Russian Sledges

Kudos to Official Friend of Dude-Kicker Opus Affair for the successful, sold-out Salon concert celebrating the Boston Cello Quartet's CD launch party, which occurred last Saturday at Theatre 1 at the Revere Hotel in downtown Boston

Among the various highlights of the evening, were possible world firsts for a classical music concenrt. Including:

• A rowdy audience fueled by Carpano Antica and Fernet Branca;
• Cellists Can-Can kicking in unison whilst playing;
• Musicians informing the audience: "by all means, keep your cell phone on"; and
• A sold-out cello performance with a median audience age less than fifty that was NOT an Apocolyptica concert.

Based on the success of this event, we are definitely looking forward to whatever events that may be hiding up Opus Affair's sleeve for 2013.

 

These days, it’s not uncommon to walk into a cocktail bar and see the bartenders chipping away at massive blocks of ice to create the perfect rock for your drink. But it’s worth remembering that not so long ago, ice was a luxury. The Atlantic says we have one Boston entrepreneur by the name of Frederic “The Ice King” Tudor to thank for making ice available everyday use in the early 19th century.

He made pricey mistakes trying to figure out a way to transport the stuff from 1806 to 1810, until he “learned to minimize melting by packing the ice tighter and insulating it with sawdust instead of straw.” His rise as the Ice King was marked by what turned out to be key business moments like selling ice to “scientists and physicians in the tropics who saw its potential for preserving food and for medical uses.” 

Not that Tudor, “known for his pigheadedness as much as his marketing savvy,” could have predicted that his single-minded pursuit would make way for the advent of refrigeration technology and artificial ice. But the Atlantic reckons he probably would have found today’s new ice developments pretty cool.

[via The Atlantic]

"In an effort to help prove that the metal community is not filled with mindless, hate-filled, angry men, author/photographer Alexandra Crockett is putting together a photography book entitled Metaldudes Cats Book that showcases some of the most brutal and visionary members of the West coast metal community with their darling, adorable little balls of fur: their cats."

Meow.

Alexandra hopes to have the book released in April, and is holding concerts to raise money for its publication in Portland and Seattle. Meanwhile you can get some merch on the official Etsy page, and preview some of the photos from the book below...

Continue reading "Metaldudes Cats Book (is coming soon)" at brooklynvegan

Follow @drewtoothpaste and @nataliedee on Twitter or join the Married To The Sea Facebook Page.

Near the end of the segment, it occurred to Carlson to ask her expert guest, Fox Business reporter Shibani Joshi, why it might be that Germany's solar-power sector is doing so much better. "What was Germany doing correct? Are they just a smaller country, and that made it more feasible?" Carlson asked. Joshi's jaw-dropping response: "They're a smaller country, and they've got lots of sun. Right? They've got a lot more sun than we do." In case that wasn't clear enough for some viewers, Joshi went on: "The problem is it's a cloudy day and it's raining, you're not gonna have it." Sure, California might get sun now and then, Joshi conceded, "but here on the East Coast, it's just not going to work."

Dropbox Tools:

A collection of little utilities I’m building as and when I need them to fix things that are wrong with my Dropbox.

Including bulk_undelete.py, which “will walk the remote Dropbox repository, and download the most recent version of any file that was deleted in the last 5 days into the recovery folder”.

femmedandy:

exsouthernbelle:

holyshit.

So casually debonair with that beer. As if she weren’t, you know, Emma Watson. In a suit.

jazzvampire:

Jessie Matthews in First a Girl (‘35).

brilliantbotany:

So, way back in 1350, when the world was a much larger place, information about plants was a bit muddled. This illustration is from the book The Travels of John Mandeville, and is an illustration of cotton.
Yes, those are sheep. 

Dr. Curtis Cooper of the University of Central Missouri has found the new largest prime number, which has 17,425,170 digits. This is the third record-breaking prime number Dr. Cooper has discovered through software provided by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search project, which was established in 1996 to find new numbers that can only be divided by 1 and itself. The mathematician will receive a grant of $3000 for his latest discovery.

