Russian Sledges

Учредили Кимченирскую международную премию, отражая единодушное стремление и чаяние прогрессивного человечества вечно прославлять немеркнущие заслуги и бесценную революционную жизнь Ким Чен Ира, внесшего огромный вклад в историю человеческих идеологий и осуществление дела самостоятельности мира.

24 декабря 2012 года Совет по присвоению «Кимченирской международной премии» по случаю 21-й годовщины назначения Ким Чен Ира Верховным Главнокомандующим КНА объявил решение об учреждении Кимченирской международной премии.

Кимченирская международная премия будет присвоена знаменитым деятелям политических, общественных, научных и экономических кругов всех стран, внесших выдающийся вклад в борьбу за самостоятельность страны и нации, в дело осуществления самостоятельности и мира во всем мире, в развитие культуры человечества, по случаю Дня Звезды, дня рождения великого Ким Чен Ира.

Работой по присвоению вышеупомянутой премии занимается Совет по присвоению «Кимченирской международной премии».

Организация Совета по присвоению «Кимченирской международной премии»

В последнее время организован Совет по присвоению «Кимченирской международной премии».

В его составе – известные деятели политических, общественных и научных кругов разных стран мира.

Совет находится в Нью-Дели.

Совет по присвоению «Кимченирской международной премии» также принял решение об учреждении Кимченирской международной премии и правило ее присвоения.

P/S     Чучхейский календарь на новый 2013 год. Отличный подарок и сувенир из КНДР

интернет магазин часов

Not a crush, but one of the cutest history personas ever. And, it’s an awesome story that needs to be told. One of the heroes of WWI, Sergeant Stubby, the first American war dog. He served 18 mos in Europe, saved his unit from mustard gas attacks, and artillery attacks since he could hear incoming missiles sooner than his human comrades.

More info can be read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergeant_Stubby

PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE

Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States from 1923-1929.

Has this man gotten any love yet? Popularly known as “Silent Cal”, he actually had a very dry wit and could dole out the zingers, which I find hot as hell. 

Follow @drewtoothpaste on Twitter or join the TFD Facebook Page.

(NEW!) Drew's blog is The Worst Things For Sale.

Art & Vintage posted a photo:

retro-vintage-photography.blogspot.fr/

The Wall Street Journal has the behind-the-scenes account today of the chilly and contentious "fiscal cliff" talks between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner.

In the piece, Obama comes across as emboldened post-election to push for a better deal than the debt ceiling "grand bargain" that collapsed during the summer of 2011. Boehner, meanwhile, wanted something in return if he agreed to raise income tax rates on those earning more than $1 million a year.

When Boehner asked Obama if they agree on a deal along the same lines as the one he walked away from during the 2011 talks, according to the paper, Obama retorted: "You missed your opportunity on that."

Obama's frustrations grew, and he told Boehner he would rail publicly against the Republicans in the absence of a reasonable compromise.

As the Journal reports:

Mr. Obama repeatedly lost patience with the speaker as negotiations faltered. In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn't reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault.

At one point, according to notes taken by a participant, Mr. Boehner told the president, "I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table. What do I get for that?"

"You get nothing," the president said. "I get that for free."

Continue Reading...

Game controllers for iPhone are no longer all that rare, even though once upon a time Apple didn’t even allow them to connect to its smartphone. Still, there’s plenty of room for innovation in this space, and Justice Frangipane’s new design is a perfect example of how things can still get better in this market. Frangipane’s project is an iPhone case that while only 3mm thick, holds a Bluetooth 4.0 video game controller that recharges via solar power.

Launching today on Kickstarter, the project is a concept that creator Justice Frangipane has been working on for the last year, but now he’s working with iDevices, the creators of the Bluetooth iPhone meat thermometer iGrill, to help make it a reality. It features a controller that snaps into the back of a super thin iPhone case, providing physical controls compatible with specific games on iOS that support Bluetooth accessories. It not only charges via solar power, but can also use “trickle charging” to sip on low light and indoor light sources, too. The goal was to build a device you never had to build in, and Frangipane says in the project description that they’ve managed to achieve that.

The controller also doesn’t need that much energy to do its thing, thanks to the use of Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy tech,. That will help it connect to the iPhone without sucking down too much juice on either side of the equation, in order to get four hours of play time on a full charge without any light source. And Bluetooth 4.0 also means that response time for input is dramatically improved: BLE has a 6 second response time, Frangipane says, vs. a sluggish 100 milliseconds for older Bluetooth specifications.

