Russian Sledges

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UPDATE: This post is simply an explanation of the difficulties of creating an additional plus size line (patterns or ready to wear).

That does not mean that we do not want to release plus sizes at Colette. We have in fact always told our customers that it is our hope to eventually do just that. But as a very small independent pattern company with just one (very hard working) pattern designer, this hasn’t been feasible yet.

For more information on how to grade patterns for plus sizes, our readers have recommended Barbara Deckert’s “Plus Size Pattern Fitting & Design” class on Craftsy.

- Rachel

Today we have a guest post for your from our friend, Alyson Clair, designer of Clair Vintage Inspired.

The other evening I was talking to Sarai about sizing, grading, and fit when she was reminded of this recent comment on the Colette Patterns Facebook page:

“I am so in love with your patterns and I really want to sew better. Your patterns seem like a fantastic place to start – except that your size range falls short of what I wear. What are your plans for extending your patters into more inclusive sizing that reflects the actual range of bodies in need of adorable, inspiring, handmade clothes?”

I receive comments like this about my clothing line, and I’ve felt similar frustrations when making clothing for myself. I’d like to explain why adding plus sizes to a clothing or pattern line is more complex than you might think.

Note: These images are from Alyson’s clothing line, Clair Vintage Inspired. True to her thoughts in this post, she enjoys creating clothing for women of all shapes and sizes. That is reflected in the variety of models in these images.

Please note- I’m coming to you with perspective not only of a dressmaker, a commercial patternmaker, and Technical Designer (fancy name for person who fits garments and does pattern/making specs), but personally, too. My body is VERY pear shaped and petite.

Before getting into explaining the nitty gritty of pattern drafting, I’d like to address two issues that frustrate all clothing shoppers:

1. Clothing brands can call their sizing whatever the heck they want (S,M,L or Pegasus, Unicorn, Centaur, it doesn’t matter).

2. Vanity sizing is running amok, making you memorize which store calls you “an 8” and which says you’re “a 12.”

That said, the standard for pattern-drafters is to begin with a base size and create a base range of sizes around that. Let’s look further into those terms.

When drafting a multi-size pattern for a garment, you start with what is called a base size. Ideally, this size falls in the middle of the range you’d like your graments to cover. For an XS through XL range, the base size is Medium. For a 0 to 16 range, the base would be an 8.

Why start with the median size? Because it gives the truest grading. If you start with your smallest size and grade evenly on up to your largest size, you’ll actually encounter a lot of fit issues.

If you grade correctly, you can hang you XS size right next to your XL size and they look the same, just larger/smaller. Sometimes proportions change a bit, but really the design should translate the same.

Tip: If you run into a company that is doing a terrible job with the fit (poor armhole grading, or tiny pockets on size 14 pants for example) you can write them a letter! Customer service will often pass it along to product development and implement your feedback.

Alright, now you got how pattern/garment development is going. So how do we get to the crux of this post, the plus sizes? Why aren’y they automatically included in the standard size range? The fact is, they will not grow correctly from your original base medium size.

Let’s say you have a fantastic dress in an 8 and wonder, “Why isn’t it available in a 20, or a 22 ,or a 24!?!?” Well, typically when you grade your garment beyond a XL or a 16, the jump between sizes increases more than the jump between a size Medium to a Large.

So to fit for a plus size, you have to start with a whole new base size that sits in the middle of the Plus size range. A good example of this at a retail location would be Lane Bryant, who doesn’t go smaller than a 12.

I can totally understand frustration with finding garments and patterns that you just adore, but they don’t fit. At the same time, don’t get too frustrated with companies that don’t offer it. My theory is that I would rather have it done right, than poorly.

Please keep in mind that next to no one is the size of the forms and base sizes used to make garments. In working in the apparel industry it’s hard to find live fit models that meet the measurements. It’s based on averages.

Finally, I don’t really care for the term “actual range” used in the comment at the beginning of this post. All ranges are actual ranges. No body is the same. Being a dressmaker, I kind of love the differences and embrace the adventure of dressing and creating around them.

[This is a guest post by Stephan Stiller.]

This post complements Robert Bauer and Victor Mair's previous LL post titled "Spoken Hong Kong Cantonese and written Cantonese" and addresses, among other things, J. Marshall Unger's comment in the corresponding thread. Please have a look.

