He was right. I watched this last night. FUCKING FLOORED.
You will probably watch a lot more of this 25-minute tour of the International Space Station than you think:
From the reader who passed it along:
It is my favorite Internet video in years. I couldn't help but smile a million miles wide as I watched it.
Update from a reader:
I don't watch anything online that has a TRT of longer than 30 seconds, my attention span ruined by the web. I can barely stand a 5 second preroll ad in front of a video. I scoffed at your preface that "you will probably watch more of this than you think."
But I watched it all. What a tour guide Williams is.
The inspiration for his collection, titled Mathematics of Love, was the "examination of bourgeois kinkyness and boudoir perversity" -- the result, men in strapless camel bustiers, frilled bloomer-shorts, doctors' gowns complete with what looks like dishwashing gloves, a powder blue robe and kinky leather pleated dresses. Wearable? Not quite. Commercial? Definitely not, but it is certainly conceptual...
...Style.Com writer Jo Ann-Furniss says "write off Anderson as a mere provocateur at your peril; his agenda is more complex than that. The effeminacy of this collection—a kind of put-together sixties jolie madame made into a twisted jolie monsieur; think Séverine in Belle de Jour crossed with some of her kinky fantasy coachmen—is intended to reconfigure both menswear and womenswear, and to give a kick up the arse to the stale state of much of men's fashion at the moment."
In fact, Anderson is a part of a bigger movement to bring originality into the men's dress-code.
Jodie Foster's speech made me so uncomfortable last night!
Full transcript here. Her date last night, believe it or not, was wife-abusing, homophobic anti-Semite, Mel Gibson. Would you entrust your young sons to a man with Gibson's violent and vile history? A highlight of her narcissistic, self-loving speech:
I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the Stone Age, in those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family, co-workers, and then gradually, proudly, to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met. But now, apparently, I’m told that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance, and a prime-time reality show.
What unadulterated bullshit. She never came out until, very obliquely, in 2007. And virtually every coming out these days is low-key, simple and no-drama. I do not remember Anderson Cooper's press conference, fragrance or reality show. She goes on:
[S]eriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then, maybe, then you too would value privacy against all else. Privacy. Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was. I have given everything up there, from the time that I was 3 years old. That’s reality show enough, don’t you think?
"How beautiful it once was"? When gay people were put in jail, or mental institutions, or thrown out of their families - all because of the "beauty" of privacy for Hollywood royalty like Foster? And she honestly believes it's courageous to come out in a retirement speech? Well I guess we should be relieved she didn't leave it for her obit. I defer to a reader's open letter:
Dear Jodie Foster:
There's nothing wrong with not publicly acknowledging the open secret of your sexuality for decades as you so chose. There's also nothing wrong with choosing to kinda-sorta discreetly come out by thanking your partner in a speech in 2007. Yet there is something very tragic and self-contradictory about a bitter diatribe criticizing how other people choose to come out, officially announcing your sexuality on your way out the door of the industry in a non-coming-out speech because you came out "1000 years ago" - while simultaneously defending your fierce desire for privacy - in a brazen attempt to get some of the praise and love you now see the younger gay generation getting for their fearlessness of/indifference to being out... all while being escorted by one of the most well-documented anti-Semitic, homophobic, bigoted assholes in Hollywood history, claiming he "saved" you. If that was indeed your retirement announcement, what a sad end to a stellar career of a brilliant artist. If ever there was a closet you needed to stay in forever, it would be the one marked "Mel Gibson's friend."
As far as I’m concerned, as long as a gay person hasn’t been actively pretending to be straight (like a number of people in that hall tonight are probably doing), I don't think she is required to be an activist or even a "role model" for younger LGBT people if she doesn’t wish to be. It is, of course, wonderful when big names like Zachary Quinto and Anderson Cooper have the courage to give up their hetero-privilege in a public pronouncement, and undoubtedly the increasing recognition that so many of our culture-makers are gay has the power to challenge perceptions. But in the midst of the noisy demand that celebrities be “loud and proud,” as Foster put it, the ostensible endgame of the LGBT equality movement can get drowned out: the ability to live our lives as we wish, freely and gently, in peace.
Yes, yes, yes. But the only way we were ever going to get past that oppression was through it. I'm thrilled Foster can now live a fuller life with less fear. I'm saddened she waited until others far less powerful had made the sacrifice to make that possible. And that she waited for the safest moment of all - winning a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award - to do so.
Quirky public radio program This American Life will have a very special guest this weekend: Fred Armisen as Ira Glass. The episode's theme is "doppelgängers," and Armisen will be co-hosting with the real Ira Glass for the entire hour. You can listen to it tomorrow afternoon on the radio via your local NPR affiliate or download it Sunday in podcast form. According to This American Life's website, Armisen developed his Ira Glass impression for Saturday Night Live but never used it on the show after deciding "the public radio personality isn't quite famous enough to be mocked on network TV." Why didn't he do it on Portlandia then, you ask? Ira Glass is probably too famous for Portlandia.
