May 8, 2011
Brown And Also Blue
John Joseph Maus (1943 - 2011)
John Maus, a.ka. John Walker, vocalist, guitarist and one-third of The Walker Brothers (with Gary and, of course, Scott) has passed away at age 67 following a battle with liver cancer. [more inside]
Farmville is getting a little frothy
Recent venture capital fund raising rounds have placed very high valuations on social media sites such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. The valuations continue to soar at an exponential pace, some placing Facebook at 75 billion and Zynga at 10 billion. Many experts have gone on record claiming this is a bubble including Eric Schmidt, Alisher Usmanov, the Russian magnate behind much of the venture capital in soical media and the Economist from last year. [more inside]
Cat Scratch Fever
Death Grips: Zombie holocaust in seconds
It started two months ago to the day, when a stuttering/strobing video of angry man obscenely rapping over a spasmodic drumbeat was posted on YouTube from an unknown group who called themselves Death Grips, with the promise of an album and a mixtape within the year. The next day, a new track went up, not furious like the day before, but the rapper sounded a bit hoarse now. More tracks were uploaded every few days, and on April 26th the mixtape was on YouTube, soundcloud, and available to download from their website and other places. Still, little is known about the group, beyond that it's probably a trio and Zach Hill is involved. [more inside]
I can't tell you what this post is about or even that it exists
In the UK, "super-injunctions" can prohibit the press from reporting a story on privacy grounds and from reporting that any such injunction has been issued. Newspapers are occasionally quite playful in getting around these increasingly unpopular injunctions. The Telegraph famously pointed its readers to the then-trending twitter campaign against Trafgura and, today, the Daily Mail appears to be playing a similar game. More prosaically, The Independent has simply reported a Tory MP's comments in Parliament that a currently sitting MP has taken out a super-injunction. [more inside]
Lara Logan's tale
Tweeting Bin Ladens Death
How the news spread via twitter Interesting visualisation of tweets of Bin Ladens demise.
"...the Tweet by Rumsfeld chief of staff Keith Urbahn that got the ball rolling was retweeted more than 80 times within one minute after it was sent, and that by the 3-minute mark, it had led to more than 300 reactions"
Oh, the Shark has Pretty Teeth, Dear
Rosa Klebb of shoe stiletto fame in From Russia with Love was played by Lotte Lenya twice wife of Kurt Weill , composer of The Three Penny Opera, with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht.
This was the beginning of the quintessential Mack the Knife
Lenya was present at the Louis Armstong recording - here live where he gives her a shout out (2.36)
The song was covered by many : Ella Fitzgerald; Bobby Darin; Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin; Frank Sinatra with Jimmy Buffet; Sting
Brecht rewrote the lyrics in 1930 to give them more edge
There are some who are in darkness
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
Those in darkness drop from sight
Nick Cave re wrote them again in 1994. (wiki)
This was the beginning of the quintessential Mack the Knife
Lenya was present at the Louis Armstong recording - here live where he gives her a shout out (2.36)
The song was covered by many : Ella Fitzgerald; Bobby Darin; Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin; Frank Sinatra with Jimmy Buffet; Sting
Brecht rewrote the lyrics in 1930 to give them more edge
There are some who are in darkness
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
Those in darkness drop from sight
Nick Cave re wrote them again in 1994. (wiki)
Bombs Away
Take a drive with Google Earth
Enter start and destination and watch your route payed out.
the academic upper middle class needs to rethink its alliances
What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of the American economy as a whole: a self-enriching aristocracy, a swelling and increasingly immiserated proletariat, and a shrinking middle class. The same devil’s bargain stabilizes the system: the middle, or at least the upper middle, the tenured professoriate, is allowed to retain its prerogatives—its comfortable compensation packages, its workplace autonomy and its job security—in return for acquiescing to the exploitation of the bottom by the top, and indirectly, the betrayal of the future of the entire enterprise. Graduate school as suicide mission, in the Nation.
"I have to go deeper."
"Discrimination generates hatred"
Brazil's supreme court recognises same sex unions. The Brazilian Supreme Court voted 10-0 (one abstention) yesterday to recognise same-sex civil unions as of equal legal validity to marriage/ with "stable" same-sex couples now able to gain certificates that allow access to equal legal rights. "Discrimination generates hatred," said Justice Carlos Ayres Britto, who wrote the ruling. [more inside]
It's gonna get so much better / Everybody's gonna get their turn / Count the matches that's left in the matchbook / One of these is gonna burn
""The GAA player who performs in front of 70,000 at the weekend will be teaching your kids on Monday..."
"It was a picture of the dissidents' worst nightmares. The GAA was defining the police in Northern Ireland as "us" and Ronan Kerr's killers as "them"." Fintan O'Toole muses on the role of the Gaelic Athletic Association in defining and redefining what it is to be Irish.
A Real Motherspammer
What better way to show your mom you love her on Mother's Day than to send her as many spammy email forwards as she sent you all year? Momspam.net This is why the Internet was invented.
Happy Mother's Day, from the songwriters of the world
Happy Mother's Day from Buck Owens, Randy Newman, John Lennon, Merle Haggard, Elvis Presley and LL Cool J
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