Russian Sledges

Todos os “yeah” berrados pelo vocalista do Metallica ao longo da sua carreira fonográfica.

E nem é o primeiro projeto do gênero.

As the paper closes, a collection of its greatest hits.

Ellen Barry | Nov 1990 [Full Story]

Showtime's 'The Vatican' Casts 'Downfall's' Hitler as Its Pope - Yahoo! TV

In the pages of Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo described the four large moons of Jupiter in a series of 64 sketches which looked a lot like ASCII art in the text:

Using an online tool for computing the positions of Jupiter's moons, Ernie Wright compared Galileo's sketches to the moons' actual motions.

Click through for an animated GIF of all the comparisons. Not bad for the telescopic state of the art in 1610. For a taste of how celestial objects actually appeared when viewed through Galileo's telescope, check out this video starting around 7:30. (thx, john)

Tags: astronomy   books   Galileo   science   Sidereus Nuncius   space

„I’m Goin’ to Prom!“ (via Boing Boing)

cinephilearchive:

Hilarious negative executives notes to Ridley Scott after seeing Blade Runner for the 1st time.

Thank you immensely for this, Matt Bloom @MattBloomFilms

Hilarious negative executive notes to Ridley Scott from Suite 666.

“Let the record show: that you can be a United States senator for 21 years, you can be 79 years old, you can be the Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and one of the most recognizable and most widely respected veteran public servants in your nation. But if you are female while you are also all of those other things, men who you defeat in arguments will still respond to you by calling you hysterical and telling you to calm down. They will patronize you and say they ‘admire your passion, sweetie,’ but of course they only deal in facts, not your silly girly strong feelings. It is inescapable, you can set your watch by it.”

- Rachel Maddow, discussing Senator Ted Cruz’s condescending lecture to Senator Dianne Feinstein during a Senate debate on gun control. March 14, 2013.

“I think I’ve finally determined what makes San Francisco so trying, its beauty and temperateness and extraordinary profusion of “fun things to do” notwithstanding. How can a metropolis devoted above all to the fulfillment of every inclination feel so often like a hard place to live? How can the world capital of aestheticization —where everything from jeans to protests to bees to haircuts to pastries to transit is made sophisticated, mannered, performative— seem so socially awkward, so ungainly?

It’s because San Francisco is Creep City. There are more creeps here than anywhere else, per capita at least and maybe absolutely. If you go out with friends, you will encounter creeps: creeps will involve themselves in your conversation; creeps will be loitering nearby; creeps will act creepy to third-parties on the bus and you will feel ashamed of inaction or guilty about action; you will judge others for how they respond to the creeps, how they avert their attention, how they arrange themselves away from the creeps, or how they explode at meandering, mostly harmless creeps, their pent-up civilizational frustrations getting the better of them.

Creeps are everywhere, but in San Francisco the variety of creeps makes it hard to have a settled method for dealing with them; they are not demographically uniform. In some cities, the natural segregation of social groups means that one infrequently encounters behavior that defies the conventions one favors; in SF, it is not some civic love of diversity that changes this but the fact that social groups are often so recently-composed. As a city of aspirational arrivals, SF has a populace that never shakes out the jerks; there’s too much churn for standards of normalcy to be achieved. (I hope I don’t need to distinguish between a given social group’s desire for standards of behavior and the villainous sort of “conformity” movies rail against).

San Francisco is a city in which we are besieged from both sides: the infinitesimal middle class here contends with rich creeps and poor creeps. For every meth-addicted jerk-victim spraying spittle and salacious slurs at commuting women, there is an ostentatious startup scion hijacking a social situation and crashing it into the ground with his self-aggrandizing prattle. While the schizophrenic is defecating on the children’s playground, the high-flying narcissist at the bar waylays five adults with an unsought lecture on the intricacies of his moral hobbies.

The middle class is divided at which is the bigger problem; at parties, we fight about which outrage demands action: the $17 tube of artisanal organic chapstick available at the VC-backed cosmetic shop (run, I hasted to add, by genuinely dedicated snobs who don’t feel phony!) or the indigent junkies whose petty crimes don’t seem petty to their victims, and whose lawlessness and verbal abusiveness aren’t funny, either. The latter need help, which they’ll neither get nor work towards or with; the former are just so trying to listen to, so exhausting in their hyped-up self-centeredness.

