Fungie the Dolphin has been a bit of a local celebrity in Dingle, Ireland since he was first spotted in the harbor by Paddy Ferriter back in 1983. The famously playful dolphin would dance with humans and leap excitedly through the air, entertaining tourists and fishermen alike. — Read the rest
Ed Markey prevailed today over Joseph Kennedy III in the Democratic Party primary in Massachussets, all but securing another term in the U.S. Senate and putting the Kennedy dynasty's political cachet to the torch. Kennedy, endorsed by Nancy Pelosi, is the first of his line to be thusly defeated in Massachussets. Markey, on the other hand, now becomes a progressive legend.
Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins, speaking at that event, praised Markey's ability to communicate with generations of progressive politicians. And she didn't mince words while talking about his challenger, who she suspects was trying to avoid a run against U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley for the next open Senate seat.
"This is a colossal waste of our time as Democrats, we're going to come down to the mat to have a Democrat beat a Democrat and then, you know, bodies strewn across Massachusetts," Rollins told reporters. "I've said this to (Kennedy) — I think it's selfish, and it's with respect to him wanting to look at what he wants in the future."
In Central Massachusetts, in a town called Shrewsbury, in a body of water called Mill Pond, sits a small outcropping called Busta Rhymes Island. It is not known by any other name — and yet, due to byzantine naming laws in the United States, it is not formally recognized as Busta Rhymes Island either.
Not yet, anyway.
The island was christened as such by local resident Kevin O'Brien. As The Boston Globe wrote in 2009:
Kevin O'Brien answers the phone and cheerfully explains why, since 2005, he has maintained and named a tiny, nondescript island in honor of his favorite rapper.
"It's a very small little island [with] rope-swinging, blueberries, and . . . stuff Busta would enjoy," he says of the 40-by-40-foot plot of land in a pond about a half-mile from his home.
O'Brien, 27, describes himself as an independent user of the island, but at some point he'd like to take official ownership. He's consulted a lawyer to see about the state's laws of adverse possession, which dictate that if land isn't being taken care of, someone can maintain it continuously for 20 years and eventually be considered the property's owner.
And truly: is there any doubt that Mr. Rhymes would enjoy rope-swinging and blueberries? Of course not.
O'Brien still has 5 years to go until he can rightfully claim ownership of the island. However, there's still a catch: according to Atlas Obscura, "the byzantine restrictions surrounding naming a geographic feature state that they cannot be named after celebrity until five years after their death." There is a possible exception that could be made for names that catch on through "local usage," which is why O'Brien has been campaigning to spread the good word. He's started petitions, changed its name on Google Maps, and even got the island recognized on a dedicated episode of the popular 99% Invisible podcast.
Clearly it's time to give Mr. Rhymes the recognition he deserves. Although there's something kinda cool and mysterious about an island that exists only a map, and not in a real life. Maps are weird like that.
Sexy Italian pop star Rita Pavone has a playful and flirty duet with an animated potato in this 1977 classic. This novelty song has been in my head all day. Now it can be in yours, too!
Fun fact: this spud stud was animated my the late great Guido Manuli, whose reel can be seen below:
I saw this video the other day of a man and child playing "analog Tetris" and I wondered where the board came from. A search revealed other versions but not this particular one. It was only today that I realized that it's cardboard and probably homemade. THEN I came across THIS video that explains it ALL.
A father from central China’s Henan province makes toys for his five-year-old daughter using low-cost materials, such as cardboard. He hopes parents can spend more time with their children and encourage them to use screens less.
Something so pure and sweet it literally made me cry
Tom Nook himself made a special announcement on Twitter Friday. The real-life musicians who play the in-game theme music for Animal Crossings: New Horizons had come together for a virtual performance of it!
Best comment: "What do you mean 'The musicians behind the main theme', where is that dog with the guitar?"
My reaction to the concert?
