Russian Sledges

Where countries prohibit homosexuality

IT HAS been a bad week for gay rights. An Australian court struck down a recent state law allowing same-sex marriage. In India the Supreme Court upheld an 1860 law that criminalises homosexual acts, overruling a 2009 judgment by a lower court. The guilty face a possible maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Worldwide, countries are increasingly providing legal protections for people to chose with whom they wish to be intimate. Still, more than 80 countries criminalise homosexuality. A majority are former European colonies, particularly of Britain, which exported its anti-gay laws. (India’s 1860 act is a legacy of British rule; the government says it is looking at how to restore the 2009 decision.) Russia penalises homosexuality as part of its "anti-propaganda" rules. In five countries and areas of Nigeria and Somalia, people face the death penalty for sharing private moments with those of the same sex. 

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), daguerreotype portrait taken in 1842 by his cousin Leon Riesener.

In case any of you have been waiting with bated breath for the conclusion of New Zealander Reese McKee's attempt to turn his life into a Tom Hanks movie, well, I've got some bad news for you. Life does not imitate You've Got Mail.

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Photo by Kimberley Hasselbrink

My mother does not like it when I adapt her recipes, but I am a rule-breaker where recipes are concerned. So when I called to ask about bourbon balls, those funny-tasting holiday treats that I vaguely recalled her making when I was young, I warned her that I would undoubtedly fuss with her recipe.

They were, and are, more of a grown-up thing — that intensely boozy flavor wasn’t so appealing as a kid. But now? That strong aroma of bourbon, coupled with a hint of chocolate and the vaguely gingerbready flavors of gingersnaps — well, it tastes like the embodiment of Christmas festivity. They’re wonderfully nostalgic — the kind of thing you might expect at a Mad Men holiday party, but very of the moment now that bourbon is so well-loved again. Their simplicity makes them welcome in this busiest of months.

Bourbon Balls

1 1/2 cups crushed ginger snap or vanilla wafer cookies (tip: use Mi-Del ginger snaps to make it gluten free)
1 cup pecans (or walnuts)
1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar, plus more for dusting
1/4 cup bourbon (or rum)
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 tablespoons honey

Pulse the pecans in the bowl of a food processor until they are coarsely ground. Add the crushed ginger snaps, along with the confectioner’s sugar, bourbon, cocoa powder and honey. Pulse until the ingredients are combined. Place in a bowl.

Chill until thoroughly cooled in the refrigerator, about two hours. (You can expedite this by chilling in the freezer for about 45 minutes.)

Remove the dough from the fridge. Using a teaspoon as a measure, roll out small balls with your hands, about one inch in size. Toss to coat in a bowl of powdered sugar.

Store in the fridge for up to a week.

All photos by Kimberley Hasselbrink

Kimberley Hasselbrink is a food photographer and blogger based in San Francisco. She is the author of the blog The Year in Food, which is framed around a monthly seasonal food guide. Kimberley enjoys unusual produce, strong coffee, road trips and summer nights.

If you happen to be in Dubai between now and December 30, drop by the Dubai Aquarium & Underwater Zoo to check out their Great Otter Art Exhibition, an interactive animal skills training projec…

BOSTON — A Massachusetts coalition of women's groups, doctors and human rights organizations are pushing a bill intended to outlaw the practice of handcuffing women prisoners to hospital beds during childbirth.

The bill would create uniform laws in county jails and the state prison system banning the shackling of pregnant women during childbirth and post-delivery recuperation "unless they present a specific safety or flight risk."

Ten Germans struggle to pronounce the word “squirrel” in this funny video by rupert93r. Here’s a challenge for English speakers: try to say the German word for squirrel, “eichhörnchen.”

via Digg

The search giant buys a military robotics contractor. “Don’t be evil” meets the Department of Defense.

Tyrone Siu / Reuters

Google has acquired Boston Dynamics, creator of the BigDog, CHEETAH, and PETMAN robots, according the the New York Times. The purchase is Google's latest investment in advanced robotics — a new priority for the search company and one that it has recently added to its list of "moonshot" initiatives.

