Russian Sledges

There's a new neighborhood in NYC, if you didn't know, called the "Empire District." And in this neighborhood there's going to be a new kind of club called a "gastro-lounge." The name of the club is EVR, and it hopes to bring the "artistry back into nightlife" with a "dynamic milieu once thought only to exist Downtown."

Please do take a minute to read this press release that just landed in the Eater inbox:

From the inbox:

Wanted to follow up with you about EVR, a new gastro-lounge scheduled to open next week in the Empire District at 54 West 39th Street.

EVR (Ever) is an all-encompassing, multifunctional gastro-lounge, fusing an industrial chic atmosphere with a high-energy, interactive component. Helmed by business partners Alex Likhtenstein and Ian Magid, EVR marks the duo's first nightlife venture and brings the artistry back into nightlife with a dynamic milieu once thought only to exist Downtown. The 5,000 square-foot, dual level space features two bars, an elevated DJ booth, rotating art installations and entertainment from world-renowned DJs. Additionally, EVR will offer delectable nouveau-American cuisine and a curated cocktail menu from renowned mixologist, Orson Salicetti (Apothéke, Jelsomino New York, Ginza Project USA).

The venue will offer nightly dual concepts comprised of EVR After Work, which will focus on mixology and bespoke cocktails, and EVR After Dark, which will highlight interactive entertainment. EVR After Work will be open from 3PM – 11PM Monday – Friday and EVR After Dark will be open 11PM- 4AM Thursday – Sunday and Tuesday.

See you there after work.
· All Editions of Adventures in P.R. [~ENY~]

It looks like a new donut shop could be on its way to one of the busiest sections of Somerville.

Eater Boston is reporting that a new project from the Culinary Cruisers team called Union Square Donuts may expand into a retail shop on Somerville Avenue at some point. (Culinary Cruisers also sells kombucha and other items from their bicycle food carts.) The folks behind the project debuted their handmade gourmet donuts at the Local is for Lovers holiday market at Somerville's Armory on Highland Avenue on December 2, and will be at the Eat Boutique Holiday Market at the Artist for Humanity EpiCenter on 2nd Street in South Boston on December 9.

There is no word on when the Union Square Donuts retail shop might be opening, so keep checking back for updates.

The address for this planned donut shop in Somerville is: Union Square Donuts, 201 Somerville Avenue, Somerville, MA, 02143. Their Twitter page is at https://twitter.com/UnionSqDonuts and the website for Culinary Cruisers is at http://culinarycruiser.com/


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UPDATE: John McAfee was rushed from jail to the hospital after suffering two mild heart attacks, his lawyer confirmed to Reuters. Whether the heart attacks delay attempts to extradite McAfee to Belize isn't clear, but Guatemalan officials seem intent on deporting him. A spokesman for the immigration department said "immediate deportation had been ruled out," but Reuters quoted two other Guatemalan officials saying they intend to deport McAfee. "He entered the country illegally and we are going to seek his expulsion for this crime," Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez Bonilla said, according to the Reuters report. Another government spokesman named Francisco Cuevas also said McAfee will be expelled to Belize.

Original story follows:

John McAfee, the fugitive software company founder who is wanted by authorities in relation to a murder in Belize, was arrested in Guatemala today for "entering the country illegally," the Associated Press reported.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Dating Tip #174: Respect her choices by forcing her to live on a parallel universe against her will. 

Being separated from the Doctor aside, living on a parallel universe sounds pretty shitty. I mean imagine waking up to a different sky every morning and knowing the man you loved sent you there against your will. 

Maybe if we make enough, we can build an entire Death Star Ice Fort for a snowball fight! Playing baseball on the planet Hoth has never been easier! It only takes a few minutes to create an irresponsibly dangerous baseball and, when the guns become useless from freezing, you've got a baseball bat! $9.99

oswald-ears:

lostthehat:

I read “Boatyard” as “Booty-yard” and I’m so sorry.

This is the best photoset.

At least they didn't call it "BROOKLYN Hipster Dust"? In the "About Us" section of www.HipsterDust.com, the creators of the spice mixture tell us pretty much everything we couldn't already glean from the name of their product: [ more › ]

The future of the radio show for the local food media entity the Phantom Gourmet may be in jeopardy now that the radio station WTKK (96.9) is, in the words of Boston.com's The Names Blog, "ditching its lineup of loudmouths in favor of music." The station is eschewing talk radio in favor of all tunes, all the time, and while the Phantom Gourmet radio show may be music to the ears of some members of the Restaurant and Business Alliance, it's not music, and so it presumably won't survive on the new WTKK.

