Russian Sledges

animeismywhore:

Revolutionary Girl Utena, episode 9: “The Castle Said to Hold Eternity”

The attacker, who killed himself, had been angry that his daughter had been barred from registering because she had not completed homework.

22g:

WarisAhluwalia

fursasaida:

LORD HAVE MERCY

It's fun to listen to Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court slap down disingenuous arguments against gay marriage. It's also fun to listen to the opponents to gay marriage try to defend their illogical opinions, such as Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher, a real asshole.

Image: Chensiyuan/Wikimedia Commons.

***Please note- there is a mistake on the back of the box that states game pieces are included. The game no longer comes with the pieces. This is because the creators of the game decided that it might make the game more meaningful if players used their own personal items for game pieces

いつもなら寝そべって食べるのに、珍しく行儀よく椅子に立ってエサを食べていたから、­動画を撮りました(^^)けど、結局何時ものようにテーブルに乗り寝転がって食べ始め­ちゃいました、あははσ(^_^;)

phil winter has added a photo to the pool:

The carbon particles move the fastest because they’re afraid of dying.

[Image: "Humvees are stored inside the Frigaard Cave in central Norway. The cave is one of six caves that are part of the Marine Corps Prepositioning Program-Norway, which supports the equipping of Marine Expeditionary Brigade consisting of 15,000 Marines and with supplies for up to 30 days." U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Marcin Platek].

Norwegian caves are being stuffed full of U.S. military equipment, including armored Humvees, tanks, and cargo containers full of weaponry, all part of a vast and semi-subterranean supply chain maintained to help wage future wars around the world.

The Marines have "stashed weapons and equipment in the Norwegian countryside since the 1980s," War is Boring explains, in sites that include artificially enlarged and fortified caves. It's all about logistics: "With this setup, Marines can fly in and be ready for a fight in no time."

[Image: "Rows of front loaders and 7-ton trucks sit, gassed up and ready to roll in one of the many corridors in the Frigard supply cave located on the Vaernes Garrison near Trondheim, Norway. This is one of seven [see previous caption!] caves that make up the Marine Corps Prepositioning Program-Norway facility. All the caves total more than 900,000 sq. ft. of storage space, full of enough gear to outfit 13,000 Marines for up to 30 days." U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Matt Lyman].

These facilities are commonly described as "supply caves," and they hold warfighting gear in a state of indefinite readiness, "reserved for any time of crisis or war."

Marines can simply fly in, unlock their respective caves, and grab the keys to one of hundreds, if not thousands, of combat-ready vehicles, all "gassed up and ready to roll in one of the many corridors" of this subterranean empire on the edges of American influence.

Among many other points of interest, the Marines identify six such supply caves in the caption of one image and seven caves in the caption of another, as if—assuming this is not just a minor clerical error—the Marines themselves don't even know how many caves they have.

Instead, there's just Norway, some faraway land of underground voids we've stuffed full of combat gear, like emperors stocking our own tombs in advance of some future demise—the actual number of caves be damned, for who will be left counting at the end of the world?

[Image: "Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacements, High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles and trailers, which belong to Marine Corps Prepositioning Program-Norway are staged in a storage cave at Tromsdal, Norway, Feb. 24, 2014. Marine Corps began storing equipment in several cave sites throughout Norway in the 1980s to counter the Soviets, but the gear is now reserved for any time of crisis or war." U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Sullivan Laramie].

On one level, I'm reminded of Marcus Trimble's old joke that France has been constructing a back-up version of itself in China. It is a frenzied act of "pre-emptive preservation," led by the cultural ministers of that sclerotic nation of well-tended chateaux who realized that la belle France could only survive if they built immediately ready copies of themselves elsewhere.

Only, in France's case, it wasn't willful self-burial in Norwegian caves, but in the real estate free-for-all of urban China. After all, Trimble suggested, that country's "construction industry seems perfect for the task of backing up bricks rather than bits—cheap and powered by the brute force of sheer population. Copies of places may be made in a fraction of the time that it took to create them. If, in the event of a catastrophic episode, the part of France in question could be restored and life would go on as it was before."

