via

“Why do Henan people love stealing manhole covers so much??” Baidu search suggestions offer a window to the world of Chinese regional stereotypes.

Below are some translations.

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As the developments in the Russia - Ukraine standoff were unfolding at warp speed, there was one thing that remained constant -- Russian President Vladimir Putin's facial expression.

There's a new anti-Russian government in Ukraine?
Dead-eyed stare with a slight smirk.
Crimea is up for grabs?
Dead-eyed stare with a slight smirk.
Let's invade!
Dead-eyed stare with a slight smirk.

And this has happened before:

2012: The Russian constitution was changed for me to run for a third presidential term?
Dead-eyed stare with a slight smirk.
2003: Why not arrest Russia's richest man, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky?
Dead-eyed stare with a slight smirk.
2000: Why don't we make Chechnya part of Russia?
Dead-eyed stare with a slight smirk.

Maybe he's just remarkably stoic. Maybe he's a great actor. Or maybe something else is at play. Has Vladimir Putin "had work done"? Has he been "nipped" and "tucked?" Is the Russian president just another member of the international elite -- the tight-skinned and high-cheekboned -- addicted to plastic surgery?

Here's the Curious Case of Benjamin Putin, who seems to look younger with each passing year, even as he sticks to his dead-eyed stare. And his smirk.

In 2000, a gaunt Putin, then acting president and by the looks of it free from Botox, arrives at a polling place to cast his ballot.

ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images

Three years later, the presidency has taken its toll:

Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Perhaps due to the rejuvenating effects of uninhibited power, things started to look up in 2005.

MAXIM MARMUR/AFP/Getty Images

Shirtless and smooth-skinned in Siberia in 2009.

ALEXEY DRUZHININ/AFP/Getty Images

Both tabloids and more reputable outlets have for years speculated about the source of Putin's youthful appearance. The chatter became especially loud in 2011 when Putin was up for a third term as Russia's president. The New Times, a Russian magazine, asked some plastic surgeons about Putin's surprisingly youthful experience. The verdict: Vladimir was likely to have had an eye-lift, Botox injections, and cheekbone injections.

"In a bid to once again become Russia's president, Vladimir Putin has pledged to lift his country's sagging economy, nip corruption in the bud, and smooth fractured relations with regional neighbors," ABC wrote in 2011, shortly after that report, barely containing its glee.  Some 60 percent of responders to an online survey on the Huffington Post thought that Vladimir Putin "had work done;" 40 percent said he probably "just got more sleep this weekend."

Here, in 2011, he looks to have shaved about 10 years off his appearance, with the dark circles under his eyes magically disappearing.

STR/AFP/Getty Images

With former Italian prime minister  Silvio Berlusconi, a man known to have dabbled with artificial anti-aging techniques, in 2012:

DMITRY ASTAKHOV/AFP/Getty Images

A year later, as Putin turned 60 and divorced his wife of 30 years, the rumors returned. In the summer of 2013, Vanity Fair, ever so diligent on the plastic surgery beat, compared his neck to Play Doh and likened his forehead "delicately raked valleys of sand in a tranquil Japanese garden." The magazine concluded that his face "reveals a laws-of-physics-bending tightness not seen since Rush Limbaugh successfully sat in a two-seater car." 

Last year, with a forehead smooth like a baby's. Did we mention he used to be in the KGB?

ALEKSEY NIKOLSKYI/AFP/Getty Images

And did the Russian leader get a refresher for his pet project, the 2014 Sochi Olympics? Judge for yourself. Here, Putin during the closing ceremony.

PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images

Mimicking emotion during the Sochi Paralympics opening ceremony:

Ian Walton/Getty Images

If there is one thing that we can be sure of in this world, it's that whatever happens, Putin's surgeons will make sure that he maintains his uncanny resemblance to a hairless cat.

Word leaked out yesterday that Amazon had picked up four of its five adult-geared pilots, with Variety reporting Transparent, The After, Mozart in the Jungle, and Bosch will all end up as series on Amazon Prime. Amazon isn’t yet commenting, but if true, it will mean the streaming service is dramatically increasing its roster of original series: Last year, the network ordered just two series, Alpha House and Betas. Both projects got decent reviews, but like the originals trotted out by Hulu Plus last year (The Awesomes, Quick Draw), neither generated the sort of hype and hoopla that rival Netflix drew for House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black. Things are already looking different for Amazon’s sophomore class. The pilot for Transparent proved to be transcendent for more than a few critics, while all of the other shows also had critical supporters, to one degree or another. TV industry trade The Hollywood Reporter declared that with its latest offerings, “It becomes clear that Amazon is a player.”