Submitted by: Unknown (via Ars Technica)

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I’ve never seen a NEWS STATION post an Onion article

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar took to his Huffington Post blog last week to review Girls. While I think he has some points worth considering about his show, I was actually more struck by his follow-up, in which he writes about the reaction to a professional basketball player writing cultural criticism—much of which ignored the fact that Abdul-Jabbar has both acted and written history. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Some questioned why a man my age would watch a show about girls in their twenties, as if they’d just discovered me hanging around a school playground with a shopping bag full of candy in one hand a fluffy puppy in the other. Of course, these critics are right. When I read Moby Dick I first had to convince the bookseller that I was a former whaler named Queequeg. When I read the poetry of Sylvia Plath, I had to pretend I was a depressed white woman with daddy issues. Don’t worry, I used a fake ID.

One of the strangest, and most persistently irritating assumptions in popular culture is, as I’ve written before, the idea that white men are general interest, while women and people of color are niche subjects. It’s bizarre to me that we would think that women are interested in stories about men, and how they view sex, work, and power, all subjects that affect us, whether we have male lovers and partners, male bosses and coworkers, or simply male relatives and friends, but that men wouldn’t be interested in what insights fiction can give them into their families, friends, lovers, coworkers, or objects of distant desire. It’s a framework that assumes that men are hopelessly myopic, which is awfully condescending, but it’s also one that gives men who pay attention to culture created by and about women extra points for reaching out beyond the range of their own experience. It’s nice to see Abdul-Jabbar give that thumb on the scale precisely the bemused side-eye it deserves.

1 ½ lbs yellow onions, preferably a sweet variety, thinly sliced About ½ cup olive oil 6 cloves garlic, slivered Salt 1 lb red Swiss chard, thick ribs removed, cut into 1-inch-wide ribbons Water 10 ounces day-old chewy artisan bread, cut into rough 1-inch cubes 2 cups good-quality chicken broth About 2 loosely packed cups good-quality Swiss gruyère

1.0 out of 5 stars TOO SAD for young kids, December 8, 2005 By professorofenglish "professorofenglish" (Zimmerman, MN United States) If you think that the cute unicorn on the front of this book makes the book a great gift for your fun-loving preschooler or kindergartener..... think AGAIN! This book is inappropriately sad. If your child is even REMOTELY sensitive, this book will knock her out. My kid bawled & we had to get rid of the book after only reading it once. It was traumatizingly sad & just WAY TOO MUCH. If you are buying this book, BE AWARE of its content before bestowing it upon some unsuspecting kid. We got ours off a library discard pile & then we threw it out.

It’s really dumb that the chnese kill the girl babies, ause then they can’t dress them up in cute dresses and those asian wrap thingys that have the silk or whatever, you know, the robe things.

Tall drink of Time Lord Matt Smith has been cast in Ryan Gosling's How to Catch a Monster movie. Which means that at some point these two men will touch hands, thus forming a squee supernova that will be felt throughout the internet for decades. More »

The cliché that liberals shop at Trader Joe’s, while conservatives prefer Walmart, is no doubt overstated. But where would the perception come from?

Newly published research provides a compelling answer: brand-name products. Conservatives gravitate toward them, and Walmart, unlike Trader Joe’s, is packed with them.

That provocative conclusion can be drawn from a study in the journal Psychological Science. A research team led by Vishal Singh of New York University’s Stern School of Business has discovered a relationship between voting behavior, high levels of religiosity, and “seemingly inconsequential product choices.”

They argue that your decision to vote for a certain candidate, and purchase a particular brand of detergent, springs from the same basic impulse:

“Our empirical results, based on extensive field data, provide strong evidence that more conservative ideology is associated with higher reliance on established national brands (as opposed to generics) and a slower uptake of new products.”

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Berlin-based street artist Evol transforms city blocks, power boxes, walls and many other public structures into micro apartment buildings as part of his ongoing Buildings series. Evol carefully maps out each unique urban project by using stencils to mimic the gridded windows and balconies that normally line an apartment building’s facade.

The artist’s extremely detailed miniature apartment buildings often include varied compositions of satellite dishes and diverse window fixtures. Some of the “windows” even have curtains while others are left bare.

Check out a few of his works in the gallery above.

Miniature Apartment Buildings by Evol is a post by Brian Farmer on Highsnobiety.