The most important parts (of J. Marshall Unger) I quote here:

May I suggest that "dialect" and "language" be defined operationally with respect to the comparative method, i.e. diachronically rather than synchronically? If most linguists who know speech varieties A and B well accept that they are diachronically related without an explicit demonstration (regular sound laws and explanations for semantic divergences, etc.), then A and B ought to be called dialects of their common language. Otherwise, A and B should be called languages, which are assumed to be unrelated until proven "to have sprung from a common source."

[...] No honest linguist thinks that describing the relationship of Cantonese to Mandarin is a trivial task. There are still "gray area" cases (e.g. Okinawan, which I tend to think of as a highly aberrant dialect of Japanese, but others consider a distinct languages), but at least we know what we're arguing about in terms of data.

I would say it's evident to most people that German is related to English; it doesn't take a linguist to make that realization. Not only that – we are 100% certain that they have "sprung from a common source".

To describe the precise relationship between Cantonese and Mandarin is of course not a trivial task, but I have – on more than one occasion – heard Chinese linguists state that it is merely for political reasons that many call 粵 Yue a dialect. Cantonese linguist Anne Oi-Kan Yue(-Hashimoto) 余靄芹 writes:

We shall follow the tradition of designating the major Sinitic languages as "Chinese dialects", although linguistically speaking the latter is a misnomer.

(Materials for the Diachronic Study of the Yue Dialects, footnote 1 (p. 270); on pp. 246-271 of: 乐在其中：王士元教授七十华诞庆祝文集 / The Joy of Research: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor William S-Y. Wang on His Seventieth Birthday; 石锋 Shí Fēng、沈钟伟 Shěn Zhōngwěi (eds.); 天津 (Tiānjīn): 南开大学出版社 (Nankai University Press))

I don't think the linguistic facts are controversial, despite some people still saying so.

In order to get a better understanding of the language situation for Cantonese, imagine this:

Scenario A: You require that everyone in Germany writes English. A German might thus write something like this (the grammatical error with the first word is intentional and illustrates the realities of L2 usage):

Mine parents have acquired a pet.

He'd still say

Meine Eltern haben ein Haustier erworben.

in German because this is correct German. But he is taught to pronounce every English sentence (when reading aloud) in a cognate-by-cognate fashion, like this:

Meine Färser¹ haben z-heischt ein *Biech.

Of course, some words here don't really exist in German, but this mirrors the situation of a speaker of Cantonese in Hong Kong. To match up German with Cantonese and English with Mandarin works on so many levels (I won't explain now), but to better illustrate the situation to a native speaker of English, let's flip things around and proceed to …

Scenario B: Imagine a situation where all speakers of English are required to employ German for written communication. The sentence "my parents have acquired a pet" is, in correct German, the following:

Meine Eltern haben ein Haustier erworben.

Now when native speakers of English talk amongst each other, they still say:

My parents (have)² acquired a pet.

but they're not allowed to write such a vulgar thing! Instead they only ever encounter German in prestigious newspapers. They are also taught, in school, to read aloud the German sentence as

My elders have a house deer ur-wharven.

linearly matching the German text with English cognates. (Okay. "ur-" is more like a recent borrowing, with a distinct foreign sound to it. And I haven't heard anyone use the verb "to wharve" lately. But these seemingly irrelevant details, too, mirror the situation for Cantonese.) The two sentences even sound similar if you say them out loud.

German is a language, and English is only a dialect. You must not write English, because it is a bastardized, corrupt, "highly aberrant" form of German, extant only among crazy islanders!

Still not convinced that German and English are but phonetic variants of one and the same common language? Let's write the sentences down in a writing system that abstracts away from inessential details such as pronunciation. What about we pick something universal – Chinese characters! After all, if you can use them for Japanese, you might as well use them for written Pan-Germanic (aka Modern Standard Germanic), to which Sinographs seem almost equally suited.

Glosses, from the German version of the sentence, which the writing is appropriately based on:

I+⟨possessive suffix⟩ old+⟨comparative suffix⟩+⟨plural suffix⟩ have one house+beast ⟨prefix indicating successful achievement⟩+revolve+⟨participial suffix⟩

The homophonous plural and participial suffixes were spelled out with Runes to emphasize the common millenia-old Teutonic heritage. (Don't the Japanese have a mixed script employing kana in similar fashion?)

Now for the finale. As constructed, the sentence is written like this in German:

("Meine Eltern haben ein Haustier erworben.")

And now in High English³:

("My elders have a house deer ur-wharven.")

We can see that the two are exactly the same! In passing we've even proven Germanic to be part of the Sino-Tibetan language family.⁴

That Cantonese barely lost to Mandarin as China's national language might be a myth⁵ akin to the Muehlenberg legend (it's the one according to which German allegedly lost to English as the official language of the United States by just one vote). But since they're dialects of the same language, why would it even matter?