However there's no official confirmation that the radio show is cancelled, though Boston Restaurant Talk did notice that the most recent show was "a 'best of' repeat." Exhibit B: clicking on the "radio" tab on the Phantom Gourmet website yields a server error. Stay tuned for updates about the future of the show and hit up the tipline with any of your own.

· WTKK to abandon talk radio for music [The Names Blog via BRT]
· Looks like 'TKK is all talked out [BH via BH&TIB]
· Phantom Gourmet radio show may be leaving WTKK [BRT]
· Where do you want to hear the Phantom Gourmet? [GS]
· Phantom Gourmet [Official Site]
· All coverage of Phantom Gourmet on Eater [~EBOS~]
[Photo: The Andelman Brothers, aka the Phantom Gourmet/Pink Hat Hell]

English has two great rhyming slanguages, cockney rhyming slang and the dozens, the African American insult game. We’ll leave the parsing of cockney phrases for now and examine the dirty, bawdy, and wonderful world of verbal street duels. While its origins lie in “yo’ mama” jokes, this is language meant for music, as rap and hip-hop today can attest. Here’s a taste with an excerpt from Elijah Wald’s The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama.

Gilda Gray, a Polish dancer and singer known as the “Queen of the Shimmy,” had set Broadway on fire that year with her blues singing, and when she was interviewed by the New York Herald she quoted the chorus of “The Dirty Dozen” as an example of the numbers she was featuring in her show. She explained that it had “a wayward sound” and added a comment that, if accurate, suggests a secondary meaning of the title: “I don’t suppose there’d be room enough to give all twelve verses.”

The Herald reporter described the song’s lyrics as “incomprehensible,” and wrote that “the singer fairly froze an atmosphere of red lights.” Indeed, Gray’s whole performance was limned in terms that accentuated its primitive sensuality. Her songs were “a form of art new to Broadway… for as the carvings of Dahomey and the totem poles of Alaska are art, crude, even repulsive tho it is at times, so the ‘blues’ are a form of art, an expression of the moods of a certain class of individuals.” The New York Sun’s Walter Kingsley similarly typed Gray’s blues as “the little songs of the wayward, the impenitent sinners, of the men and women who have lost their way in the world… the outlaws of society.”

Despite such knowing commentary, neither Gray nor the reporters seem to have been aware that “The Dirty Dozen” was connected with an insult game or referred to anything but a large, poor family. The first evidence of our kind of dozens crossing over to Euro-American pop culture is from 1921, when the pianist and composer Chris Smith published “Don’t Slip Me in the Dozen, Please” under the imprimatur of his own Smith & Morgan company. Born in 1879, Smith was touring in African American musical shows by the turn of the century and had a major national hit in 1913 with “Ballin’ the Jack,” a song based on the dance whose “vulgar contortions” the Indianapolis Freeman critic attacked. His dozens song began with a scene-setting verse that included the first printed explanation of the title phrase:

Brownie slipped Jonesie in the dozen last night
Jonesie didn’t think it was exactly right
Slipping you in the dozen means to talk about your fam’ly folks
And talkin’ ’bout your parents aren’t jokes.
Jonesie said to Brownie “Really I am surprised
If you were a man you would apologize,
If you refuse to do what I’m telling you to do
I’ll swear out a warrant for you:

Chorus:
It makes no diff’rence who you are
Please don’t talk about my Ma and Pa
Talk about my sister, my brother and my cousin
But please don’t slip me in the dozen.
Talk about my past or my future life
Talk about my first or my second wife,
I’m beggin’ ev’ry human on my bended knees
Don’t slip me in the dozen, please.”

By the time this song appeared, Smith had formed a partnership with the singer Henry Troy, another show business veteran who had toured England in 1905, formed an act with the composer and pianist Will Marion Cook in 1907, and in 1909 became a sideman to the most famous African American performer of that era, the musical comedian Bert Williams. It is not clear when Smith and Troy teamed up, but by the late teens they had crossed over to white vaudeville, and an ad from 1923 described them as “perhaps the best known and most popular Colored artists on the Keith circuit today.” Given the earlier mention of dirty dozens routines in black theaters, the explanatory lines in their song were presumably intended for Euro-American fans, and the sheet music was specifically targeted at that audience, showing a white singer and pianist on its cover. Smith and Troy recorded “Don’t Slip Me in the Dozen” for the Ajax record label in 1923, with Troy reciting the lyric in a mournful style reminiscent of Williams’s comic masterpiece “Nobody.” After the final chorus, he murmured: “I just can’t stand it. It’s my cup. It’s my bucket. It’s my little red wagon,” and the duo went into a skit that briefly illustrated their theme:

TROY : Look-a-here: Didn’t you say last night that my father was stung by horseflies?
SMITH : Yes, I said that, yes. What about it?
TROY : Well, I suppose you know what a horsefly is, don’t you?
SMITH : Oh, I know what a horsefly is.
TROY : What’s a horsefly?
SMITH : Why, a horsefly ain’t nothing but one of them old dirty flies what hangs ’round the stables and skips over the horses and bites the jackasses.
TROY : Hey, wait a minute! Do you mean to insinuate that my father was a jackass?
SMITH : No, no, no, no! Course I know your old man. Know him good. He’s a blacksmith. But you know, it’s kind of hard to fool them horseflies.