This is a city of gafflers: people who talk to you at length without seeking or allowing your participation, people who subject you to monologues. It is a city of people who already know everything, either because they’re wasted and have been wasted for ten years and have their ideas and fixations, or because they just got back from a festival or series of talks or a conference or they’ve sold a company or been at their crowdsourced 501(c) for a few years, etc. etc. etc. etc.

And I know: street-gafflers are suffering; so are rich-kid gafflers, in their way. This isn’t really about them being immoral or blameworthy; it’s just about how hard it is to go anywhere in San Francisco without having some creep slide up to you, your girlfriend, your buddy, your dog, your bag, your table, start in on whatever automated creeper script he runs on people: his political screed, his moralizing sermon about his causes, his worn-out jokes, his little dance, his innuendo, his pitch, his act.

Haven’t these people heard about the Internet? Anyway: seriously, this is Creep City. Or Monologue City, if you like that better. Who cares?”

San Francisco: Creep City | millsinabout

[video] [h/t: fat-birds]

 

bowtiesandbiscuits:

15th of March 2012.

Ordered a Caesar Salad today, proceeded to stab it 23 times before consumption. Nobody else found it as hilarious. 

NASA this week released new high-resolution panoramic images of Mars' Mount Sharp, captured by its Mars Rover Curiosity. Named after late geologist Robert Sharp, the massive Martian mountain is a gently sloping formation that sits at the center of the Gale Crater, where Curiosity recently uncovered evidence that the Red Planet may have supported microbial life forms. According to NASA, Mount Sharp rises three miles above the surface of the crater, making it higher than any point within the 48 contiguous United States.

Continue reading…

Finalist for Whitest Thing Ever Said

The unnamed staff member's allegation echoes that of Darnell's wife, who accused him in divorce papers of beginning a sexual relationship with Colleen Manassa ’01, ’05PhD, when Manassa was an undergraduate majoring in NELC. Manassa went on to get her PhD in the department under Darnell's supervision and was then hired as an assistant professor. She is now an associate professor and the director of undergraduate studies in the department.

“And just like that, Portman joined the ranks of the men and women who only realized that gay rights were important when their absence affected someone they love. Let’s call it the “gay kid convert” club; the Dick Cheneys, the Jon Huntsmans — and yes, even the Barack Obamas — who, after years of silence or fierce opposition, came around to equal rights through a gay child, friend or a close colleague.”

- LGBT’s new allies: The Gay Kid Converts - Salon.com

When I found out yesterday—via Twitter, of course—that Google would be shutting down its Google Reader, I felt a surprising wave of nostalgia.

"Hop Mr. Bunny, Skip Mr. Bear If you don't dig this party you ain't no where!"


The place was Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s. Rents were high and wages were low for many African Americans and one way they came together to fight the injustice and to raise the rent money was to hold rent parties.
Refreshments and music were provided and they printed up these neat cards to promote the evenings.
When Langston Hughes moved to Harlem he was already familiar with the rent party scene from his days writing for the Chicago Defender. He would eventually put together "quite a collection" of the cards. Hughes said “When I first came to Harlem, as a poet I was intrigued by the little rhymes at the top of most House Rent Party cards, so I saved them. Now I have quite a collection.”


Hughes' collection of rent party cards resides at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the above images are from.

Thanks to The Vault, a new blog from Slate for the lead.

List of new or revised Library of Congress Classification numbers and captions approved by the editorial meeting of the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Policy and Standards Division on February 18, 2013

The entire Internet forgot it was grandpa's birthday today. Symbolics.com—the first domain name ever registered—turned 28 today, and just about no one had anything nice to say.

Lost in the furor of Sony’s PS4 launch, Microsoft’s potential Xbox 720 launch, Valve entering the console market, and the long shadow of Apple looming over all, is speculation that next-gen console games may in fact come with a next-gen price, setting the standard video game launch pricepoint at $69.99—a hefty 17% hike over the current launch pricepoint of $59.99. Thus far, industry leaders have avoided discussing specifics in terms of pinpointing future prices, but this evasiveness may in and of itself be cause for concern.

[INSERT COIN... x 1000.]

Read the full article

How walking shapes our minds. Maybe. By Wayne Curtis

Here’s a weird CPAC moment: I’m sitting in a hallway in the Gaylord Convention Center with Cynthia Yockey. Between the two of us, I think we got a total of five hours of sleep last night, so we’re sitting on the floor, talking about what it’s like for her to be a lesbian at this conservative confab, especially when GOProud, a leading conservative gay group, wasn’t invited this year. 

