Sea Otter Has a Dainty Yawn

Via James Brooks

[Kodiak, Alaska, U.S.]

George Mahlberg Oswald/Ruby as a Rock Band  ::  Yasumasa Morimura A Requiem: Oswald

dolphin-spit:

oswaldofguadalupe:

The Twitter Mandela Hall Of Shame

worth a read

cumberbatchweb:

Caitlin Moran on Benedict Cumberbatch in this week’s Celeb Watch (At number 3!)

This week, the most staggeringly unlikely bitch-off in the history of pop was recounted by one of the participants themselves — Bendybum Cumbybag, aka Bumperdinck Cumberbats, aka Benedict Cumberbatch — in an interview with GQ.

Really, if you’ve got a former Harrovian, plum-voiced sex actor v the Long-Reigning and Dirty-Fighting Queen of Pop, Madonna, you’d know where to place your bets if things got a bit hissy. BUT YOU’D BE WRONG.

“I met Madonna,” Cumberbatch recounted. “She said, ‘You’re the one with the strange name’. I said, ‘Yes, I am, Madonna …..’”

TEN POINTS AND A VIP BOOTH AT RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE TO FENDERWICKS CLUMBERHOUND.

(chuckling)

nicevagina:

To do list:

• go shopping
• wash the dishes
• vacuum the duck

As one does.

In fashion, I think the decade in which you came of age is the one that solidifies your style. For me, that would be the ’90s, a decade of Grunge, plaid, Betsy Johnson dresses and Sassy magazine. I was a precocious weirdo living in the WASP-y suburbs of Connecticut when I discovered Sassy and it was like my adolescent bible. Another pivotal player in the world of teenage outcasts growing up in the ’90s was the show Twin Peaks and Sassy published an editorial that perfectly captured that twisted-schoolgirl-in-the-Northwest, Twin Peaks style. To this day, it’s one of my favorite spreads ever, and, thanks to the wonder of the internet (and the tumblr site Sassy Scans), I was able to see it again!
Twin Peaks appealed to my teenage self because it was almost as dramatic as I was. I used to sit in the dark in my room, listening to the soundtrack: the eerie synth strains of Angelo Badalamenti made it easier to pretend my life was infinitely more interesting and dark thank I could ever be.
This edition of Loving {Forever} is dedicated to Twin Peaks, where the pie is always cherry, everyone leads a double (or triple) life and the owls are not what they seem.

photo from Sassy Magazine Oct. 1990 via Sassy Scans

photo of Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks via 

photo by: Chris Hunt for Nylon Mexico via Fashion Gone Rogue

photos on left and right: “Young Americans” by Silja Magg via Fashion Copious

photo from Sassy Magazine Oct. 1990 via Sassy Scans

photo by Leda and St. Jacques for Elle Canada via Visual Optimism

photos, on left: Mayflower Supply Company lookbook on right: Tegan Dearing & Maria Dvirnik by Josh Cornell for Flare CA via Dusty Burrito

Advocates of an overnight passenger train that would connect Montreal with Boston, Portland and Old Orchard Beach have about two months to reach an agreement with freight railroads that own the route if they want the service to start next summer. If the group misses that deadline, it will try for the summer of 2015, said Francois Rebello, the Montreal entrepreneur behind the project, called the “hotel train” or “night train.”

State-run television deleted Kim Jong-un’s uncle from a propaganda film, possibly confirming rumors that he was recently dismissed from all his posts.

Sprezz School Is Now In Session.

Jean Cocteau.

Eraserhead (1977)

“I had a friend who once squeezed her rabbit too much until it started to squeal and she thought it was kind of going, ‘I love you’, when it was really saying, of course, ‘You are the reason I’m dying’.”

