May 3, 2016
Moon Knights and Demon Bears
A celebration of Bill Sienkiewicz - the unique comics artist most famous for his work on Moon Knight, The New Mutants, Stray Toasters and of course Elektra: Assassin.
This is the Dark Souls of “This is the Dark Souls of…” metacommentary
It's the largest fire evacuation in Alberta history
Fort McMurray, a city of more than 80,000, has been ordered to evacuate after a massive wildfire breached the city limits today. The city wide evacuation order advised remaining residents to evacuate north to Noralta Lodge with the work camps that service the oil sands being pressed into service to house the evacuees. Earlier evacuations to the south producing some harrowing footage. Highway 63 has been closed south of the city, cutting off the main road connection between Ft. McMurray and the rest of Alberta.
Natasha Romanoff hated pierogies — but more than that, she hated lies.
“Watching them feels wicked meditative.”
Brian Feldman, Hopes&Fears: Why are people obsessed with Japanese miniature cooking videos?
There is an irreconcilable conflict at the heart of working with miniatures: “It’s about as far removed as you can get from the chaos of real life, but at the same time it requires you to be a very attentive observer of real life if you hope to capture that in your miniature art. It’s a cool paradox and one that’s really fun to play with as an artist.”[more inside]
Trump will be the Republican standard-bearer
Philadelphia - Rainbow - Phoenix - Montauk
From Project Rainbow to the Montauk Project - a brief history of what might have happened.... From the Philadelphia Experiment to Project Montauk. [more inside]
Queer Theatre at La MaMa (1962-1980)
Queer Theatre at La MaMa (1962-1980): This exhibit, which was created by Pooja Desai, a student in NYU’s Program in Archives/Public history, looks at theatrical experiments from La MaMa’s early years (1962-1980) through a queer lens. Using objects from La MaMa’s Archives, Desai reconstructs a history of the plays, production companies, playwrights, and directors who presented work on La MaMa’s stages that either reflected a “queer sensibility” or were relevant to queer/trans/LGBTQA audiences.
The Racist History of the Word Caucasian
(Great video + summarizing text) In America, white people are referred to as Caucasians, but outside the U.S. the term refers to people from the Caucasus region, which includes the countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, Russia, and Turkey. So why do Americans refer to people of European ancestry as Caucasians? In the video above, Franchesca Ramsey from MTV’s Decoded takes a look at the word’s history and it’s really racist. [more inside]
Episode 00084: The Biracle of Thanksgiving (Part 4)
Fullest House. We fed every Full House script into a artificial neural network machine learning algorithm. Each day, a new episode of Full House will be generated by a computer, forever.
RIP Bookslut
After 14 years, Bookslut has published its final issue. Vulture has an interview with Jessa Crispin, the site's founder and editor.
The Lobster
The odd friendship of Harry the skeptic and Arthur the believer
Arthur Conan Doyle became interested in Spiritualism as early as 1886, inspired by the writing of the US High Courts Judge John Worth Edmonds, and confessing his belief in the supernatural in various publications, including The Coming of the Fairies, "a collection of facts" about the Cottingley Fairies, published a year after the start of an odd friendship. In 1920, Doyle received the book The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin from none other than Harry Houdini, the renowned magician turned resolute skeptic, yet the two became friends, discussing spiritualism in terms of faith and frauds, respectively. [more inside]
The triumphant return of Canada's census
Canada's census has returned after a 10 year hiatus. And when the number-crunchers at Stats Can link this event to the Battle of Hogwarts [Stats Can Facebook], you've gotta know it feels like a new era to those who dwell in the world of evidence based policy. Canadians seem to agree with the statisticians' enthusiasm, crashing the census site with their nerdy rush to participate and end the data drought. Meanwhile the Beaverton covers the Tory response to this egregious end of privacy.
Meanwhile, gender analysis has evolved since the last census, so here is your guide to answering binary gender questions in the census (stop gap until this can be reviewed).
Build lots and lots (and lots) of new power plants
Here's what it would take for the US to run on 100% renewable energy. It is technically and economically feasible to run the US economy entirely on renewable energy, and to do so by 2050.
Drones will airlift soylent packets and water to members
Class warfare in the skies
It’s perhaps no surprise that air rage — instances in which passengers become unruly — appears to be on the rise. The logic is straightforward: When people are strapped to their seats with no escape for hours on end, when they’re hungry and tired and they lack control over their surroundings, that’s when they’re most likely to snap. Except new research suggests that the explanations most commonly offered for passenger outbursts don’t actually explain what’s going on. ... It turns out that what really upsets us in the sky is palpable inequality.