I am in fundamental agreement with much of J. Marshall Unger's academic work on Japanese and its script, to the extent that I am familiar with it. But I am not sure in what way his proposal for a comparative method of dialect determination is workable. Also, in what way is it, as he states, "diachronic" as opposed to "synchronic"? For linguists to determine diachronic relatedness – the existence of a common ancestor – "without an explicit demonstration" is for sure something that would rely on present-day similarities, which would make it a synchronic procedure.

Notes:

¹ "Färse" means "heifer", so I'm forming an ambigendered plural "Färser" from a constructed male singular form, which would also be "Färser". I encourage the reader to explore the Indo-European Lexicon at UT Austin.

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/index.html

² The German present perfect corresponds to the English simple past as well. The way I have constructed my examples, details about grammatical aspect shouldn't matter.

³ What you hear on the streets is Low English, not worthy of ink. For example, "pet" sounds slangy. (HKers frequently use the word "slangy" to describe their perception of Cantonese lexis as being less refined than that of Mandarin.) There's regional variation anyways. Better to have a standard, no?

⁴ I know someone who insists that Japanese is Sino-Tibetan. Guess where his confusion is coming from.

⁵ Discussions of the Conference on Unification of Pronunciation (讀音統一會) are in The Languages of China by S. Robert Ramsey and Nationalism and Language Reform in China by John DeFrancis. It seems like Mandarin clearly won in the end. Who knows whether the oft-encountered "by one vote" can be accurately applied to an intermediate negotiation that took place there in 1913.

Troops must enroll on federal property rather than at state facilities.

by Joseph Laycock

Almost two weeks ago, a mysterious monument appeared in front of the Paseo Grill in Oklahoma City.  The monument is a concrete trapezoid, vaguely reminiscent of an obelisk.  Although not very large, it is quite heavy.  The proprietors of the grill have so far been unable to remove it and it remains a mystery how it was transported there overnight.  A bronze plaque on the monument declares, “In the year of our lord 2012 Cree Pipi claimed this land for Azathoth.”

Azathoth, of course, is an entity created by H.P. Lovecraft.  In one of his letters Lovecraft described Azathoth as the primordial entity from which other horrifying beings such Cthulhu were spawned.  In stories such as “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath,” “The Dreams in the Witch-House,” and “The Haunter in the Dark,” Azathoth is described alternatively as a “daemon-sultan” or a “blind idiot god.”  Whatever Azathoth is, it is omnipotent and, like all Lovecraftian entities, completely dispassionate toward humanity.  What then, are we to make of this entity’s name appearing on an unwanted concrete block in Oklahoma City?

We can safely rule out the possibility of a sinister Lovecraftian cult.  The date 2012 suggests the monument was made last year for some other purpose before being deposited at the Paseo Grill.  Furthermore, a true worshipper of Azathoth would not refer to 2012 as “year of our lord.”  Creer Pipi is an anagram for Eric Piper, a local sculptor.  (Poking through Piper’s publicly accessible Facebook photos I discovered a prototype of the monument.)  While this does not mean that Piper was responsible for the sculpture appearing at the Paseo Grill, this discovery takes much of the mystery out of the monument.

There is, however, a larger context to the Azathoth Monument.  In January 2001, a nine-foot-tall steel and iron monolith mysteriously appeared on a hill over Seattle in an apparent homage Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  A group of guerrilla artists calling themselves “Some People” eventually took credit for the installation.  Then there are the mysterious Georgia Guidestones, the true creators of which may never be known.  And recently, tiny gnome houses have been appearing mysteriously in Overland Park, Kansas.

Lesley Rawlingson of the Paseo Grill told reporters she does not consider the Azathoth Monument to be art.  Presumably if the monument is not art, it is merely a prank and a nuisance.  But even if the people who left the monument are not true Azathothian cultists, might there still be a religious impulse behind their actions? Why do these sorts of pranks so often invite us to speculate about the plausibility of supernatural beings, prophecies, and secret cults?  And what of cases like the Cottingley Fairies, in which a prank attracted the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and became part of twentieth-century paranormal lore?

