February 18, 2015
I Wanted to Be a Millionaire
I Wanted to Be a Millionaire. How failing colossally on a game show changed my life for the better.
It's not the 7-10 Split
Drowned In A Sea Of Salt
Blake Morrison on the literature of the east coast. - "Writers from Crabbe to Sebald have been drawn to the fragile beauty of the east coast of Britain – and have immortalised it in words"
Sex redefined: the spectrum between male and female
"The muscle is very elastic."
Taking care of your vulva is easy (hint: do almost nothing). (Warning: frank talk about genitals, nsfw.)
Close shave.
Astronomers have discovered that a red dwarf and a brown dwarf (a binary system known as Scholz's star) passed through our Solar System's Oort Cloud a mere 70,000 years ago.
Hi-Yo, Scuttles! Away!
Glorious photos of a Reinwardt’s Flying Frog riding a horned beetle , captured by Hendy Mp, wildlife photographer from Indonesia. (previously)
London Grammar live performance in the KEXP Studios
London Grammar is amazing live in the KEXP Studios English trio London Grammar combine sparse electronic pop in the model of The XX with dramatic, big-voiced lead singer Hannah Reid, whose vocals evoke contemporaries Florence Welch and Natasha Khan of Bat for Lashes.
Here, they play a beautifully restrained set and leave the KEXP annpouncer speechless.
If you like this, check out their cover of Wicked Game
Where do the dead belong, in the world of the living?
Todd McFarlane's Spawn aired on HBO from 1997-99. A faithful depiction of McFarlane's popular action-fantasy-horror comic, this groundbreaking, (NSFW,) animated series won an Emmy for 'Outstanding Animation Program' during its third and final season. [more inside]
In praise of artistic theft
Tom Petty knows what many don’t—that appropriation and originality can’t be separated.
miscarriage invisibility
a lost possibility: women on miscarriage (an open discussion on a topic that nobody talks about) [more inside]
Dogs. Big Dogs.
Russian Spring
Pussy Riot's new song 'I Can't Breathe', their first in English, is an ‘Industrial ballad’ inspired by Eric Garner. Q&A. Behind the scenes of the video shoot.
"Oh, how I mourn her passing"
Traces of Mavis. David MacFarlane writes about the life and work of Mavis Gallant for Canadian magazine The Walrus.
...an aspiring novelist once pressed Gallant for advice, which she stubbornly refused to give. She could have said something—anything, almost—to satisfy the would-be writer. But she wasn’t the kind of person who did that. ... How to write? This was not, as far as Gallant was concerned, an uncomplicated question. It was also a question that, were it to be answered meaningfully, would require more soul-searching, more thought, more self-analysis than she would want to undertake in front of a stranger. It’s easy to imagine how the question could come across as rude or impossible to answer—or both. Besides, she firmly believed that writing could not be taught. But the young author persisted. “All right,” Gallant finally said. “Here’s some advice: never drink cheap wine.”
Hither and Jawn
New research examines the spread (or not) of local dialectical terms on Twitter. [PDF] [more inside]
Nobody Likes Us - We Don't Care
Violent Gentlemen is a clothing line co-founded by former NHL enforcer George Parros and hockey fans Brian Talbert and Mike Hammer.
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The Marines Are Building Robotic War Balls
A research team from Stamford, Conn. has developed an amphibious drone that they are currently testing with the Marines. The GuardBot is a robot ball that swims over water at about 4 miles per hour and then rolls along the beach, at as much as a 30-degree incline and 20 miles per hour.
Niagara Climbs
On January 27th, 2015, Canadian Will Gadd became the first person in recorded history to climb a frozen Niagara Falls.
SCOTUS Search
Now in open beta, SCOTUS Search allows users to "search the text of 1,424,780 individual statements within 6,683 Supreme Court oral arguments." [more inside]
No, "Twilight" doesn't count...
Inspired by the recent release of What We Do In The Shadows, the staff over at The Dissolve take a look at one of the more unusual movie sub-genres: Vampire comedies.
Forced to be “Charlie”
“When a kid tells you he’s not ‘Charlie’, he’s not saying ‘I’ll kill everybody in two months time’, he’s trying to say something in his own vocabulary, in the space where he is at. We have to stop looking at this with adult eyes”, says Truong.Valeria Costa-Kostritsky looks at the challenges teachers and pupils face in France, a month after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
The Magic Poop Potion
tell your mama, tell your pa, gonna send you back to Arkansas...
Friends, February 18 was a BIG day in American music history. For it was on this day, in 1959, that Mr. Ray Charles recorded "What'd I Say". Here is that recording, including Ray's spoken explanatory introduction. Here's a live version from that same year. Heres a version from 1963, live in Brazil. Here's a version in living color, with none other than Billy Preston sitting in on organ, from 1964. Also from 1964, here's an artfully filmed version from a British motion picture called 'Ballad In Blue. A mere 18 years later, here is a decidedly uptempo version from 1982, live in Japan. Finally let's fast forward 41 years from the original recording, and hear Ray doing it one more time (with some serious note bending) live in Paris the year 2000. Feels so good.
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