[Image: "China: ample space for a spare copy of France"; image by Marcus Trimble].

Militarize this, secret it away in a cave in Scandinavia, and you have something roughly approximately what's called the Marine Corps Prepositioning Program.

However, I was also reminded of a recent paper by Pierre Belanger and Alexander Scott Arroyo at Harvard's GSD. There, Belanger and Arroyo describe the U.S. military as a kind of planetary logistics challenge. (A PDF of their paper is available here courtesy of the U.S. Department of Defense).

Specifically, it is the problem of building and often violently maintaining "logistics islands," as Belanger and Arroyo describe them, that now characterizes much of the U.S. military's global behavior, an endless quest for finding and protecting "a secure staging ground adjacent to the theater of operations," in an era when adjacency is increasingly hard to define. As they explain:

While logistical acquisitions are managed by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), logistical operations in the field are predominantly coordinated by USTRANSCOM. On average, the command oversees almost 2,000 air missions and 10,000 ground shipments per week, with 25 container ships providing active logistical support. From October 2009 through September 2010 alone, USTRANSCOM flew 37,304 airlift missions carrying over 2 million passengers and 852,141 tons of cargo; aerially refueled 13,504 aircraft with 338,856,200 pounds of fuel on 11,859 distinct sorties; and moved nearly 25 million tons of cargo in coordinated sea-land operations. DLA and USTRANSCOM and their civilian partners are responsible for the largest, most widespread, and most diverse sustained logistics operation in history.

The largest, most widespread, and most diverse sustained logistics operation in history.

The obvious and intended resonance here is that military operations perhaps now most closely resemble complicated UPS deliveries than anything like actual ground combat. However, we can also infer from this that establishing new and ever more convenient logistics islands is vital to U.S. national security.

A literal archipelago of shipping hubs is thus key to the country's global military activities, and this not only requires sites like Diego Garcia, which Belanger and Arroyo specifically write about, or even the "mobile offshore bases" they also describe, where the pop-up urbanism of Archigram has been inadvertently realized by the U.S. military, but artificially fortified caves near the Arctic Circle where truly daunting amounts of military materiel are now kept on hand, as if held frozen in some imperial freezer, awaiting the day when global tensions truly heat up.

Read a bit more at War is Boring.

(This is more or less irrelevant, but you might also like Kiln, earlier on BLDGBLOG).

Japanese company Torune has created a combination bread cutter and mold that forms and cuts a piece of bread into an adorable pop-up panda. The device is available online at JBOX.

photos via JBOX

via TokyoFinds, Andrew Ledford, Lustik

After a year and a half of silence, Fung Wah bus lashed out at the federal government in a public letter, accusing the federal government of arbitrarily shutting down the cheap Boston-to-New York bus service.

image via The Sentinel

Sometimes, the best thing about the interwebz is when you just kind of come across some website that just feels incredibly out-of-place to you. A website that seems to not really understand what it is selling or promoting. A website that feels like it came right out of 1996 and somehow landed back in your computer, almost 20 years later. Today, for me, that site is:

Cookeville Police.com

First and foremost, it is clear they take what they do at the Cookeville Police very seriously. You know how you can tell? The way the website has flashes of lightning around the name. Heck, even that photo on the main page says: We are not playing any games (even though the site totally looks like it would totally be a load screen for some lame action game).

Keep in mind, we say this with no disrespect for the police force in mention. We tip our hats to what they do. It takes courage and bravery to choose that line of work and we commend you all for it.

But your webmaster on the other hand? Um, not so much. 

He is also really good at humming.

The post Varg Vikernes Uses Papyrus Font, Doesn’t Own an Amplifier appeared first on MetalSucks.

“Ever heard of the Jewett City vampires?”

