July 8, 2015
A bread making resource you can really sink your teeth into.
Humans have been baking breads successfully for thousands of years. Don't know where to start, or looking for new ideas to try? Although this wonderful resource comes up regularly in ask.mefi, I thought it was high time to be featured on the Blue. Truly belonging to "The Best of the Web": The Fresh Loaf (News & Information for Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts) forums, handbook, lessons, recipes and more.
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends...
au sommet de les pavés, la plage
The National Building Museum in Washington DC is hosting an interactive installation by the design collaborative Snarkitecture: THE BEACH [more inside]
Time Keeps on Slipping... Into the Past.
May I present One Minute Time Machine. It is the best 5 minute and 40 second time travel romance film that will ever have been made.
They Deserve Better
NYC Public Advocate Letitia James and 10 children in foster care have filed a federal class action lawsuit [PDF, trigger warning] against the child welfare agencies of New York City and New York State, alleging "that the city’s Administration for Children’s Services fails to provide the services, planning and caseworker training to help children find permanent families before they suffer irreparable harm".
Begun again, the Crypto Wars have
Once again, the ability of ordinary people to use strong encryption is under threat from lawmakers. In the wake of the exposure of the Five Eyes spying dragnet, consumers have demanded encryption, while the FBI claims encrypted devices will prevent it from fighting crime (or will they?) While the FBI has its own solution, experts deride it as impossible. Meanwhile, online mercenaries sell spyware to anyone who will pay them.
Georgian (?) Muscle Men. Dumplings.
Khinkali Battle Challenge
Khinkali Battle Challenge #2
Spoiler: Battle #2 is much better, the guys are shirtless, and better eaters.
Khinkali Battle Challenge #2
Spoiler: Battle #2 is much better, the guys are shirtless, and better eaters.
The Greatest Pie Fight in Cinematic History, re-discovered.
Pamela Hutchinson of Silent London
reported this weekend that the second reel of Laurel and Hardy's Battle of the Century has been found. That's the reel with a thousands of pies pie fight that was hugely influential (and hilarious) and largely considered to be a lost classic. Slate provides some backstory and history around how the reel got lost - and on the 1950s highly edited remix that has been the only surviving parts of the piefight for decades .
"Honest to God, a dead body is not an emergency.”
Amber Carvaly and Caitlin Doughty on distrupting the funeral-home business:
"Although Undertaking L.A. will offer a conventional service like cremation, it will also work with families to facilitate what the two call a “more natural” death — no formaldehyde cocktail, no pods that fill hollow eyes, no mouth former, no satin-lined casket, no metal vault. The goal is to promote home funerals. If family members care to, they can undress, bathe, and cool the body with ice themselves or they can watch Carvaly and Doughty do so. “What I believe to be the problem is the lack of the dead body, the lack of reality, the lack of the ritual around the death,” Doughty says. “The solution is a return to all that.”Caitlin Doughty, previously
What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?
Teachers and administrators still rely overwhelmingly on outdated systems of reward and punishment, using everything from red-yellow-green cards, behavior charts, and prizes to suspensions and expulsions. [... ] But consequences have consequences. Contemporary psychological studies suggest that, far from resolving children's behavior problems, these standard disciplinary methods often exacerbate them. They sacrifice long-term goals (student behavior improving for good) for short-term gain—momentary peace in the classroom. What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?
Make It Reign
How An Atlanta Strip Club Runs the Music Industry (slGQ, NSFW)
Moisture-wicking, four-way stretch, and anti-odor
Violinist Kevin Yu has invented a high-tech tux shirt. The Coregami Gershwin incorporates athletic wear principles and technology to bring symphonic musicians' formal wear into the 21st century.
“Maybe they're friendly.”
Goosebumps [Official Trailer] [YouTube]
Upset about moving from a big city to a small town, teenager Zach Cooper (Dylan Minnette) finds a silver lining when he meets the beautiful girl, Hannah (Odeya Rush), living right next door. But every silver lining has a cloud, and Zach’s comes when he learns that Hannah has a mysterious dad who is revealed to be R. L. Stine (Jack Black), the author of the bestselling Goosebumps series. It turns out that there is a reason why Stine is so strange… he is a prisoner of his own imagination – the monsters that his books made famous are real, and Stine protects his readers by keeping them locked up in their books. When Zach unintentionally unleashes the monsters from their manuscripts and they begin to terrorize the town, it’s suddenly up to Stine, Zach, and Hannah to get all of them back in the books where they belong.
Redskinned
A federal judge has ordered the cancellation of the Washington NFL team's registered trademarks, upholding the United States Patent and Trademark Office's 2014 ruling that the trademarks are "disparaging" to Native Americans.
No Comment
Only You Can Save Mankind
But they didn't call it "MANT!"
The Vulture came up with a trailer for Marvel's upcoming Ant-Man film as a '50s-style horror picture -- complete with narration by the great Vincent Price!
(Ant-Man previously, previously) [more inside]
Is it ok to have nice things?
As Peter Singer's new book is released, the Boston Review hosts a forum on "The Logic of Effective Altruism." [more inside]
Do's and Don'ts of announcing professional wrestling.
"Don't say 'Edge is busted open,' instead say, 'Edge got his teeth knocked down his throat!'" [more inside]
Don’t Have Dice?
