January 8, 2015
You say potato scallop, I say potato cake (and I'm right)
Mel Campbell mines the Macquarie and her own Melbournian experience to come up with six divisive regional slang terms that just might result in an Australian civil war, if last year's Scallop War is anything to go by. [more inside]
This is how we roll while chillin' it in our pick up trucks
The formula works. A mashup of 6 top-40 country songs.
Goats in Coats. GOATS IN COATS.
caring for AIDS patients "when no one else would"
In the darkest hour of the AIDS epidemic, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of people whose families had abandoned them.
Courage, love and the 30-year secret of one little graveyard in Hot Springs, Arkansas. [more inside]
The Worst Critic In The History Of The World
Artist, The Toast contributor, adult movie star, and all-round very sharp guy Zak Smith talks about the absolute worst way possible to do art criticism.
Zak Smith previously.
Free Community College
President Obama posted a Facebook video today, and will formally announce tomorrow in Tennessee a plan to provide any American student with good grades two years of community college, for free. Tennessee is the president's last stop on his pre-State of the Union tour. [more inside]
The Seven Deaths of the Empress
recite to us some new story... to while away the waking hours of night
The general structure of this tale are well known; a young lady tells a king a series of stories, enough to fill one thousand and one nights, ensuring her survival. The themes became common enough that L. Frank Baum listed the "stereotyped genie, dwarf, and fairy" as traditional fairy tale characters to exclude from his attempts at modern tales, yet there's enough to unpack and discuss to consume multiple lifetimes. This is One Thousand and One Nights, the multinational compilation of folktales and stories, passed as word of mouth, then written and compiled into one large volume. But it was only when one of these collections was translated into French, at a time that fairy tales were already in vogue, did this large frame story and its contained tales really catch on. But it's history is not all that simple a tale. [more inside]
THIS IS JUST TO SAY
I have taken /
the poem /
that was your /
favourite
and which / you were probably / not expecting / in an FPP
Forgive me / it was fantastic / from Toast / and Ortberg
and which / you were probably / not expecting / in an FPP
Forgive me / it was fantastic / from Toast / and Ortberg
Jihadi Uncool
Average Mohamed [AP text|AP video] is a cartoon series by a Muslim convenience store manager in Minnesota who seeks to provide a counter-narrative to Jihad extremism and Islamic State propaganda videos, rap, etc. The target audience is young (8-16) Muslims and the site is multilingual. "It takes an average Mohamed to recruit and radicalize our youth," he said. "It will take another average Mohamed to counter that perspective."
Wolf on the Rock
"Great athletes sometimes find themselves in these clarifying final acts. Shaq retired in a cloud of chummy nonchalance. Jordan went out on a play that completed the perfection of his all-important legacy (and then came back to screw it up, in a move that told us just as much about what drove him). Most of the time, though, careers wind down in ways that mean nothing except that time is passing. Remember Karl Malone in Los Angeles? This season is the distillation of the go-it-alone challenge Kobe set for himself back when O’Neal and Phil Jackson left L.A., or even sooner — Kobe, remember, is the star player who invited none of his teammates to his wedding. (It’s a wonder he invited his wife.) He can’t win, a fact that has no apparent bearing on the fury with which he is trying. We’re seeing Kobe stripped of everything except the will to succeed, a will that persists despite being hopeless. We’re seeing him face his doom with a fearlessness that is ludicrous, profane, and maybe slightly inspiring. We’re seeing the existential Kobe Bryant." Grantland's Brian Phillips on Kobe Bryant. [more inside]
It's difficult to improve upon perfection
It may have taken him over ten years to do it, but Tommy Wiseau has finally followed up on his cult hit "The Room" (previously). "The Neighbors" originally existed as some rarely seen footage Wiseau shot in 2004 (only the wacky trailer was ever released to the public). Cut to ten years later when a newly shot pilot for a "Neighbors" TV series (Official website and trailer) has been making the rounds in big cities across the country to give Wiseau fans the follow up they have been craving.
Both the Gothamist and the AV Club weigh in on the show (with a bonus AV Club interview with Wiseau).
Darth Vaders, a Storm Woopers and a People!
A different Star Wars Kid watches the opening to Episode IV A New Hope for the first time. [SLYT] [more inside]
All They Need Now Is a Groovy Van and a Talking Dog...
