April 14, 2014
Gut Feeling
You Create Your World
Murder Dog Magazine has served as the voice of underground hip hop for over twenty years, printing unfiltered interviews with up-and-coming artists from regional scenes on their way to national prominence. The magazine's founder and editor, the Sri Lankan immigrant Black Dog Bone, shares the improbable story of how a boy from the jungle championed the voice of inner city youth in the U.S.
Female Pain
Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain. "The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt." [more inside]
A Floating Population
"81 Bowery - one of the last standing lodging houses in New York City has been home for more than a generation of immigrant Chinese laborers who work at construction sites and kitchens throughout Chinatown.
Today, dozens of individuals are left sharing the fourth floor - each occupying a 64-square-foot cubicle." [more inside]
"I think we've done beauty a great disservice by quantifying it."
Adam Pearson suffers from neurofibromatosis, a condition that causes tumors to grow on his face. They are sizable. You wouldn't fail to notice them, even from a distance. Nonetheless, he appears in a small but absolutely pivotal role in Under the Skin, opposite Scarlett Johansson, playing a sexy alien serial killer, in one of the most remarked-upon scenes in the film. "[Facial scars and other disfigurements are] always used very lazily" by filmmakers, he tells The Guardian. "In an ideal world actors with conditions would play the characters with these same conditions.... If they'd got Adam Sandler and blacked him up to play Nelson Mandela, there would have been an uproar ... but with scars and stuff, it seems like people are cool with that." [more inside]
13 Gods of the Internet
13 Gods of the Internet Featuring Listikles, Faprodite, Poseodon...
Ottomans not included
For those of you who prefer your science isolated with a side of moody furniture, I give you Lonely Chairs at CERN.
The story of how Yasiel Puig made his way from Cuba to Los Angeles
Escape from Cuba: Yasiel Puig's Untold Journey to the Dodgers
For close to a year Puig had been trying to force an answer, to extract himself from Fidel Castro’s state-run sports machine, which paid him $17 a month, and sneak across the tropics to a mythical north, where even benchwarmers lived like kings. Two, three, four times, maybe more, he had risked everything and fled, only to be detained by the Cuban authorities or intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard—each failure making the next attempt more urgent. Finally, in June 2012, the 21-year-old outfielder left his home in Cienfuegos, on Cuba’s southern shore, and set off by car for the northern province of Matanzas, just 90 miles from Florida. He was traveling with three companions: a boxer, a pinup girl, and a Santeria priest, the latter of whom blessed their expedition with a splash of rum and a sprinkle of chicken blood.
Probably Possibly Partially Parsley
If Smitty and Hoppy Are Still Hungry That Means It Was Marijuana. Organic gardening in 1974.
Ech!
Meet the majestic American WoodEch.
The LDS Church meets feminism: the quest of Mormon women to be ordained
An interesting look inside the Ordain Women movement seeking the priesthood in the LDS Church. This group of women are seeking the priesthood... not the priesthood that a Catholic bishop holds but a lay priesthood that would allow them to be on the same footing as their 12-year-old sons.
Focus testing and hard-light constructs
Giancarlo Volpe, the showrunner for the short-lived but critically acclaimed Cartoon Network program Green Lantern: The Animated Series, has posted a minicomic about his bad experience when the studio ran focus testing on the show. Executive producer of GL:TAS and creator of Batman: The Animated Series Bruce Timm shows up in the end to provide some perspective. [more inside]
Expos 8, Cardinals 7
45 years ago today at Montreal's Jarry Park, outfielder Mack "The Knife" Jones hit a 3-run homer and a 2-run triple to lead his Montreal Expos to an 8-7 win over the St. Louis Cardinals in the first Major League baseball game ever played outside the US (home opener coverage starts at 4:28 of the CBC video). [more inside]
The London Philharmonic Orchestra perform Górecki’s Symphony No. 4
Górecki's 4th Symphony premiered this past weekend. Left unfinished, but near completion, at his death, it has been now been finished by his son, Mikołaj Górecki, who describes the work as "very different from its immediate predecessor … and is closer to monumental works like Symphony No 2 or Beatus Vir and to later pieces with Tatra folk influences such as the Little Requiem." The immediate predecessor, Symphony No 3, was hugely successful, selling over a million CD copies. The Guardian hosts the video of the performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and tells the story behind the posthumous premiere.
Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced.
The Washington Post and The Guardian won the Pulitzer Prize in public service for their reporting on the widespread domestic spying by the US National Security Agency.
A full list of the mentioned articles can be found here for the Washington Post, and here for the Guardian.
Edward Snowden, who supplied the journalists with the leaked information, today said: "Today's decision is a vindication for everyone who believes that the public has a role in government. We owe it to the efforts of the brave reporters and their colleagues who kept working in the face of extraordinary intimidation, including the forced destruction of journalistic materials, the inappropriate use of terrorism laws, and so many other means of pressure to get them to stop what the world now recognises was work of vital public importance." [more inside]
Calvin and Hobbes in motion - sorry Bill, they had to move
Animator Adam Brown took two Calvin and Hobbes comics as keyframes and animated the pair in motion, with some sound: dancing in the forest (Vimeo; YouTube; GIF without the background) and a fireside tiger attack (Vimeo; GIF). [more inside]
Cheerio
Pop/ska duo The Monroes had a big hit in Norway with Sunday People in 1983. Perhaps the tallest musical duo ever they were often referred to simply as 4 meters of pop. Sadly, last year they both died of cancer. Their second hit was Cheerio.
Lawn maintenance for beginners
The approximate moment when grumpiness kicks in for men is around age 70. Researchers found that as men grow older — from, say, 50 on — they have fewer obstacles and annoyances to worry about in life and, furthermore, they are more equipped to deal with adversity. But around age 70, life — or at least the perception of happiness — begins to go downhill. [more inside]
A savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson, published in Rolling Stone, November 11, 1971.
It was almost noon, and we still had more than 100 miles to go. They would be tough miles. Very soon, I knew, we would both be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Press registration for the fabulous Mint 400 was already underway, and we had to get there by four to claim our soundproof suite. A fashionable sporting magazine in New York had taken care of the reservations, along with this huge red Chevy convertible we'd just rented off a lot on the Sunset Strip ... and I was, after all, a professional journalist; so I had an obligation to cover the story, for good or ill. The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed driving all over Los Angeles County – from Topanga to Watts, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
"Nature doesn't need people, people need nature."
Harrison Harrison Ford, correspondent for Showtime's Years of Living Dangerously (previously), answered questions on Ask Me Anything (slreddit). You may also recognize Mr. Ford as Dr. Indiana Jones.
Fighting for the Federation
Why Most Brazilian Women Get C-Sections
Oxford University Press Celebrates National Library Week
In honor of National Library Week, Oxford University Press is making all of its non-journal products available online for free for the week of April 13th-19th, 2014. This includes the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Handbook series. [more inside]
Six Scientists Show Six Super Surprises
New smartphone battery charges in 30 seconds •
Programmable nanobots injected into cockroaches I for one welcome our etc etc • MIT unveils shape-shifting furniture • Windtraps from Dune I mean the Smithsonian announces towers that distill water out of air • Body heat may soon power wearable gadgets • US Navy converts seawater to fuel
"I'm Martin's Dad"
The Boston Globe visits the Richard family, on the eve of the one year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings. The Richard's youngest son, Martin, was killed, and their daughter Jane, is still recovering, learning to navigate with her prosthetic leg.
The better robots of our nature
War! What was it good for? Quite a lot, argues historian and archaeologist Ian Morris. Over thousands of years humans used war to build our societies, then turned it against itself. With luck our newly acquired habits and forthcoming robots will keep the world from returning to older levels of bloodshed.
Which Dewey Decimal Category Are You?
We know you love your library! Ever wonder what it would be like to become a book? Where would you be in the library? Which Dewey Decimal [hundred] number would you be given? Take this quiz to find out!
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