September 24, 2014
The Short And Tragic Life Of Robert Peace
"On a May night in 2011, a man was murdered — shot — in a basement just outside Newark, N.J. Cash and marijuana were found at the scene...Robert Peace, a 30-year-old African-American, was a Yale University graduate and an almost straight-A student in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. He also dealt marijuana." (slNPR)
Don't Follow Me (I'm Lost)
Born to Nashville music royalty. Grew up next to George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Had a #2 record on the country charts at age eight. Had a minor alt-rock hit for the same major label as Korn and Incubus in his 30's. His mentor was Shel Silverstein. One of his bands, The Young Criminals Starvation League has featured members of My Morning Jacket, Lambchop, ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Clem Snide, and myriad others. His other band Is She Weird? Is She White? plays Pixies and Breeders covers on weekends in Nashville. Unless he's opening for Guided by Voices or playing someone's living room. Or delivering lost luggage to pay the bills.
It's a hell of a life singer-songwriter Bobby Bare, Jr. has had. It's only makes sense that someone went and made a movie about him: Don't Follow Me (I'm Lost). Sample the trailer. [more inside]
It's a hell of a life singer-songwriter Bobby Bare, Jr. has had. It's only makes sense that someone went and made a movie about him: Don't Follow Me (I'm Lost). Sample the trailer. [more inside]
I love how your torso has an arm on either side
Comedian Bo Burnham has released a video of his song "Repeat Stuff," from his What album. (The complete What live performance is also available, with the hilite for me being "From God's Perspective.")
No children are born hating
"No matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or what God you pray to, or who you love, there is something fundamental that we all share."
Obama delivers one of the most humanist, powerful, and intellectual speeches to the United Nations.
Obama delivers one of the most humanist, powerful, and intellectual speeches to the United Nations.
Running a server? Drop everything and update it now!
But wait...your medallion begins to glow!
Nethack's Dev Team have confirmed that code circulating under various next-version numbers (3.4.4, 3.5, 3.5.0) was a leaked development build. [more inside]
Totally Freaking Out About Peg + Cat
Peg + Cat is an Emmy award-winning cartoon from PBS, featuring the adventures of a young girl and her feline friend, using the power of math to solve Really Big Problems. The show, created by kid TV and Broadway veterans Jen Oxley & Billy Aronson, not only gives preschoolers an introduction to practical mathematics, it's also surprisingly entertaining for adults.
Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz
Bargeloads of art and exhibit materials have been going out to the former prison island of Alcatraz recently, all for an imprisonment- and human rights- and freedom of expression-themed exhibit by Chinese activist dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who designed and directed the installation while remaining under detention in Beijing. The barged materials include over a million Lego blocks, assembled in San Francisco.
The 50 Year Argument
The New York Review of Books recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding (previously), growing out of an alliance between Harpers editor Robert Silvers and writer Elizabeth Hardwick to find a place for what she called "the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy, the intransigent, and above all, the interesting." Known as the New York Review or the NYRB, it is also known to fans as the best magazine in the world. Next Monday, HBO will air The 50-Year Argument, a documentary by Martin Scorsese about the history of the magazine and what makes it special. [more inside]
like something out of the Aeneid!
"A new electricity distribution system being described as the "'Hoover Dam' of the 21st century" will bring wind energy from Wyoming to customers in California—and it will get there by way of a $1.5 billion artificial cave built specifically for storing air inside a salt dome in Utah. " [more inside]
Farm fantasy camp
Terry Pratchett isn’t jolly. He’s angry
Terry looked at me. He said: “Do not underestimate this anger. This anger was the engine that powered Good Omens.” I thought of the driven way that Terry wrote, and of the way that he drove the rest of us with him, and I knew that he was right. Neil Gaiman on Terry Pratchett.
No mention of the cats of Queen Berúthiel
The long and tangled history of video game adaptations of the worlds of JRR Tolkien.
Gentrification, Inc.
How one developer is attracting the 'right kind of people' to new locales with, among others things, dance parties.
MacWHAAAAAAT?????
"What a bizarre day. I'm sitting here watching my email fill up with message after message from people from so many different times and places of my life, all congratulating me for the astonishing good fortune of receiving a MacArthur Fellowship. Not to mention a flurry of texts and tweets, and I haven't had the energy to even look at Facebook." Cartoonist and Graphic Memoirist Alison Bechdel (previously on MetaFilter: 1, 2, 3, 4) has won the prestigious MacArthur Genuis grant, giving her the opportunity to dig into her archives for a previous comic she drew in 2004 to conclude her reaction blog post. [more inside]
the core family dynamic, to show that this is a real family
Where men are men and the plumbing is outside
Have a swell chuckle 1940s-style at Jolly Lindgren's "hysterical" tourist maps of the Grand Canyon, Grand Coulee Dam, Lake Tahoe, Yellowstone Park, Palm Springs, and Death Valley. And it's lookin' mighty low..
Wait for Me!
Deborah Cavendish née Mitford has died at the age of 94. She is famously the youngest of the Mitford Sisters, the Dowager Dutchess of Devonshire and author of 12 books. [more inside]
Fantasy Families
FastCo explores the invasive practice of taking someone else's baby's pictures off Instagram and pretending that the baby is yours, or even, you. It's called Fake Adoption or Baby Role-Playing. In response to the FC article, Instagram has declared, "This type of content violates our terms. Once a parent or guardian reports it to us, we work quickly to remove it."
betcha Brian Eno's gonna snap this baby up...
If you've got 20,000 to 30,000 bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you might consider purchasing the world's first electronic music synthesizer: the Helmholtz, which is up for auction.
Lost & Found Beagle
In this KLM promotional video, we are introduced to their newest lost & found team member who returns lost items to their owners--adorably.
All aboard.
The Art of Repair
When the painting of an Old Master starts cracking and flaking off, what is the best way to make it good? Should we reverently pick up the flakes of paint and surreptitiously glue them back on again? Is it honest to display a Raphael held together with PVA glue? When Renaissance paint fades or discolours, should we touch it up to retain at least a semblance of what the artist intended, or surrender to wabi-sabi?
I, for one, welcome our new ‘handwriting’ spambot overlords
The Holy Grail of Guitars?
John Lennon's second Rickenbacker 325 has been put on display (complete with 1964 set list taped to it!) at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum. [more inside]
The real problem with Big Data and ubiquitous surveillance
The question is not so much “do you trust the CIA/NSA/MI6/etc?”. It’s “Do you trust every single sysadmin working for these organisations? Every single analyst? Every single middle manager?”
You are either a God or a Fool. You can’t be both.
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