Russian Sledges

Want to feel like you're part of a decadent crumbling society that oppresses the working classes and forces children to kill each other for your amusement? CoverGirl has you covered, with their decadent new Hunger Games makeup line.

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A dagger, or obelisk, U+2020 † dagger (HTML: † †), is a typographical symbol or glyph. The term "obelisk" derives from Greek ὀβελίσκος (obeliskos), which means "little obelus"; from Ancient Greek: ὀβελός (obelos) meaning "roasting spit".[1] It was originally represented by the ÷ symbol and was first used by the Ancient Greek scholars as critical marks in manuscripts. A double dagger or diesis, U+2021 ‡ double dagger (HTML: ‡ ‡), is a variant with two handles.

The Trypophobia subreddit is a place for posting photos of things with clusters of small holes or pits in them, like lotus plants, funguses, multi-chambered plants, and strange infections. Trypophobia is the (not medically recognized) fear of "objects with small holes." It sounded weird to me, but after clicking through the first couple-dozen links, I was massively squicked. Shown here, Ethiopian injera bread from Apple Pie, Patis, and Pâté Recipes. Normally, I love the stuff, but in the context, I have to admit, it gives me the frisson.

The most common phobia you've never heard of. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

From food stamps to Medicare, fraudsters are usually managers and executives, not 'welfare queens.'

Google’s “20% time,” which allows employees to take one day a week to work on side projects, effectively no longer exists. That’s according to former Google employees, one who spoke to Quartz on the condition of anonymity and others who have said it publicly.

What happened to the company’s most famous and most imitated perk? For many employees, it has become too difficult to take time off from their day jobs to work on independent projects.

This is a strategic shift for Google that has implications for how the company stays competitive, yet there has never been an official acknowledgement by Google management that the policy is moribund. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment from Quartz.

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“The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.” —Julia Child

 

“A knitting group said it was no longer allowed to meet at a library because its needles are “dangerous” and its members are too noisy. The Knit ‘n’ Natter group met at the library in Cramlington, Northumberland once a week to knit replica anatomical parts for training NHS midwives. But now the library has moved and the knitters said Northumberland County Council had barred them. (via BBC News)

sandandglass:

Jessica Williams proposes applying New York’s Stop and Frisk policy to Wall Street bankers. 

Like the water-filled plastic bags, the glass sphere functions as a sustainable pesticide. The refracted water reflects and amplifies colors and movements, irritating the fly’s the sensitive eyes to repel it unharmed, while leaving food free of flies in a no fly zone. (via Outdoor Hanging Glass Sculpture Functions As a Sustainable Fly Repellent | Urban Gardens)

Growing up outside of Chicago, one of my favorite places in the city was The Museum Of Broadcast Communications. They’ve got an extensive collection of old commercials—I’m talking black-and-white Alka Seltzer ad old—that you can watch in little viewing cubicles. It’s definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area, but if you’re not, there’s [...]

Openings, closings…

KAIN’BIGAN Filipino comfort food spot Kain’bigan had its soft opening in Oakland this week at 2101 14th Ave. Each day, Chef Charleen Caabay “creates a daily special based on the fresh and seasonal ingredients she finds at local markets throughout the Bay,” according to the company’s website. The business is open daily from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and menu offerings include Filipino breakfast with garlic rice, chicken and pork adobo, sweet cured pork sausage, and vegetable or shrimp lumpia (pastries similar to fried egg rolls). Caabay’s restaurant may be new, but she’s not new to the area, having worked at The Den inside the Fox Theater, Somar, Oakland Art Murmur and more. Learn more on Kain’bigan’s Facebook page.

HOI POLLOI Hoi Polloi Brewpub and Beat Lounge, which we first featured in March, is on track with its development plans, having just had its building permit approved Wednesday. The nano-brewpub is set to open in the Lorin District at 1763 Alcatraz Ave., next door to Easy Creole. Owner Viet Vu told Berkeleyside Hoi Polloi will be a “place where people can have conversation,” unhindered by television, with a soundtrack that will run the gamut from underground hip hop to indie rock. The space, with room for 30-40 people, will feature a bar and a few tables, with brew kettles and fermentation tanks in the back.(...)