[Announcement] The musicians behind the main theme of #AnimalCrossing: New Horizons have come together virtually for this special performance! We hope you enjoy it! #ACNHpic.twitter.com/QP8nLbyD1U
Punk rock label of note, Dischord, has made their entire 40-year catalog of music available on Bandcamp for free. While free, they're hoping listeners will chip in to support the artists. Bandcamp has waived their sales fees for three months so that all of the money will go to the artists.
While the foundations of punk music have multiple different influencers, seminal Washington DC punk label Dischord have always had their say. The independent label, co-owned by Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson, founded the company in 1980 in order to release Minor Disturbance by The Teen Idles. From there, Dischord focused on a nationwide network of underground bands and continued to spearhead the punk movement with their uncompromising approach to the music industry.
“We don’t use contracts, lawyers, any of those kinds of things,” MacKaye once commented on the ethos of Dischord Records. “We are partners—they make the music, and we make the records.”
Nelson, echoing MacKaye’s sentiment, added: “From the beginning of this label, people have said that the way we do things is unsustainable, unrealistic, idealistic, and we were just dreaming,” he said. “Well, the dream is now 35 years old, so they can go fuck themselves.”
Update: Just to be clear, the catalog is free to listen to online. If you want to download the records, you still have to pay. But hey, do that. Support artists!
Celebrated artist, Roger Dean, known for his iconic album cover art for Yes, Uriah Heep, and Asia (but mostly Yes), has been Facebook streaming the development and rendering of the cover for Yes' forthcoming record.
Dean did the first session on Wednesday and the second today. Unfortunately, his feed has had bad audio and buffering issues, making it challenging to watch. Let's hope some of that can get sorted out by the next one.
With many people playing their part to flatten the COVID-19 case curve by staying home, Korg and Moog are doing their part to keep them occupied by giving away free versions of their synthesizer apps.
For a limited time Moog’s Minimoog Model D iOS app and Korg’s iKaossilator app for iOS and Android are free to download. I got them both and they are a lot of fun.
Have you ever heard of the Grasshopper mouse? It lives in the deserts of North America, lives on a meat diet, and hunts scorpions. Unlike other animals, it is immune to scorpion venom and actually turns it into a pain killer. Oh, and this little rodent bad ass also howls at the moon, giving it the nickname of werewolf mouse.
This is very interesting to me and a side of the new deal I was not aware of
100 years ago, wealthy people bought up newspapers as fast as they could, then used them to smear progressive reformers, inventing lies ("Congressmen don't pay taxes!") to discredit the entire project of dismantling American oligarchy.
The reformers railed against "absentee owners" -- distant media tycoons who didn't care if the fake news their papers printed ruined the lives of the people in the towns they served. The New Deal joined forces with newspaper unions to create the will for trustbusting and anti-monopoly regulation that later weakened the control of phone companies and broadcasters.
The idea of "objective" news comes from this regulated, competitive era in which the ethics of news-reporters were able to trump the profit motives of media owners, and also allowed alternative news-sources like minority-owned papers, union papers, and so on.
This held until the deregulation and union-busting of the 1980s and 1990s, the rise of Reaganism (carried on by Bill Clinton), which allowed for large-scale media consolidation and the regulatory changes that made Rush Limbaugh and Fox News possible.
Meanwhile Big Tech was rising and rising, taking advantage of the same deregulation bonanza to do all kinds of crooked, monopolistic stuff -- vertical integration (Google/Doubleclick); buying nascent competitors (Facebook/Instagram); merging with major rivals (Yahoo/everyone).
Matt Stoller's (previously) Twitter thread on this history wraps it all up by noting that Big Tech's recommendation systems have become the ultimate "absentee owner" -- and, like the absentee owners of the past century, they are vectors for fake news, which are like "barnacles" clinging to the Algorithm -- and the authoritarian response to fake news and algorithmic chaos is to turn the Big Tech giants into all-powerful arbiters of our discourse.