An international student threw sneakers at employees of a Central Square store last week after she became enraged over bad customer service, according to police.Cambridge Police responded to a report of an assault and battery on Mass. Ave. at approximately 6:20 p.m. on Aug. 19. A sales clerk told officers a woman refused to wait in line to pay for a cellphone charger and became so enraged that she spilled an employee’s soda at the cash [...]

lacxste:

kogyaru:

ノッてる柴犬「しゅん」ちゃん（その2）-カメに乗る

me

Florida Polytechnic University in Tampa has just opened, with over 300 students attending the first day of classes this week. The newly-built campus has a gorgeous library building, but no plans to stock it with books. Instead, it will be the nation's first all-digital college library. But it gets weirder than that.

Read more...

When I was studying Buddhism at the University of Washington (Seattle) in 1967-68, there were about ten students in my first-year Sanskrit course for Buddhologists and Indologists.  What intrigued me greatly was that there was another beginning Sanskrit course being offered at the same time.  It had many more students than the class I was in and was offered by the Linguistics Department.  The rationale for encouraging (I can't remember if it was actually required) linguistics students to take Sanskrit was that the foundations of the scientific study of language had been laid by Panini, Patanjali, and other ancient Sanskrit grammarians around two and a half millennia ago, so that it would be good to have at least a basic understanding of the roots of the tradition.

Still, there was always something antiquarian about the study of Sanskrit.  After the rise of the vernaculars such as Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bhojpuri, Oriya, Sindhi, Sinhala, Nepali, and Assamese, especially when they developed written literary forms, Sanskrit was relegated to the position of a dead, classical language, studied mainly by priests and pundits.

Now, however, Sanskrit has somehow managed to remake itself as a living language.  Universities around the world (including Penn), schools, and summer camps offer courses on spoken Sanskrit that are well attended, and there are villages in India where most of the people are conversant in Sanskrit.

The reason I bring all of this up now is that BBC News Asia just published an article entitled "Why is Sanskrit so controversial?" which focuses on the political aspects of the spread of Sanskrit in recent times.  One thing that I think needs to be made clear is that the modern rebirth of Sanskrit began long before the ascension of the BJP to power.

"The 'Revival' Of Spoken Sanskrit In Modern India: An Ethnographic And Linguistic Study" (1998)

Nonetheless, it is clear that the new Prime Minister Narendra Modi is well disposed toward Sanskrit and that this venerable classical language can expect to see additional gains in the coming years.

"Narendra Modi’s Election Sparks Hope for Sanskrit"

"Shri Narendra Modi speaks on Sanskrit after honoring Sanaskrit [sic] scholar Vasant Anant Gadgil in Pune"

There's no danger of this ever happening with Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese), since it has not been a spoken language for two millennia, if ever.

[Hat tip Jim Breen]

Via HiLobrow (8/10/2014), Ben Zimmer came across this virtuoso display of Gothic katakana on feitclub's Tumblr:

I must confess that I have a hard time reading off this beautiful, ornate font, which is so different from the spare, simple, Japanese katakana. From Wikipedia, here's a chart of the latter for comparison:

Gojūon – Katakana characters with nucleus

	a	i	u	e	o
∅	ア	イ	ウ	エ	オ
K	カ	キ	ク	ケ	コ
S	サ	シ	ス	セ	ソ
T	タ	チ	ツ	テ	ト
N	ナ	ニ	ヌ	ネ	ノ
H	ハ	ヒ	フ	ヘ	ホ
M	マ	ミ	ム	メ	モ
Y	ヤ		ユ		ヨ
R	ラ	リ	ル	レ	ロ
W	ワ	ヰ		ヱ	ヲ

I've seen the English alphabet written to look like Devanagari, like Chinese characters, and other scripts, but this Gothic katakana is one of the most amazing lettering tours de force I've even encountered.  Yet what do all of these script metamorphoses tell us about the nature of writing?  Do scripts look the way they do because of esthetic preferences?  Or because of something intrinsic about the course of their development, including the surfaces on which they are written and the instruments with which they are traced on those surfaces?  One thing is certain:  the multiplicity of different scripts and their diverse appearances are wondrous to behold.