We are a long way from Jelly Roll Morton’s Chicago dives, and Smith and Troy’s whitewashed “Dirty Dozen” is typical of the way African American traditions have regularly been reshaped to suit mainstream commercial needs. Within a half dozen years, another “Dirty Dozen” song would make the phrase more popular than ever, but the bowdlerizing had already begun.

Elijah Wald is a musician and writer who has toured on five continents and written thousands of articles for newspapers, magazines, and album notes. His ten published books include The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, and The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. He has taught blues history at UCLA and won multiple awards, including a 2002 Grammy.

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The post The Dirty Dozens appeared first on OUPblog.

One of the more interesting arguments I've had to adjust to since diving into the Civil War is the cynic's denunciation of the Emancipation Proclamation as a document which didn't do anything. I assume this is a reaction to a point in our history when people went around claiming that the Proclamation "freed the slaves."
It did not. But, as historian Eric Foner notes, the Proclamation is still one of the most important documents in American history:

A military order, whose constitutional legitimacy rested on the president's war powers, the proclamation often disappoints those who read it. It is dull and legalistic; it contains no soaring language enunciating the rights of man. Only at the last minute, at the urging of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, an abolitionist, did Lincoln add a conclusion declaring the proclamation an "act of justice." 
Nonetheless, the proclamation marked a dramatic transformation in the nature of the Civil War and in Lincoln's own approach to the problem of slavery. No longer did he seek the consent of slave holders. The proclamation was immediate, not gradual, contained no mention of compensation for owners, and made no reference to colonization. 
In it, Lincoln addressed blacks directly, not as property subject to the will of others but as men and women whose loyalty the Union must earn. For the first time, he welcomed black soldiers into the Union Army; over the next two years some 200,000 black men would serve in the Army and Navy, playing a critical role in achieving Union victory. And Lincoln urged freed slaves to go to work for "reasonable wages" -- in the United States. He never again mentioned colonization in public.

One part of the problem is that there is a left-radical strain descending from the days of the abolitionists that has trouble crediting Lincoln with anything. (I am partial to Frederick Douglass's ultimate assessment.) And there's a right wing quasi-libertarian strain which fashions Lincoln a tyrant and believes black people should have remained slaves waiting on a compensated emancipation which was never in the offing. 
Another part of the problem is the idea that, with something as dramatic as emancipation, there should be some break point, some specific document that freed the slaves. But as Foner points out, emancipation is a process (one that I would argue begins with slave abscondance and the Underground Railroad), not so much a point. And emancipation is itself a part of an even larger process -- integrating African Americans as citizens of equal standing. That effort continues even today.

The Deal: In honor of its five month anniversary, Shōjō is offering all lunch items for $5.

When: January 8 through January 31, Monday through Friday, 11am to 3pm.

Where: 9a Tyler Street, Chinatown.

[Photo: Cal Bingham]

· Upper Crust Workers' Lawyer Raising Funds to Buy Four More Stores [BG]
· The Hipster Food Glossary [Guardian]
· Subway Testing New 'Creamy Sriracha Sauce'? [Food Beast]
· Restaurants Happy To Dodge A Fiscal Cliff Bullet [WSJ]
· Rare Beer Sells For Thousands on eBay [Slate]
· No More Celebrity Chefs Please [Express]
· Restaurant Chains to Drive Growth Through Nontraditional Locations [NRN]
· 15 Food & Drink Events for January and Beyond [-EN-]
· Watch a Short Film With Serious Chinese Food Porn [-EN-]

The Museum of Soviet Arcade Games is a historical display in the basement of an engineering school in Moscow that houses a very unique collection of arcade machines that were released in the USSR in the ’70s. It is run by Maxim Pinigin, Alexander Stakhanov and Aleksandr Wugman and contains around 40 arcade machines (some are still under repair). The museum is open to the public seven days a week as a functioning arcade. You can play the “Morskoi Boi”
(Sea Battle) arcade game online or browse through other machines to try out via their Russian website.

