Yet another reason why @BrickMortarLtd is awesome -- their matchbooks: pic.twitter.com/DArEzdujhp

germannn:

Funny and bizarre German animal names

The German language is famous for some really long nouns (Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän comes to mind). This is because German nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives are like lego bricks; you can stick them together in almost any way to create new words that encapsulate new concepts. This gives the language a special ability to name just about anything. You could call it the German language’s lego brick-like quality, or Legosteineigenschaft (see what I just did there?).

But why does German rely on such an elaborate process to name things as simple as squirrels? When broken down into their separate components, the names of familiar animals mutate into bizarre new creatures.

The Uncanny X-Tiere

Comics are full of heroes with names like super, wonder, iron, ultra, bat or cat followed by -man, -woman, -girl or -boy. A lot of German animal names work the same way, where Tier – the word for animal – is preceded by a word describing that animal’s “super power”.

• Stinktier – stink animal (skunk)

• Faultier – lazy animal (sloth)

• Gürteltier – belt animal (armadillo)

• Murmeltier – mumbling animal (groundhog)

• Schnabeltier – beak animal (platypus)

• Maultier – mouth animal (mule)

• Trampeltier – trampling animal (bactrian camel). The verb trampeln means to trample or tread upon, whereas the noun Trampel is a clumsy oaf.

Sometimes suffixes get more specific than -tier, but still tend to describe the wrong animal:

• Schildkröte – shield toad (tortoise)

• Waschbär – wash bear (raccoon)

• Nacktschnecke – naked snail (slug)

• Fledermaus – flutter mouse (bat)

• Seehund – sea dog (seal)

• Tintenfisch – ink fish (squid)

• Truthahn – threatening chicken (turkey). Trut is onomatopoeic for the trut-trut-trut cluck of a turkey, but it’s also been hypothesized that the name comes from the Middle German droten which means “to threaten”.

No, I’m Pretty Sure That’s A Pig

Swine seem to be a popular yardstick in German animal taxonomy.

• Schweinswal – pig whale (porpoise)

• Seeschwein – sea pig (dugong). Not to be confused with the Seekuh, or sea cow, known in English as a manatee.

• Stachelschwein – spike pig (porcupine). The English word is actually just as literal; porcupine sounds a lot like “pork spine”.

• Wasserschwein – water pig (capybara)

• Meerschweinchen – ocean piglet (guinea pig). The ending -chen denotes something small. Add it to the end of Schwein and you get a little pig, or piglet. Since the stems Meer and Wasser are often interchangeable, it’s most likely that Meerschweinchen actually means little capybara.

Just Plain Weird

I’d like to end this list by giving one animal a category all to itself: the humble squirrel.

Eichhörnchen:

• little oak horn: Eiche (oak tree) + Horn (horn) + -chen (little)
• oak croissant: Eiche (oak tree) + Hörnchen (croissant)

alternate names:

• Eichkätzchen (regional name) and Eichkatzerl (Austria) – oak kitten

Calling a squirrel a “tree kitten” is reasonably literal, but where does “little oak horn” come from? It seems that the answer comes down to a misplaced h: Eichhörnchen comes from the Old and Middle German eichorn, which has nothing to do with oak trees or horns. In this case, the eich comes from the ancient Indo-Germanic word aig, which means agitated movement, combined with the now obsolete suffix -orn. Somewhere in history a superfluous h was added (along with the diminutive -chen ending) but the original meaning remained. Today, Hörnchen is a category of rodents that includes all squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, prairie dogs and flying squirrels.

Keep an eye on this spot for an upcoming post where we’ll delve deeper into the animal kingdom: branching out to birds, insects, reptiles, fishes and any other mammals we find crawling around.

Directed by Michael Patrick O'Leary and Ashley North Compton Written and performed by Wye Oak

The NRA has disavowed its recent criticism of pro-gun demonstrations in Texas. In an interview on Tuesday with the organization's own news site, the head of the NRA's lobbying arm blamed a staff member's "personal opinion" for the content of an unsigned statement published Friday on the organization's website, and he apologized for "any confusion" the statement may have caused.

taishou-kun:

Women observing stars.  1936, Japan

Artist Oota choou 太田聴雨 (1896-1958)

Hoshi wo miru josei 星をみる女性  - 

Megan Carloto, a 22-year-old UCSB graduate, was one of the victims shot by suicide-killer Elliot Rodger. After her release from the hospital, Megan shared some of her recollections and thoughts with ANIMAL.

An anonymous reader writes "Netflix yesterday furthered its plans to ditch Silverlight for HTML5 on Macs, having already done so last year in IE11 on Windows 8.1. HTML5 video is now supported by Netflix in Safari on OS X Yosemite, meaning you can stream your favorite movies and TV shows without having to install any plugins." Courtesy of encrypted media extensions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tests have revealed that Houghton Library’s copy of Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de l’ame (FC8.H8177.879dc) is without a doubt bound in human skin.

Harvard conservators and scientists tested the binding using several different methods. According to Senior Rare Book Conservator Alan Puglia, they are 99% confident that the binding is of human origin.