- Benedict Cumberbatch on the obsessive nature of some of his fans (x)

Vincent Washington, senior business development manager at RIM from 2001-2011, in Businessweek’s “The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry: An Oral History”:

One thing we missed out on was that Justin Bieber wanted to rep BlackBerry. He said, “Give me $200,000 and 20 devices, and I’m your brand ambassador,” basically. And we pitched that to marketing: Here’s a Canadian kid, he grew up here, all the teeny-boppers will love that. They basically threw us out of the room. They said, “This kid is a fad. He’s not going to last.” I said at the meeting: “This kid might outlive RIM.” Everyone laughed.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh on Friday marked the passing of South African leader Nelson Mandela by criticizing American civil rights leaders. 

"Nelson Mandela actually lived through the indignities, the punishment, the discrimination, the horrors of the South African apartheid system. Came out of it -- you realize when he was inaugurated president, he invited as his special guests the white jailers from his Robben Island prison? He literally did forgive everybody," Limbaugh said. "Twenty seven years of the prime of his life and he said resentment's like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.Nelson Mandela would not qualify as a civil rights leader in this country with that philosophy. They can't let it go."

Read More →

Benedict Cumberbatch fans would gladly watch the actor read a phone book. But Jimmy Kimmel made his guest's monologue a little more interesting by giving him R. Kelly lyrics to recite. The British actor, best known for playing Sherlock and providing the haunting voice to Smaug, read the lyrics to "Genius," a song from R. Kelly's upcoming album Black Panties.

“Toronto Public Library recently commissioned the Martin Prosperity Institute, part of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, to conduct the first Canadian study to measure the library’s economic impact on Toronto. Results clearly demonstrate that Toronto Public Library delivers a strong return on investment through the delivery of library services that enhance Toronto’s competitiveness and prosperity and contribute to a better quality of life for all.” (via CNW)

New Yorker

Pope to Set Up Commission on Child Abuse Scandal Wall Street Journal VATICAN CITY— Pope Francis will establish a special commission to help advise the Catholic Church on how to better handle the problem of sexual abuse of children, one of his first big moves to confront an issue that has badly shaken the church. Cardinal ... Pope Francis sets up committee against child sex abuseTimes of India Vatican setting up commission against sexual abuse of minorsCNN Pope to set up special committee on child sex abuseReuters NBCNews.com (blog) -The Globe and Mail -Sydney Morning Herald all 420 news articles »

How Twin Peaks made modern art of the soap opera -and saved network TV in the process.

David Lynch and Mark Frost seemed an unlikely pair when they met for lunch one day in 1988. Lynch was an auteur who'd burnished his reputation directing the bizarro films Eraserhead and Blue Velvet; Frost was best known as a writer for the network police drama Hill Street Blues. But the two had hit it off a few years earlier when they met working on Goddess, a Marilyn Monroe biopic that never made it to production. Now they were looking to get their hands dirty again.

As the duo sat in Du-par's, the kitschy L.A. restaurant near the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura boulevards, inspiration struck. "All of a sudden," Lynch is quoted as saying in Lynch on Lynch, "Mark and I had this image of a body washing up on the shore of a lake." From that stray spark, Lynch and Frost sketched the idea for what would become Twin Peaks, an enigmatic murder mystery that surrounded its plot twists with art-house motifs. Though it would run for only two seasons on ABC, the show revolutionized television and laid the groundwork for the golden age of prime-time dramas. But before Twin Peaks could storm the small screen, Lynch and Frost had to convince someone to roll the dice.

Lynch was a shaky choice for prime time. His name was synonymous with eerily beautiful cult films, and his one dip into the mainstream, an adaptation of Frank Herbert's beloved sci-fi novel Dune, was a critical and commercial disaster. To the industry observer, it seemed that Lynch was just too niche -or maybe just too weird- for network television.

The move didn't seem to make any sense from a career perspective: TV was a giant step backward for an auteur of Lynch's caliber. Today, in an era where shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad enjoy all the glitz and prestige of the big screen, it's easy to forget that television used to be the stepping stone to film. An Oscar-nominated director like Lynch working on TV was like an all-star demoting himself to the minor leagues.

