Patrick Kennedy

Back in January, Mark wondered if the new coronavirus would wipe out Corona beer in the same way AIDS killed the anti-suppressant candy Ayds in the 1980s. After all, days before Mark's post, David posted about a Google Trends graph that showed a spike on "the words corona, beer, and virus." And memes about "corona virus beer" were popping up, while Constellation Brands, Inc — the makers of Corona beer — saw shares decline by 8% in February, according to Time.

Now, seven months after Mark's post, with 180,000 lives lost in the United States from Covid-19, it looks like Corona beer was able to overcome "the AIDS/Ayds effect," as Mark put it, and, at least according to the Daily Beast, "it hasn't just survived, it's actually prospered."

From Daily Beast:

The folks at Constellation Brands surely had a premonition that this was going to be a very tough year. 

"Seriously?"they must have thought, "there's a virus that's become a deadly pandemic, and it's got the same name as our bestselling beer Corona? You have got to be kidding." …

The Corona/coronavirus thing was mostly a worry that never materialized. There were a small, small number of people who seemed to consider a connection between the beer and the pandemic for more than a few seconds, but mostly it was fodder for "man on the street" interviews at local TV stations. The company did feel compelled to issue a response on Feb. 28, about two weeks before the panic took hold in the U.S….

It's been a rough year, and it's not over, but Corona has met corona, and so far, the beer is still standing.

Image: Panos Sakalakis / Flickr

The messiah on his way to Manchester City fc c’mon you know LG x

— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) August 25, 2020

“C’mon you know” 

Liam is as excited as a kid on Christmas Eve, and he’s not the only one. All of football is glued to this one.

Messi Messi Messi Messi Messi Messi. You cannot move for the lad. I mean, Jamie Vardy signed a new three-year Leicester contract this week, and no one noticed. The England captain was hit with a suspended jail sentence, you say? Buried inside the back pages. Andy Carroll scored a good goal against some bad defenders. Not interested mate. It’s Messi’s world now.

Ronaldo left Real Madrid, 750k tweets in 2years.

Lionel Messi THOUGHT of Leaving Barca for Manchester City, Over 10 Million Tweets in 12 Hrs

This Man is bigger than Sports and it's not even close! pic.twitter.com/Ur0GeEY0YE

— Rock (@staconzy16) August 26, 2020

If you’re not sick of this mega-saga already, give it a day or two. Or come back to me in a month, when it’s being dragged through the courts. Popcorn is lovely (a sweet & salted mix, of course) but not for 30 days straight.

Whatever happens, this is the end of Barca as we know it…

The talented and young Francisco Trincao arrives to Barça to strengthen our sporting project. Welcome! pic.twitter.com/MyIOPTZTNY

— Josep Maria Bartomeu (@jmbartomeu) August 26, 2020

Bartomeu is shameless, eh. He’s also fucked.

Barcelona fans have gathered outside Camp Nou and have a clear message. pic.twitter.com/34P9J1z8u0

— Squawka News (@SquawkaNews) August 25, 2020

If Barcelona sell Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Ivan Rakitic this summer, Ronald Koeman will be the only one left at the Nou Camp who has scored in a Champions League final.

— Richard Jolly (@RichJolly) August 25, 2020

The post Messi the Messiah is on his way to Man City - Liam Gallagher first appeared on Who Ate all the Pies.

Ethan Rosenthal is "particularly fond of peanut butter and banana sandwiches." As a data scientist, he wondered if he could "maximize the packing fraction of the banana slices," the amount of banana coverage, using computer vision and machine learning. Months later, he succeeded. Now, Rosenthal has written a deep description of the project and released the code so you too can delight in computer-optimized peanut butter and banana sandwiches. From his blog:

It's really quite simple. You take a picture of your banana and bread, pass the image through a deep learning model to locate said items, do some nonlinear curve fitting to the banana, transform to polar coordinates and "slice" the banana along the fitted curve, turn those slices into elliptical polygons, and feed the polygons and bread "box" into a 2D nesting algorithm[…]

If you were a machine learning model (or my wife), then you would tell me to just cut long rectangular strips along the long axis of the banana, but I'm not a sociopath. If life were simple, then the banana slices would be perfect circles of equal diameter, and we could coast along looking up optimal configurations on packomania. But alas, life is not simple. We're in the middle of a global pandemic, and banana slices are elliptical with varying size.

"Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches" (EthanRosenthal.com)

Business planners are clinging to the dream of the open-plan office despite the coronavirus pandemic. I hope that this proposal for a post-Covid shared desk setup is not the final solution. [via @twlldun]

Yonsei University professor Kim Suk-kyung suggests this new office layout for the post-COVID-19 era to reduce the risk of disease transmission. ... “We need to consider if offices will need large spaces in the future. For example, the US is focusing on using smaller space efficiently. Changes to the layout of work stations can prevent the need to move to larger space to social distance,” said Kim.

Kim suggested rotating work stations and raising cubicle walls between desks so that workers do not face each other.

No stranger to IP gaffes, Brewdog brewery reacted perfectly to Aldi's clearly humorous broadsides. How will Aldi respond? Takes a few weeks to brew a new beer…

Techdirt:

Yeah, this is actually happening. Consider the back and forth here for a moment. Brewdog makes a Punk IPA in a blue can. Aldi decides to release a Establishment IPA in a blue can, one that harkens specifically to Brewdog's. Rather than go full IP lawyer-rage, Brewdog takes the whole thing in stride and announces the release of an IPA called Yaldi, which mimicks Aldi's branding. The whole thing is enough to make an IP maximilist keel over and die from an embolism.

And, yet, no trademark threats. The only mention of a cease and desist comes from a third party that has a Yaldi brand beer. Aldi never gets in on the threats. Instead, the game continues.

It is like a rap battle but for advertising. I enjoyed Mini Cooper vs Porsche a few years back, and the Porsche response video was wonderful but no longer appears online.

If you haven’t had a chance to watch this, it’s really worth your time. Rapper and activist Michael Render, aka Killer Mike of Run the Jewels, spoke at a press conference in Atlanta about the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the history of policing in the city, and his outrage, delivering a plea for the city’s residents to not “burn your own house down for anger with an enemy”.

I’m. Mad. As Hell. I woke up wanting to see the world burn down yesterday, because I’m tired of seeing black men die. He casually put his knee on a human being’s neck for nine minutes as he died, like a zebra in the clutch of a lion’s jaw. And we watch like murder porn, over and over again.

So that’s why children are burning it to the ground. They don’t know what else to do. And it is the responsibility of us to make this better — right now. We don’t want to see one officer charged, we want to see four officers prosecuted and sentenced. We don’t want to see Targets burning, we want to see the system that sets up for systemic racism burnt to the ground.

Update: Although Killer Mike’s remarks have been widely praised (including by prominent members of the Black community like Lebron James), others in the Black community have condemned them. See Devyn Springer’s article in the Independent:

This weekend, as I watched T.I. share a stage with fellow rapper and landlord, Killer Mike, and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, in an attempt to disparage the righteous Black rage in response to the police killing of George Floyd, I instantly knew we’ve entered a new era of Black sellouts that we must reckon with.

It’s interesting that the underlying message of Barack Obama’s recent post How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change is not substantially different than Killer Mike’s comments. That post was also widely shared and praised (though, conspicuously, not by many prominent Black activists), especially by White people. One of the reasons I shared the video of Killer Mike is that there is disagreement — real, non-cynical disagreement — within the Black community about how to best address and protest racism & oppression in the United States, and you can plainly hear that his feelings and motivations are complicated.

As protests against the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on Monday continue to build in the city and around the nation, an Afro-Latino CNN reporter who was arrested on live TV early this morning has been released from custody. The arrest took place at 5:09 a.m. local time, as Omar Jimenez…

Read more...

Two men hired to break into their client's house, menace him with machetes, tie him up, then tickle him with a broom, have been acquitted of armed break-in after hitting the wrong address. The unsuspecting victim awoke to find the men looming over his bed armed with the knives.

The role play was arranged over Facebook by a man near Griffith, New South Wales, who provided his address to the hired pair.