Boston Dynamics represents a new type of acquisition for Google. It is best known for projects that were carried out under military contracts, such as the tottering BigDog robot, a demonstration of which went viral in 2008:

youtube.com

BigDog's development was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is part of the Department of Defense. Boston Dynamics' other DARPA-funded projects include:

- CHEETAH, a four-legged robot that holds a land speed record
- PETMAN, a bipedal, humanoid robot that walks convincingly like a person
- RiSE, a wall-climbing bot
- Atlas, a Terminator-esque successor to the PETMAN

View Entire List ›

Antiques expert Mark Hill stumbled upon this Internet brand transistor radio while perusing a vintage shop in Amsterdam. Hill believes the radio, sold by the British firm Internet Radio Product Ltd., is from the late 1960s or 1970 at the latest—the term “internet” was first used in reference to the emerging technologies which became the Internet back in 1974.

photos by Mark Hill

via Boing Boing

Gifpop lets you make custom gif cards with the magic of lenticular printing.

Inside the Rainbow Gulag

"Lisa Frank is notorious in Tucson as the world's shittiest employer," said Caroline, who considered applying for one of the many job openings at the company she saw advertised when she moved to Tucson in 2001, but decided against it after speaking with locals. "Every single person I talked to advised me to avoid Lisa Frank at all costs," she said. "I didn't know a single person who had not heard horror stories about the work environment there."

Even court documents reflect those sentiments, with one longtime employee, Dan Mullen, stating how lowly regarded the company was in the community.

"The word in Tucson is that 'you don't want to work for the Lisa Frank Company,'" he said.

"I don't know if it's possible to really communicate how bad their reputation was in town," Caroline stressed, before adding, "Every person who ever worked there seemed to have a case of PTSD from it. 'Rainbow Gulag' is really an apt description."

SExpand

While there was an emphasis on productivity, the rules that were implemented seemed counterproductive to a creative environment. According to former employees, the office was a place of silence and co-workers were not allowed to speak to one another. The management secretly (and illegally) recorded phone calls. An interoffice, bimonthly publication called "Frankly Speaking" [left] informed employees how they were to behave, particularly regarding how they were expected to interact with their boss, CEO James Green. Memos were frequently circulated with new, increasingly restrictive company policies. No visitors, including family members, were allowed. The penalty for any violations ranged from verbal abuse to name-calling to screaming to automatic termination to even more bizarre restrictions.

(One time, after discovering that someone left the office 10 minutes early, an enraged Green instructed the warehouse manager to put chains and padlocks on all the downstairs doors so that "the staff can't escape.")

Original Source

Original Source

malformalady:

A rapier, manufactured in the mid-19th century by the technology of the old masters as a gift to one high-ranking person. Such exceptionally flexible rapiers were made in Toledo in the beginning of 17th century. They were sold in gun shops and coiled in a circle to show its flexible properties.

Want.

Calling all bad-ass Chicagoan geeklings! We've found your new favorite store for the holidays (and for ALL the days). Blue Buddha Boutique — a chainmaille-only brick-and-mortar store. Yup, you read that right… mother freaking chainmaille store.

Founded in 2003 by self-taught artist Rebeca Mojica, Blue Buddha Boutique is one of the largest chainmaille suppliers in the world with an awesome store-front location in Chicago. Blue Buddha Boutique carries jump rings in nine metals, tools for making chainmaille jewelry, a large selection of ready-to-weave kits and project instructions, as well as handmade goods by local artisans.

Aside from having everything you need to make awesome chainmaille projects, gifts, and accessories, Blue Buddha Boutique also hosts classes and crafty events. (Psst: Their holiday trunk show is December 14th and 15th 2013 — you should go if you're in the area!)

Of course, if you don't live in or near Chicago, that's okay… You won't miss out on all the chainmaille-y goodness. Blue Buddha Boutique offers their kits and starter packs online, and they ship all over world.

Now, go get your super-bad-ass holiday shopping spree on!

This business has paid a fee to be listed on Offbeat Home because they feel their products and services are in-line with our philosophies and needs … and we agree. Here's more info about how advertising works on Offbeat Home.

Recent Comments

• Rebeca: So glad you guys are excited about the store; the past 11 years have been a pretty amazing journey for … [Link]
• Cass: I love posts like these! This is such a cool thing. I will probably go visit next time I'm in … [Link]
• alison: I took a chainmaille class from Rebecca in 2007. She was a great instructor and I'm delighted to see … [Link]
• Jessica Gibson: So apparently I have to jump on a plane tomorrow for Chicago… This is fantastic, I've wanted to chain … [Link]
• Sylvia: That's fantastic! I have a friend who makes gorgeous chainmaille jewellery, and made earrings for herself and my other bridesmaid … [Link]

+ 1 more! Join the discussion

In October we told you about Vancouver Aquarium’s efforts to save a sea otter with gunshot wounds; we’re happy to report that the otter, now named Walter, has continued to recover — and has an appr…

Joint Honours in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, Oxford University

Strømme Throndsen Design helped create this year's Christmas aquavit for Arcus and their Gilde brand in Norway.