What we need to restore democracy is a wholesale anti-monopoly approach to our media ecosystem, starting but not ending w/ the platforms. Communities must have the ability to organize their own public commons for debate and speech, unmediated by private monopolies.
Esteemed Estonian animator Rein Raamat created this groovy short, "Värvilind," in 1974. The music is by composer Rein Rannap who was also the founder of Estonian prog rock band Ruja.
Researchers at Telecom Paris have developed an artificial skin that responds to stroking, pinching, tapping, and tickling. To demonstrate it, they covered a mobile phone with the skin and showed how it could work as a back-of-the-device interface. The video also shows how the material can be used to give robots a skin that "feels" when it is touched.
Herwig explains that he became interested in the underground architecture of the stations while visiting Moscow and Tashkent. Because many of the metro stations were used as nuclear bomb shelters, they were considered military sites and photographing them was prohibited. “Although I likely could have gotten away with a few images I really wanted to do the series properly and cover all the cities in the former USSR with metro lines not just a few flashy ones in Moscow,” he told Colossal. “With restriction being lifted in many of the cities it meant I could have a go at it.”
Herwig’s images take viewers on a journey through the architectural and political influences of decades pasts. Soviet-era symbols, relief sculptures of significant events and figures, and displays of opulence cover every square meter of the well-maintained subterranean spaces. Often making early morning and late night trips into the stations, Herwig says that many of the otherwise busy hubs appear to be abandoned because of his goal to “use people with purpose and not to distract from the space and design of the stations.”
The pix ...
(Photos used here by permission of Christopher Herwig / FUEL)
Raffi rules. It brings me peace to know that Raffi rules.
Raffi Cavoukian (AKA "Raffi") is best known as a beloved children's singer -- I vividly remember attending one of his concerts as a child -- and possibly secondarily as the brother of former Ontario Privacy Commissioner and excellent privacy advocate Ann Cavoukian, but in recent years, he's emerged as a smart, acerbic political activist whose anti-Trump and climate-oriented tweets are as much as source of uplift as his Baby Beluga was when I was a kid.
His latest foray is a pair of songs honouring the Climate Strike, Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg, and the millions of children around the world who have taken their futures into their own hands. They're golden Raffi originals, a delight to listen to, and perfect for kids and their grownups to use to strengthen their resolve for a just climate transition...NOW.
For decades, architectural critic and photographer John Margolies obsessively documented roadside attractions: vernacular architecture, weird sculpture, odd businesses and amusements. By his death in 2016, his collection consisted of more than 11,000 slides (he published books of his favorites, with annotations).
The Library of Congress purchased the Margolies archive and has released it to the public domain, with hi-rez scans of 11,710 slides.
Almost all of Margolies’ work was done in the interest of preserving images of what would otherwise be lost to time. Even his first book, published in 1981, was elegiacally called The End of the Road: Vanishing Highway Architecture in America. From the start, Margolies knew the quirky motels, miniature golf courses, diners, billboards, and gas stations were being endangered by franchising and changing fashions — not to mention changing patterns of automobile traffic. (For decades now, most drivers have, of course, opted for the high speed-limits of superhighways and the convenience of service areas, leaving the old local highways in the lurch.)
I am very excited about this because I too own Plenty, and I've always wanted to make this recipe but every time I think I will, I see 11 tbsp butter and think, "That can't be right," and bail.
