Russian Sledges

An instant MoOM classic, Gallery of Tea Tags.

Just in case you weren't already aware of how difficult it is to survive on minimum wage, allow McDonald's to lay it all out for you. The fast food giant has partnered with Visa to release a just-shy-of-condescending "budget journal" to help their employees manage their finances. In a hilariously obtuse budget breakdown, the Big Mac purveyor's first piece of advice to employees: get a second job. Yup, even McDonald's knows that workers can't survive on the pittance they make flipping patties and fighting off customers. [ more › ]

Steven Moffat has been talking to Entertainment Weekly about the eagerly awaited Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special and has stressed that the episode very much revolves around David Tennant and Matt Smith's Doctors.
"People say, 'Are you going to do the eleven Doctors?', We can't do eleven Doctors! Three of them are dead!"
And although the episode will see fan favourites David Tennant and Billie Piper retun Moffat says it's not a big reunion style episode:
"What we're not doing is the traditional massive reunion. It's a different kind of anniversary, and the spine of that is David and Matt." 

Burzum frontman and Euronymous killer Varg Vikernes has been arrested in France for allegedly plotting a massacre. Vikernes was pinched at his farm near Salon-La-Tour, France, and the police are currently in the process of searching his farm for weapons. Motives for the alleged murder plot are unclear, but numerous French sources are pointing readers to an open letter he wrote in 2011 to Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Oslo that same year.

This is, of course, not Vikernes’ first brush with Johnny Law. He stabbed Mayhem guitarist Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth to death in 1993, receiving a sentence of 21 years in prison for the murder in 1994. Vikernes was released in 2009, after having becoming affiliated with both Germanic paganism and what he calls Odalism (and others call neo-Nazism) in prison. He's also suspected of burning down at least three Norwegian churches in 1992, but he ...

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	Courtney shared this story from Yo, Is This Racist?:
	oh snap!

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anonymous asked: Yo I’m so confused - why aren’t the NRA releasing a statement to say that the tragedy wouldn’t have happened if only Trayvon Martin was armed, and calling on young black men to get themselves guns? Surely that’s the kind of thing they like to do?

It’s allllmoooooooooost like they are a bunch of racist assholes?

I first saw Ghost World when I was entering my freshman year of high school and, in retrospect, it was the perfect film to usher in that period of my life. Based on the Daniel Clowes comic of the same name, the film centers around Enid (Thora Birch), a sarcastic, slightly misanthropic artist during the summer after her high school graduation. Without any college or career prospects, Enid whiles away much of her time with her best friend, the equally jaded Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson)—hanging out in diners, following strangers, and swapping witty observations about the world around them. Enid and Rebecca’s relationship hits a speed bump, however, when the two stumble upon Seymour, an introverted blues enthusiast (Steve Buscemi) who draws Enid in with his bizarre interests and offbeat charm.

Thora Birch is no stranger to playing angst-ridden teenagers in middle-American suburban wastelands (anyone remember her role in American Beauty?). Daniel Clowes’ Enid, however, proves a fantastic foil to the monotonous, oftentimes nonsensical world around her—she is brimming with curiosity, artistic drive, and wry wit. With a killer sense of style, amazing taste in music, and the little black bob that launched a million little black bobs, Enid is certainly the style icon of a generation—and the perfect alt role model for any teenager (or teenager at heart). —Max

1. Plaid Dress | 2. Fetch Eyewear Glasses | 3. Dr. Martens Boots | 4. Manic Panic Hair Dye | 5. Milkshake Glass | 6. Batman Mask | 7. Patio Folding Chair | 8. VHS Tapes | 9. Wall-mounted Ironing Station

(more…)

~Alison Kafer

2 oz Rye
1 oz Campari
1/2 barspoon Henri Bardouin Pastis
2 dash Peychaud's Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Twist an orange peel over the top.

After Brick & Mortar, I headed across the street to Rendezvous to meet up with Andrea for dinner. There, bartender Scott Holliday wanted to make me the Red Dwarf - a drink I had read about in Luke O'Neil's article in the Boston Globe. The article describes how Scott took several classics including the Cocktail à la Louisiane, Boulevardier, and Sazerac and invented something inspired by these drinks. Scott was quoted as saying, "What we've done with the Peychaud's and pastis or absinthe is replace the aromatics of the vermouth in those cocktails with less sweetness, as you'd hoped, all while tipping the glass in the direction of New Orleans and Father Sazerac."
The orange oil from the twist played pleasantly with the herbal aromas of the Campari. Next, the rye's malt on the sip transitioned into its barrel notes on the swallow; afterwards, the Campari's complexity came through and things ended with the pastis' anise and other herbal flavors.

33-year-old director Neill Blomkamp came out of nowhere with 2009's District 9. Good thing he did: Beyond making a great, game-changing film, Blomkamp is legit interesting; his Wired profile proves it. You can read the whole thing here, but below are nine interesting tidbits. Learn about the very unlikely people who were supposed to star in Elysium instead of Matt Damon, why the director loves Michael Bay, and more.

1. He turned down the opportunity to work on the new Star Wars movie when Simon Kinberg, his friend and Elysium producer who's also working on the restarted franchise, brought it up. He's hesitant to work on someone else's ideas, especially one with such high expectations.

2. Elysium was not meant to reference the Occupy movement in any way.

3. Early in the production of Elysium, Blomkamp approached Die Antwoord's Ninja to star in what would've been a lower budget version.

4. When Ninja said no, he approached Eminem. Eminem said he'd only do it if they'd shoot in Detroit.

5. Blomkamp loves Michael Bay. “It’s not just blowing stuff up,” he explains. “I like the way he composes scenes and action. He’s inspiring.” At 19, he took a trip to L.A. to try to meet him.

6. As a kid, Blomkamp was obsessed with designer Syd Mead, who worked on Aliens and Blade Runner. At 80, Mead designed sets for Elysium.

7. He and his writing partner/wife Terri Tatchell have written an eighteen-page treatment for District 10, but he's not sure when he'll make it, as he has other ideas he wants to pursue first.

8. One such idea is Mild Oats, which he described as “somewhere between John Waters and Jackass.” Here's a description of a prop from the project: "A 3-foot-tall, photo-realistic silicone puppet rocking a mullet and jailhouse tattoos. The deranged redneck stands completely naked, revealing six nipples and a prodigious, uncircumcised penis. The character’s name, Marvin, is inked on said organ in gothic lettering."

9. In the next six years, he hopes to buy a skyscraper in downtown Johannesburg. He sees it as his own version of Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation headquarters or Elysium.

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Filed Under: neill blomkamp ,elysium ,movies ,fun facts

Richard Cohen's column in Tuesday's Washington Post— arguing that George Zimmerman was right to assume Trayvon Martin was a criminal, because he was a black male—is racist and wrong. More important, it's wrong because it's racist. That is, it's not that Cohen is "wrong" in the oh-that's-so-politically-incorrect sense. It's that he's wrong because the assumptions he makes about race and crime are not based on facts.

Cohen appears to believe all black men are the same, and that they are violent. Cohen says he's "tired" of politicians and activists "who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist." He justifies Zimmerman's assumption that Martin was a criminal by citing statistics about crime in New York. "In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects—almost all of them young men," Cohen writes. "We know them from the nightly news." While New York's stop-and-frisk program has been criticized for disproportionately targeting minorities, Cohen says, "if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk." If police "ignore race, then they are fools and ought to go into another line of work."

"Urban crime" is shorthand for young black people committing crimes in big cities on the verge of collapse. But Martin wasn't killed in Cabrini-Green. He was killed in Sanford, Florida (population 53,570), inside a gated community called the Retreat at Twin Lakes, which has about 260 townhouses. The alleged crime was a suburban crime. And, just for the record, it was not the black kid who was just acquitted of it.

Cohen is trying to conjure images of urban blight in the 1980s—back when, as Matt Yglesias points out, Cohen argued that it was okay for jewelry store owners to refuse to let black people in because they were afraid of crime. Today, Cohen writes that even the black male president should be scared of black males:

In his acclaimed Philadelphia speech on race, [President Obama] cited his grandmother as “a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street.”

How about the former Barry Obama? When he was a Columbia University student living on the lip of then-dangerous Harlem, did he never have the same fear?