An interactive way to give back! More fun than caving during a fundraising drive! Jeff Rau and co. are smart: “Now every time we mention that we heard something on NPR / KCRW, we put a dollar in the jar. This is not as punishment but rather to contribute back to the station that has offered us so many excellent topics of conversation over the years! At the end of the year, we’ll donate the proceeds to KCRW–our local NPR affiliate station.”
The end of the year offers the opportunity to look back at the First Lady's standout fashion moments from the twelve months prior. This year I've divided my top picks into two categories: gowns and everything else. (Let's be honest, there's nothing quite like a ball gown!) Below you'll find a short list of my picks for Mrs. O's best gowns from 2012, as well as a poll. Dress, suits and such follow in a post below. Collectively we can declare the best of the year. Polls will remain open for three days. Happy Voting!
January 14, 2012: BET Honors - J. Mendel
February 28, 2012: US Armed Forces Dinner - Jason Wu
February 26, 2012: Governors' Dinner - Naeem Khan
March 14, 2012: White House State Dinner - Marchesa
April 28, 2012: White House Correspondents' Dinner - Naeem Khan
June 13, 2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom Ceremony - Michael Kors
December 2, 2012: Kennedy Center Honors - Michael Kors
The past couple seasons have seen ABC's sitcom Happy Endings emerge as one of the best comedies on network TV, but unfortunately, the show's ratings have taken a hit this year after the network scheduled it on the busiest comedy night of the season by putting it head-to-head with hits like Fox's New Girl and NBC's Go On. ABC started airing extra episodes of Happy Endings and Don't Trust the B at 10pm on Sundays this week (in addition to their regular Tuesday slot) to burn off the remaining episodes to clear the Tuesday timeslot for Dancing with the Stars' return in late March. The first Sunday episode aired this week, and the ratings aren't good. The episode earned Happy Endings' worst audience yet: just 2.6 million viewers.
Vulture's Joe Adalian points out that part of the problem this week ratings-wise is that comedies in the 10pm hour have rarely worked and that ABC didn't promote Happy Endings or Don't Trust the B's new timeslots at all. Adalian hypothesizes that there's a chance the network and the studio will ignore the sliding ratings and pick up the show just to get it to syndication next season since it'll have 57 episodes in the bank by then and only needs to get to 80ish for a lucrative syndication deal. Also, it's possible that another network – like TBS, who just picked up ABC's Cougar Town – or a streaming video service like Netflix or Amazon Prime will buy another season of Happy Endings if ABC cancels it. Either way, it's time to start up that internet campaign to save the show, everybody.
Jim Burroway warns that "you’ll probably want a tissue" after watching 15-year-old Noah St. John tell a story about his mamas:
Update from a reader:
Long time reader and recent subscriber. Noah is a student at Berkeley High School where I work. Absolutely amazing kid. Here is another poem from two years ago. And check out this video from when he was just 13 years old.
New highs forecast in Australia have forced the government to add a new color to its heat maps, AFP reports:
Central Australia was shown with a purple area on the latest Bureau of Meteorology forecast map issued for next Monday, a new colour code suggesting temperatures will soar above 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). The bureau's head of climate monitoring and prediction David Jones said the new scale, which also features a pink code for temperatures from 52 to 54 degrees, reflected the potential for old heat records to be smashed.
"The scale has just been increased today and I would anticipate it is because the forecast coming from the bureau's model is showing temperatures in excess of 50 degrees," Jones told Fairfax newspapers. Australia's all-time record temperature is 50.7 degrees, set in January 1960 at Oodnadatta in the state of South Australia.
As noted above, the "Best of 2012" is divided into two categories this year: gowns and everything else. This post contains the latter. Below you'll find a short list of my picks for Mrs. O's best-dressed non-gown looks from 2012, as well as a poll. Collectively we can declare the best of the year. The poll will remain open for three days. Happy Voting! P.S. Please feel free to use the comments to give any missed looks their due credit.
January 24, 2012: State of the Union - Barbara Tfank
You quote Michael Adams: "But still others appear to be well and truly invented by Tolkien, such as Bilbo, Bungo, and Frodo." Tolkien might have come up with the name "Bilbo" by himself, but there was a Theodore G. Bilbo (1877-1947), who served as US Senator and Governor from Mississippi. According to Wikipedia he "believed that black people were inferior, defended segregation, and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan." Fantasy writer Andy Duncan took advantage of this coincidence of names in his story, "Senator Bilbo," which imagined a racist politician in Tolkien's Shire.
Another writes:
"Bilbo" is an example of the sort of old-fashioned Scots-Irish or Anglo-Saxon surnames that persisted in the Bible Belt and Appalachia after becoming rare in the U.K., or at least, in urbanized England. (As they say, if you want to know what Shakespeare sounded like, go to West Virginia.) Plenty of Hobbit names are to be found in U.S. phone directories - Baggins itself, as well as Bracegirdle; Brockhouse - I had a friend in law school with the fine old North Carolina surname of "Brock"; Goodbody; Goodenough or Goodenow; Burrows; Chubb (a major U.S. insurance agency); Hogg - another historical, southern-U.S. name; Proudfoot, etc.