These hosannas don’t mean Amazon Prime is now suddenly a smashing success: The shows need to live up to the promise of their pilots, and more importantly, over the next year or two, Amazon will want to see evidence that more people are signing up for Prime (at $79 per year) in order to watch its shows. But it’s clear that Amazon’s expansion into the streaming business has taken a big step forward. Before news of the possible pickups broke, Vulture rang up Amazon Studios chief Roy Price to talk about just how much progress he thinks Prime has made, what he’s learned from the company’s first year in the TV production business, and how he plans to proceed next.

It’s possible Amazon could hand out different kinds of series orders to each of its pilots.
As noted, Amazon still isn’t confirming any orders. If it does end up picking up four out of five pilots to series, however, Price offered some insight in to how Amazon might make such a move work financially. “There are a lot of variables,” he told us. “You can do shows at different budget levels. You can do different numbers of episodes. You can move the timing around. There are a lot of … different ways you can serve the dish.” This is not unlike what linear networks already do: Some shows like ABC’s new drama Resurrection will air eight episodes a year, while a successful sitcom could run 24 originals each season. We spoke to Price before the Variety report hit, but even then it was clear he was mulling the idea of ordering more than two shows, as he did last pilot season. When we asked him specifically if ordering all five adult-geared pilots to series was an option, rather than dismiss the idea, he said, “We’ll have to see. There’s no question that the fairly widespread enthusiasm is going to make for some serious trade-offs and hard decisions.”

Like HBO and Netflix, Amazon is much more interested in how much people love its shows than in how many watch them.
While broadcast and even most cable networks are driven by viewership tallies, Price says he’s much more interested in getting Amazon Prime subscribers (and potential subscribers) emotionally invested in his shows. “People do have to have that extra level of passion for a show for it to be viable,” he says. “It’s important, because in an on-demand world, where there is no 8:30 show, there is no hammock — it’s all appointment viewing. That’s really what you have to be looking at. If you have broad support but it’s just not very deep, that can be not as good as having very deep support that is a little bit more narrow.” This doesn’t mean Amazon doesn’t want to see its shows viewed by decent-sized audiences: “You don’t want to take it to an extreme, where you have a show with one audience member who’s incredibly passionate about it,” he quips. “But it’s not the just the one who gets the most views. It’s got to wind up being somebody’s favorite show. And those are very different things.”

While the first two originals did well within the Amazon Prime universe, it’s too soon to draw many lessons from them.
Because Amazon, like Netflix, doesn’t release viewership data for its shows, there’s no way of knowing whether the audience of Alpha House and Betas was 2 million viewers or 2,000. But Price says the two shows “have been amongst the most popular series on Prime since their release. And that’s what we’re really paying attention to: On a relative basis, within the Prime universe, are they getting people’s attention, and are people interested?” Still, Price won’t yet say whether either show will return for a second season, though he indicated a formal decision would be revealed soon. He also isn’t willing to read too much into reaction to the shows, positive or negative. “It’s hard when you only have two shows. You don’t have a huge sample size to compare outcomes,” he explains.

We could see Amazon experiment with different release patterns, both for shows and episodes.
Last year, Amazon Prime debuted both its new shows within a week of each other. That could change this time around. “Maybe in the future we should space it out more,” Price says. “In general, we’re not religious about it. We’re open to trying different things and seeing what people prefer.” And that applies not to just when shows debut, but how many episodes drop at once. With Alpha House and Betas, new installments popped up weekly, but Price says he’s mulling doing what Netflix has done, and putting all episodes online at once.

But he sounds torn about that notion, because the season-dump strategy means viewers will have to wait months longer to see the next episode of Transparent, until producers wrap filming on every episodes. “You’re saying, ‘I’m not going to let you watch any of it until you can watch all of it’,” Price says. “And I don’t know.” Plus, Price has seen data which suggests the buzz half-life for shows is greatly reduced when episodes aren’t doled out every week. “There’s no question that when you release all at once, the social media conversation related to the show tends to decline more rapidly than with a normal show, a network show,” he says. “A network show over the course of 30 days will decline around one-third [from premiere night buzz]. And a binge show will decline about two-thirds.” And yet, Price doesn’t deny that “there’s also a certain degree of enthusiasm” with the way Netflix does things. “So maybe we should try it anyway,” he muses. “And you certainly could see that happen, because sometimes the only way to understand something is to try different approaches.”

