only plugin deep
When a soap company washes off the glow filter For 10 years a certain manufacturer of soaps has been on a campaign to normalize realistic images of beauty. Rather subversively, they took their message to the graphic artists themselves by masquerading a Photoshop glamour enhancing plugin as a "beauty augmenter;" a trick revert action to the original model, wrinkles, puffiness, true body and all. This begs the question: can we now accept that some corporations may act in the best interest of body image, or is this just good PR? [via Petapixel]
"Pop Culture Often Mocks My Faith, But Fallout Treated It Right."
Folk Neuroscience
Ah, she likes to travel around...
Dancin' Nana (slyt) (nsfw - one wee little curse) Eighty eight years old and she could dance all (bleeping) day.
Electrolysis and Elbow Grease
This playlist documents the restoration to operable status of an early US Army 1911 (1918 pattern) pistol. The 1911 was recovered buried in 3 feet of mud in Tennessee alongside an old bootlegging road. Wanna see the 1911 in action? The incomparable hickok45 gives a run-down of its history and fires a few mags.
Badass cello > badass other instruments
Giovanni Sollima is a contemporary composer and cellist whose music is at once fiercely modern and lushly romantic. Witness Daydream: the first half is a rich, warm trio, and the second half is a virtuosic cello solo that is, for lack of better words, punk as fuck. His longer composition Violoncelles, Vibrez! is a lush, pulsating piece that builds to an incredible climax. My favorite work of his, L. B. Files, is a four-part work that rapidly shifts styles and colors and textures – simply glorious all around.
No Diggity/Thrift Shop acoustic (sorta)mashup.
The best game you can name
"Are you blind? I'm on the field right now!"
Pantai Remis Landslide
On 21 October 1993, the working face separating the ocean from an open-pit tin mine collapsed dramatically, leaving a cove where the mine had once been.
From Maine to San Diego
Shunned by New York's bachelorette population after handing out one too many gift baskets, Derek Jeter loses his confidence with the fairer sex and retreats to Springfield a broken man. There he finds a kindred spirit in Moe, the only man on Earth lonelier than the heartbroken Captain...The two leave Springfield to start a holistic living clinic in North Haverbrook and are never heard from again. The New Springfield Nine: If Mr. Burns had to re-staff the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant softball team with a lineup full of present-day players, who should he choose?
‘Mr. Drake? We’ve been expecting you’
United Airlines holds plane so passenger can say goodbye to his dying mother. Kerry Drake broke down when it seemed he would miss the last flight to Lubbock, Texas, where his mother lay dying. Then something that an airline watchdog says "almost never happens," happened. Also on CNN.
The Wheels On The Page Go Round And Round
Cat responds to rotational optical illusion. The illusion in question. But why does it work? Link to the actual paper.
You ain't a poet, just a drunk with a pen
Hayes Carll is a Texan alt-country singer who's known, if he's known at all, for the soundtrack to Country Strong and the novelty song She Left Me For Jesus. Slate ranked his latest album, KMAG YOYO (and other American stories), as one of the best albums of 2011, partly on the strength of its poetic title-track about an Afghan war vet and partly due to the Red State/Blue State love song duet Another Like You. Other Hayes Carll hits include Drunken Poet's Dream, his duet with Ray Wylie Hubbard, and the melancholy Wish I Hadn't Stayed So Long .
Contempt for every institution, except Fugazi
Punk rocker John Roderick thinks Punk Rock is Bullshit.
The Count: 1 Billion YouTube Views!
"How do you get to be the first nonprofit to top 1 billion YouTube views? One view at a time. The Count from 'Sesame Street' tallies them up."*
RIP rock guitarist, Alvin Lee, 68 years old
Alvin Lee Is Going Home: 'Ten Years After' Guitarist Dies | I'd love to change to world | TEN YEARS AFTER - A Space in Time - Full album.
Ugh, Jonathan Livingston Seagull twice
For this blog I plan, among other things, to read and review every novel to reach the number one spot on Publishers Weekly annual bestsellers list, starting in 1913. Beyond just a book review, I'm going to provide some information on the authors and the time at which these books were written in an attempt to figure out just what made these particular books popular at that particular time.
Right to privacy
The Arkansas House voted today to override Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe’s veto of the earliest abortion ban in the nation, 12 weeks of pregnancy, just weeks after voting to override a similar veto on a law banning abortions after 20 weeks. [more inside]
An Elegant Weapon For A Less Civilized Age
They were the finest European swords the day, superior to almost any other on the battlefields of the Viking Age. Made from steel no one in Europe would know how to make until the Industrial Revolution. Stronger, more flexible, almost magical in combat, engraved with the mysterious name "+ULFBERH+T" by unknown makers, these swords were the both fearsome weapons and incredibly expensive prestige possessions. Only 171 have every been identified. And no one had made one from start to finish, using only hand tools, for over 900 years. [more inside]
A Disturbing Sound.
Would you say no to having David Bowie on your Coffee Table?
Along with a career retrospective, the V&A Museum in London will publish an extensive photo book covering Bowie's career to date. Graphic design studio Barnbrook has designed the 'David Bowie is' book which accompanies the V&A's exhibition of the same name. [more inside]
two girls, two cups
They deny being neo-Nazis.