Frangipane says that the project has Apple’s support, and that in fact, the iPhone maker has agreed to work with their team to help make sure the controller works with iOS devices, thanks to help from iDevices. At this stage, the prototype still looks like something created by a home hacker in a garage, but it clearly demonstrates that the concept works: by the time it ships, Frangipane says the control pods will snap into place on the front of the device in the case frame, and of course any wires or connectors will be less exposed.

Backers can get shipping devices for $60, with an estimated delivery date of June 2013. If you’re feeling adventurous, there are 125 prototype testing spots open at the $500 pledge level. Overall, the team hopes to raise $135,000 to bring the controller to market.

Ahh, assistant district attorneys—whether they're allegedly slapping EMTs or wearing blackface, they're always a barrel of laughs! And on Thursday night, a Brooklyn ADA joined that motley crew when he was arrested after refusing to pay his cabbie. And after cops were brought in to settle the dispute, Imran Ansari allegedly told them, “I’m a Brooklyn ADA and I outrank you." [ more › ]

Back to the Future, 1985 | Source

Studio letterhead used during production of Back to the Future in the mid-’80s. 

Bar in Sydney, Australia

Designed by Julia Jacqueline Warnock.

This menu is an exact visual replica of the Exotica/Lounge station on Pandora. Everything from the impeccable illustrations to the mysterious logo to the worldly typography comes together to transport the reader to a paradisiacal atmosphere. They should really turn this one into a movie.

Visit The Botanist Kirribilli.

For bigger menu images see this post at Art of the Menu

Food

Bar

flip coffee cup chair by daisuke motogi. via

Strange maps may be found hiding in antique atlases or down some of the internet’s more obscure cul-de-sacs [1]. But sometimes, curious cartography greets you on your very doorstep, hand-delivered by servants of the commonwealth. Like this postcard, sent from the Isle of Lewis [2] in the Outer ...

Read More

“Random Selection in Random Image” is new website by Jan Robert Leegte. It does exactly that: it loads a random image from Flickr and it makes a random selection. Reload the website to get another random selection in a random image.

found at triangulation

“Everything that I wish I could be” is the title of a series of book collages made by Kent Rogowski. He used the titles of self-help books to create larger narratives, which become portraits of emotions, people and events in life.

“Yesterday,Today and Tomorrow”

“There Is A Rainbow”, Emilio also liked this one.

“You Are Special”

found at kiameku

Braided II by Joseph Parra.

There is no other shoe that epitomizes the traditional “Business Shoe” like a black captoe oxford. There’s no end of black captoe oxfords out there but then there is Gaziano & Girling’s “Oxford” which takes the genre to a whole other level.

The narrow waist and extended toe box of this shoe is what gives them their graceful and urbane appearance. And because it’s a perennial classic these shoes are forever in style. And for the first time we are now stocking this beauty on the G&G soft square MH71 last.

Oxford MH71 Last, Black Calf, Oak Bark Soles

nevver:

NYC Subway Infographic Posters

It would be most remiss of me not to mention this Kickstarter project from Andrew Lynch, also known as vanshnookenraggen. As well as these great posters, he’s also responsible for the fantastic animated history of the MBTA map that I’ve featured before.

Basically, Andrew is seeking funding for bulk printing of these posters (in effect, your pledge to him is a preorder for the poster(s) of your choice). For every $25 you pledge, you get another poster, all the way up to $225 for the entire set of nine.

Printing won’t start until next year, so they won’t arrive for Christmas, but if you like the look of this (and I sure do!), I strongly encourage you to get behind this project and give what you can. $25 for an awesome NYC subway poster sounds like a good deal to me. I’ve personally pledged $50 to the project and hope you can join me.

Kickstarter Project Page | Flickr Photoset

The Iowa Supreme Court has ruled that a dentist was within his rights firing an assistant who he found attractive simply because he and his wife thought she was a threat to their marriage. That seems a bit iffy to me. But perhaps he could be held culpable simply for saying the following. And I don't just mean for harassment -- that seems kind of like a given in this case, just for being maybe the weirdest dentist ever, in addition to being a harasser.

This from the AP ...

Nelson, 32, worked for Knight for 10 years, and he considered her a stellar worker. But in the final months of her employment, he complained that her tight clothing was distracting, once telling her that if his pants were bulging that was a sign her clothes were too revealing, according to the opinion.

He also explained to Nelson's husband about how his desire to bed his wife might have become a problem ...

Knight fired Nelson and gave her one month's severance. He later told Nelson's husband that he worried he was getting too personally attached and feared he would eventually try to start an affair with her.

Late Update: TPM Reader KM notes that 'you're so hot my spouse is threatened' is something the federal courts have generally been okay with as a cause for termination, which is bizarre, but there you go ...