While we sit back and watch the scene, Yockey begins tearing into social conservatives and the religious Right. As if on cue, Rick Santorum walks by, followed by a small entourage of sorts. Once he gets a few feet past us, he stops around on the other side of the hallway to pose for a photo with a group of boys who look to be high-school age.

Keep reading this post . . .

Carpet Pattern Skyscraper Sculptures by Babak Golkar via Designboom

the carpet skyscraper works of iranian artist babak golkar draw a relationship between the two dimensional and three dimensional, architecture and art, and ultimately - the associations with the much-debated tension between east and west. through extruding the elaborate ornamental patterning of nomadic persian carpets, the pieces generate a dynamic visual and conceptual reflection on existent cultural barriers.they do not only reference the erected symbols of western patriotism, they also bring attention to the emerging megapolis’ and the advance of oil powered arab countries.

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — A panel about how conservatives can fight back when liberals call them racists descended into shouting when an actual segregationist joined a CPAC event titled "Trump the Race Card: Are You Sick and Tired of Being Called a Racist and You Know You're Not One?" We're not making any of this up. Led by K. C. Smith and KCarl Smith, two brothers from Birmingham who are black and who call themselves "Frederick Douglass Republicans," the discussion began with their argument that the Republican Party can reach out to blacks, women, Latinos, when it starts talking about the constitutional principles Douglass espoused when he campaigned for Abe Lincoln. It was southern Democrats, after all, who fought for slavery and created Jim Crow laws. The first jeers began when a black woman, who initially did not give her name, said the idea that liberals are the true racists is ridiculous because so many Southern Democrats defected to the Republican Party. But the madness started when Scott Terry, one of the 23 members of the White Students Union at Towson University in Maryland attending CPAC, raised his hand and suggested the GOP might do better as "Booker T. Washington Republicans" — "united like the hand, but separate like the fingers." ThinkProgress has some video of the exchange.

When the crowd realized what Terry was suggesting, there were wide-eyed looks around the room, including from me. I was sitting two seats down from him, next to Matthew Heimbach, president of the Towson White Students Union. Heimbach, at right, was wearing a rebel flag shirt, a George Wallace button, and beat-up black boots. I was sitting next to Heimbach, because when I got to "Trump the Race Card," there were no seats left. Heimbach was saving two, as his friends were in the bathroom, but another man gruffly said saving seats was not allowed, and pushed the chair toward me. I am very grateful to this man. 

"Trump the Race Card" was one of the very few CPAC panels to directly take on the Republican Party's core problem from the 2012 election: it is very white. KCarl Smith's message was partially about spin, but included some substance (he wants more subsidies for poor kids to get private educations). He told the story of Douglass as a man who escaped slavery and became the wealthy intellectual we celebrate through conservative principles. Speaking to one of the more diverse audiences at CPAC, Smith said that right now, "If you call yourself a black Republican, a black conservative... you might as well call yourself a black racist." Conservative, Republican, Tea Party — all these words have been tarnished by the left's propaganda. "People will think you're a Bull Connor Conservative, not a Frederick Douglass Republican." The GOP must embrace Douglass as an icon. He was smart, rich, a hard worker, super into the Constitution and Founding Fathers — plus, "You cannot out-victimize Douglass. Nobody can out-victimize Douglass." Republicans had the true history of promoting racial justice, Smith said. He'd been raised a Democrat, so "I thought George Wallace was a Republican." Then he had an awakening — even the KKK had been Democrats. "I don't care how much they improve, I'm not joining the KKK!" Big laughs.

A young black woman -- who, again, would not give her name, so let's call her Amy [Update, March 16: Her name is Kim Brown] — did not laugh. "I was at the [Democratic National Convention] in Charlotte and I did not see the KKK advocating for Barack Obama." She was not a popular speaker. Then Chad Chapman, a 21-year-old student at Prince George's Community College who is black, stood to speak. "When are we going to stop seeing ourselves as victims, and when are we going to see ourselves as an opponent?" The white people applauded, making me somewhat uncomfortable. Smith said the Bible says we're all conquerers. 