The either/or logic of art, prank, or “legitimate” religious phenomenon is not adequate to understand why someone would mysteriously deliver an unwanted monument to a fictional god of chaos.  A number of scholars including Lynn Schofield Clark, Danielle Kirby, and others have suggested that the binaries of real and imaginary, sacred and profane, have become increasingly entangled and that some people are simply uninterested in them.  Adam Possamai has written on “hyper-real” religions in which fictional media is repurposed to create new religious worldviews.  In an essay entitled “The Postmodern Sacred,” Em McAvan suggests that contemporary subjects often encounter “real” religious symbols and ideas within the context of fictional and fantastic media.  The fact that traditional religious worldviews are constantly filtered and refracted through fictional media representations further breaks down the barriers of real and imaginary.

Lovecraft’s stories are the example, par excellence, of this creative confusion between real and imaginary.  Lovecraft’s stories were painstakingly researched and often blended factual details with fantasy (itself a kind of prank).  This convinced some readers that Lovecraft’s stories were actual occult lore masquerading as fiction.  In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft complained about another writer who was convinced that both he and Smith were genuine agents of dark powers.

Religion scholars such Doug Cowan, Wouter Hanegraaff, and Daryl Caterine have written on “Lovecraftian Magick,” which emerged in the 1970s.  This was a system of rituals devised to invoke Azathoth, Nyarlathothep, and other Lovecraftian horrors.  Some of these magicians (and some of their evangelical critics) claim that these entities, along with Lovecraft’s fictitious book The Necronomicon, are real.  But most the innovators of Lovecraftian magic were simply uninterested the binary of real and imaginary.  Many of the so-called “chaos magicians” who performed these rituals described this distinction as a form of cultural hegemony that they sought to overthrow.

Lovecraft’s stories can be read as a response to a fundamental dissatisfaction with the findings of reason.  For Lovecraft, the grim meaninglessness of the universe as defined by scientific-rationalism was so intolerable that even the possibility of world-destroying alien gods would be preferable.  Cthulhu and his ilk are beyond the limits of human reason and its facile patterns of explanation.  While horrifying, they cannot be assimilated into a profane order of rationalism.  In this sense, they are sacred.  Indeed, of all Lovecraft’s entities, Azathoth conforms the most closely to an Eliadean notion of the sacred.  In “The Whisperer in Darkness,” Azathoth is described as “the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name Azathoth.”  Azathoth, then, exists simultaneously at the center of the universe and completely beyond it.

Many of Lovecraft’s readers shared this longing for enchantment at any cost.  In an essay entitled Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houllebecq explains why the horrific world of Lovecraft’s stories is preferable to our own:

The paradox, however, is that we prefer this universe, hideous as it is, to our own reality.  In this, we are precisely the readers that Lovecraft anticipated.  We read his tales with the same exact disposition as that which prompted him to write them.  Satan or Nyarlathothep, either one will do, but we will not tolerate another moment of realism.

Here, Hoellebecq may well have captured the feelings of a frustrated young sculptor living in rural Oklahoma.

Even if modern people do not believe in Lovecraft’s entities, the longing for them to be real can be regarded as a “religious” impulse, especially when this longing results in challenges to the symbolic order.  For the so-called “chaos magicians” who developed Lovecraftian magick, performing rituals to a god invented by a pulp-fiction author was a way of challenging society’s right to declare what is “real.”  Through these rituals they sought to create a rift in the sacred canopy through which mysterious forces might enter.  The Azathoth Monument took this attack on profane reality further by bringing the forces of chaos out of the conjurer’s chamber and into a posh dining establishment.  The public was confronted with something new that could not be removed, ignored, or explained away.

The media attention (which while small, was utterly disproportionate to a misplaced block of concrete) as well as speculation over the monument’s meaning proves that the pranksters were successful.  While some dismissed the object as a prank or even garbage, others claimed it was art and offered to buy it.  Still others interpreted the monument as demonic and advised the staff of the Paseo Grill not to touch it.  In “Religion as a Cultural System,” Geertz describes a large toadstool that formed in a carpenter’s home in Java, inciting numerous Javanese to see the toadstool and devise theories as to what it meant.  Geertz wrote of this response: “The odd, strange, and uncanny simply must be accounted for––or again the conviction that it could be account for sustained.”  Like the giant toadstool, the Azathoth Monument introduced something from beyond our comfortable web of meaning and threatened a community’s ability to make sense of the world––at least for a short while.

The Azathoth Monument, along with the Cottingley Fairies and similar hoaxes, represents a longing for re-enchantment and a desire to introduce mysterious forces into the world.  The fact that the pranksters do not believe in these mysterious forces themselves does not undermine the religious significance of these pranks.  Like Lovecraft, the pranksters believe that there ought to be something worth believing in.  Through their pranks they give us what they cannot have themselves––a moment of confusion, fear, and wonder.