But Lynch's agent was keen to see what his client could do with the medium. And Lynch and Frost were starting to develop a killer storyline. Set in a fictional Washington hamlet, Twin Peaks revolves around the grisly slaying of blonde homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). The protagonist is a quixotic FBI agent named Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) with an obsessive attention to detail and an affinity for diner coffee, which he takes "black as midnight on a moonless night." Together, Laura's killing and the big-city detective's arrival upend the small town, pulling back the curtain on its underbelly -gambling, prostitution, and backdoor dealings that turn local power brokers into villains- before uncovering the even more sinister forces that lurk in the woods.

The mystery is riveting, but it's the heavy injection of trademark Lynchism, the juxtaposition of the familiar and the surreal, that makes the show so special. For Lynch, it wasn't enough to have straightforward heroes and villains, so some of the show's rogues haunt an alternate dimension accessible only in nightmares and, when conditions are right, through a pit of bubbling tar among the pines. The result is a crime procedural filtered through an off-kilter lens. But the elements that make the show so original also made it risky. Prime time was the province of Murphy Brown and Sam Malone, not one-armed shoe salesmen and dancing dwarves.

When the time came to pitch the show, Lynch received a good omen. Even when he wasn't directing, he was always searching for symbols and oracles. One of his superstitions was that if you saw a license plate with your initials in it in any order, and the numbers on the license plate added up to what you'd consider to be a good number, and it was a really nice car, it would bring you good luck. Driving down Melrose on the day he and Frost were headed to present their creation to ABC brass, Lynch spotted a brand-new Mercedes with a lucky number and his initials. He told Frost, "Mark, this is going to be very good!"

Fortunately for the duo, ABC was in a gambling mood. As the new decade dawned, all the major networks were pushing for more originality in their lineups. The big three were anxiously watching Fox and cable channels eat into their ratings, and ABC was struggling. The network had a reputation as a stodgy, corporate outfit that micromanaged its productions to mediocre results. NBC, on the other hand, was enjoying some success with a laissez faire approach to working with Hollywood talent, so ABC did what all TV networks do: It replicated the formula. "We had a strategy to turn the network around by taking shots and being patient," an ABC executive, Chad Hoffman, said at the time. Hoffman spent just 45 minutes with the Twin Peaks pilot script before deciding, "We've got to do this."

As part of the Twin Peaks deal, ABC gave Frost and Lynch unprecedented creative control over the final product, and the duo took advantage of the freedom. As Lynch, who was 44 when the show debuted, and Frost, who was 36, looked for inspiration, they benefitted from the same serendipity that initially spawned their masterpiece. While scouting locations at a sawmill, they encountered a woman whose job it was to touch each log as it made its way down the conveyor belt. This chance meeting presumably inspired the Log Lady, one of the show's quirkiest characters.

Later, while shooting a scene in Laura Palmer's bedroom, a set dresser named Frank Silva was moving some furniture when someone warned him not to lock himself in the room. A lightbulb went off above Lynch's head. Silva was lanky and wild-eyed, with a long face and stringy gray hair -someone so completely out of place in a frilly pink bedroom that seeing him there was unsettling. "Frank, are you an actor?" Lynch recalls asking. He'd found the man who would end up playing Twin Peaks' spectral bad guy, Bob, described by the The Awl as "one of the scariest, most terrifying, most nightmare-inducing-est characters ever."

While some of the series' highlights came from off-the-cuff moments like these, the ultimate charm of Twin Peaks lies in just how meticulously Frost and Lynch developed their sordid little town. Even the minor supporting characters were fully fleshed out. And Lynch coaxed his actors into bringing their idiosyncrasies to life in his own offbeat way. "Think of how gently a deer has to move in the snow," he whispered to Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Laura Palmer's best friend. After nearly 40 takes, that was the odd direction she needed to get the scene just right.