Netflix may be the dominant brand in streaming content, but Amazon isn’t worried it’s too late to the game.
Even though Showtime has lots of hits, wins Emmys, and makes a ton of money, it’s hard to argue that HBO doesn’t have a stronger overall brand in terms of premium cable networks (unless, of course, you’re a Showtime exec, in which case you’d likely strongly disagree.) Much of HBO’s “dominance” of the quality space, be it real or perceived, stems from the fact that it was first to make a big splash in the original cable programming waters. And so it seems to be with Netflix: With last year’s success of House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and the revival of Arrested Development, it vaulted ahead of Crackle, Hulu, and, yes, Amazon in terms of buzz and attention. Netflix sometimes seems to be streaming content what Kleenex is to tissue — a brand which defines an entire product.

That would seem to make it harder for Amazon (and others) to grab attention from the 800-pound gorilla, but Price, perhaps not surprisingly, doesn’t seem overly concerned.

If anything, he dismisses “all those rivalries” between outlets as a relic of a passing age. “In a world where there’s only CBS, ABC, and NBC, then it really does makes sense to put up a grid on the wall, and compete in a zero-sum game,” he says. “But these days, there are many providers of programming, and a lot of them are awesome ... It’s become more like the book business. It’s not a useful way to spend your time, if you’re a particular publisher, to be angling against one of the many publishers down the street. The important thing is not whether you beat out that particular publisher, or in this case, the other network or streaming service. The only issue you can do something about is, ‘Are you doing a great job for your customers? Are you really putting together distinctive shows that are worth seeking out in an on-demand world, that are really appointment television?’”

Price doesn’t dismiss Netflix’s current advantages completely, however: “Brands are important. Awareness (of programming) is critical.” His answer to the prestige gap between Netflix and other streamers: “Coming up with interesting shows. You can’t generate the buzz artificially. The only way you can get it is to earn it, with terrific material. I tend to focus on that.” For as he surely recalls, even Netflix’s initial stab at first-run programming, Lillehammer, was far from a hit.

Read more posts by Josef Adalian

Filed Under: tv ,streaming ,amazon prime ,across the streaming-verse ,transparent ,the after ,mozart in the jungle ,bosch

Different countries, languages, travel purposes…same habits.

The Guy With A Guitar

Sitting on the backrest of the couch, plucking those sweet guitar strings...

Via gifrectory.tumblr.com

Partying Australians/Canadians

He and his friend would drink shots every morning and never really stop.

Via gifeye.com

The Gap Year Student

A year away from school to explore the world? Everyone trying to cram a country in two weeks annual leave is insanely jealous of these “students.”

Via quickmeme.com

The Wannabe Local

He’s been in this country so long that he’s speaking the language, dressing like a local and explaining why their customs are better!

NBC / Via gifatron.com

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Raccoons?!?!? Knee socks!?!??!!

Via reddit.com

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Make it so!

Tacuinum sanitatis, ÖNB Cod. Vindob. s. n. 2644, f. 30r (14th c.)

"Take old cheese, and cut it into little pieces, then put them in water for two full days or more. Then grind them well on a marble stone. Then add to them almost as much good quicklime, and grind them well together, and it is the best glue; use it immediately while it is moist. This glue joins wood very well and when it is dry it is dissolved by neither fire nor water." 

Secretum philosophorum (c. 1300)

State-of-the-art adhesive technology circa 1300! Behold its excellence, its durability, its beguiling cheesy aroma.

In a piece the other day about Ronan Farrow’s new MSNBC chat show, Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times noted that Farrow “made an effort to seem hip. He referred to marijuana as ‘weed’ and made an aside about the Ukrainian opposition leader, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, who was recently freed from prison, saying that she ‘also has amazing hair.’”