Joseph Laycock holds a PhD from Boston University and is a wandering adjunct at present.  He is currently busy with numerous publications on American religious history, foremost of which is a manuscript on the Catholic seer Veronica Lueken.

More than 2,000 tickets were issued last weekend by the Inspectional Services Department as an army of students returned to Boston and moved into their apartments for the school year. Tenants were not allowed to move into 30 units at two buildings, which were condemned, ISD officials said.

The School District of Philadelphia, the eighth largest school district in the United States, nestled in the country’s fifth largest city, will make history when it permanently closes it doors within the next two years.

"Moby Dick: a Memoir" - performance by d'Entremont 7:30pm $10

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

What’s wrong with the patent system?

Forecast the German election with our coalition tracker

ON SEPTEMBER 22nd Germans go to the polls. The six main political parties have enjoyed fairly consistent popularity ratings over the past year. Yet a change of just a few percentage points could tip the balance of power in terms of establishing a governing coalition.

Our interactive infographic lets people identify likely coalition combinations based on the latest polling figures, as well as track the popularity of the frontrunners for the chancellorship. Make your call on the coalition and predict which parties are on the road to the Reichstag.

Updated with comments from author Michael Kodas 9/3/13 |  The image above is a screenshot from a mind-blowing video shot from the cockpit of a California Air National Guard C130J aircraft as the crew gets ready to drop fire retardant on the massive Rim Fire. As I watched the video, I was struck by how low and slow these aircraft fly — and the risks taken by the crews. Is it worth the risk? The answer is not entirely clear. More about that in a minute. But first, make sure to click on t

Amazing! This sundial is digital in that it shows the time with digits, but it's not electrical:

Like a digital clock, the digital sundial displays the current time using digits. In the true tradition of all sundials, the device is purely passive - it operates without electricity, and has no moving parts. Instead, the sunlight is cast through two cleverly designed masks in the shape of numbers that show the current time of day. The sundial is available in two versions, for use in either hemisphere. Placed on the inside of a south-facing window (north-facing in the southern hemisphere), the sundial can be read through the horizontal mirror. The display updates every 10 minutes, and gives a remarkably accurate record of the time during the daylight hours.

Link -via TYWKIWDBI

I was a Libertarian in college. I even volunteered for the 1980 Ed Clark/David Koch (yes, that David Koch) Libertarian party presidential campaign. As promised, the following is the story of how I outgrew Libertarianism. There were three factors:

1. Hypocrisy
I became increasingly aware that many Libertarians arguing stridently against governmental regulation had business interests which would benefit directly. And while, as a Libertarian at the time, I saw nothing inherently wrong with greed, it bothered me that they claimed their political philosophy to be idealistic and sincere. Greed may be fine, but hypocrisy is not.

Furthermore, real Libertarianism isn't socio-economic Darwinism. It's not "fuck the poor". It doesn't blithely shrug at poverty and distress. The idea is for an unfettered free market to float everyone higher, and for vigorous private philanthropy to arise to patch up any social damage (to his credit, David Koch actually is one of the nation's top philanthropists). I was prepared to do my conscientious best to help. But few of my fellow idealists seemed as committed to the "patching up" part as they were to the "greed is good" part.

"Let the most ruthless grab all the gold, and hope someone patches up the wounded later" didn't strike me as a cause I could get behind.

2. Wariness of Egghead Utopias
As I studied political philosophy in college, I came to realize that there's no lastingly viable political system. In the long run, nothing works. Nothing has ever worked. Nothing ever will work. Every system is corruptible, and in the end all but a tiny minority gets screwed. Fortunately, things inevitably churn. Discontentment peaks, corrupt, unviable systems are overturned, and a fresh new corrupt, unviable system replaces it. The ending of Animal Farm is not a tale of failure. On contrary, it's humanity's sole saving grace that the pigs in charge are periodically replaced by slightly less entrenched pigs. That's really the best we can hope for. Blame Eve for eating that apple.

But every century or so eggheads proclaim some smug new utopian plan (which always sounds great on paper) destined to create a permanent steady state of prosperity and happiness. Communism was one. Libertarianism is another. But pure intellectual concepts always lack real world pragmatism. You can announce your brilliant pure plan but I don't believe it, I don't trust it, and I know it's bullshit before you even explain it to me.

3. Meeting Real Live Poor People
The idea made sense at first: level the competitive playing field, remove restrictions, and let the best and brightest superheat a blazing economy for the betterment of all. Sort of like America, but without the sludgey inefficiency. It also made sense that those who'd fall behind would have only themselves to blame. Hey, they had an equal shot, right?