Read the rest of Bites: What’s new in East Bay food XXXV (1,025 words)

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By emilie. | Permalink | 3 comments |
Post tags: Berkeley dining, Bites: What’s new in East Bay food, Dine and Unwind, Doughnut Dolly, Gogi Time, Hoi Polloi, Kain’bigan, Lucky Three Seven, Lungomare, Oakland dining, Oakland Restaurant Association, Pollinate Farm & Garden, Ramen Shop, The Mushroom Maestros, Vinity Wine Company

If Sheridan was unpopular in Texas, neither did he have much appreciation for the Lone Star State. In 1866 newspapers quoted him as saying, "If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell", a statement which he repeated in later years in various forms.

I don't have much to say about the latest tempest in a teapot over the non-literal use of "literally." It started, as such things often do these days, on Reddit, where a participant in the /r/funny subreddit posted an imgur image showing Google's dictionary entry for "literally" that pops up when you search on the word. The second definition reads, "Used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true." That was enough for the redditor to declare, "We did it guys, we finally killed English." As the news pinged around the blogosphere, we got such fire-breathing headlines as "Society Crumbles as Google Admits 'Literally' Now Means 'Figuratively'," "Google Sides With Traitors To The English Language Over Dictionary Definition Of 'Literally'," "I Could Literally Die Right Now," and "It’s Official: The Internet Has Broken the English Language."

The outrage was further heightened by the realization that (gasp!) pretty much every major dictionary from the OED on down now recognizes this sense of the word. So now we get vitriol directed toward the OED's lexicographers, who revised the entry for "literally" back in September 2011, coming from such sources as The Times, The Daily Mail, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. [Update: As Fiona McPherson points out on the OxfordWords blog, the usage was actually noted in the "literally" entry when it was first published in 1903. The 2011 revision reorganized the entry and expanded the historical record.]

I've previously shared my thoughts on "literally" here on Language Log in a 2005 post discussing a piece on Slate by the OED's Jesse Sheidlower, as well as in a Word Routes column in 2008 ("Really! Truly! Literally!"). If I were pressed to find a silver lining in the latest round of hand-wringing, it would be this: many people are now learning about Frances Brooke, the novelist who is responsible for the earliest OED citation for the hyperbolic sense of "literally," from 1769. I first dug up the citation for the 2005 Language Log post, and it eventually worked its way into the OED's 2011 revision:

(You can read Brooke's History of Emily Montague, an epistolary novel, online here. As Wikipedia informs us, it holds the distinction of being the first novel written in Canada — she lived in Quebec from 1763 to 1768 before returning to England.)

The British press has duly noted that the maligned use of "literally" has been lingering since Brooke's time, but that hasn't stemmed the outrage: it's still wrong, they all say, even if it's been in continuous use for two and a half centuries. But it's a little inconvenient for the peevers, who would much rather blame Google or "the Internet" for the destruction of English. It doesn't make for as good a story to hold an 18th-century novelist responsible for "breaking the English language." Somehow, we've managed to soldier on since the linguistic horror perpetrated by the dastardly Mrs. Brooke.

would eat there

"Obama will claim we need a national police force in order to fight terrorism and crime. The Boston bombing is a useful start, especially when combined with random shootings by crazy people. "Where will he get his 'national police'? The NaPo will be recruited from 'young out-of-work urban men' and it will be hailed as a cure for the economic malaise of the inner cities. "In other words, Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama's enemies. "Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people 'trying to escape' -- people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama."

During WWII, Japanese schoolgirls were called out of school because of their nimble fingers. They brushed root paste on washi paper and layered it, pasted pieces to pieces across sumo halls, courtyards, school auditoriums. They made paper balloons like this … Continue reading →

Boston Public Library posted a photo:

File name: 10_03_002017a
Binder label: Tobacco / Cigarettes
Title: Quakeress [front]
Created/Published: N. Y. : Burrow-Giles Lith. Co.
Date issued: 1870 - 1900 (approximate)
Physical description: 1 print : chromolithograph ; 12 x 9 cm.
Genre: Advertising cards
Subject: Women; Cigars
Notes: Title from item.
Statement of responsibility: Reliance Cigar Factory
Collection: 19th Century American Trade Cards
Location: Boston Public Library, Print Department
Rights: No known restrictions.