Do you remember when—I love corndogs—we went to the town fair?

spock and jim sporting this winter’s must haves 

Slickstones Quarry (as an actual quarry)


Little Rollright Quarry (as a cliffside on Earth)


Worsham Quarry (as Oseidon and Earth)


Betchworth Quarry (as Skaro)


Winspit Quarry (as Skaro)


Betchworth Quarry (as the landscape of the Matrix)


Beachfields Quarry (as the Gallifreyan outlands)


Buckland Sand and Silica Co Ltd Quarry (as Antarctica)

doctorwhogifs:

Quarries of the Fourth Doctor Era

Beachfields Quarry (as the planet of the Ogrons)


Totternhoe Lime and Stone Co Ltd (as Earth)


Springwell Quarry (as Omega's world)


Colliery Quarry (as Metebelis Three)


Binnegar Plain Quarry (as Exxilon)


Beachfields Quarry (as Spiridon)


Old Baal Clay Pit (as Uxarieus)

doctorwhogifs:

Quarries of the Third Doctor Era

Warmwell Quarry (as the cheetah planet)


Whatley Quarry (as Lakertya)


Westdown Quarry (as Lakertya)


Warmwell Quarry (as Segonax, home of the Psychic Circus)


Cloford Quarry (as Lakertya)

doctorwhogifs:

Quarries of the Seventh Doctor Era

On this day in 1978, the storm of the century paralyzed the entire state of Massachusetts. The Blizzard of '78 dropped between two and four feet of snow on the Bay State in the space of 32 hours. Ferocious winds created drifts as high as 15 feet. Along the coast, flood tides forced 10,000 people into emergency shelters. Inland, over 3,000 cars and 500 trucks were immobilized along an eight-mile stretch of Route 128. By the time it subsided, the storm had taken 29 Massachusetts lives, destroyed 11,000 homes, and caused more than one billion dollars in damage. The Blizzard of '78 is also remembered for many acts of kindness, cooperation, and courage.

I love legumes of all shapes, colors, and sizes, but if I had to play favorites, it is the chickpea I would single out as the cutest (right?) and the most incredibly versatile.

I love it in my vegetables, in my salads, and in my soups, in my hummus and in my baked falafel (I'll be sharing a recipe soon), in my Nice-style socca and in my socca tarts (recipe in my upcoming cookbook!).

But my latest, fondest use for the pale yellow, nutty, slightly smoky flour that is ground from dried chickpeas, is this: a simple crêpe batter flavored with cumin that can be whipped up in a matter of minutes, with 100% pantry items.

The resulting golden crêpes (which happen to be gluten-free if that matters to you) are flavorful and nutritious, and can be used in various ways: you can fill them like classic savory crêpes, with whatever ingredients you have on hand; you can garnish them with the spread of your choice, roll them up, and slice them into bite-size vortex rounds; and you can serve them as a side, to dab at the juices of a vegetable curry.

In the photo above, I spread the crêpes first with tahini sauce, then with a dollop of mashed beets -- the remnants of a purée I'd made for Milan before deciding beets were way too messy when an 8-month-old is manning the spoon -- and a scatter of chopped hazelnuts. It was very, very good.

A nice variation on the process I've outlined below is to sprinkle the crêpes with chopped herbs (chives, cilantro), or seeds (sesame, cumin, fennel), or very finely minced or shredded vegetables (scallions, carrots) just after pouring the batter into the skillet, so they're effectively studded with those ingredients, which looks and tastes lovely.

And next time, I plan to leave the batter out to ferment at room temperature -- presumably just until bubbles start to form -- to see how the flavor and texture are altered.

Are you a chickpea fan yourself? In what recipes do you like to use chickpea flour?

Continue reading "Cumin Chickpea Crêpes"
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For modern browsers ligatures are available and a state's abbreviation is it's ligature. For example, "va" generates the glyph of the state of Virginia and "dc" the District of Columbia. Additionally, the ligature "usa" produces a character of the full US map.

Almost two months after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, residents and officials are trying to figure out what to do with thousands of letters and other items.

Using hundreds of second-hand shirts Finnish environmental artist Kaarina Kaiakkonen creates site-specific installations suspended above roadways or inside large warehouse spaces. Her most recent work Are We Still Going On? (top images), was conceived at Collezione Maramotti, a private collection of contemporary art in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and involves hundreds of children’s shirts hung in rows to resemble the interior hull of a giant ship. The shirts are organized by color on each side of the skeletal boat to represent a sort of symbolic dialogue about gender. You can learn more over on Art Texts Pics and see a brief video of the piece here. (via global art news)

The largest public gathering in the world, the Kumbh Mela is expected to draw as many as 70 million people, a crowd greater than New York, London, and Paris combined, for ritual bathing in the rivers.