I envisioned myself in such a scenario, making decisions, expending energy, and using my resourcefulness to compete. Yeah, it'd work! And I imagined some lazy dude (currently on, like, welfare or something), opting to hang out smoking Pall Malls in front of the 7-11. Fine, to each his own. We make our choices. It seemed equitable as I thought it all through.

Here's the problem with "thinking it all through":

You may have been following my series, "Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out", the story of how I sold Chowhound to CNET (now CBS). Here's a flash-ahead. There were times when my boss needed to make deep decisions about the site's future. I'd watch him close his eyes and envision how things would unfold, how it would impact users, etc.. But it was ludicrous because the guy knew nothing about food and had nothing in common with Chowhound's users. His taste, his vision, his ideas were from a different planet. Yet the vein on his forehead would pulse as he'd boldly envision it all. Very smart, very savvy...and invariably very wrong.

It can be useful to try to envision scenarios, but only if you have deep knowledge of the various factors. And my caricature of poor people hanging out in front of 7-11s wasn't exactly deep knowledge! As I'd envisioned it, libertarian societies made visceral good sense - but only because I was naive from my sheltered upbringing (show me a Libertarian, and I'll show you someone with a sheltered upbringing).

After graduation, I found myself living in a terrible shared apartment in a terrible neighborhood making $15,000/year as a jazz trombonist. I survived okay because I was smart, resourceful, and had middle class parents in the suburbs where I could, say, drive out and sleep in air conditioned comfort on hot August nights. I was educated. I had lots of smart, capable friends. I was articulate, young, intelligent, and healthy. I made a good impression. If trombone didn't work out, I had a world of possibilities open to me.

None of those things were true of the people around me. One fateful night, I had a beer with a grimly untalented middle-aged musician. He was neither a druggie nor an alcoholic, but he was only barely functional. He walked with a limp and didn't think too clearly. I looked into his eyes, and realized, with overwhelming empathy, that this guy, who'd worked hard all his life, and who was a really good, conscientious fellow, was hanging by a frigging thread, and had lived his entire life with one foot in the abyss. No resourcefulness, no connections, no education. Crappy genes, crappy family. And none of it was his fault. He was truly doing his very best with what he had. By just plain being there, reasonably healthy and well-fed, he'd overachieved more than I ever could hope to.

The scales fell from my eyes and for the first time I saw all my unearned advantages. And I fell into a reverie, envisioning myself with a never-ending lifelong case of flu, with fever impeding my intelligence, judgement and energy. My parents and friends were gone. I was on the verge of eviction from my apartment, and had no savings or education. I'd dropped out of high school to support myself, and had nobody smart to call for help or advice. No lifelines, no backup plans, no connections. Dizzy, feverish, and disheveled, I could hardly think straight. Let's add a couple of children to the picture, as well. Ok, hotshot: what's your move? How would you make out in a society with no safety net? What would be your odds? "My God," I thought to myself, shuddering with terror, "what on Earth would I do?"

After that night, I've had no interest at all in Libertarianism.

Original Source

Via Instagram (via FilmDrunk) comes a picture of Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, hugging, smiling, underneath a rainbow.

I bid you good day.

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The federal government has released the annual, insane list of valuable junk given to U.S. leaders by their international counterparts — Obama's stuff from France alone in 2011 totaled more than $40,000 — and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton's haul is a doozy. Among her 2012 gifts are a $560 bottle of cognac from Russia and jewelry worth an estimated $500,000 from the king of Saudi Arabia.

But as The Wall Street Journal notes, government employees can only keep gifts worth less than $350: "Most are turned over to the GSA, which manages government property. Some gifts are then donated, and others are sold to the public." Someone should probably tell these generous, obscenely wealthy foreign people to stop.

Read more posts by Joe Coscarelli

Filed Under: vladimir putin ,hillary clinton ,international intrigue ,diplomacy

The famously bizarre and inscrutable headlines that often adorn Bloomberg News articles are a cherished joke among journalists, most of all within Bloomberg itself. But they may be in danger of losing their peculiar edge.

Some prototypically odd headlines from the past year:

∞ Feeding Naked Chef’s Chickens Killing Biggest Bond Rally
∞ Mao’s Red Flag May Need to Evoke Panda DNA to Beat Audi
∞ Harvard Women Freed From Urinal 50 Years After First Female MBA
∞ BMW to Amazon Space Demand Spurs Rush to Inland Empire

That Bloomberg writes sometimes incomprehensible titles for its article is no secret. The phenomenon has a hashtag and a parody Twitter account. But now, to the chagrin of some Bloomberg News staff, someone important has taken notice.