I spotted black pepper tofu on Ottolenghi’s* Instagram last week, a fine place to gush over food. The recipe is from Plenty, an excellent cookbook that I happen to have, which means I could make it right away. However, rather than making it and then still feeling a loose obligation to make a vegetable side dish or salad, I decided to add eggplant. From there, everything went south. I don’t have three types of soy sauce. I can get them, theoretically, but I was feeling lazy about it. I was pretty sure five tablespoons of crushed peppercorns and eight thinly sliced red chiles would make my children run screaming from the room; 11 tablespoons of butter was a bit rich for my tastes. But here’s the thing with this and, I think, all recipes. Much ado is made about “internet recipe commenters” and their “I changed eight ingredients and it didn’t work, zero stars”-type presence on websites. I’m often asked how I don’t “lose patience” with these types of comments and here comes an opinion, you just know I had one brewing:
A new study from the United Way claims that 43% of American households are in a status called "asset limited, income constrained, employed" (ALICE), which denotes employed people who can't afford housing, food, childcare, healthcare, transportation, and a cellphone -- the basics of modern living.
Umair Haque (previously) connects this to the idea of America as the world's first poor rich country, a country that is awash in wealth, yet so unequal that nearly half its residents sink deeper into debt every month -- and most Americans die in debt.
As Haque says, if you work hard all your life and die with no assets, no savings, and debt, that's not employment, it's serfdom. America's former middle class have now hit the limits of their ability to survive with stagnating wages by taking on debt secured by their meager assets -- the family home, pensions and so on. Now, Americans are both kinds of poor: asset-poor and wage-poor. Americans aren't poor because they don't work hard enough: they're poor no matter how hard they work.
And unlike poor people in countries like Pakistan or Nigeria, American poor people live in a country where things like childcare, medicine, rent and food are very, very expensive. American poor people are poorer than the poor people in poor countries.
Poverty in America, in other words, has become endemic and ubiquitous because its systemic and structural. It’s baked into the system. It’s a feature, not a bug. And most Americans these days, I’d wager, understand this intuitively. Work hard, play by the rules, become something, someone worthy. Be a teacher, engineer, writer, coach, therapist, nurse etcetera. What do you get? You get your pension “raided” (read: stolen) by hedge funds, you get your income decimated by “investment bankers”, you get charged a fortune for the very things you yourself are involved in producing but never earn a fair share of, you get preyed on in every which way the predatory can dream up.
But it’s a new kind of poverty too — or at least one unseen since the Weimar Republic, really. It’s the poverty of decline, degeneration, decay. It’s the poverty of a middle class becoming a new poor. It’s the reversal of an upwards trajectory — not the failure to launch. It’s people who expected to live better and better lives finding themselves in the grim, unfamiliar predicament of never being able to reach them, no matter what they do. Except maybe sell out and become one of the predators. What happens when that takes place? Something strange, something difficult, something paradoxical and backwards.
If I say to the average American — “hey, I know you’re poor. Listen, I’m not trying to insult you. I’m trying to help you. I know it. The statistics tell me so. I can see it in on your stressed out, depressed face. I can see it in everything about you now” — what will the average American say? Well, he or she will respond defensively, probably. “Hey, go to hell buddy! I’m not poor!” That’s understandable. Nobody likes to be called poor — and especially not Americans, because living in a hyper capitalist society, poverty is stigmatized, scorned, mocked, and hated. To call an American poor is something like calling a Soviet a bad communist party member — or maybe even a capitalist. Comrade! To the gulag with you!
pic.twitter.com/Ei9sOBuNcl
I spotted black pepper tofu on Ottolenghi’s* Instagram last week, a fine place to gush over food. The recipe is from Plenty, an excellent cookbook that I happen to have, which means I could make it right away. However, rather than making it and then still feeling a loose obligation to make a vegetable side dish or salad, I decided to add eggplant. From there, everything went south. I don’t have three types of soy sauce. I can get them, theoretically, but I was feeling lazy about it. I was pretty sure five tablespoons of crushed peppercorns and eight thinly sliced red chiles would make my children run screaming from the room; 11 tablespoons of butter was a bit rich for my tastes. But here’s the thing with this and, I think, all recipes. Much ado is made about “internet recipe commenters” and their “I changed eight ingredients and it didn’t work, zero stars”-type presence on websites. I’m often asked how I don’t “lose patience” with these types of comments and here comes an opinion, you just know I had one brewing:
