Russian Sledges

Yesterday J and I took the T into Boston to go to the Museum of Fine Arts, where we saw Paul Cezanne’s “The Large Bathers,” which is currently on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as an exhibit of samurai armor. Although I don’t know much about Cezanne or the samurai, I was enchanted by both exhibits, albeit in entirely different ways.

Cezanne’s “Bathers” are calmly monumental with their bold, blurry pastels. Although the painting is in oil, Cezanne creates a watercolor-like effect that is simultaneously provocative and mesmerizing: the kind of painting you could study for an eternity, drawn into the depths of its soothing pastoral vision.

Displayed alongside Paul Gauguin’s equally evocative “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going,” Cezanne’s “Bathers” represents a turn away from the classical nude, which seems almost too-perfect in its idealized timelessness, and toward a more embodied Modernist vision. The bodies Cezanne and Gauguin depict look like actual, earthly bodies at rest, and it seems natural to rest a while in their presence.

The pieces of samurai armor currently on display at the MFA, on the other hand, are almost cartoonishly quirky, and I immediately fell in love with them. After walking through several galleries containing glass-case examples of helmets, breastplates, shin-guards, and other armature, J and I entered a room with two life-size free-standing displays: on one side, a trio of fully-bedecked warriors galloping on heavily-armored steeds…

…and on the other, a gang of walking warriors, their ornate armature letting enemies know in an instant that these guys mean business.

When you look like a bad-ass space alien and carry a big sword, you can let your appearance do the talking.

This is the last week of the semester at Framingham State, which means I’ll be swamped with paper-grading for the next two weeks. It felt good to take a virtual vacation at the MFA yesterday, traveling first to France to lounge with Cezanne and then to imperial Japan to stand with samurai. I’ve set the photo at the top of this post as my desktop background: a silent reminder to stay samurai strong over the next few, tiring weeks.

Click here to see my complete photo-set from yesterday’s MFA outing. Enjoy!

The Twitter account managed by McConnell's senate campaign tweeted a photo of the senator having a drink next to an empty chair, meant to represent Obama -- an allusion to Clint Eastwood's performance at the Republican National Convention. McConnell has a beer in front of him. A glass of red wine appears to be on the bar in front of the empty chair.

Just so it is said, clearly and unambiguously: the Tsarnaev brothers are white guys. They are white. The FBI’s own wanted poster for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lists his race as “white”, but you would never know it from the cover image on The Week.

We will be smoking and roasting a whole pig on the patio grill to serve throughout the day! This isn’t just any pig either; this pig was raised on the spent grain from each brew day here at CBC!  The pig comes from our friend Antonio Fontes, who owns a small, low key farm raising cattle and pigs. 

“Jail food may get a bad rap . . . but jail EMPLOYEE food is off the chain,” wrote one woman of a local jail cafeteria, where $1.50 apparently buys a plate of chicken, green beans, wheat bread, dessert and fresh, not instant, mashed potatoes.

A Canadian prairie city best known for it’s petroleum industry and western motif is showing it’s geeky side this weekend.

The Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo (CCEE) is currently taking over the city in full force, and the people and even it’s mayor are fully embracing it.   All of the CCEE’s 56,000 tickets were gone before it even started.

The event kicked off Friday morning with a parade that weaved it’s way though the downtown core all the way to Olympic Plaza.  The parade was marshalled by the cast of Torchwood, who led a contingency of cosplayers, guests and Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi gleefully rolled along in a Delorean, sporting a very McFly red vest.   At the plaza, where they were greeted by an army of Storm Troopers, where Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi white-hatted various Expo guests, which is Calgary’s unique equivalent to being awarded the key to the city.

Nenshi continued to let his geeky side show in this Twitter post, freaking out over being with the Torchwood stars.

An excited Mayor of Calgary in his “Mayor Who” TARDIS T-shirt, tweets about meeting the cast of Torchwood: John Barrowman, Eve Myles, and Gareth David-Lloyd.

The first night wrapped up with a concert featuring nerdrock band Kirby Krackle, who knew how to please the comic loving fans through fun catch, and largely inspired comic tunes, crooning about Green Lantern and Emma Frost. Then main act Weird Al Yankovic took to the stage with his signature accordion and crowd pleasing parodies. He had numerous costume changes, including a rather exquisite plush tiger lounge suit, which he wore when he ran out into the audience and flirtatiously rubbed up against various fans.

Weird Al Yankovic performing live at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo. Photo by Stephanie Chan.

CCEE hosts a huge number of comic guests, entreatment celebrities and creative types during its three day event, which I will be featuring more of in the days ahead. The Expo wraps up today.

Fortune cookie

A few weeks ago, while I was on vacation, a controversial new study out of France took over the internet. After 15 years of studying 320 women, French scientist Jean-Denis Rouillon found that wearing a bra actually makes women’s breasts saggier, a condition known medically as ptosis. Bras and breasts are always two popular topics; [...]

No one can live forever, but having a garment named in your honor ensures that, in a certain sense, you're still walking around years after your demise. Read on to learn the historical origins of your favorite closet staples.

On Reddit and the atheist blogosphere, this image was circulating last week. We managed to talk to the father of the child who took the test.

You don’t hear much about Guantanamo these days, unless you keep an eye on the writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage. Last week, Savage reported on a hunger strike involving 93 prisoners that’s now in its third month. Ostensibly the protest is in response to prison guards handling the Koran in disrespectful ways. But the real cause comes down to this: “a growing sense among many prisoners, some of whom have been held without trial for more than 11 years, that they will never go home.”

As part of Savage’s reporting on Gitmo, he has also created a photo blog that gives us insight into the prison library and its odd collection of books. The library offers prisoners access to Captain America comics (that must go over well with enemy combatants); pulp romance books by Danielle Steele (another choice pick for Islamists); the complete Harry Potter series (I imagine the Prisoner of Azkaban volume hits home); some more serious works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien and Charles Dickens; an assortment of religious books; and the occasional self help book like The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook.

According to news reports, the library currently has 3,500 volumes on pre-approved topics. Prisoners have to order books in advance. (They can’t just wonder through the stacks.) And the most popular books include Agatha Christie mysteries, the self-help manual Don’t Be Sad; the The Lord of the Rings; and, of course, Harry Potter. 

We know that other prisons have given their residents access to our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks. But I doubt that will be happening at Gitmo any time soon.

You can follow Savage’s photoblog here.

via @themillions

The Odd Collection of Books in the Guantanamo Prison Library is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

THIS.

suicideblonde:

rockstarsuits:

Bowie in his wedding tuxedo by Thierry Mugler. (Iman in Herve Leger)

THIS IS EPICCCC

Original Source

After the excitement in Trafalgar Square last week, filming continues apace on the 50th Anniversary episode.

It’s been widely reported and is common knowledge that David Tennant is back as the Tenth Doctor.

He has been spotted filming with his TARDIS, but as yet he has not been seen in costume with Matt Smith - until today!

They have been shooting at Chepstow castle, and some pictures have emerged on Twitter and Tumblr.

Matt and David can be seen being interviewed by Lizo Mzimba, who regularly reports on the antics of the Doctor Who crew.

But a picture of greater interest to me shows David walking onto set, in costume, and wearing A NEW TIE!

Knowing the ties inside out, I can confirm this is NOT a tie previously worn.

We'll have to call it Tie Thirteen!

But through the interviews I did with Louise Page, and knowing the labels of eleven of the twelve ties worn by the Tenth Doctor, I have some insight into where the ties were sourced.

Tie Three (Yves Saint Laurent), Tie Four (Christian Laxroix), Tie Seven (Giorgio Armani), Tie Eight (Nina Ricci) all came from prestige store Selfridges, and cost £60 plus when new.

Tie Two (Daniel Hechter), Tie Five (Thomas Nash), Tie Ten (St George by Duffer) were found at Debenhams, a more modestly priced department store where they were around £20 when new.

My first point of searching was the cheaper option, and it took me 30 seconds to stumble across a St George by Duffer tie in brown with a blue floral design.

I think we have a match - and it’s only £14 new! RESULT!!

Debenhams.com
St George by Duffer
Blue jacquard floral tie

Has any president been so comfortable in his Oval Office and Situation Rooms as Obama is? A photo investigation.

April 16, 1930. "These Washington society girls will compete for fencing title of the District of Columbia at the Mayflower Hotel this week. Left to right: Elizabeth Bunting, judge; Priscilla Holcombe; Maj. Walter E. Blunt, referee; Margaret Montgomery; and Lillian Shuman, judge." Harris & Ewing. View full size.

It was a tweet by the literary agent, Jonny Geller, that alerted us to this cover. It is his favourite version and quite frankly it has shot right to the top of our list too.

The title and author name are printed in gloss black on a matt black background, so can only been seen when held at the right angle.

This wonderful piece of (apparent) ‘censorship’ might seem crazy at first yet it tells us so much about the story contained within.

In fact, it is perhaps the most concise piece of design communication that one could possibly imagine for this incredible book.

And yet at the same time it is also utterly distinctive, memorable and intriguing.

A remarkable achievement.

BOSTON — A major house fire in a neighborhood popular with college students turned fatal Sunday morning.

After firefighters battled the multiple-alarm fire at 87 Linden Street in Boston’s Allston neighborhood, they found the body of an unidentified adult woman in the attic.

Fifteen people including six firefighters were hurt, none with life-threatening injuries.

“It’s a neighborhood that’s heavily populated with college students,” said Boston Fire Department spokesman Steve MacDonald. “There’s a history of many people living in few apartments.”

The fire department later tweeted that 19 people lived in the house.

MacDonald said an active investigation is underway to determine the cause of the fire and whether the home was zoned for its 19 residents.

One person jumped from the roof of the house, while several others had to be rescued over ladders.

In January 2012, a house on the same block was hit by a major fire during which occupants were forced to jump from windows to safety.

Heidegger vs. Google Glass

The Facebook analytics service introduced by Wolfram Alpha last year has yielded some fresh insights, as detailed in a blog post by company founder Stephen Wolfram. Among them: men and women post about very different things. The chart-heavy piece shows that men post more about sports, technology, and pop culture. Women post more about pets, family and friends, relationships, and health.

"Some of this is rather depressingly stereotypical," Wolfram writes. "And most of it isn't terribly surprising to anyone who's known a reasonable diversity of people of different ages. But what to me is remarkable is how we can see everything laid out in such quantitative detail in the pictures above." Some of Wolfram's findings do appear to confirm stereotypes. But by training a "computational telescope" on Facebook, he writes, we can discover new phenomena about the ways we connect to one another.

• Source Wolfram Alpha
• Image Credit Wolfram Alpha
• Related Items facebook wolfram alpha stephen wolfram big data

“Investigators in white hazmat suits are searching a landfill for a laptop tied to the accused Boston Marathon bombers, a potential lead that emerged as a result of interviews with two men from Kazakhstan who knew the terror suspects, law enforcement sources told ABC News.
Immigration officers arrested the two men, Dias Kadyrbayev, 19, and Azamat Tazhayakov, 20, on Saturday on suspicion that they had violated the terms of their student visas because they were no longer attending classes. They are being detained on the administrative charges at the Suffolk County (Mass.) House of Corrections.
The men lived in an apartment near the campus of University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, had been enrolled as a student. Both Tsarnaev brothers were believed to have visited the New Bedford apartment of Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov after the bombing, according to three law enforcement sources, who spoke on the condition they not be named because they were discussing an ongoing investigation. The police sources told ABC News they traced calls and Russian language text messages from one of the bombing suspect’s cell phone to the Kazakhstani men.
It was through the Kazakhstani men that investigators learned of the possible whereabouts of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s laptop and authorities have been searching the New Bedford landfill for the past three days, the police sources told ABC News. And, the sources said, agents found a cell phone believed to belong to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s in the New Bedford apartment.
One of the New Bedford men drove a BMW with a vanity plate that read “TERRORISTA #1” on the front, which his father told reporters was an unfortunate joke gift from some friends in Spain.”

- Feds Search Landfill for Bomber Suspect’s Laptop

One of the side effects of Google's decision to shut down Reader on July 1st is that numerous mobile and desktop apps are now scrambling for a new way to provide value to their users. Reeder, one of the most popular Google Reader appsfor iOS, had previously announced plans to continue development despite Reader's impending shudown, and now there's a new version of the app available that can sync with third-party RSS reader Feedbin. Of course, you'll need to sign up for the $2 monthly fee that Feedbin charges, but after that you'll be free to use Reeder long past July 1st.

Perhaps more noteworthy is Reeder's new, standalone RSS feature — you don't even need a Feedbin or Google Reader account anymore. Instead, you can start curating RSS feeds right on your iPhone; if you had a Google Reader account you can also simply import your feeds straight from there. Unfortunately, this feature isn't available on the iPad or OS X versions of Reeder yet, but those apps will get all of the iPhone features when they are updated to version 2.0 "in the coming months." For now, Reeder cautions that its standalone RSS syncing is "still a work in progress," so it might be a little buggy at first. If you'd prefer to sync through an alternate service like Feedbin, Reeder says that more options will be added in the future.

• Source ReederiTunes App Store
• Related Items reeder reader google reader rss sync feedbin iPhone 5 (GSM) Google Apple

Decaying Cityscapes Made Entirely Out of Bread by Johanna Mårtensson via Junkculture

What would happen to our cities if humans suddenly disappeared? Stockholm-based artist and set designer Johanna Mårtensson set out to recreate that scenario by erecting a model cityscape made out of bread, and  documenting the naturally slow process of decay every day for six months. Speaking about the project Johanna says, “I was inspired by an article about how well the earth would do without us. Within 500 years all buildings would be half fallen or fallen, perfect homes for animals and plants. The forrest would soon grow in cities. After hand buildings aswell as pollutions would be taken care of by bacterias and micro-organisms.”

In the background of flurries of punching, kicking, and special moves, fighting games have a long history of taking players on an exotic tour of the world. Reddit user RudeBootie has put together a collection of 125 retro fighting game backdrops depicting locations everywhere from training gyms, to the Serengeti, to hot springs — all as animated GIFs that recreate their bumpy 16-bit animations. The settings are pulled from nine different games, including three titles from the Street Fighter series. Though many of the locales have mystic or ancient vibes, the more modern-day settings are often filled with wonderful details hidden and animated in the background.

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• Source Fighting GIFs (imgur)RudeBootie (Reddit)
• Related Items video game game street fighter background gif 16-bit fighting game

Aaron Pressman, Reuters:

Talking out loud to control the Google Glasses via voice recognition is “the weirdest thing,” Schmidt said in a talk on Thursday at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

People will have to develop new etiquette to deal with such products that can record video surreptitiously and bring up information that only the wearer can see, Schmidt said.

“There are obviously places where Google Glasses are inappropriate,” he said.

Weird and inappropriate. Perfect product for Google.

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