Lynch was also literally hands-on. At the very beginning of the pilot, Jack Nance's character, Pete Martell, discovers Laura's plastic-wrapped body on the shore of the lake. "David hand-placed those granules of sand on my face and played with the plastic as if it were a bouquet of flowers," Sheryl Lee told The Guardian in 2010. When inspiration struck Lynch, he would call Frost to share his latest breakthrough. "Mark, I think there's a giant in Agent Cooper's room," Lynch once theorized into the phone. (It worked; there is!)

It was as if Lynch was an all-knowing mystic who'd endeared himself to a congregation of believers. "There's a scene where Kyle has to throw a rock and hit a glass bottle. He sat us down and told us Kyle was going to hit [it] -and that bottle was freaking far away," recalls Kimmy Robertson, who played the loyal secretary of the sheriff's department in that same Guardian feature.  "Kyle hit it, and everyone freaked out. It was like David used the power of the universe to make Twin Peaks."

Within a month of the show's April 8, 1990, premiere, America had caught Twin Peaks fever. "Everyone at parties is talking about it," a 29-year-old George Stephanopoulos told Newsweek, while a New York magazine writer put it this way: "In Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Madison, Wisconsin, and in Berkeley, California, there are Twin Peaks watching parties every Thursday night, after which …Deconstruction."

Menacing promos that promised something new and "90s" lured viewers who couldn't get enough of this avant-garde cinema masquerading as prime-time soap opera. Twin Peaks was scary enough to rival any horror flick, but would also turn funny, beautiful, and heart-wrenching. The ratings were gangbusters. By May, Twin Peaks had been renewed for a second season. The show was a critical coup as well, collecting nearly 20 Emmy nominations between 1990 and 1991. Not even Lynch expected Twin Peaks to resonate with viewers the way it did. "We had zero thought that this thing would travel so well around the world," he said in 2008. "It was a magical thing."

But it wasn't long before the bottom fell out. Busy making his next film, Wild at Heart, Lynch became less involved with the second season, leaving his writer's bench to hash out the plot. Then ABC shot itself in the foot by bumping Twin Peaks from Thursday's prime time real estate to Saturday's wasteland, which killed the Friday-morning break room buzz that had made it a smash.

The fatal blow, though, was the network's demand for the show to answer the central question the plot and the marketing buzz orbited around -Who Killed Laura Palmer? Midway through season 2, the killer was revealed and the writers found themselves in a bind. The series devolved into an unsustainable hodgepodge of silly side plots and the writers struggled to keep the story's larger mythology alive for 14 more episodes. Lynch himself took control of the series finale, which bridges the gap between Palmer's murder and the supernatural mysteries of Twin Peaks. The stunning two-hour episode brought the curtain down on June 10, 1991. Just a little over a year after it had first rocked TV, Twin Peaks had disappeared.

Despite its brief run, Twin Peaks' immense influence was visible almost immediately. Lynch and Frost had proved that viewers would tune in for big screen-quality production in a weekly format, and in the process they ushered in a new age of televised drama. Two years later Fox would debut The X-Files, which relied on a similarly elaborate mythology to sustain its nine-season run. When ABC's Lost premiered in 2004 -constructed around an ever-unfolding course of otherworldly (and largely forest-based) mysteries- it drew immediate Twin Peaks comparisons. "Twin Peaks was a huge impact on me," the show's co-creator Damon Lindelof told an audience in Manhattan as few days before the Lost series finale in May 2010. One of the lessons he learned? That a show doesn't have to solve every mystery it sets up.

More importantly, Twin Peaks proved to fans, critics, industry gatekeepers, and film creators alike that television would no longer live in the shadow of film -it could actually be good. Little by little, TV shows were becoming every bit as worthy of close attention and deconstruction as films -a shift that wouldn't just make for better water cooler chatter, but would also open up a new venue to which writers and bloggers could devote entire careers. And none of that might have happened, if one daring network hadn't gambled on Frost and Lynch.