For Arcus's 2013 Gilde Jule Aquavit, the design looks celebratory and elegant. Using hand lettered typography, Strømme Throndsen Design wanted to "emphasize the tradition and expert knowledge that goes into producing this exclusive aquavit." 

This bottle design is the perfect addition to your Norwegian Christmas. The aquavit comes in bottles of 0.5, 0.7, and 1L, in addition to an extra matured edition in a special gift box.

Designed by Strømme Throndsen Design, Oslo

It all started with a conversation at Guts and Glory; If Helvetica was a perfume, what would it smell like? In unison, they decided that it would smell like nothing. So, Guts and Glory set out to embrace nothingness in a perfume form, Helvetica, The Perfume

"Bottles printed in real 24K gold inks and black on black letterpressed boxes were the appropriate expression of this idea, drawing on the opulent cues of the perfume industry, further fetishizing the idea of Helvetica. We love the provocative nature of the statement: The scent of nothing. This is a design object rooted in super nerdy design humor (which we love.) It's an idea and a point of view, not a real perfume in the traditional sense." 

We feel that Guts and Glory have embodied the packaging industry, "the power of design to create desire as well as poking fun at ourselves and the industry we work in."

"While Helvetica The Perfume is an homage to a typeface loved (and hated) the world over, we think the idea of a perfume inspired by nothingness is bigger than recontextualizing a typeface. What does nothing actually smell like? We hope that this product makes people think about everything from the concept of nothingness to the beautiful absurdity of the perfume category.

We are graphic designers who specialize in branding and we are leveraging the power of design to create desire as well as poking fun at ourselves and the industry we work in. It is, after all, just packaging. But as designers we see the beauty and art in packaging. We are collectors and catalogers of these objects which are essentially meant to be tossed after opening"

Why Helvetica:

"Helvetica is one of the most ubiquitous fonts in use. It was designed with very specific cultural reasons in mind: to create a highly legible and completely neutral expression of the Modernist design movement. Helvetica was to have no intrinsic meaning, allowing the content to convey the message. We wanted to explore those reasons and the love/hate relationship with Helvetica by putting it into an entirely different, and quite honestly, amazingly absurd category of perfume. It is in this spirit that we created the ultimate Modernist perfume–a scent distilled down to it's purest and most essential elements to allow you, the content, to convey the message with utmost clarity.

Target audience:

"Our target is anyone who appreciates design and art objects. Font lovers, collectors, culture makers. This is an object for fetishizing, it is a manifestation of an idea that we found both provocative and also quite funny." 

Designed by Guts & Glory, California 

One of the beautiful things about jewelry is that it can be plain and simple or insanely detailed. These rings by designer Sevan Bicakci fall into the latter category. The large faceted domes on the rings conceal miniature cities. Seriously. It’s like something right out of a fantasy novel. The tiny buildings are the icing on a breath-taking bejeweled band cake. I’d just pretend that it was like the bottle city of Kandor but on my finger.

See more styles after the break.

(Sevan Bicakci via Tumblr)

THE WRISTS SPARKLE

(submission by renkris)

For the 2012 Paragon Annual Holiday Mailer, Paragon opted to design a collectible, entirely custom deck of playing cards.

"The goal was to incorporate the symbolism and philosophies surrounding the Classical Greek Elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water and once we began digging into the rich history of these concepts, we decided the only way to do it right was to allow each traditional kingdom to represent the corresponding elements. Earth took Diamonds, Air Clubs, Hearts became Fire and Spades Water.

Traditional icons were incorporated into the face cards as well as new embellishments like Latin text and the complex visual language of the elements. The backs of the cards featured a graphic pattern created using our logo mark. Both the deck and custom box were printed on Shine paper appropriate for the Holiday Season."

Designed by Paragon Design Group

Creative Director: Andrew Davies

Art Director, Production Coordinator: Susan Isaacs: Art Director

Printing: Rapid Press, Inc

Another Whitey McConnaughy classic?

The post “Blood Like Cream” Video: Red Fang and Fred Armisen Vs. Beer Drinkin’ Zombies appeared first on MetalSucks.

bizarrelovequadrangle:

sashayed:

#dig if you will the picture  #of an elephant inside a snake (x)

Omg