"He was willing to pay A$5,000 if it was 'really good'," the judge said. However, the client moved to another address 50km (30 miles) away without updating the two men. They then entered a home on the street of the original address. ... When they realised their error, one of the pair said "Sorry, mate" and shook the resident's hand, according to local reports.

Could happen to anyone.

Dalton and Kanaan Dern turned their Apopka, Florida abode into a skatepark. Watch them shred the house. Don't tell mom.

The brothers won the "Murder Your House" contest sponsored by Liquid Death and The Berrics. The prizes included six months of mortgage payments (up to $10,000) but not the new roof that they'll likely need sooner rather than later.

Learn from the world's best.

Written and directed by Kathleen Cameron; starring Jim Cameron; original music by Bensound.com.

Digital media studio d'strict created "WAVE," a magnificent video art work for the humongous LED screen wrapped around the SM Town building the COEX (Convention & Exhibition Center) in Seoul, Korea. The display is 80.1 meters (263 feet) wide by 20.1 meters (66 feet) high.

Below is Samsung's video about the Smart LED screen, installed in 2018:

From Global News:

A Colombian advertising company is pitching a novel if morbid solution to shortages of hospital beds and coffins during the coronavirus pandemic: combine them.

ABC Displays has created a cardboard bed with metal railings that designers say can double as a casket if a patient dies.

[…]

The beds can hold a weight of 330 pounds (150 kilograms) and will cost about $85 each, Gómez said. He said he worked with a private clinic on the design, which he hopes will be put to use in emergency clinics that might become short on beds.

At least one doctor was skeptical of how sturdy a cardboard bed might be. He also warned that any corpses should first be placed in a sealed bag before being put in a cardboard coffin to avoid potentially spreading the disease.

What stage of Dystopian Hell is this?

Colombian company creates hospital beds that can double as coffins [César García / Global News]

Courtesy of the Funk Turkey, who explains his methodology:

Using lyrics.rip to scrape the Genius Lyrics Database, I made a Markov Chain write AC/DC lyrics. This is the end result- "Great Balls".

The Bot did not write the sick riffs, however. But it definitely works for an AC/DC tune.

History tells us that nothing has ever been made less creepy by introducing dolls into the mix, but that’s not stopping The Inn at Little Washington, D.C.’s only 3-Star Michelin restaurant. In an attempt to comfort shell shocked diners returning to their half-capacity restaurant after shelter-in-place is lifted, they’ve decided to fill the void with mannequins. You know, to make it less weird. They’re partnering with a local theater company to build the sets and servers are being instructed to pour wine for the mannequins and ask them how their night is going. Chances of animatronics appear low, but all the same, I salute this melding of a fine dining experience coupled with tourist attraction flourish.

My Irish ancestors all came to America between 1847 and 1849 — during the time of An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, when the British Empire hoarded all the food they were producing on colonized Irish land and left the native people with nothing but diseased potatoes to survive. This plight resonated with the Choctaw Nation, who lived in and around modern-day Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and of course had had their own experiences with a systematic genocide at the hands of a land-greedy colonizing force just a decade earlier. So the Choctaw rallied their resources, and sent $170 over the Atlantic to the starving people in Ireland — the equivalent of either $5,000 or $20,000 dollars today, depending on your calculations.

To commemorate this generous act, a statue was erected in Midleton, County Cork in 2017.

But solidarity is even better than a statue. Which is why, as Native Americans have disproportionately suffered from the impacts of COVID-19, Irish people rallied to the cause, raising more than a million dollars for the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund on GoFundMe in just a few days. The effort was largely spearheaded — or at least publicized — by Irish journalist Naomi O'Leary, who also spoke about the historical relationship and the legacy of colonialism on the Irish Passport podcast:

From O'Leary's Irish Times article on the initiative:

Many comments on the GoFundMe page referenced the Choctaw donation. Some read “Ní neart go cur le chéile” ["No strength without unity"] and others simply “Ireland remembers”. “173 years ago, the people of the Choctaw nation showed Ireland unimaginable generosity,” wrote donor Michael Foy. “I am donating today in memory of our shared past, and to help overcome this crisis together – just as we did nearly two centuries ago.”