Microscopic samples were taken from various locations on the binding, and were analyzed by peptide mass fingerprinting, which identifies proteins to create a “peptide mass fingerprint” (PMF) allowing analysts to identify the source.

Bill Lane, the director of the Harvard Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory, and Daniel Kirby of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies described the results:

“The PMF from Des destinées de l’ame matched the human reference, and clearly eliminated other common parchment sources, such as sheep, cattle and goat. However, although the PMF was consistent with human, other closely related primates, such as the great apes and gibbons, could not be eliminated because of the lack of necessary references.”

Although unlikely that the binding was made from a primate source, the samples were further analyzed using Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry (LCMSMS) to determine the order of amino acids, the building blocks of each peptide, which can be different in each species.

“The analytical data, taken together with the provenance of Des destinées de l’ame, make it very unlikely that the source could be other than human,” said Lane.

Houghton’s book is now the only known book at Harvard bound in human skin. Similar testing done on books thought to be bound in human skin at the Harvard Law School Library and the Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library revealed that both were actually bound in sheepskin.

Houghton’s book contains a very specific note from the late 19^th century detailing the binding’s origin. This was not the gruesome pastime of just one individual; there are many accounts of similar occurrences in the 19^th century, in which the bodies of executed criminals were donated to science, and the skins given to tanners and bookbinders.

The book has been a part of Harvard Library’s collections for eighty years; it was deposited at the library by John B. Stetson, Jr. in 1934, and presented as a gift by Stetson’s widow twenty years later. While the unusual and grotesque provenance have made the book a popular object of curiosity, particularly to undergraduates, it serves as a reminder that such practices were at one time considered acceptable.

Thanks to Heather Cole, Assistant Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, for contributing this post.

 

 

 

Join us for an interactive evening of conversation and live performance with Hallelujah The Hills, celebrating their new record ‘Have You Ever Done Something Evil?’.

[Video] Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers - New England [totp2] (Wiggy St Helens UK 2008)

In the Library with the Lead Pipe » Ice Ice Baby: Are Librarian Stereotypes Freezing Us out of Instruction?

Psychology, Knox College.

kierongillen:

sizvideos:

Seal befriends woman sitting on the beach - Video

GPOY FLIRTING.

“Love me, love me, saaaay that you love meee…”

The bodies of almost 800 babies and children were discovered in an unmarked septic tank. The facility was run by nuns from 1925-1961.

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Odds and ends from another great Annie Clark, St. Vincent concert at the historic Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Being in the middle of the crowd makes it hard to hold the camera super steady especially when zoomed in at 10x but it's a pretty good sampler of her current show. A must see if you like St. Vincent even a bit. The girl can play and really sing and play guitar at the same time extremely well. She obviously puts in the practice work to pull off a great show.

C'était le 18 février 2014 à La Cigale, Paris, France extrait de l'allbum "St Vincent" plus d'infos : http://ilovestvincent.com/

St. Vincent Performs at Amex Unstaged Diane Von Furstenberg Fashion Show 2014

Day Two of #NegroniWeek and still going strong @jmCurleyBar! Come try our Negroni Carrot Cake w/Gin Dreamsicle IC! pic.twitter.com/NKLZQmLn1i

Brunch is coming. For real. As in you'll be able to come here on Sunday afternoons and crush some seriously delicious drinks and snacks, with a special appearance being made by Stumptown's coldbrew, all pre-12 pm. We're excited, and in honor of that excitement (read: anxiety) we're throwing ourselves one last hoorah in the style of our first, and potentially only, Industry Night. Keep your eye on social media and perhaps your real life mailbox for more information. Shit's about to get real.



Hannibal took a bunch of elephants through the Alps and totally pwned Rome.

(2013) dir Chuck Workman w/Mike Leigh, James Franco, David Lynch, Yvonne Rainer, Bill Viola, Costa-Gavras, Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, Michael Moore, Kelly Reichardt, J. Hoberman, Michael Winterbottom [80 min; Digital] Academy Award-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman’s documentary WHAT IS CINEMA? tackles the question of its title through over 100 clips and new interviews with Mike Leigh, Jonas Mekas, Yvonne Rainer, David Lynch, video artist Bill Viola, Robert Altman, Kelly Reichardt, Costa-Gavras, Ken Jacobs, Michael Moore, critic J. Hoberman, and others, and with archival interviews from Robert Bresson, Alfred Hitchcock, Chantal Akerman, Akira Kurosawa, Abbas Kiarostami, and more. The film also includes commissioned sequences from experimental artists Lewis Klahr and Phil Solomon. WHAT IS CINEMA? not only asks a poignant question, but chronicles the best of filmmaking today and proposes where cinema will go, and should go, in the future.