A Golden Dawn candidate for parliament threatens the extermination of immigrants on camera (alt) (NSFW). There is also an interview with the filmmaker. [more inside]
\m/ ?
Mr. Paul Goes To Washington
Rand Paul Has Started What Could Be an Epic Mr. Smith-Style Filibuster on the Senate Floor. Rand Paul is filibustering John Brennan's nomination to lead the CIA (USA Today). He started at 11:45 AM on Wednesday morning and is still going strong.
""I'm going to speak as long as I can to draw attention to something I find very disturbing," said Paul, who started speaking at 11:45 a.m."
Here is a link to the live feed from C-SPAN. [more inside]
"The Fiery Cross guards you at nights."
In the 1920's, the Ku Klux Klan operated a resort for Christian white supremacists called Kool Koast Kamp near Rockport, TX. For just a dollar a day per family, they offered swimming and "big game fishing" in "deep blue surf," educational activities and "watermelon parties." All under the protection of a "fiery cross" and "an officer of the law, the same Christian sentiment." (Brochure pages 1, 2, 3, 4) [more inside]
"Do not try this at home on your own typewriter"
NBC presents Real People: Ron "Typewriter" Mingo - The World's Fastest Typist (SYTL)
Wonderful.
Here's an amazing multitrack a capella cover of Stevie Wonder's I Wish by Yeo Inhyeok. [slyt | previously | via]
The Mix: The Austin 100
NPR is offering online streaming and a download of 100 songs by artists to discover at SXSW 2013.
Move over, Jedi!
Introducing the Tazer sword.
“DOJ Admits Aaron [Swartz] Prosecution Was Political”
Steven Reich told the House that Aaron Swartz’s Guerilla Open Access Manifesto played an important role in the DOJ's decision to prosecute him. (previously) [more inside]
"The barbaric buffoonery of online discourse"
The Trials Of Nadia Naffe
Young, attractive, ambitious, conservative, and black, Nadia Naffe should have been a right-wing operative’s dream. For a time, she was. Naffe served as a campaign coordinator in Florida for George W. Bush’s re-election effort, hobnobbed with conservative superstars like Andrew Breitbart, and joined the production team of James O’Keefe, the shock-videographer whose pranks humiliated NPR and made ACORN a dirty word. ...And then, in a single night nearly two years after they first met, Naffe’s life became a nightmare.[more inside]
“Miss me? Well, I’m not dead yet.”
Nora Ephron’s Final Act by Jacob Bernstein (her son). [NYTimes.com]
"At 10 p.m. on a Friday night in a private room on the 14th Floor of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital on 68th and York Avenue, my mother was lying in her bed hallucinating, in that dream space people go on their way to being gone."
Fodder for your Amazon wishlist
Windsor McCay was one of the first superstars of the American comics strip, a pioneer in both cartooning and animation, massively prolific. All of his work is in the public domain, but where to start? Over at Robot 6, Chris Mautner provides the lowdown in the first installment of a new series of Comics College, "a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work". [more inside]
Color in the cracks of the city
Lego Bombing and the Art of Infrastructure: "Oftentimes the displays are little more than attempts at drawing the eye or conveying a message. Sometimes, though, the two combine to great effect, pointing out glaring, gaping holes in the world around us. In the case of Lego Bombing, as it has become known, those holes -- and therefore, that art -- crop up in our crumbling infrastructure. The colorful plastic blocks are being snapped into walls, streets, and buildings all over the world courtesy of Dispatchwork."
Student Data to Be Legally Given (and then Sold) to Capitalist Ventures
via Reuters A joint venture sponsored in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a vast student database including personal information on students grades K through 12 will be shared with corporations selling "personalized" educational software. Information can include social security numbers, presence of learning disabliities, or anything else school officials choose to share with any companies involved in this venture.
What we talk about when we talk about the Tube
The first District line train out of Upminster in the morning is the first train anywhere on the underground network. It leaves the depot at 4.53, the only train anywhere in the system to set out from its base before 5am ... if you catch that train, you might be tempted to say ta-dah!—except you probably wouldn't, because nobody is thinking ta-dah! at seven minutes to five in the morning; certainly nobody on this train. People look barely awake, barely even alive. They feel the same way they look; I know because, this morning, I'm one of them.John Lanchester on the experience, at once aversive and hypnotic, of catching the London Underground. Lanchester's article is an extract from his forthcoming entry in the new Penguin Lines series of tube-reading-friendly books released to commemorate the Underground's 150th anniversary. Meanwhile, the Guardian have compiled a collaborative Spotify playlist of songs that mention Tube stations, for those so inclined.
2012 Rise In CO2 Levels Second-Highest In 54 Years
The prospects of keeping climate change below that (2-degree goal) are fading away. Scientists track carbon pollution both by monitoring what comes out of factories and what winds up in the atmosphere. Both are rising at rates faster than worst-case scenarios that climate scientists used in their most recent international projections.
Children In Eastern Congo Meet A Giant White Male For The First Time!
The Priority of Democracy
Dissent Is the Health of the Democratic State - "We live in big, complex societies, which means we are thoroughly interdependent on each other, and that we will naturally have different ideas about how our life in common should go, and will have divergent interests. This means that politics we shall always have with us. It also means that political problems are largely ones about designing and reforming the institutions which shape how we interact with each other..." (via) [more inside]
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