Cassandra Begay, a member of the Navajo Nation and one of the team organising the fundraiser, burst into tears as she told The Irish Times of seeing the donations flood in.

“We noticed that we were getting a lot of donations from Ireland so we were wondering why . . . sorry I get emotional talking about this part,” Ms Begay broke off. “And I learned about what the Choctaw did for the Irish people, and it was so beautiful.”

You can still support the Navajo and Hopi GoFundMe campaign, which is up to $2.5 million as of this writing.

Coronavirus: Irish donate to hard-hit Native Americans to repay famine aid [Naomi O'Leary / The Irish Times]

Irish return an old favor, helping Native Americans battling the virus [Ed O'Loughlin and Mihir Zaveri / The New York Times]

Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund

Image: Kindred Spirits Choctaw Memorial in Midleton, Co. Cork, Éire, taken by Gavin Sheridan via Wikimedia Commons/CC 4.0

Simon Chandler writes on Forbes:

Gun advocacy and conservative groups are responsible for astroturfing the reopen America campaign that has swept the US in recent days, according to research from cybersecurity experts.

Since April 15, protests against coronavirus lockdown measures have been sweeping across various American states. Informally unified under the ‘Reopen America’ slogan, they seek an end to measures intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus. They’ve arguably been flared up by tweets President Donald Trump posted on April 17.

But according to new research from cybersecurity researchers, many of these protests are neither spontaneous nor organic. Cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs and researchers at DomainTools have separately analysed web addresses including the word "reopen." And interestingly, they’ve found that many of these can be linked to domains associated with gun advocacy groups, lobbyists, and other conservative organizations.

Read the rest.

[H/t Alberto Gaitán]

Image: Lorie Shaul, CC BY-SA 2.0

Grimes + Elon Musk = X Æ A-12

Continue reading…

The NYPL has released an album of sound-based experiences that you might be missing right now as we all shelter at home: Missing Sounds of New York.

It’s a short album (16 min) and includes soundscapes like Serenity Is a Rowdy City Park, I’d Call a Cab to Anywhere, and The Not-Quite-Quiet Library.

See also this 3+ hour album of ambient city sounds. There are also many videos of ambient city sounds on YouTube, like this 10-hour video of ambient NYC sounds:

This is a mix of ambience sounds recorded around Christmas Eve as well as St Patrick’s Day. Enjoy the sounds of people talking, traffic noises, police sirens, subway sounds, footsteps around NYC. City sounds at night and day.

Or perhaps you’d like to go for a stroll in the city instead? (via the morning news)

At a grand 85 years of age, Dame Judi Dench is the oldest person to grace the cover of Vogue magazine—and for good reason. The woman is a legend; an incredible actor with a generous spirit and just a total G.D. delight, as evidenced thoroughly by her interview with the magazine, conducted at her home in early March.…

Read more...

In 2015, Charlie Brooker deconstructed economics news reports in this grimly amusing pastiche — a sequel to his earlier boiling-down of feature news reports.

I'd like to see Charlie and Emily Surname do this for Covid-19 updates.

Just a few days ago, UK tabloid The Daily Mail was caught fabricating a photograph of a famous athlete breaking coronavirus lockdown rules. It has a history of crude photoshop work passed off as news photography, but its latest effort is one for the ages: it fabricated its own coverage of Hitler's and Mussolini's deaths.

"Is it me or is this extremely weird: the Daily Mail forging its *own* archival front pages?" writes Huw Lemmey on Twitter. "Here's the one they say shows "Extraordinary Daily Mail pages from the day Adolf Hitler died 70 years ago this week" - and here's the actual one from same date."

This is a good example of what I said last time: it's not a conspiracy or, in this case, a conscious attempt to lie about a specific fact. Fabricating content is simply the content formula of The Daily Mail. The old newspaper page isn't optimized for present-day consumption, so they just made a new old page. The notion that this is inappropriate would be inconceivable to the people doing it, and criticism of it incomprehensible. They simply do not live in a world where those standards mean anything.

Of course, the newspaper openly supported fascism. Contrary to its new version of its old front page, Hitler's death was not an outcome The Daily Mail was praying for.