The Chemin de fer de Petite Ceinture (French for “little belt railway”) was a 32 km railway that encirled Paris, connecting all the major railway stations within fortified walls during the Industrial Revolution. In service from 1852 to 1934, the line has now been completely abandoned for 80 years.

Several developers and local officials have recently set their sights on the vast swath of unused land, tunnels, and stations as an opportunity for new development. However, some railway enthusiasts and related organizations want the tracks and stations to be preserved indefinitely as part of the cities’ heritage. Others want to turn areas of de Petite Ceinture into parkways similar to the nearby Promenade plantée, a 4.7 km park built on an elevated train track in 1988 that later inspired New York’s famous High Line.

As part of his project “By the Silent Line,” photographer Pierre Folk has been working since 2011 to photograph the 160-year-old railway’s last remnants before any final decisions are made. He stalks the tracks at all times of the year, often returning to the same locations to document nature’s slow reclamation as rusted tracks and crumbling tunnels are swallowed by trees, vines, and grass. This is just a small selection of Folk’s work, you can see many more photos right here.

Oakland, California, has lifted its long-standing ban on pinball machines, making it legal to play pinball in the city for the first time in almost 80 years. Oakland's ban stretches back to the 1930s, when several cities in the United States adopted...

 

Latrobe did a “brilliant” job here, picking up on a lot of important trends.

Let’s see how many instructive legal issues this one label raises. Extra points for anyone who can raise additional issues. No more ALS challenges, please.

1. It is beer but it more or less screams spirits.
2. In a variety of ways. (For example, the brand name refers to moonshine paraphernalia, as Tickle’s sidekick helpfully explains.*)
3. Within the rules, probably.
4. Even though spirits terms are not allowed on beer labels.
5. Even though this product contains and purports to contain absolutely no whiskey of any sort.
6. It mentions George Dickel at least three times.
7. It mentions Rye but not Rye Whiskey. This is very smart in that, though they mean about the same thing to most people, rye is just a grain, and it’s not necessarily whiskey without the second word attached. Like Bourbon is not sufficient on even a Bourbon Whiskey label, without the second word.
8. Latrobe used a formula, notwithstanding that TTB has eased way up on formula requirements.
9. The label raises a lot of good trademark issues, tied up with Latrobe’s use of another company’s highly protected brand name.
10. TTB seems to be allowing the term “refreshing” these days, on a pretty liberal basis, even though this policy has wavered a bit over the years.

This Tequila-themed beer shows that the above Whiskey-themed beer label is not just a fluke.

What did we miss?

* John’s parents will be proud that we have done some work for Tim Smith, Junior Johnson, The Hatfields & McCoys, Jesse Jane, Popcorn Sutton, Jesse James and other rapscallions. And this guy just looks guilty — I am not sure of what — but moonshining at least.

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• Old Bay Beer (2)

4) I've been to Sorrelina, Troquet, DeuxAve, Mistral, Toscana, and Menton, and I liked them; I'm happy enough to eat there. But none of those places has the comfortable special occasion vibe that Hamersley's has. Sorrelina is too trendy, Troquet is a little off, DeuxAve too casual, Mistral too formulaic, Toscana not special enough food, and Menton is a pawn in an business empire.

optimysticals:

partysoft:

usagov:

Image description: On Saturday, the Navy christened a new research ship the “Sally Ride” after the first U.S. woman and youngest person in space. It is the fifth current ship named for an astronaut. 

Photo from the U.S. Navy

the person doing the christening is dr. tam o’shaughnessy, ride’s partner of 27 yrs. sally ride was not just the first woman and youngest person in space: she was also the first lesbian in space - likely, the first lgbtq person in space.

I know we shared this before but finding out that this ship was christened by Dr. Tam O’Shaughnessy was something that required re-sharing.

Furthermore, on at least one occasion, wine bearing a Harvard label was inadvertently placed for sale at a liquor store.