That decision may seem surprising, but as someone who represents plaintiff's in sexual harassment cases, I can tell you that it is pretty consistent with federal decisions, including the New York-based federal appeals court. Firing an employee because your spouse is jealous (which seems to be what happened here if the AP report is right) has been consistently been held to be a non-discriminatory, lawful motivation. There's little doubt that women get fired for this reason about a million times more often than men, but the courts don't seem to factor that into the analysis. And, yes, that dentist is weird, but I've seen much worse in my practice.

(Kraft's cheese cave in Springfield, Missouri. Photo by Christoph Morlinghaus.)

Previewing an upcoming exhibition co-organized with The Center for Land-Use Interpretation (CLUI), Nicola Twilley, of Edible Geography, takes us on an abbreviated tour of North America's coldscape, the “vast and immeasurable volume of thermally controlled space” that “is as ubiquitous as it is varied.” Exactly how varied? According to her undoubtedly incomplete list for Cabinet Magazine, these spaces of “distributed artificial winter” include shipping containers, floating fish factories, international seed banks, livestock semen storage, cheese caves, banana-ripening rooms and sushi coffins.

These are spaces in which a perpetual winter has distorted or erased seasonality; spaces that are located within an energy-intensive geography of previously unimaginable distance—both mental and physical—between producers and consumers. Artificial refrigeration has reconfigured the contents of our plates and the shape of our cities—it has even contributed to the overthrow of governments, as anyone familiar with the rise and fall of United Fruit can attest. Perhaps most bizarrely, although their variations in form reflect the particular requirements of the perishable product they host, coldspaces have, in turn, redesigned food itself, both in terms of the selective breeding that favors cold-tolerance over taste and the more fundamental transition from food as daily nourishment to food as global commodity.

Information about the CLUI exhibition is, I'm hoping, forthcoming.

Fine artist and designer INSA creates elaborately painted walls that are photographed in sequence to create these amazing, psychedelic animated gifs. His latest piece (top 3 images) is a collaboration with artist Stanley Donwood called Hollywood Dooom to help celebrate the release of a new album for Atoms for Peace, AMOK, for which Donwood did the album artwork. INSA painted the entire exterior of XL Recordings four times to create the frames for the animation. Of the work he says:

My challenge was to take two very static items, a beautiful lino-cut and a less beautiful box of a building, and bring them to life. After a week of sweating in the Los Angeles late summer sun re-painting the whole building several times I got there. Animated as a continuous GIF it may only live online but some would argue that is where most now live there lives…

You can see more of INSA’s gif work and other pieces on his blog. (via the creator’s project)

More lies from the king of liers

Image from the Melbourne Ring website.

Just how many times will the Ring of the Nibelung be performed during Wagner's bicentennial year? I have been making a count, and here's what I've come up with: at least forty-one performances of the complete cycle, by twenty companies, plus three abridged cycles in Dijon. In addition, the Teatro Massimo, in Palermo, will present the four operas of the Ring over the course of 2013. In all, twenty-two different cycles will be seen complete, and there may be others yet to be announced. Quite a few companies will be offering individual works from the cycle; I won't attempt to list them. (Wagner Opera and Wagner Werkstatt have good general calendars.) It would be wonderful if some wealthy lunatic attempted to see each of these cycles in succession, but it can't be done.

Bayerische Staatsoper: Jan. 5-13, Jan. 23-27, July 13-18

Frankfurt Opera: Jan. 25 - Feb. 3, Feb. 6-13

Darmstadt Opera: Jan. 26 - Feb. 3, May 4-9

Halle / Ludwigshafen: March 3-9, April 21-27

Karlsruhe Opera: March 27 - April 1

Berlin Staatsoper: April 4-10, April 13-21, July 22-28 (at the Proms), Sept. 21-29

Metropolitan Opera: April 6-23, April 25 - May 2, May 4-11

Wiener Staatsoper: May 12-22

Mannheim Opera: May 22-31, June 7-16, June 28 - July 7

Hamburg Staatsoper: May 26 - June 2

Latvian National Opera, Riga: June 4-9

Longborough Festival Opera: June 16-22, June 26 - July 2, July 6-12

La Scala: June 17-22, 24-29

Paris Opéra: June 18-26

Bayreuther Festspiele: July 26-31, Aug. 14-19, Aug. 22-27

Seattle Opera: Aug. 4-9, 12-17, 20-25

Lucerne Festival: Aug. 30 - Sept. 4 (in concert)

Deutsche Oper, Berlin: Sept. 21-29

Mariinsky Theater: September (dates to be announced)

Dijon Opéra: Oct. 5-15 (three cycles, abridged)

Opera Australia, Melbourne: Nov. 18-25, Nov. 27 - Dec. 4, Dec. 6-13

A prolific fundraiser and dean at St. John’s University, Cecilia Chang was also accused of murdering her husband and had connections to organized crime. Two days after she was convicted of stealing more than $1 million from the schoool, she took her own life.