It's wicked weird, kid, being stuck at home in Boston this April week, exactly 7 years after the last time I was stuck in this same home during this same exact April week for very different but still terrifying reasons.

But it made me feel a little better when I saw that Lindsay Devers, a nurse anesthetist at Massachusetts General Hospital, had designed her own 26.2-mile running route around Boston's Back Bay, in a way that spell out "Boston Strong" — harkening back to that fateful week in 2013 when the bombs went off.

It wasn't until after this healthy healthcare heroine completed her solo marathon trek that she realized that she forgot the "n" in "Strong." From CBC Radio:

"I pulled up the app and I instantly was like, oh no, I spelled it wrong ," she said.

Despite the initial frustration, Devers is keeping a good sense of humour about the gaffe.

"I think a lot of people are inspired by it. And a lot of people have had some really good laughs," she said. "So I think it's a great comic relief in this stressful period."

And honestly? That warms my quarantined heart even more.

Devers had already been training to run the Boston Marathon to raise money for Dream Big! From her GoFundMe campaign (which you can still give to, if you're so inclined):

Dream Big! is a 501c(3) non-profit supporting opportunities for young girls who, due to economic circumstances, are unable to participate in athletic  endeavors. The mission of Dream Big! is to help young girls and young women from low-income situations achieve their dreams by providing them with equipment, sports attire, athletic footwear, training and program fees, and leadership training needed for them to participate in sports and physical activities that contribute to the health, education, and overall well-being. Dream Big! has impacted over 8000 girls in 125 sports programs and schools in economically disadvantaged communities last year. Funds raised through the B.A.A. Boston Marathon Official Charity Program will help Dream Big! to further breakdown the economic barrier that currently prevents  many girls from participating in sports and physical activities.

I hope to buy this woman a beer once/if this ever ends.

'Oh no, I spelled it wrong': Nurse runs solo marathon in shape of 'Boston Strog' [As It Happens / CBC Radio]

She tried to spell 'Boston Strong' by running through Boston. Just one thing was missing. [Nicole Yang / Boston Globe]

Why do dogs often walk in circles before lying down for bed? Turns out, it's a survival trait inherited from their evolutionary ancestor the wolf. From Southern Living:

“Turning in circles before lying down is an act of self-preservation in that the dog may innately know that he needs to position himself in a certain way to ward off an attack in the wild,” notes [veterinarian and Animal Center co-owner Lynn] Buzhardt. “Turning around 360 degrees also provides an opportunity to take one last look for potential predators before bedtime.” [...]

In addition to self-protection, circling and nesting help dogs in the wild to make their sleeping space more comfortable. Undomesticated dogs don’t know the luxury of fluffy pillow and plush cushions—to make a “bed,” they mat down grass, clear away rocks and branches, and reposition brush. This practice helps dogs uncover any hidden threats like snakes or other critters, and it also allows them create a nice sleeping niche.

It seems like everyone on the planet has seen this gray-rooted coronavirus protester complaining that she can't go to a hairdresser. But someone on Tik Tok looked at the length of her roots and determined that she has not had her hair done since October, many months before they stay at home order went into effect.

Campus Univers Cascades (CUC) is a French school for stunt performers for film and live experiences. The coaches and students created this wonderful video titled "Fightcovid CUC."

Julio Vincent Gambuto writes that the Covid-19 pandemic has given Americans an unprecedented chance to “see ourselves and our country in the plainest of views” and that we should prepare for a coalition of powerful forces that will try to convince us that this whole thing never happened.

Until then, get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels. And on top of that, just to turn the screw that much more, will be the one effort that’s even greater: the all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw. The air wasn’t really cleaner; those images were fake. The hospitals weren’t really a war zone; those stories were hyperbole. The numbers were not that high; the press is lying. You didn’t see people in masks standing in the rain risking their lives to vote. Not in America. You didn’t see the leader of the free world push an unproven miracle drug like a late-night infomercial salesman. That was a crisis update. You didn’t see homeless people dead on the street. You didn’t see inequality. You didn’t see indifference. You didn’t see utter failure of leadership and systems.