Arcade Games were a part of childhood and youth of Soviet people. They were made at secret military factories from the seventies up to the Perestroika. Forgotten and broken down Soviet-era arcade games are now being restored for Moscow’s newest museum and now it is possible to play and feel atmosphere of the passed epoch. Around 20 of 37 different kinds of machines are now in working order. They operate with old Soviet 15 kopek coins, the hammer-and-sickle emblem of which itself conjures up a bygone time.

images via the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines blog and Facebook page

From Extra Fabulous Comics:
Toad later overdosed on sleeping pills in the quiet of his home. Mario was last seen by Wario, who stated, "He just came and sat at the edge of my bed in the middle of the night, I awoke to him drunkenly sobbing about it all being a joke. He said 'Mia forgive me', left, and I never saw him again." Princess Peach hasn't talked since the incident, and has shirked her duties as ruler as well, opting to be alone in her highest tower. Bowser has declared a respite from his war on the mushroom kingdom.

Submitted by: Unknown (via Extra Fabulous Comics)

Tagged: Webcomic , Ruined Childhood , mario Share on Facebook

Hand-drawn and "meticulous maps showing the names and locations of every brothel, bar, casino and saloon that existed in the Cheyenne and Levee Districts of Chicago between 1870 and 1905." Just wow. "Click to enlarge" is good advice. Via Matt Fraction.

While visiting Burbank, California, I had the pleasure of stopping by the oldest remaining Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in the United States (aka “Bob’s 49″) for lunch (and pie, naturally). It was built in 1949 by local residents, Scott MacDonald and and Ward Albert, using a design by noted Googie style architect, Wayne McAllister. According to the restaurant’s Point of Historical Interest plaque, the iconic architecture incorporates “the 1940s transitional design of streamline modern style while anticipating the freeform 50s coffee shop structure…” (history page). “Bob’s 49″ is located at 4211 Riverside Drive in Burbank, California and I have additional images of the diner over at Flickr.

photos by Rusty Blazenhoff

submitted by munificent
[link] [212 comments]

 

I think that fake succulents are some of the most realistic looking silk/plastic plants.  Perhaps the fleshy texture of succulents lends itself well to molded plastic.  Here's a neat mock terrarium with plastic succulents from Target - for the black-thumbed miniature gardener.
From the Fern & Mossery: How to Make and Maintain Terrariums. See more!

There is a Google+ Community for RDA Cataloging, a place to share ideas. For example, currently there is a template for a corporate body name.

RDA Cataloging is an online community/group/forum for library and information science students, professionals and cataloging & metadata librarians. It is a place where people can get together to share ideas, trade tips and tricks, share resources, get the latest news, and learn about Resource Description and Access (RDA), a new cataloging standard to replace AACR2

The hallowed halls of academia may have filled with a dizzying array of counter-culture fashion since the 1960s, but like its fellow fashion statement the corduroy jacket, the academic beard continues to hold fast to the faces of many an academic.

Google Inc. is gaining ground against Facebook Inc. thanks to a controversial tactic: requiring people to use the Google+ social network.

Google over the past year has boosted the Google+ operation by integrating it with the company’s top-tier properties, including its Web search engine, Gmail, YouTube, business listings and the Android mobile-operating system.

People using Google to search for photos or customer reviews of a restaurant, for example, automatically are steered to the restaurant’s Google+ page. In the fall, Google began requiring people who want to post their reviews of restaurants or other businesses to use their Google+ profiles to do so. The same rule applies for reviews of physical goods or mobile apps obtained through Google.

Read the rest of the post on the original site »

In gentlemen's clubs in St James's to ordinary dinner tables it is imperative to pass the port to the left, pouring a glass for your neighbour on your right before you do so. Ideally, the decanter (vintage port is always decanted because of the extreme level of sediment in the bottle) should never stop its clockwise progress around the table until it is finished. If the decanter should ever stall it is considered very bad form to ask for it. Instead, you ask the person hogging the decanter: "Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?"

The $500 million acquisition of Zipcar by the Avis Budget Group represents a perhaps inevitable evolution for a company that has been more successful as a collectivist concept than as a profit-making venture.

Wayne Curtis, in Yankee Magazine!

We started looking for commercial space in Brooklyn that would meet our needs at a price that we could afford. Unfortunately, those types of places are far and few between. Just finding space that has a full sized loading dock or ramp is a challenge, let alone one that is the right size and price. We then expanded our search to include the entire NY Metro Region and realized that for what we needed, we would be paying much more than we really could afford.    Looking around the country, we found a few cities where we thought Bittermens could thrive. At the end of the day, there was one city that had the right blend of what we were looking for. So, at the end of January, we're shutting down production for two weeks and moving down to New Orleans!   As the first independent bitters producer to be licensed after Prohibition, moving to New Orleans brings bitters production back to the region for the first time since Peychaud's manufacturing was relocated to Kentucky.