June 3, 2011
Louis Theroux: Miami Mega Jail
Sweet, sweet payback
Homeowners foreclose on Bank of America. (Not an Onion story.) A Florida couple watches as their lawyer and sheriff's deputies foreclose on a Bank of America branch that had refused to pay the couple damages for wrongfully seizing their home.
Shangaan Electro
Double negatives be damned, but you can't not dance to South Africa's Tshe Tsha Boys brand of super infectious Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa. Part South African hbpm dance and chant, part finger piano, part melted Mario Brothers, Third World Edition.
Adventures in the Screentrade
"Even from his earliest days, he was a hateful little fuck."
In everything good there is also something bad, and this was not only the theme Dahl took up in much of his work for both children and adults, but it was also true of him personally. By all accounts an arrogant and hateful man, Roald Dahl was an unfaithful husband, an arch misogynist, and an anti-Semite who openly sympathized with Adolf Hitler. Should his "macabre unpleasantness" diminish Dahl's status as one of the world's most beloved children's authors? Or was it that very darkness that gave his writing its unique and lasting appeal? [more inside]
Capote profiles Brando
"The Duke in His Domain" - a profile of Marlon Brando by Truman Capote, published in The New Yorker, November 9, 1957
Mineralia
It airs right after "Teen Mom"
30 and Pregnant "How did this happen?" he said. I couldn't believe he didn't know. "We were so careful." I sighed heavily, twirling a piece of spaghetti around my fork, feeling overwhelmed that now I would officially have to come down on one side of the cloth versus disposable diapers debate.
What happens when you flip the light switch?
“If you try to do what they do in West Virginia in the Berkshires, the Catskills or the Sierra Nevadas, or in Utah or Colorado, people would just put you in jail. Over the past 10 years, they’ve blown up and leveled an area of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia that is larger than the size of Delaware. They’ve blown up the 500 biggest mountains in West Virginia. They explode everyday 2,500 tons of dynamite, or ammonia nitrate explosives. It’s the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb once a week.”
In the valleys of Appalachia, a battle is being fought over a mountain. It is a battle with severe consequences that affect every American, regardless of their social status, economic background or where they live. It is a battle that has taken many lives and continues to do so the longer it is waged. This is the story of The Last Mountain.
20 Facts About U.S. Inequality that Everyone Should Know
The Halle Berry movie never happened. Shut your bat mouth.
What's Catwoman's deal, anyway? dr_von_fangirl has a fantastic, exhaustive answer, cobbling a coherent, newbie-friendly origin story together from a variety of comic sources.
A lack of compassion - from whose side?
Canadian contemporary dance icon Margie Gillis gets interviewed by right-wing network "Sun TV". Perhaps "interview" is too kind a word. (and as there is reference to it in the interview, a little background on the current PM's views on the arts)
Science Fiction You Can Dance To
Claire L. Evans is half of the music group YACHT. She also writes two thoughtful blogs: the science blog Universe, and the science fiction blog Space Canon. The latest post on Space Canon is her sci-fi infused hour long dance mix Fly On, UFO. (direct mp3 link, 111mb) It promises "to travel to disco dystopias and far-flung cosmic boogies." Groovy.
It's not easy being brown
Swimming Under A River Of Stars
An awe-inspiring time-lapse sequence of the Milky Way rising and falling above the plains of South Dakota. (Place Vimeo in full-screen mode before you play. You’ll thank me later. Much more, including technical info, at the photographer’s website.)
The Very Large Telescope Array in Chile, previously mentioned, is also the subject of a new film that documents the most remarkable contrast between science and politics, wonderment and hate. [more inside]
The Very Large Telescope Array in Chile, previously mentioned, is also the subject of a new film that documents the most remarkable contrast between science and politics, wonderment and hate. [more inside]
RIP, James Arness (1923-2011)
James Arness, the 6'7" actor famous for his long-running role as Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, has passed away just a week after his 88th birthday. Arness's younger brother, fellow actor Peter Graves, passed away last year.
Dressed to the #9's
Dressed to the Nines: A History of the Baseball Uniform. Explore the different parts of the uniform, or browse a timeline. Features a fully searchable Uniform Database. Thanks to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Reload the front page for two fresh quotes.
The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the Empire!
The Age of Imperialism is over, but its impact remains, leaving behind a long-lasting legacy through cultural norms. Comparing individuals on opposite sides of the long-gone Habsburg Empire border within five countries, it shows that firms and people living in what used to be the empire have higher trust in courts and police.
Gays and Lesbians for total AT&T World Domination
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Explains How the AT&T/T-Mobil Merger Promotes Social Justice. [more inside]
NPR Alt.Latino: a completely new Latino soundscape
NPR's Alt.Latino is a new program that started almost a year ago. There is the main NPR sub-site that provide access to everything Alt.Latino, including the blog with a tracklist and links, and a 30 minute radio-type show, where the two hosts chat about the music, describing the lyrics for those not fluent in Spanish, and providing background on the musicians.
Somebody Bigger Than You And I
American gospel singer Marion Williams (wiki) performs for a Dutch television special, recorded in Utrecht, November 1962:
"Somebody Bigger Than You And I"
"Mean Old World"
"Take Me To The Water"
"It Is Well With My Soul"
"I Believe" [more inside]
"Time flies when you're having a culture."
As part of a 1995 Wired special issue on scenarios of the future, Douglas Coupland ( previously ) noted that most time capsules seem irrelevant to the modern eye, and dared to contemplate:
If you could send a time capsule back 20 years [to 1975], what artifacts [from 1995] would you choose?[more inside]
John Edwards Indicted
Former U.S. Presidential candidate John Edwards, the Democratic Party's nominee for Vice-President in 2004, has been indicted on felony charges stemming from illegal use of campaign contributions to hide his affair with film producer Rielle Hunter, with whom he belatedly admitted fathering a child while his wife suffered from an ultimately terminal recurrence of breast cancer.
Just don't call it a pie chart.
The USDA has ended the pyramid scheme. For the first time, the USDA advises Americans to "eat less." The previous design abomination (previously) is archived for comparison.
Springwatch Webcams
The BBC Springwatch webcams are four live webcams showing herons, nesting pied flycatchers, a buzzard, and a barn owl.
Dr. Kevorkian dies at 83
Dr. Jack Kevorkian, "the central figure in the tumultuous national drama surrounding assisted suicide," died today at age 83. [more inside]
Yes but no but yes but no...
There have always been regional labels equivalent to chav - skangers, spides, charvers, scallies and neds, respectively in Ireland, Northern Ireland, North East England, North West England and Scotland. But chav has somehow scaled regional barriers to become a national term of abuse. [more inside]
"And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too."
"I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me." VS Naipaul, no stranger to literary spats and rows, has done it again. This time, the winner of the Nobel prize for literature has lashed out at female authors, saying there is no woman writer whom he considers his equal – and singling out Jane Austen for particular criticism.
3...2...1...
Remember those crazy Danes? Turns out they've had some problems. But they're trying again today! Cecil, meanwhile, is uncharacteristically uninformed. (Previously)
Telehack, ANSI window into the past
This is how the net looked like in the beginning. The exploration of this simulation of early arpanet and bbs hosts is like a descent into a cave filled with unknown riches, much as it was at the time many people got their first modems and started discovering the proto-internet. [more inside]
I still don't get it
Physicists have managed to observe light behaving both as a particle and wave in the same double-slit experimental condition, by means of a new method to weakly observe a particle's momentum. This article in Nature summarizes the results in non-mathematical terms. [more inside]
My name is Two-Ten
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