Tolkien was known to chat up his occasional American student in search of these wonderful old names. I remember from somewhere (the Letters?) that he was delighted to find Baggins had hung on as a surname in the U.S. (Supposedly, it's also north-England slang for a workman's bagged lunch.) I would bet that if Tolkien's American informants had happened to mention some of my favorite names - Puryear, Boger, Law, Thigpen, Gasaway, Pickett - they might have found a place in the Hobbitton genaeology.
Another:
Please allow me to geek out a bit over Tolkien's strange and fascinating translation practices.
Even more than just the weird provenance of the hobbits' names as they appear in the book is how they interact with Tolkien's translation convention - the idea that Tolkien was merely translating the Red Book of Westmarch from the original Westron and Elvish tongues into English for modern readers. Tolkien had a complicated way of translating even Westron names into English. For instance, Meriadoc Brandybuck's name in Westron was Kalimac Brandagamba. "Kali" in Westron was a close pun (something the hobbits in particular were fond of) of a word meaning "happy," so Tolkien, in communicating that meaning, transposed Kalimac into Meriadoc.
As another example, the Brandywine River in the Shire was originally known as the Baranduin in Sindarin (an Elvish language), which then corrupted to Branda-nin ("border water" in Westron, since it was originally the eastern border of the Shire) in hobbit-speak, which further turned into Bralda-him ("heady ale," for the color of its water). Tolkien "chooses" to take the English translation from the alcoholic pun, while still keeping it phonetically similar enough to the Elvish Baranduin that we can see its descent - though it does lose the intermediate step until we are informed of it in an appendix.
Even further, he alters some colloquialisms of the Rohirrim and Gondorin to show their languages' relationship to Westron. Hobbits in Rohan are known as "hobylta," demonstrating that hobbits had more exposure to Rohan of old than they did to Gondor or other Edain (Elvish-speaking) humans. Gondor, relying still on the much more foreign Sindarin, calls the hobbits "perrinaith." (And even the names for hobbit is a stand-in word, with Tolkien borrowing Old and Middle English words and word-parts to construct them - in Westron, "hobbit" was in fact "kuduk," and "hobylta" was "kud-dukan.")
All of this illustrates not just how important the names were to Tolkien, but also how important it was that even his English "translations" capture the spirit, character, and descent of the languages. This is just one stance in a long and involved debate among translators on how to participate in translation - particularly as to whether and how to translate "sense for sense," as opposed to word for word. For Tolkien, this is especially important because, while he held an apparently quite extensive internal knowledge of the function and purpose of his languages, he never wrote the "original" Westron version of the Lord of the Rings, and so we have no way of gleaning any contextual meaning past what Tolkien includes in the English translation.
Modern scholars can debate for weeks over what passages in the Bible would've meant to a contemporary reader in the original Greek, and whether the King James or NIV gets the meaning right, but we can't do that for the Red Book. Tolkien instead does all the contextual assignment for us. Reading with this in mind makes a lot of the otherwise strange discussions on language and meaning in LOTR far more fascinating.
Update from another:
My nerd alarm just went off, an though the point is minor, I had to chime in. The reader says: "Hobbits in Rohan are known as "hobylta," demonstrating that hobbits had more exposure to Rohan of old than they did to Gondor or other Edain (Elvish-speaking) humans." In the internal history, the Rohirrim, who would use that word (actually "Holbytlan"), came out of the north of Middle Earth before settling in Rohan. The ancestors of the hobbits of the Shire came from roughly the same area. It was in the north that the Rohirrim had contact with hobbits, not in "Rohan of old."
Music history is littered with
examples of "moral panics": be-bop jazz was blamed for white-on-black
race riots in the mid-1940s, just as rap music was blamed when riots
erupted in Los Angeles following the Rodney King trial.
In both cases, sensationalized news reports and especially a focus on
the "dangerous" elements in the music attracted young people in droves. Moral panics, like magnets, repel and attract. This is also true when
disputes involve dueling scenes, like the fights between "mods" and "rockers" in the U.K. in the early 1960s or the battles between fans of
heavy metal and punk that played out on the pages of Creem magazine
in the early 1980s. It is equally true when outsiders attack: the
Parents’ Music Resource Center’s efforts to ban heavy metal and rap
music resulted in those Parental Advisory stickers. When rock fans
staged the infamous Disco Demolition at Comiskey Park they may have kept
disco in the limelight for an extra year.
Quirky public radio program This American Life will have a very special guest this weekend: Fred Armisen as Ira Glass. The episode's theme is "doppelgängers," and Armisen will be co-hosting with the real Ira Glass for the entire hour. You can listen to it tomorrow afternoon on the radio via your local NPR affiliate or download it Sunday in podcast form. According to This American Life's 
The past couple seasons have seen ABC's sitcom Happy Endings emerge as one of the best comedies on network TV, but unfortunately, the show's ratings have taken a hit this year after the network scheduled it on the busiest comedy night of the season by putting it head-to-head with hits like Fox's New Girl and NBC's Go On. ABC started airing extra episodes of Happy Endings and Don't Trust the B at 10pm on Sundays this week (in addition to their regular Tuesday slot) to burn off the remaining episodes to clear the Tuesday timeslot for Dancing with the Stars' return in late March. The first Sunday episode aired this week, and 