De-exoticizing the Design of Anthropology
A friend of mine pointed out how all anthropology textbooks have these "exotic" images of others on the covers and never an image of "white women eating salad". Me, being Dr. Smarty Pants, said, "Wouldn't it be great to replace those exotica images with those of middle class American/Australian Caucasians doing stuff, maybe even using stock photos?" Anthropologist Dori Tunstall and her students de-exoticize Anthropology.
Contact! Let's make contact!
"'Too many children think that scientists are all middle-aged white males in laboratory coats,' Edward Atkins, 3-2-1 Contact's director of content, told The New York Times in 1983." The Kids' Show That Taught Me to Ask "Why?", an ode to 3-2-1 Contact. [more inside]
The Victim
A Marine's Convictions. "After a flawed sexual assault investigation, a Naval Academy instructor fights to prove he has done nothing wrong. But did he?" (content warning: rape) [more inside]
You don't just stick it in your underwear!
Remember those period belts from Are You There God, It's Me Margaret? What did they feel like to wear? Did they actually work all that well? What did women use to catch blood, anyway, before adhesive pads and tampons became de rigueur? Turns out that keeping thick cotton pads in place was something of a problem, inspiring a parade of belts, "sanitary shields", and even
suspenders. Of course, all of these were originally designed to work with the default style of women's underwear until the 1930s: crotchless. [more inside]
I'm not a light switch, you can't just turn me on
Nightmare in the Morning, animator Yonatan Tal's 3rd year CalArts student film, takes us along on one alien tyrant's musical journey toward wakefulness. [more inside]
The Rock Clock
The Classic alarm has The Rock say, ‘beep, beep, beep … I could do this all day … beep, beep, beep.’
Paper for Water
Katherine and Isabelle Adams are 9 and 11 years old. When they learned that girls in many places have to walk for miles to get to the nearest well (and clean drinking water), they decided they wanted to help. They started selling their origami ornaments to fund a single well in Ethiopia. When they overshot their goal, they just kept going. [more inside]
CHOOSE FROM HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE HEADS
Most mascot costumes are boring. Facemakers creates custom costumes guaranteed to satisfy. Ten kinds of bugs! Natural and artificial sweeteners! Maalox and wart removal gel! Money! Female heads! Male heads! Nose heads! Worried about your budget? They have some clearance items, maybe only slightly used.
Rankin-Bass Presents “The Wicker Man”
Radiohead have released a video for “Burn The Witch”, the lead single off of their upcoming album. It was directed by Chris Hopewell.
this is good
Louie gets his own Jurassic Park!
[SLYT] A guy built a mini version of Jurassic Park for his pet tortoise "I made a miniature Jurassic Park for my Leopard Tortoise Louie. It has grazing areas with seeds planted to grow as the weather gets better, a pool for him to drink/swim about in, visitors center and the Jurassic Park Gates. "
A Sort of Gorilla Version of “om nom nom”
Gorillas appear to express their delight with good food by humming little songs. “They don’t sing the same song over and over,” says Luef. “It seems like they are composing their little food songs.”
The sound clip here should definitely be played at your next dinner party.
If you prefer more formal research and information, it's all here: Food-Associated Calling in Gorillas (Gorilla g. gorilla) in the Wild.
Virgil Brigman Back On The Air
From April 20 to July 10 [2016], a team of NOAA and external partners who are participating both at-sea and on shore will conduct the 2016 Deepwater Exploration of the Marianas expedition.You can follow the expedition website's daily updates for such sights as this beautiful and chill jellyfish, or perhaps an ROV hanging about, among other things.
Paging Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean to the courtesy phone.
On appeal, Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation has overturned the conviction for theft of Roman Ostriakov, a homeless man who stole a few Euros worth of sausages and cheese in 2011. The court ruled that "in the face of the immediate and essential need for nourishment" the theft was not a crime.
“Everybody wants to own the end of the world.”
Back to the Future by Tony Tulathimutte [The New Republic] For 45 years, Don DeLillo has been our high priest of the American apocalypse, having tackled just about every man-made disaster: nukes in End Zone, nukes and garbage in Underworld, toxic pollution in White Noise, financial busts in Cosmopolis, terrorism in Falling Man, terrorism and the death of the novel in Mao II, war in Point Omega. His latest novel, Zero K, clears out every end-times scenario left in the bag: climate change, droughts, pandemics, volcanoes, biological warfare, even meteor strikes and solar flares. But these only menace in the background as future probabilities, and the novel’s focus is not human extinction but its inverse: immortality through cryonics. [more inside]
Growth in US incarceration has been fueled by criminal justice policies
Two weeks ago the White House released a report by the Council of Economic Advisors entitled, "Economic Perspectives on Incarceration and the Criminal Justice System." (pdf) The report is a wonkish bombshell, concluding among other things that "if prison admission rates and average time served in prison remained the same as they were in 1984, research suggests that State imprisonment rates would have actually declined by 7 percent by 2004, given falling crime rates. Instead, State prison rates increased by over 125 percent." The CEA also found that "given the total costs, some criminal justice policies, including increased incarceration, fail a
cost-benefit test." But the goal is to explain and fix this chart.