As the ombudsman at the Washington Post, Patrick Pexton was charged with being the prestigious paper's internal watchdog, making sure it complied with journalistic ethics and offering a public finger wag when it did not. Then, when his term was up in March, The Post replaced him with a part-time employee. Such are the new times for old media.

But he's not done dispensing tough love for a newspaper where he worked for years, writing an essay for the alt-weekly Washington City Paper with his advice Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who recently purchased The Post. One of his top recommendations: Fire conservative opinion blogger Jennifer Rubin:

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Dear anyone. If a restaurant invites you to a "friends and family" writing a public negative review is a cunty thing to do.

Fair-market rent for the average two-bedroom apartment in the San Francisco metropolitan area will run you about $1,795 a month (that's for the metro area, not the city proper; the latter number is even more absurd). That makes San Francisco the second most expensive rental metro in the country, behind Honolulu. And the number has two major implications: Increasingly, only certain occupations can afford to live in the region. Meanwhile, all kinds of workers any city needs – bank tellers, parking lot attendants, fire fighters – cannot.

So what happens when a city becomes unaffordable to the people who keep it running?

Full-time fast-food workers famously have a hard time getting by wherever they live. But the same is true in many metropolitan areas for decidedly less-maligned jobs like child-care worker, home health aid... and urban planner. Details from the depressing intersection of high housing costs and low wage growth come from an updated database by the Center for Housing Policy that runs the numbers on 76 occupations in 207 metro areas.

A full-time income for a housekeeper or a waitress with intermediate-level experience won't cover fair-market rent for a two-bedroom in any one of these metro areas (should said housekeeper or waitress be, say, a single mom). Drill in to a metro like San Francisco, and all kinds of occupations won't even cover a one-bedroom (based on the standard that you shouldn't devote more than a third of your income to housing):

This ultimately means that people needed to work in downtown restaurants and hospitals, or well-to-do neighborhoods, often must live at the far reaches of a metro area. Or it means they're spending way more on their housing than a family budget can really afford.

"It’s all part of this tradeoff that lower-income, even moderate-income workers are having to make," says Maya Brennan, a senior research associate with the Center for Housing Policy. "What am I going to sacrifice here? Am I going to sacrifice space and try to squeeze people into a smaller home, or sacrifice the length of my commute, or is it going to be money for food, retirement savings, money for my kids? What’s going to give in order for this housing and wage mismatch to realign?"

You can pull numbers on every one of these jobs and cities, for both rental properties and owning a home, through the Paycheck to Paycheck database. Homeownership is understandably even farther out of reach in most of these places (although renting is now cheaper in a few locations where people can at least afford to make a down payment). But for a more realistic picture, we also pulled some discouraging occupations from two other metro areas among the nation's most expensive, Washington and Boston.

Here we found at least one livable job: auto mechanic.

Top image: sculpies/Shutterstock.com

Несомненно, корейские ученые, порадовавшие свою Родину заметными результатами своей повседневной деятельности заслуживают всяческого поощрения. Главными стимулами в их работе являются высокое доверие со стороны Полководца Ким Чен Ына и безграничное уважение всего народа. Без них стали бы невозможны те великие изобретения, весть о которых недавно так взволновала весь мир.

Согретые теплыми лучами любви Верховного Главнокомандующего интеллигенция КНДР вновь продемонстрирует миру полное торжество  чучхейского стиля и метода руководства наукой!
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Первый секретарь ТПК, Первый Председатель ГКО КНДР, Верховный Главнокомандующий КНА уважаемый Маршал Ким Чен Ын посетил стройку жилых домов ученых на завершающей стадии.

Глядя на облицованный кафельными плитками 17-й корпус жилого массива, он с большим удовольствием сказал, что дом выглядит красавцем.

Ким Чен Ын осмотрел квартиры № 1, 2 на первом этаже 17-го корпуса.

Конкретно узнавая о положении дел при строительстве внутренней части, он с большим вниманием рассмотрел цвет обоев и мебель, предназначенную на новые квартиры.

Надо как следует обеспечить ученых всеми условиями, чтобы они во время новоселья приносили только предметы личного пользования и любимую домашнюю утварь, просил лидер страны.

После осмотра жилых домов Ким Чен Ын наметил задачи для завершения строительства.


Он спросил о результатах строительства школы, детсада, больницы и других общественных зданий, учреждений бытового обслуживания и сказал, что нужно налаживать строительные работы по плану.