__________________________

The above article was written by Joe Pompeo. It is reprinted with permission from the November 2013 issue of mental_floss magazine.

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Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!

Andy Beaumont, regarding his Tab Closed; Didn’t Read website:

What we’re witnessing here is the first wave of the second world pop-up war. Those of us who lived through the first one can only describe the horrors to our disbelieving children. This time though, the pop-ups are winning because we don’t yet have the tools to fight back. The web has seemingly evolved into something that actively antagonises people — why would anyone in their right mind hide the content that visitors are there to see?

In short, maybe they’re not in their right mind. This is what happens when analytics make decisions for you.

Whole piece is simply brilliant.

1969.

Salvador Dalí walks his pet anteater out the Métro and through the streets of Paris.

Erin Whittaker via Grand Canyon National Park

Mayberry Photography

Mayberry Photography

Mayberry Photography

Mayberry Photography

Mayberry Photography

Last week on November 29th the Grand Canyon experienced a rare temperature inversion where cool air began to rise from the bottom of the canyon and met warm air above creating low level clouds. Apparently this type of thing happens once or twice a year, but almost never with clear skies which provided an unprecedented once-in-a-decade view of the canyon filled to the rim with fog. Several photographers were on hand including Ben Mayberry who captured some amazing panoramic shots, and Paul Lettieri managed to shoot a timelapse of the event. (via My Modern Met)

Earlier today we had mentioned that a cafe in Boston's Back Bay had closed. Now we have learned that a new restaurant has already moved into the space, and it is one with a familiar name.

According to one of our readers--and confirmed by Yelp--Sepal is now open in the former Orange Leaf Cafe spot on Mass. Ave., with the new eatery apparently being part of the group of Middle Eastern restaurants found at the Longwood Galleria in Boston as well as the MIT Student Center and CambridgeSide Galleria in Cambridge. Based on the menus at those locations, expect the new Sepal to offer such items as falafel, chicken shawarma, beef kababs, hummus, baba ghanouj, and more.

The address for this new Middle Eastern spot in the Back Bay is: Sepal, 374 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115. The website for the existing Sepal restaurants can be found at http://sepalrestaurant.com/

[Earlier Article]
Orange Corner Cafe in Boston's Back Bay Has Closed

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[New article from our sister site (Boston's Hidden Restaurants): Slideshow--Twelve Cheesy Items from Places in the Boston Area and Beyond]

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An Irish pub in one of the busiest sections of Cambridge is going to be closing later this month.

According to a post on its Twitter page, Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square is planning to close at the end of business hours on December 22 after being in business for approximately nine years. Another Twitter note from the place says that "we have decided to not renew our lease and are looking for new locations and opportunities." It looks like their other location in the Kendall Square section of Cambridge will remain open. (Locations of Tommy Doyle's in Newton and Hyannis are under separate ownership.)

[December 9 update: The Boston Business Journal mentions that the folks behind Tommy Doyle's are looking at Boston, Cambridge, or Somerville as possible locations of a replacement pub for the soon-to-close Harvard Square spot.]

[December 24 update: Posts on the Tommy Doyle's Facebook page confirm that the Harvard Square location has indeed officially closed.]

Tommy Doyle's first opened in Harvard Square in 2005, moving into the building where the House of Blues had been. (A newer House of Blues has since opened across from Fenway Park in Boston.)

The address for this soon-to-close pub in Harvard Square is 96 Winthrop Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138. The website for the remaining two spots can be found at http://tommydoyles.com/

Thanks to one of our Facebook fans for initially bringing this to our attention.

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And this trailer makes 300: Rise of an Empire look like Evil Eva Green: The Movie, with bonus Lena Headey. I will always be down for that.

Oh, crap. Did I just convince myself to see the 300 sequel?

(via: Tor.com)

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