Russian Sledges

It’s no secret that packing into a lurching, overcrowded train brings out our basest, most obnoxious qualities. If you ride the subway often enough, you’re bound to see all sorts of disgusting stuff, from public urination to puddles of vomit and discarded nail clippings—not to mention people sprawled out across a number of seats. (As we’ve previously noted, manspreading is a plague.)

Chicago is the latest city to launch a campaign intended to curb our bad transit behavior.

In contrast to New York’s MTA campaign entitled “Courtesy Counts, Manners Make a Better Ride,” the CTA initiative, launched on Wednesday, isn’t pulling any punches. The MTA characterized their placards as “gentle, but firm reminders pointing out common courtesies.” The CTA posters take it up a notch with snarky tag lines. Take, for instance, “Your maid doesn’t work here. Please don’t leave your crap behind.”

On the other hand, the cartoon figures that populate the MTA’s world get off with little more than a light slap on the wrist. The ad below is essentially equivalent to asking, “Excuse me, sir, would you mind removing your knapsack?”

The CTA ads seem to be full of vitriol gurgling just below the surface. They throw serious shade at people gabbing on their phones. Look at the scathing side-eyed glances this wild-eyed lady is receiving from her fellow riders.

One contender that gives Chicago’s campaign a run for its money: this series of courtesy ads unleashed in Paris in 2012. They compare riders to wild animals, like this buffalo charging in the door, barreling through a throng of other passengers. (Translation: “If you jostle people while boarding, you still won’t leave any faster.”)

Are we rude on the subway? Sure. (In fact, 63 percent of Parisians admitted to the kinds of behaviors that were lambasted in the ads.) But sometimes it seems that the punishments for insensitive behavior go too far. Recently, manspreading has led to the arrest of two Latino men in NYC, Gothamist reported. (The trumped-up, broken windows-style charges were dismissed in court.) Other etiquette issues—such as slumping with feet up on seats—have also resulted in arrests. Hopefully this good-natured public shaming will pay off, and these ads will help us be a little less annoying on trains without inspiring a rash of prosecutions.

The Copley Square library is not a neighborhood library. This is Boston, the American intellectual capital as surely as New York is the economic and media capital, and Washington the political capital, and Los Angeles the entertainment capital. The BPL used to be in the same league as the Museum of Fine Arts, MIT, the Boston Symphony, the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard and so on. Historically it still is. But as to resources? No more I fear.

BOSTON — An audit of the Boston Public Library says it ineffectively protects its special collections, haphazardly stores valuables, and does not keep a complete inventory of prized possessions.

The audit, obtained by The Boston Globe was given to the Boston Finance Commission on Tuesday. It comes just weeks after two valuable pieces of art worth $600,000 were reported missing, and possibly stolen.

The audit says the library used guesses to estimate current holdings, often based on guesses made years ago.

Boston’s pop-up arcade and classic video game festival returns. This time for TWO nights, Thursday June 4th and Friday June 5th at Night Shift Brewing​ from 5pm to 11pm. 20+ arcade games (including many new games for this event), 10+ classic video game systems, multiplayer indie games, geek related vendors, trivia & tournaments, food trucks, and amazing beer! This event is 21+. No Tickets! All games will be set on freeplay (so no quarters needed!) Just a $5 per person suggested donation at the door.

Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs by Karen Dalton is a compilation of covers by various artists, featuring unreleased songs from the late blues and folk underground star. Also on Spotify. (Thanks Karlo!)

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• Price: $10

The effortless manner in which this film has presented a character’s disability is incredible. I literally could not ask for anything more. It’s ubiquitous. No big deal. Her body is never a plot point. It is simply allowed to be.

ryanpanos:

Cinemagraphs | Julien Douvier | Tumblr | Via

With temperatures hovering in the mid-80s along the Northeast corridor today, it's easy to forget how terribly cold and snowy this winter was. It's slightly harder for Bostonites, though, since they still have melting snow on the ground.

The Tide Street Snow Farm sits in a parking lot near the seaport and is where much of Boston's snow is taken after a large snowfall. What started as 15- to 20-foot piles of white has now dwindled down to black garbage mountains.

America the beautiful!

Read more posts by Jessica Roy

Filed Under: winter never dies

Persona (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1966) 

twostriptechnicolor:

Steam trains in color, 1936 - 1941.