Уважаемый Маршал Ким Чен Ын распорядился завершить жилые дома ученых на зависть миру.

When first encountering this body of photographs Madrid-based advertising and industrial photographer Miguel Vallinas it’s easy to view it as a familiar “animals dressed as people” project. But as you look closer you realize it’s quite a bit more than that. Aside from the solid retouching, lighting and overall execution, Vallinas took this anthropomorphic project a bit further and imagined what the fully-realized wardrobe of each animal might look like if it were wearing human clothes.

Titled Segundas Pieles (Second Skins), the ongoing series includes some 50+ animals whose personalities seem to be perfectly amplified by their pitch-perfect attire, making the portaits just a bit more human than animal. I’m pretty sure the hipster bird in the cardigan works at a coffee shop by my house. The work is a sister project to another series called simply Pieles where the photographer portrays himself in a wide range of professions. (via lustik)

popular shared this story from kottke.org.

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For the Journal of the American Revolution, Todd Andrlik compiled a list of the ages of the key participants in the Revolutionary War as of July 4, 1776. Many of them were surprisingly young:

Marquis de Lafayette, 18
James Monroe, 18
Gilbert Stuart, 20
Aaron Burr, 20
Alexander Hamilton, 21
Betsy Ross, 24
James Madison, 25

This is kind of blowing my mind...because of the compression of history, I'd always assumed all these people were around the same age. But in thinking about it, all startups need young people...Hamilton, Lafayette, and Burr were perhaps the Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg of the War. Some more ages, just for reference:

Thomas Jefferson, 33
John Adams, 40
Paul Revere, 41
George Washington, 44
Samuel Adams, 53

The oldest prominent participant in the Revolution, by a wide margin, was Benjamin Franklin, who was 70 years old on July 4, 1776. Franklin was a full two generations removed from the likes of Madison and Hamilton. But the oldest participant in the war was Samuel Whittemore, who fought in an early skirmish at the age of 80. I'll let Wikipedia take it from here:

Whittemore was in his fields when he spotted an approaching British relief brigade under Earl Percy, sent to assist the retreat. Whittemore loaded his musket and ambushed the British from behind a nearby stone wall, killing one soldier. He then drew his dueling pistols and killed a grenadier and mortally wounded a second. By the time Whittemore had fired his third shot, a British detachment reached his position; Whittemore drew his sword and attacked. He was shot in the face, bayoneted thirteen times, and left for dead in a pool of blood. He was found alive, trying to load his musket to fight again. He was taken to Dr. Cotton Tufts of Medford, who perceived no hope for his survival. However, Whittemore lived another 18 years until dying of natural causes at the age of 98.

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Tags: history   lists   Revolutionary War   Samuel Whittemore   Todd Andrlik   USA   war

Boston Public Library posted a photo:

File name: 10_03_002142a
Binder label: Perfume/Hair Products
Title: Buckingham's Dye for the Whiskers. Use this dye and prevent the unwelcome marks of age. [front]
Date issued: 1870 - 1900 (approximate)
Physical description: 1 print : chromolithograph ; 9 x 8 cm.
Genre: Advertising cards
Subject: Men; Hair preparations
Notes: Title from item.
Statement of responsibility: R. P. Hall & Co.
Collection: 19th Century American Trade Cards
Location: Boston Public Library, Print Department
Rights: No known restrictions.

sexycodicology:

New on Sexy Codicology: The Adventures of Medieval Bunny!
Above, part one and two of ninja killer bunny.

(BL Add. MS 49622 and Paris, Bibl. de la Sorbonne, ms. 0121)

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"That rabbit’s got a vicious streak a mile wide! It’s a killer!"

imaginarycircus:

pbs-food:

Julia and the Swordfish

Happy Birthday Julia!

SHE HAS A SAW AND A CLEAVER.

I have always loved this woman.

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

Yo momma so fat when she take the Red Line they have to shut it down in both directions due to grease fires

Grease on tracks just outbound from South Station ignited in four separate spots shortly before 8 p.m.

The T shut Red Line service in both directions. Firefighters at first responded to Broadway due to heavy smoke. After evacuating the station, however, they discovered the smoke had been blown into that station through the tunnel from South Station.

Why there might be grease on the tracks.

Original Source