Yes, weed is apparently the broadly hippest current term for marijuana, that venerable fount of slang. (I’ll save for another day a discussion of the relative merits and nuances of amazing, fabulous, and awesome.) If I close my eyes and think about Conan O’Brien making a joke on the subject or Seth Rogen actually saying anything at all, weed is the word I imagine them saying. And indeed, just the other day, Rogen tweeted this:

(You can get to a video of Rogen’s testimony, which concerned the Alzheimer’s disease of his mother-in-law, by clicking on the image, but I warn you that that the joke, which comes in the first minute, isn’t that funny.)

Marijuana itself is an anglicized corruption of mariguana or marihuana, Spanish terms for the Cannabis sativa plant, traditionally known in English as hemp. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the “currency” of marijuana “increased greatly in the United States in the 1930s in the context of the debate over the use of the drug, the term being preferred as a more exotic alternative to the familiar words hemp and cannabis.”

Most of the slang variations date to that period as well, including weed. In 1929, American Speech included it “Among the New Words” and defined it as “marijuana cigarette.” Three years later, the OED cites Chicago Defender as reporting, “The humble ‘reefer,’ ‘the weed,’ the marijuana, or what have you by way of a name for a doped cigarette has moved to Park Ave. from Harlem.” It doesn’t surprise me that the first author cited using the term in its currently popular manner (no the in front, referring to the drug in general rather than to a cigarette) was the master, Raymond Chandler: “They were looking for … a suitcase full of weed.” (The Little Sister, 1949.)

For decades, weed lurked in the weeds, as it were. Google’s Ngram Viewer (showing relative frequency in American printed sources) gives a rough sense that it started making its move to prominence in the early 1990s:

Ngram Viewer includes data only through 2008, but it appears the trend has continued and weed is now on top. In Google Books searches confined to 2013 publications,  smoke marijuana pops up 69 times, smoke pot 94 times, and smoke weed 149 times. That is also the sense one gets from Urban Dictionary, whose users have been inspired to contribute 225 separate definitions for weed. The most popular one, with more than 39,000 “up” votes, was posted by “AYB” and is short and sweet: “God’s gift to the world. Brings peace when used wisely.” Although Urban Dictionary’s custom is to follow the definition with an example of the word used in a sentence, AYB was apparently too distracted to comply and gave the sentence, “Pass the blunt, dude.”

Urban Dictionary also offers definitions for the weed derivatives weeda, Weedabis, Weedable, Weedache, WeedAcres, Weedacus, Weedafarian, Weedagasm, weedage, Weedaginity, Weedaholic, Weed aint no drug, weedajuana, Weed Album, Weedalicious, Weed and Feed, weed and pussy, Weed Angel, weed anthem, weedar, Weedarded, Weedarm, weedasaurous-rex, and Weed-ash.

Consequently, it didn’t surprise me that the wrong-number text message recently left on my phone concluded: “And I have no weed.”

Why the recent weed dominance? It seems clear to me that it’s a generational thing. In the 1990s, a new generation of users wanted to distance themselves from their parents’ dope or pot (the latter dates from 1930s and apparently originated in African-American slang). Weed was already in the lexicon, and provided a nice implicit variation on the hippie-ish grass.

Plus, its funny. For some time, it has been generally understood that anything related to marijuana is or is potentially humorous. This is probably due to a combination of factors: the illicitness of the drug, the fact that stoned people sometimes giggle, the fact that their actions can be perceived as comical (viz., Cheech and Chong), the widespread sense that unlike, say, alcohol or heroin, weed is not ultimately harmful. In any case, I, for one, chuckle when confronted with the word weedar. Not to mention “the munchies.”

Weed has not completely penetrated mainstream journalism. The slang term most often found there is pot, probably partly because it’s so useful in headlines. Just the other day, my local Philadelphia Inquirer had an article called “Pot an Election Issue?” that used marijuana eleven times, pot six (not including the headline), and cannabis and weed one time each.

The New York Times is a bit more proper and allows weed in its news columns only in direct quotations, as in the Ronan Farrow case. Otherwise it sticks to marijuana, even in the face of extreme word repetition. A front-page article published on Thursday, “Pivotal Point Is Seen on Legalizing Marijuana,” uses marijuana 27 times (not including the headline) with the only variations being “the drug” and (once) “cannabis.”

Times columnists follow different rules, of course. A couple of months ago, David Brooks published a column that took a dim view of marijuana legalization. It began:

For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships.