“Several editors acknowledged that headline clarity can sometimes be an issue,” wrote journalist Clark Hoyt last month in a report commissioned by Bloomberg (pdf). He then ticked off a few headlines that had caught his eye:

∞ DSM’s Flirt With Red Hot Mamas Cuts Investor Love for Plastics
∞ Brokers Go Gray as Youth Proves Unsustainable With No Cold Calls
• Cold War With Soup Tempts East Europeans to Menus of HBO, Sony
• DoCoMo Cash, Girl Band Help Beat Softbank on Costs: Japan Credit

“I assume that, to them, it makes complete sense what they’ve written,” said the anonymous proprietor of Strange Bloomberg Headlines, a blog that has documented myriad examples since 2011. “They just don’t realize that a reader coming at it for the first time won’t understand what’s going on.”

He added, “The headlines usually make sense once you’ve read the article.”

That may no longer be sufficient. Hoyt’s recommendations, which Bloomberg said it would follow, included the appointment of a standards editor to, among other things, “review headlines for accuracy, clarity, and tone.”

Hoyt, who previously served as public editor of the New York Times, was hired by Bloomberg to review its journalistic ethics after the revelation that reporters had access to information about how Bloomberg customers used the company’s data and news terminals. Several large banks, which are responsible for the bulk of Bloomberg’s revenue, complained about the intrusion.

The Hoyt report ran just 20 pages but covered a lot of journalistic ground, surprising some Bloomberg editors. It’s not clear how seriously his recommendations will be taken, but he remains employed by the company. Bloomberg declined to make Hoyt available for an interview.

There’s a certain art to the Bloomberg headline—a pile of words that somehow adds up to something meaningful, if not understandable. Let’s pause for some more:

∞ Carney Not Yet With Pink Set Sharing Policies Beyond BOE Circle
∞ Shark Oil for HIV Shot Takes Cue From Hemingway’s Old Man
∞ Giraffe Mulling Suicide as ‘Terrorists’ Chant in Cairo
∞ Kill Your Wife While Sleepwalking or Get Goldman Touch

Most news organizations adopt headline conventions that, over time, become institutional clichés. (The New York Times: In Starting With a Prepositional Phrase, a Way to Sound Intelligent. Business Insider: BOOM: Here Is Something Extraordinarily Mundane. Quartz: Why everything you ever believed is a lie, in charts.) Other headlinese words—mull, see, probe, nix—are artifacts of space constraints imposed by narrow newspaper columns.

Space may also have something to do with how Bloomberg headlines got to be so odd. They are limited to 63 characters (45% of a tweet) to ensure the entire headline can fit on a single line of the terminal, which is the primary context in which Bloomberg News articles are read. “Billionaire Dethrones Kings in Beer to Burgers as Batista Model,” the headline on a profile of a Brazilian private-equity baron, ran exactly 63 characters and probably seemed more legible in the terminal than when the article found its way to the web. Much of Bloomberg’s journalism makes less sense as it gets further away from the terminal.

Inscrutability can also be a ploy for clicks. Bloomberg headlines like “Bieber Joins Ex-Addicts Fighting Chase in Prepaid Market” are often just intriguing enough to find out what the hell they mean. Certain terms alluring to Bloomberg’s clientele will find their way to the top of articles that are really about something else, as in this ur-headline (63 characters long): “Steve Jobs Spurs Harvard MBA to Drop McKinsey for China Website.”

Hoyt observed that Goldman Sachs makes regular appearances in Bloomberg headlines that have nothing to do with the bank: “The most egregious, ‘Ex-Goldmanite Trades on Girl Power of Stiletto Networks: Review,’ was over the review of a book by an author last connected with Goldman 11 years ago as a low-ranking associate.”

OK, just a few more:

∞ Ganges Turns Fecal Lab as Wealthy Bathe With Nude Mystics
∞ Where Raptors Roamed Rio’s Dream Stirs Water Worry
∞ Bin Laden’s Parrots Blood Fuel Boom in Pakistan Artists
∞ Forex During Birth Shows Asian Women Top Men Private Bankers

Within Bloomberg, the unofficial house style for headlines is beloved by many; choice examples are often emailed around the office. But the practice is hardly without critics at Bloomberg, who say the news organization should strive to be understood above all. Surely, market-moving headlines about breaking financial news, which many Bloomberg customers rely on for making trades, are almost always written with complete clarity. Why, they ask, shouldn’t everything else be held to the same standard?