Comedian W. Kamau Bell arranges a special meeting with the KKK
The United Shades of America is a new show on CNN. It's hosted by standup comic W. Kamau Bell, and he says the show is about "a black guy who goes where he shouldn't go or where you wouldn't expect him to go." And if you think that's hype, well, in the very first episode Bell hangs out with Ku Klux Klan members in Kentucky and Arkansas (45 minute Youtube link).
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How do I stay
In his documentary "the Drew", about a summer basketball league in South Central Los Angeles, 2-time NBA all star Baron Davis uses a basketball league to convey the compassion and the loyalty that allowed him to go from South Central to an exclusive Los Angeles high school to U.C.L.A. and the N.B.A. without leaving home.
“It is a ’hood story and it’s a positive ’hood story,” Davis said in a recent interview. “There’s good stuff in our neighborhood: good people, good leaders, good mentors. That was the beauty of the film.”
“It is a ’hood story and it’s a positive ’hood story,” Davis said in a recent interview. “There’s good stuff in our neighborhood: good people, good leaders, good mentors. That was the beauty of the film.”
Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Film Challenge
On Saturday morning you're given a title, a line of dialogue, and a description of a prop. Exactly 48 hours later, your team hands in a completed 5-minute science fiction film. The shortlisted 5-minute films to win this year's challenge have just been announced, and are free to watch here. Plus, in a new twist for this year, the shortlisted flash fiction (<1500 words) entries based on the same time limit and randomised prompts. [more inside]
In the realm of the ridiculous
Leicester City Football Club has won the UK's Premier League title, an event which bookies were giving 5,000 to 1 odds against at the beginning of the season. As a result, bookmakers will be paying out £25 million, the biggest loss in British history on a single sporting market, with some people winning £10,000 on £2 bets. Striker Jamie Vardy broke a league record for goals scored in consecutive games. The team's new manager, Claudio Ranieri, was initially viewed as an uninspired choice; in another betting market statistic, he was initially considered the most likely manager to be the first to lose his job this season. Ironically, the game that sealed Leicester City's victory was a drawn match between Tottenham City and Chelsea, a team that fired Ranieri in 2004.
Take and eat, this is my body
Like Burning Man. But in Vegas. For the 1%. The 1% of the Tech Elite.
Picture Eric Schmidt wearing a leather Top hat and a waistcoat made of mirrors No really, the article contains a picture of Executive Chairman of Alphabet (previously one of the Google CEOs) Eric Schmitdt wearing a leather Top hat and a waistcoat adorned with mirrors [more inside]
James May - The Reassembler
James May reassembles things in his shed. Episode 1 - Lawnmower. Episode 2 - Telephone. Episode 3 - Electric Guitar.
Meet the Fugglers
Mrs McGettrick makes Fugglers from felt and discarded false teeth. Even stranger, some people buy them. "It was something I would do in the evening to unwind: cup of tea, episode of something trashy on TV, force some teeth into the gaping maw of a felt teddy bear... I was both bewildered and excited when I sold my first order. I purchased another bag of teeth."
contains the entire word Solar and rhymes with Polaris
33 COSMIC CAR NAMES / Car names -- past & present -- that reference or evoke the Universe.
A list by Neil deGrasse Tyson
A list by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Creative People Say No.
"How much less will I create unless I say “no?” A sketch? A stanza? A paragraph? An experiment? Twenty lines of code? The answer is always the same: “yes” makes less. We do not have enough time as it is. There are groceries to buy, gas tanks to fill, families to love and day jobs to do."
Pogo, Plain or Peanut
Mix-mashmaster Makes M&Ms Medley (SLYT) Pogo (previously) who usually finely purees moments from movies, turns 75 years of candy commercials into 3 sweet minutes that melt in your eyes and ears. Contains chocolate, peanuts, cgi and ancient b&w.
Reviews say it's better than Batman vs Superman
17-year-old Nigerian student Joshua Umia is getting a lot of attention for his homemade action films with special effects, especially his remake of a Flash vs Zoom episode - which are all filmed on a Blackberry Bold 5.
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