George Rodrigue's painting Wendy and Me was stolen from a New Orleans gallery on Tuesday. The painting, one of the late artist's famous Blue Dog series, was valued at approximately $250,000. But the story had a happy ending later that evening when the members of local punk band Stereo Fire Empire, on their way home from a gig, discovered the painting and another artwork abandoned on a sidewalk. Guitarist (and apparent art aficionado) Even Diez recognized Wendy and Me and knew it had been stolen. The band turned the paintings in to police in what they admit is basically a real-life Scooby Doo episode .
GIS: coming up with solutions for the problems no one asked!
Mitch Hedberg and GIS Disproving “La Quinta” is Spanish for “next to Denny’s.”
"Writers are always selling somebody out."
Céline Unveils Its Latest Poster Girl: Joan Didion [New York Times]
“I don’t have any clue,” said the 80-year-old author of well-thumbed classics such as “The White Album,” “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The Year of Magical Thinking,” reached by telephone on Wednesday at her Upper East Side residence (where the photo, by Juergen Teller, was taken). “I have no idea.” Whose idea was this? “They got in touch with me,” Ms. Didion said, as crisp as one of Phoebe Philo’s cotton tunics."[The Céline ad featuring Joan Didion.] [more inside]
How to grow fresh air
Why you should water your house plants more often... Kamal Meattle describes how common houseplants can result in measurably cleaner indoor air. His work stems from earlier NASA research by Bill C. Wolverton who first investigated how to grow air in a space station before researching the indoor environmental impact of plants themselves. [more inside]
You think your character is cool?
Who The Fuck Is My D&D Character Gonna Be? Click to find out!
an impossibly large, semi-persistent realm of items
If you’ve ever said, “markets are conversations” you’re quoting the words of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the ’90s-era opus on the promise of the Web [previously]. David Weinberger and Doc Searls (two of the original authors of Cluetrain) are publishing another provocative work today called New Clues. [more inside]
Meet Shani Hilton, the youthful conscience of Buzzfeed News.
"I like to like things, and it's nice that I work at a place where our default stance is to like things." More about Shani Hilton the news manager at Buzzfeed.
"I will be content with the smell."
University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass offers a hypothesis about an inversion fog event that brought Seattle various unpleasant smells yesterday
Sacred Typography
Come and listen to my story 'bout a hoofer named Buddy...
Before he was folksy detective Barnaby Jones, before he was folksy hillbilly-millionaire Jed Clampett, before he was folksy hubby Doc Golightly, and before he was folksy frontiersman George Russell (Davy Crocket's sidekick), Buddy Ebsen sang and danced his way to stardom. Yeah, he was folksy back then too, even in white tie and tails. His original dance partner was his sister Vilma... [more inside]
NASA Exoplanet Travel Posters
3 awesome downloadable NASA designed Travel Posters for places we haven't been to yet NASA's Kepler telescope is still discovering new, distant exoplanets in our corner of the Milky Way, but oftentimes they're hard to visualize and easily forgotten about by some of us normal folk.
Now, to get everyone dreaming about these potentially habitable worlds, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has drawn up a trio of beautiful posters by the "Exoplanet Travel Bureau." All three echo the WPA's iconic travel prints from the mid-1930s, with classic typefaces and swathes of flat, contrasting color.
"What is occurring everybody?"
Xhosa, one of the Bantu languages used in South Africa has often confounded non-native speakers with its use of "clicks". Fortunately, you can learn how to use them yourself! [more inside]
Dieselpunk: Myth and Metaphor
Black Empire: George Schulyer, Black Radicalism and Dieselpunk "Sometime in the 1930s, a black journalist is kidnapped in Harlem by the charismatic Dr. Henry Belsidius, leader of the Black Internationale—a shadowy organization determined to build a Black Empire and overthrow the world of white racial hegemony with cunning and super science." [more inside]
I said “I feel like these characters should be guys.” She said, “Why?”
"Hello! I am going to answer your question, and then I am going to talk a little bit about GENDER IN COMEDY…" [more inside]
The OED in two minutes
The OED in two minutes is a visualisation of the change and growth of the English language since 1150, showing the frequency and origin of new words year by year. Notes and explanations about the project. [more inside]
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