The Bloomberg Way, a book by editor-in-chief Matt Winkler that serves as a bible for the company’s reporting, doesn’t mention clarity in its section on headlines. It advises that every headline include two or three of the following elements: “names,” “surprise,” “what’s at stake?,” and “conflict and conflict resolution.” Winkler, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment on his approach to headlines.

Some Bloomberg staffers say headline clarity was already improving before Hoyt’s report, driven by some top editors. That assessment was confirmed by the financier who runs Strange Bloomberg Headlines. (He asked not to be named.)

“It’s no longer an easy job to collect these things,” he said in an interview. “My activity slowed down quite a bit after a few months. The number of really obvious nonsense headlines went down a lot.”

Asked if he would rue a significant crackdown on strange headlines, the man said, “I’d miss them, sure. They’re like little puzzles.”

(via Ikaria Metallic Silver Sandals ► Ancient Greek Sandals » mytheresa) …Making a note…

I’m sure a lot of people don’t think of video games as pieces of art, but I’d say they’re wrong, and this proves it. Reddit user RudeBootie has put together a collection of 125 different backgrounds from various fighting backgrounds in animated GIF form, and they’re pretty mind-blowing.

As you can see above and below the artists that created these backgrounds did some fantastic things with pixels, and yes, it’s all pixel art. These images are packed with a ton of details and I’d have to imagine that backgrounds like these would take weeks to complete. My personal favorites are the blowing sand in the Egyptian scene above and the totally random manatees in the GIF below.

Don’t forget to check out the full collection by clicking here.

The airplane is called “Aero Martí,” and it is stuck in a kind of federal limbo. After two years of haphazard spending cuts in Washington, it has too little funding to function but too much to die. The plane was outfitted to fly over the ocean and broadcast an American-run TV station into Cuba. The effort was part of the long-running U.S. campaign to combat communism in Cuba by providing information to the Cuban people uncensored by their government. But Cuban officials jammed the signal almost immediately, and surveys showed that less than 1 percent of Cubans watched. Still, when Congress started making budget cuts, lawmakers refused to kill the plane. But then they allowed across-the-board “sequestration” cuts. And there was no more money for the fuel and pilots. So the plane sits in storage at taxpayer expense — a monument to the limits of American austerity. In this case, a push to eliminate long-troubled programs collided with old Washington forces: government inertia, intense lobbying and congressional pride. The result was a stalemate. And a plane left with just enough money to do nothing.

BOSTON (AP) — It's big, beautiful and free, but a 217-acre former prep school campus in the hills of northern Massachusetts has also proved tough to give away.

The state Supreme Judicial Court will begin hearing arguments this week in an atheist Acton couple’s quest to strike the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance their children say in the Acton-Boxboro Regional School District.

The couple’s suit, filed anonymously on behalf of their three children, goes to the SJC tomorrow, with a pair of Washington, D.C., activist organizations 
taking part in the proceedings.

thebrigadiersmoustache:

Nyssa - "I’m not going with you. There’s too much to be done here."

Who By Elevens | Eleven Companions

obscenemachine:

The saddest part is that their arguement is never fully resolved… because Adric dies a few hours later

'Nduja is a spicy spreadable sausage made with pork. It is typically made with parts of the pig such as the shoulder, belly and jowl, as well as tripe, roasted peppers and a mixture of spices. It is a Calabrian variation of salami, loosely based on the French andouille introduced in the 13th century by the Angevins. The name derives from the Latin "inducere". 'Nduja is made using meat from the head (minus the cheeks, which are used for guanciale), trimmings from various meat cuts, some clean skin, fatback, and roasted hot red peppers which give 'nduja its characteristic fiery taste. 'Nduja originates from the southern part of Calabria, namely from the small town of Spilinga and its neighborhood.

More than two decades after they vanished from Cuban TV with the fall of the eastern communist bloc, quirky Soviet-era cartoons are fueling a wave of nostalgia for middle-aged Cubans. The "Russian cartoons" as Cubans tend to call them -- though they were from several different allied countries -- have inspired T-shirts honoring old shows like the Soviet "Mashinka and the bear", Poland's "Lolek and Bolek", and the Hungarian hit "Gustavo."

explainshell.com:

Write down a command-line to see the help text that matches each argument (support for pipes, redirections and other special shell syntax will be added later on).

lolzpicx:

cartoon logic.

Troubling new trend alert: In the last few months, there’s been a preponderance of Craigslist ads selling positive pregnancy tests.