Then Terry stood to talk. "It seems to me that you're reaching out to voters at the expense of young white southern males like myself." The audience was open, like maybe he would go in a positive direction. He went in a segregationist direction. There was crosstalk, commotion. Smith regained control of the room, talking about Douglass forgiving his slavemaster. The Terry went full troll: "Did he thank him for giving him shelter?" Whoaaaaaaa. "Slavery was not a 'benefit' to black people!" Brown said. More commotion. Smith said "Racism does not have a political face" -- both liberals and conservatives are capable of it. To make a difference, you have to talk to people. "Dr. King interacted and impacted..." Heimbach broke in: "We don't need Marxists in the Republican Party!" "We don't need Marxists anywhere," Smith said. Brown said King was not a Maxist. "Yes he was!" Heimbach said. "Two of his advisors!" Terry joined in.

Smith retook control of the room, and tried to get Brown to ask her question so he could move on. "I am not a conservative," Brown said. "I hope that's not too obvious." Begrudging chuckle from the crowd. "These gentlemen are being disingenuous," she said. The crowd did not like that. A sampling of the cacophony:

Smith: We have a method that works...

Heimbach: Well I have never seen it work!  

Smith: ... See how they're trying to vilify us!

Crowd: Huge applause.

Lady in crowd: [To Brown] We didn't come here for you!

Heimbach: [Quietly] I just want to talk about Barry Goldwater and The National Review...

Finally another man got up to speak. He spoke slowly, and the crowd was tense -- was he another liberal or segregationist? Douglass's pulling himself out of poverty "speaks volumes about what capitalism can do for the poor," the questioner said. Huge applause, and huger relief. But the Smith-Brown-Heimbach trio fell into debate again. Finally Smith got control of the room, and said we should always remember to put Jesus above party.

Afterward, I talked to Heimbach, who was very cheery and clearly enjoying being a troll. In a sense, he and Brown agreed on something: what happened to the Republican Party in the 1960s. (They just have very different takes on whether it was a good thing.) Back then, when writing for The National Review, none other than conservative intellectual icon William F. Buckley said white southerners have a right to be separate, Heimbach said. But today's Republicans are being forced to take an "oath of diversity" that runs counter to that history of supporting states' rights. "I don't believe in slavery or anything like that," Heimbach said. But he became a member of the "white dissident right" because "I came to realize over time by reading Republicans of the 60s and 70s that the right-wing is lying to itself." As for Smith's talk, "Republicans did switch their policies in the 60s and 70s.... Dixiecrats did switch parties." To say they didn't "doesn't jibe with history." He doesn't want to be called racist, though. That term was invented by the Bolsheviks. 

Afterward, I turned to Chapman, who really wanted to speak with Heimbach. Chapman decided to call himself a Frederick Douglass Republican. He was unsettled by the shouting. "When people disagree, they go off the deep end," he said. And what about the way in which the liberal and the segregationist seemed to agree? "Weird."

Note: This post has been updated to reflect that the liberal woman questioner's name is Kim Brown.

Stay tuned to complete coverage from on the ground at CPAC all weekend long...

Information minister's tweet reveals about-turn on permanent display of ex-president after Russian medical advice

Venezuela's information minister says the government has decided that the body of Hugo Chávez will not be embalmed for permanent display, as officials had said it would be.

Ernesto Villegas' tweet on Friday night said the government had discarded the option based on the advice of a Russian medical commission. The commission said Chavez's body would have to be sent to Russia for seven to eight months to be properly embalmed, according to the message.

Acting president Nicolas Maduro announced last week that Chavez's body would be perpetually displayed, but then on Wednesday he said that now seemed "highly unlikely".

Chavez died on March 5 after succumbing to cancer. On Friday the government moved his body from a military academy, where it had been on display, to a hilltop military museum.

• Hugo Chávez
• Venezuela
• Americas

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In honor of the election of Pope Francis I, I've written a post for Vulture about conclave conspiracy theories in pop culture. Check it out here.

I attended the University of Michigan, but I got my real education at alternative newsweeklies. That’s where I learned to write, to report, and to think of myself as a journalist; that’s where I...

Political scientist Charles Murray has never backed away from controversy, but usually his opponents have been liberals. Friday, however, he managed to upset conservatives at the annual conference known as CPAC, where thousands of...

Ennio Morricone, who has worked on four Quentin Tarantino films, told film students in Rome that he would never collaborate with the director again, saying he “places music in his films without coherence.”

“Wicked Single” on VH1 follows a half-dozen young people around Boston.