(Follow for more vintage randomness and early color pics!)

miss-flapper:

Cast and crew of The Red Shoes, 1947

digitalcedar:

Docks, Ohio

Photograph by Jacob J. Gayer, National Geographic

In a circa 1928 autochrome, ships approach a vast dock to unload millions of tons of iron ore near Ashtabula, Ohio. The photo was published in the May 1932 issue of National Geographic.

Photographer Jacob J. Gayer served as a staff writer and photographer for the magazine from 1921 to 1931.

Hamburg, old city, 1927


Hamburg, old city, 1927


Hamburg, old city, 1927


Port of Hamburg, 1927


Dockyard of Hamburg, 1927


Hamburg, a view to town-hall, 1927


Hamburg view, 1927

waybacking:

Autochrome color photos of Hamburg, 1927.

sisterwolf:

Holman Hunt -The Lady of Shalott, 1905

rouquinoux:

Streamline episode 3

Out Of Print: Irreplaceable Cambridge record shop Weirdo Records has closed:

FUCK

museumbot:

Deep Dish with Egret (from a set of ten)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Holyoke Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967

(Sert, Jackson & Associates)

Last December, Science published a provocative paper about political persuasion. Persuasion is famously difficult: study after study—not to mention much of world history—has shown that, when it comes to controversial subjects, people rarely change their minds, especially if those subjects are important to them. You may think that you’ve made a convincing argument about gun control, but your crabby uncle isn’t likely to switch sides in the debate. Beliefs are sticky, and hardly any approach, no matter how logical it may be, can change that.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Ready your “Holy Tilda Swinton!” gifs, because Holy Tilda Swinton: The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Tilda Swinton will have a part in Marvel’s Doctor Strange. It’s for none other than Stephen Strange’s mysterious magical teacher, the Ancient One!

Read more...

“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine (“Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily”, page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study’s lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: “The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere.”

Read more...

The biggest problem with “mixed” and “biracial,” as opposed to mulatto, isn’t even their negative correlations—all words have negative attributes, that’s the nature of language—it’s their overwhelming vagueness. The words don’t really say a damn thing. Yo — mixed with what? Biracial with whom? The larger mixed community isn’t simply defined by people of African American and European descent; it comprises people descending from all kinds of hookups. Whether mixed people are combinations of Asian, black, white, Native, or Latino ancestry, each of these hybrid backgrounds comes not only with its own culture, but with its own racial history in America. Mixed works great as a generic term for the larger group, but not in specific terms. Using the fairly new descriptions “mixed” and “biracial” in relation to black/white American identity also runs the risk of being ahistoric in nature. There’s not a damn thing new about being a person of African and European descent in America. In fact, this describes the vast majority of African Americans, who average three-quarters African and one-quarter European DNA nationally (and 0.8% Native American, which accounts for the phrase “I got Indian in me”). What is new about today’s children of interracial unions is that we are born into a social reality in which they have the privilege to publicly connect with all of their ethnic heritages. For people of African and European heritage, this acceptance of dual identity is heavily weighted by the racial denial of the American slave past, when most mulattoes in America were born to captive black women, often as the products of rape. And that is the poltergeist in the room. Within this larger context, first-generation mulatto identity can be seen as a subset of a larger African American experience; and the African American experience, a multigenerational mulatto story. So hello, I’m a mulatto.

In the Philippines, the word mestizo usually refers to a Filipino with combined Indigenous and European ancestry, but occasionally it will be used for a Filipino with apparent Chinese ancestry, who will also be referred to as 'chinito'. The latter was officially listed as a "mestizo de sangley" in birth records of the 19th century, with 'sangley' as a reference to the Hokkiense word for business, 'seng-li'.

“What was great about this is that the luxury of a love story was not where we were, I mean they can’t even talk to each other. We never even talked about it - it was never there, no one said ‘maybe’, we never had to fight against it. It was always going to be two warriors on par, starting off with very little respect for each other and ending up with a massive respect for each other.” - Charlize Theron (x)

Films Watched in 2015 → Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)

wike-wabbits:

Inferno

“Have you any idea at all why you have an obsession with this kind of woman?” (in regards to the icy Hitchcock blondes in most of his films)

“I’m only obsessed because I don’t believe in stamping the woman with the word ‘sex’ all over her. I think it should be discovered in the course of our getting acquainted with her. It’s more interesting for this thing to be not apparent. In other words we don’t have to have the sex hanging round her neck like baubles.” - Alfred Hitchcock