Mosi Secret | New York Times | Dec 2012 [Full Story]

These beautiful and other-worldly photographs of ice were taken last year by University of Washington graduate student Jeff Bowman and his professor Jody Deming while they worked on a study combining oceanography, microbiology, and planetary sciences in the central Arctic Ocean as part of the Integrated Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program. Their single focus was the study of frost flowers, a strange phenomenon where frost grows from imperfections in the surface ice amid extreme sub-zero temperatures nearing -22C or -7.6F, forming spiky structures that have been found to house microorganisms. In fact, the bacteria found in the frost flowers is much more dense than in the frozen water below it, meaning each flower is essentially a temporary ecosystem, not unlike a coral reef. Via IGERT:

Around their research icebreaker in the central Arctic Ocean new ice grows on long open cracks that network amongst the thick floes of pack ice. Abruptly the surface of this new ice changes texture. The cold, moist air above the open cracks becomes saturated and frost begins to form wherever an imperfection can be found on the ice surface. From these nucleation points the flower-like frost structures grow vertically, quickly rising to centimeters in height. The hollow tendrils of these “frost flowers” begin to wick moisture from the ice surface, incorporating salt, marine bacteria, and other substances as they grow. The fog dissipates and the Arctic sun lights the surface of the frost flowers, initiating a cascade of chemical reactions. These reactions can produce formaldehyde, deplete ozone, and actually alter the chemical composition of the lower atmosphere. [...] Bowman and Deming have discovered that bacteria are consistently more abundant in frost flowers than in sea ice. Since microscopic pockets in sea ice are known to support an active community of psychrophiles (cold-loving microorganisms), even in the coldest months of the year, these results are encouraging.

Bowman and Deming are currently building an ultra-clean chamber where they can grow artificial frost flowers and hope that their research leads to a better understanding of how life might be able to survive in extreme conditions elsewhere in the universe. Amazing! Photos by Matthias Wietz. (via the daily what)

A visit to the hotel North Korea starved to build, still unfinished after breaking ground in 1987.

Simon Parry | Daily Mail | Dec 2012 [Full Story]

Boston Public Library posted a photo:

File name: 08_06_033987
Title: Digging out auto
Creator/Contributor: Jones, Leslie, 1886-1967 (photographer)
Date created: 1939 (approximate)
Physical description: 1 negative : film, black & white; 4 x 5 in.
Genre: Film negatives
Subject: Snow removal; Blizzards; Automobiles; Boston (Mass.)
Notes: Title and date from information provided by Leslie Jones or the Boston Public Library on the negative or negative sleeve.
Collection: Leslie Jones Collection
Location: Boston Public Library, Print Department
Rights: Copyright Leslie Jones.
Preferred credit: Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

This quite brilliant video is available exclusively on the Hardy Amies website. It discusses the famous designer’s (he was once Royal outfitter to Queen Elizabeth II) involvement creating costumes for Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

SEE THE VIDEO HERE

We could go into details, though frankly you would be better off just watching the video for yourself. It is around 16 minutes long and worth every second. Look out for some very interesting titbits concerning the famous Pan-Am ‘grip shoes’, where Amies gathered inspiration and how scary but talented milliner Freddie Fox (also The Queen’s outfitter) created those wonderful egg-shaped helmets.

Incidentally, an exhibition of Hardy Amies’ work for 2001: A Space Odyssey is on display from now until 20th June at Los Angeles County Museum of Art featuring sketches and actual costumes from the film. Amazing.

You can watch 2001: A Space Odyssey at LOVEFiLM.com.

© 2012, Chris Laverty.

tactful-cactus:

Storylines

London’s iconic tube map is transformed into a pit-stop journey through classic styles of storytelling, with the individual tube lines turned into genres and sub genres of literature. The depths of the Northern Line are made over into the aptly named Horror Line. The Bakerloo Line coursing past Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street becomes, of course, the Crime & Mystery Line. And the pink trajectory of the Hammersmith & City is converted to the Romance Line. Each Storyline features a range of illustrations bringing to life both classics and mavericks from that theme, with a genre-defining work lurking at each journey’s end. Stations falling on intersecting Storylines get a sub-genre cross over. Many many days and weeks were spent researching and crafting this piece.

Normally, I’m not a huge fan of the whole “let’s use a well known transit map and replace the station names with something else” thing, but I’m going to make an exception for this stunning poster by artist Anna Burles. This is beautifully done, and – for once – the interchanges between the genre/route lines have actually been thought about properly.

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(NEW!) Drew's blog is The Worst Things For Sale.