My Blue Polyester Prison
The NYPD uniform is as iconic as it is polarizing. Wearing it makes me a target for both praise and censure—neither of which I, in most cases, did anything to deserve. My character becomes a many-sided die, the cast contingent on the preconceptions and experiences of whoever is looking. With each person I encounter I wonder how it’s going to be: Am I an oaf? A hero? A pawn? A tyrant?An anonymous female NYPD officer reflects on what it's like to wear the blue.
If Male Actors Were Described the Way Female Actors Are
Tucking his shapely legs underneath his curvaceous body in the dimly lit booth, Chris Hemsworth looks longingly at the bread basket the waiter places on the table in front of us. “Screw it — I could die tomorrow, right?” He smiles charmingly at me as he grabs a crisp roll and wraps his mouth around it, not even caring who’s watching. He closes his eyes and moans, savoring the carb-loaded moment like it could be his last. “If I die, bury me in a bread casket,” he says, displaying the kind of outrageous humor that doesn’t quite match his angelic looks.
#Hashtag Government
Where do you wash that towel, hmm?
Dear People Who Live in Fancy Tiny Houses… "You look so freakin’ happy in that Dwell Magazine article or Buzzfeed post, but c’mon, you can’t tell me that you don’t lie awake at night, your face four inches from the ceiling because the only place your bed fits is above the kitchen sink which also acts as your shower, and think, I’ve made a terrible mistake."
A Tart My Dears, A Tart
How British Gay Men Used To Talk: A short film featuring Polari, the cult language of UK homosexuals derived from theatre and circus slang, popularized in the 1960s by the camp radio characters Julian and Sandy. Need a dictionary? Or a translated Polari scene from Velvet Goldmine?
Why Did Mechanics In New York's Worst Neighborhood Go On Hunger Strike?
The Queens neighborhood of Willets Point is an anomaly - on some of the most valuable land in New York City, you have a mass of auto shops that look completely out of place. And for decades, the area has been a target for redevelopment, being next door to Flushing Meadows - and for decades, the mechanics who made their living there had fought back. But finally, it seemed like a deal had been made - in exchange for allowing the city to redevelop the land, the community would be moved to the South Bronx, with assistance to transition these businesses.
But after legal snafus, bureaucratic roadblocks, and other failures - why did the mechanics feel that their only option was to go on hunger strike?
"The nights I can't remember are the nights I can never forget."
It's possible you don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe you're a moderate drinker who baby-sips two glasses of wine and leaves every party at a reasonable hour. Maybe you are one of those lucky people who can slurp your whisky all afternoon and never disappear. But if you're like me, you know the thunderbolt of waking up to discover a blank space where pivotal scenes should be. My evenings come with trapdoors.An excerpt from Sarah Hepola's new memoir: "Everyone has blackouts, don't they?" [more inside]
The Dissolve is no more.
The End..because of the various challenges inherent in launching a freestanding website in a crowded publishing environment, financial and otherwise, today is the last day we will be doing that.
The only thing we were doing that impressed the Klingons was dying well
Star Trek: Axanar - Prelude to Axanar is a documentary style prelude to Star Trek: Axanar the upcoming (2016) fanfilm about the story of Garth of Izar during the Four Years War between the Federation and the Klingon Empire.
Creating a treatment for Ebola--and maybe other diseases
Moses, meanwhile, stepped out into the searing midday heat and stretched her legs. She saw six people sitting on the concrete steps of an office across from her lab. Some had been nurses and researchers at Kenema; a couple were part of a newly formed survivors’ union. That’s how they’d heard about Moses’ mission.
All six had been infected with Ebola and survived. Hypothetically, that made them immune to the disease. That’s why Moses had returned—to harness that immunity to try to ensure Ebola never killed anyone again.
The shit that's going down has been testing my ability to block it.
About once a year he has nightmares of earth becoming a very alien planet. "Part of being a scientist is you don't want to believe there is a problem you can't solve."
The Kids Are Alright
Contrary to the fears of our parents, teachers, and pastors, 80s metalheads did not grow up to be drug and booze addled Satan worshipers.
Spoiler Alert: Spock Dies!
'They thought I just sit on my ass all day and yell at the screen.'
It was revealed this week that YouTube gaming star Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, made $7.4 million in 2014, sparking predictable Internet grizzling. He responds to the report in an admirably frank and charming way, discussing money, work, charity, hotdogs and the haters.
Samsung Safety Truck
"In Argentina, a person dies in a car accident almost every hour. 80% of those happen on roads, often when cars are attempting to overtake another vehicle. In a country with hundreds of one-lane roads, large transport trucks that obstruct views ahead can cause many dangerous overtake situations.
In an attempt to reduce the danger, Samsung thought maybe a built-in wireless camera broadcasting to TV displays on the back of the truck would let drivers know when it was safe to pass." [slyt] [via]
You Get One Minute. Use It Well.
The Most Exclusive Website only gives full access to one person at a time for one minute. You take a 'ticket' at the 'lobby' and wait your turn. It's like a virtual deli counter, but with much higher numbers. Of course, it's on a current list of "10 Completely Useless Websites" (which is, itself, a rather useless list). [more inside]
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