The thing is, a lot has changed since the 1980s. Reading Cohen's column, you'd get the impression that there was an epidemic of crime committed by black people. Too bad he didn't read Jamelle Bouie's article in The Daily Beast a day earlier, about "the Myth of Black-on-Black Crime." Crime rates have been dropping for 20 years. (Just for the record, New York's murder rate in 2012 was the lowest since the 1960s.) If black people were predisposed to committing crimes, Bouie points out, "you would still see high rates of crime among blacks, even as the nation sees a historic decline in criminal offenses. Instead, crime rates among African-Americans, and black youth in particular, have taken a sharp drop." Fewer than 10 percent of black kids in Washington, D.C., the home of Cohen's employer, "are in a gang, have sold drugs, have carried a gun, or have stolen more than $100 in goods."

Cohen is upset that no one is talking about the epidemic of black violence that isn't real. "Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males?" he asks. "Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment... It is, like sex in the Victorian era (or the 1950s), an unmentionable but unmistakable part of life."

It is unacceptable to complain that "nobody is talking about X" when you have an Internet connection. You can find people talking about anything. Email me, and I can point you to the top 10 '90s nostalgia GIF tumblrs. But you wouldn't need to dig for people saying we should be afraid of black violence—warning, say, that black people would riot if Zimmerman were acquitted. You could just flip on Rush Limbaugh.

Studies have shown poverty has more to do with crime than race does. More unexpectedly, research published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2001 found that people are more likely to think their neighborhood has a higher crime rate if more young black men live there. The Retreat at Twin Lakes is a multi-ethnic neighborhood—about half white, 20 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent black, The Daily Beast's Amy Green reports. George Zimmerman had called police 46 times. He organized the neighborhood watch. Cohen writes, "There’s no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman profiled Martin and, braced by a gun, set off in quest of heroism. The result was a quintessentially American tragedy—the death of a young man understandably suspected because he was black and tragically dead for the same reason." With his column, Cohen is perpetuating the attitude that made that tragedy possible.

The singer said he won’t perform in any state or part of the world that has a Stand Your Ground self-defense law like Florida’s.

demonsee:

Cumberbatch and The Stig

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me." - Anglican Mainstream, reacting to yesterday's House Of Lords decision by quoting Martin Neimoller. Because gay marriage = the Holocaust. Or something. (Via Gay Star News

NEW YORK — Not many people owned a copy of "The Cuckoo's Calling" before word leaked out over the weekend that author Robert Galbraith was, in fact, J.K. Rowling.

But among those who did, a handful managed to get a signed edition. And that could mean a lot of money.

Last week saw the announcement that Fox is adapting Alan Moore’s League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a TV show, officially starting the countdown clock on when someone would phone Moore for a quote disparaging yet another attempt to adapt one of his works. Turns out that someone was Entertainment Weekly, and the quote is every bit as acerbic as you’d expect. It also includes the word “spittoon”—which you maybe didn’t expect, but you have to admit it fits in nicely with League’s Victorian-era setting: 

“Me and Kevin [O’Neill, co-creator] have been chuckling about that one, we only heard about it the other day. When [DC Comics] did the recent Watchmen prequel comics I said all of sorts of deeply offensive things about the modern entertainment industry clearly having no ideas of its own and having to go through dust bins and spittoons in the ...

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maptitude:

Apparently Australia used to have an inland sea? Not really, but for some reason early explorers thought there would be one there. This map by Thomas Maslen, who worked in the East India Company, was drawn in 1827.

Ms. Popova was a member of a renowned unit of deadly female Soviet pilots called the “Night Witches” by German invaders because of the sound their plywood planes made.

On March 2013, in co-operation with fundamental construction and authorized by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH), Yantai Museum has organized an archaeological team and excavated, as a means of rescue, a series of burials in the area. On May 16th, while cleaning tomb no.73, the archaeologists found liquid material in a pottery pot buried there. They protected it immediately and sampled it for examination. It has been confirmed to be light-fragranced “baijiu” (white liquor).   

La Russie a aidé à transformer le jeune homme en traître aux yeux de l'opinion américaine, estime la politologue Lilia Shevtsova.