Customers can satisfy their Negroni hankerings in several ways too. Take Sam Treadway’s Campari and orange juice-infused milk punch at Backbar or Joy Richards bitter jelly shots at The Franklin Café. Negroni Week seems to have inspired a degree of creative one-upsmanship with beverage directors like Kevin Mabry at JM Curley assembling single serving bottles made with a Spruce tip-infused gin, amber vermouth, and carbonated Campari to complement pastry chef Kate Holowchik’s Negroni carrot cake. At The Kirkland Tap and Trotter, Jared Sandoian whipped up a giant batch of Negronis that he’s bottled in large format bottles and cellared since 2013. And the team at Park Restaurant and Bar in Harvard Square has created several variations on the classic recipe with concoctions like a Contessa (gin, Aperol, Cocchi Americano) and The Slinger (gin, jalapeno-infused Aperol, lemon juice, pale ale) to round out their all Negroni menu.

The University of Michigan is building a mock town to test self-driving cars. The vehicles will confront all the normal obstacles of a bustling city: traffic signs, stoplights, merge lanes, construction work, streetlights, sidewalks and even "mechanical pedestrians" that dart out into the street in front of traffic.

Read more...

Are men not interested in career women?  I’m thrilled to introduce Melanie Notkin, founder of the site Savvy Auntie, and author of the new book, Otherhood: Modern Women Finding a New Kind of Happiness.  She describes the book this way: “Otherhood is the story of so many women of my generation, the daughters of the modern feminist movement, who expected to have the social, economic and political equality our mothers didn’t have, and surely the husband and children they did. But many of us remain single and/or childless as our fertile years wane.” She shared an excerpt with Corporette: 

Jared, a divorced dad friend of mine, asked me to set him up. I acquiesced immediately; he’s a nice-looking man, early forties, works in commercial real estate. I was sure he’d be a good match for one of my friends, so I asked him what he was looking for. He prefers tall brunettes, he told me, and someone, he added, who is “down-to-earth.” This remark was curious to me. What did “down-to-earth” mean? Did he want someone who’s charitable? Someone who wasn’t materialistic? Someone who was sincere?

“I mean,” he explained when I pressed, “I don’t want someone with a fancy career like, you know, a doctor, a lawyer, or like a PR person. I want a teacher or social worker type.” Oh, I thought immediately. He wants someone who won’t threaten him. “Fancy careers” were only for men, it seemed. It begged the question: Are so-called career women really not interested in men, as is so often presumed, or are some men simply not interested in “career women”?

Joanna is thirty-eight, never married. She tells me she’s recently had a career change. “When I was thirty-two, I was on the partner path,” she explains, “but I was working day and night and rarely dated. It’s not that I didn’t want to date, but the men I met weren’t accommodating of my schedule. They’d get frustrated if I had to break a dinner date because I was still at work at 9:00 PM, implying I was trying to prove myself, or that I didn’t care about the relationship. Worse, some men weren’t interested in dating me, simply because I was a corporate attorney. How was I supposed to know when I went to law school that my biggest battle would be proving that I’m just a girl who wants to be a married mom? I knew that if I wanted to get married and be a mom, something had to give.”

At thirty-two, Joanna gave up her career path and took a job in legal marketing at the same firm. The partners were disappointed in her, telling the want-to-be bride that she was being groomed to become a partner one day and that she was giving up too much. They would have understood if she were a new mother, but the male partners could not understand why she, as a single woman, would take a step down.

“It was more like ten steps down!” Joanna exclaimed. “I gave up more than 50 percent of my annual income and settled into my new role. But the men I met were still not satisfied. I couldn’t find a man who challenged me the way my work used to. I missed being an attorney, and I was envious, watching my colleagues move up to bigger cases. But I held steadfast to my decision. I truly believed I was making the right choice. So here I am at thirty-eight, almost thirty-nine, still single, still not a mom.”

Joanna made the decision last month to get back onto the partner track at the firm. “If I’m going to be alone, which I still hope I won’t be, at least I’ll have a big apartment and a walk-in closet to show for it! You know, Melanie, they talk about ‘having it all,’ but when it came to my career, I had it all, and I gave it up to have all the other stuff, too. So now I’m back to having it all right now.”

Excerpted from Otherhood: Modern Women Finding a New Kind of Happiness, by Melanie Notkin. With permission from Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2014.

Readers: Does this excerpt ring true for you? Have you ever dated a guy who seemed intimidated by your career, or one who didn’t understand the demands of your job?  Does the concept of  the “Otherhood” demographic make sense to you?

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N.B. PLEASE KEEP YOUR COMMENTS ON TOPIC; threadjacks will be deleted at our sole discretion and convenience. These substantive posts are intended to be a source of community comment on a particular topic, which readers can browse through without having to sift out a lot of unrelated comments. And so, although of course I highly value all comments by my readers, I’m going ask you to please respect some boundaries on substantive posts like this one. Thank you for your understanding!

 

The post Book Excerpt: Are Some Men Not Interested in “Career Women”? appeared first on Corporette.com.

yopatrick:

Some good tips about comic lettering from Nate Piekos of Blambot.com

Opera-goers will be able to experience the glory of the Ring in our intimate 600-seat theater and with a state-of-the-art fully digital orchestra in a multimedia presentation that will make this "Ring Cycle" an operatic experience to remember!!