I don’t want to see this

At The New Yorker, Jon Michaud looks at why Frank Herbert's space opera, Dune, endures despite failing to ender the public consciousness the way Lord of the Rings and Star Wars have.

There are no “Dune” conventions. Catchphrases from the book have not entered the language. Nevertheless ... With daily reminders of the intensifying effects of global warming, the spectre of a worldwide water shortage, and continued political upheaval in the oil-rich Middle East, it is possible that “Dune” is even more relevant now than when it was first published. If you haven’t read it lately, it’s worth a return visit. If you’ve never read it, you should find time to.

A good article, which points out how the first novel's brilliance has been obscured by a distinctly second-rate franchise. A more salient reason Dune didn't penetrate massivedom, though, is simply that the movie wasn't good enough and it bombed. To seal the pop culture deal—and popular culture isn't quite the same thing as mere success or awareness—the screen is all-important. It's the moment of translation, the emergence of a story from the cocoon of literature to the glare of popular culture in all its splendor and squalor. A brilliantly-imagined but confused movie by David Lynch made Dune too weird, and a SyFy TV series made it too cheap. This puts it where Lord of the Rings was before Peter Jackson: pregnant with cinematic possibility, but misshapen by prior efforts.

But hey, it could be worse! You could be into Earthsea, which has had two movies made of it, each terrible in entirely different ways except one: both replaced the protagonist of color with a white dude.

Japanese brand Glico has teamed up with Lucasfilm to make a whole line of Star Wars branded snacks, including multi-colored lightsaber versions of their popular food sticks, Giant Pocky (8 inches long!) and Pocky. Dominique of Foodbeast writes “the ‘Green Tea’ one is the little green guy’s, the ‘Grape’ one is Luke’s and the ‘Strawberry’ one belongs to the Sith Lord himself.” The whole line of Star Wars food items can be viewed at Glico’s website (in Japanese only) and the Pocky snacks can be found for sale on ebay.

images via Glico, video via Japanese Stuff Channel

via Eataku, Foodbeast

"Destination… ARLINGTON and Beyond!"

This was the brochure given out by the MBTA to build support for the proposed extension of the Red Line from Harvard to Lexington through Arlington.  The town declined service opting for improved bus service and a commuter bike path.

It was hearing about this line through my home town that got me thinking about finding old maps of proposed and never built lines.  This brochure I got as a gift for my birthday 10 years ago and helped launch the futureMBTA.

Eric Hodgson, a California citizen who was attempting to defraud $2 million from the California State Department of Transportation, has lightened his sentence by relinquishing a number of his possessions to the state.  Among these possessions is $10,000 worth of Star Wars merchandise, which, apparently, now belongs to the state of California.

A new study suggests that people who write fake negative reviews on online sites might not just be trollin'. In actuality, many authors of unhappy reviews are actually devoted customers of the restaurants and shops in question. Citing the idea that "your best friends are your worst critics," researchers concluded that many customers sharing negative experiences consider themselves "self-appointed brand managers" who just need to vent. [Bits/NYT]

Elon Musk wants to revolutionize transportation. Again. The serial entrepreneur envisions a future where mag-lev trains in enormous pneumatic tubes whisk us from Los Angeles to New York in 45 minutes. Need to be in Beijing tomorrow? No problem. It's a two-hour ride away.

#out of context every tos scene is an opening to a gay porno

The Musée des Arts Décoratifs will unveil an ‘underworld’ exhibition on July 5^th that explores the history of both the female and the male silhouette – and its undergarment counterpart – dating as far back as the 14^th century. This retrospective presents intimates of various shapes, sizes, materials, and functions according to the changing fashions and the ideal beauty of the time. Showcased here are techniques that span the pannier and the bustle through to the corset and the stomach belt, while materials range whalebones, hoops, and padding. Such rather “mechanical garments” were used as a means for women and men to draw their silhouettes. La Mécanique des Dessous reinterprets the seductive intimates market of today through the illusory garments of the past. –Sarah Ryan Hecht

La Mécanique des Dessous: une histoire indiscrète de la silhouette

On view through November 24^th at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs

107 rue de Rivoli 75001

+33 (0)144555750

Photos courtesy of the museum