But then we all sort of moved away from it. I don’t remember any big group decision that we should give up weed. It just sort of petered out, and, before long, we were scarcely using it.

One does not associate David Brooks with uninhibited frolic. He is actually sort of the anti-Seth Rogen, and if the two of them are both using weed, I predict Rogen will fairly quickly start using something else. Something else as a word, that is.

 

[via Noisey]

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Artist Jonas Dahlberg will create a permanent cut in the headland to remember the victims of Anders Breivik.

This is the winning proposal to commemorate the victims of Norway's July 22 massacre, the 2011 attack in which 77 people died after far-right militant Anders Breivik bombed an Oslo government building before committing a mass shooting on the island of Utøya.

The artist Jonas Dahlberg won the competition to build a memorial to the Utøya victims by proposing a permanent cut in the headland at Sørbråten, which overlooks the island.

Jonas Dahlberg Studio

The judges unanimously backed his proposal to create a cut that will "recreate the physical experience of something being taken away" while also reflecting "the abrupt and permanent loss of those who died on Utøya".

Jonas Dahlberg Studio

Visitors will be able to access the cutting and see the names of those who died, which will be engraved on the opposite side of the excavation.

Jonas Dahlberg Studio

The cut will be three-and-a-half-metres wide and will make it impossible to reach the end of the headland. Earth removed from the excavation will be taken to Oslo and used to build the foundation for a memorial to the government workers who died in the capital city.

The judges concluded that Dahlberg's proposal is "radical and brave, and evokes the tragic events in a physical and direct manner".

Jonas Dahlberg Studio

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Surprisingly, it’s not too bad.

blog.newswhip.com

NewsWhip, a company that ranks and monitors news stories through social shares, conducted an interesting experiment yesterday. Using Spike, a tool that monitors social activity to find the "most shared" stories across a particular site, NewsWhip swapped the front page stories of major newspapers with each paper's most shared stories. The results touch on an interesting truth: that the front page isn't so much a comprehensive collection of the most important and popular stories on a given day as it is a reflection of editorial whims and, in the case of a tabloid paper like the Daily Mail, a clear demonstration of the institution's agenda.

Perhaps more important though, is how, in many cases, the re-imagined front pages appear reasonably well rounded and contain plenty of hard news. While culture and lifestyle stories do seem to outrank the choices most front-page editors — the "Top 10 Ramen Destinations in New York" is unlikely to grace the front page of the New York Times — hard news stories (conflict in Ukraine, Obama's 2015 budget) still appear on the "redesigned" front pages, though less prominently. It's also easy to see the internet's influence in the new pages. Stories about social media are more prominent and local news with its limited audience is hard to come by on the internet's version of page one.

Wall Street Journal

blog.newswhip.com

Daily Mail

blog.newswhip.com

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You don't see a lot of big name "edutainment" titles on the market today. Whereas my childhood was dominated with Reader Rabbit, Number Munchers, Math Blaster and Oregon Trail, it's rare to really see an educational game release with any fanfare these days. That's why Calculords [Free] is so special, because the game is almost entirely based around multiplication, subtraction, and addition. Oh, and blasting aliens into the next galaxy, of course.

The way the game works is fairly simple -- at first, at least. On the top of the screen lays a giant board with three lanes, and two sides. Players will mount their attack on the left side -- the AI, on the right. On the bottom of the screen you'll obtain a random "hand" of attack cards selected from a larger deck, with two separate distinctions - - one of the collections signifies your troops, and the other, numbers from zero to nine.

Each attack card has a number on it, usually in-line with how powerful it is. So lowly troops generally have values less than 10, and big-time vehicular units are usually over 40. It's your job to take the numbered deck and use the three aforementioned mathematical operations to create new numbers, and "summon" your attack cards on the board.

Here's where it gets tricky. You can not only divide by zero, but subtract like numbers from each other to also obtain zero, and "add" it to another value. You'll want to do this because if you use up all of the numbers you have available, you'll get a new set of number cards to continue your turn.

It's genius in that it uses elements of deck building and strategy RPGs, and forces you to actually learn something to succeed. While your "times tables" were usually something most people learned in grade school, it doesn't hurt to refresh yourself with some quick equations, and it's a lot more enjoyable than you'd think at first glance. Calculords also sports an endearing visual style with tons of unique units and enemies, as well as a small amount of humor built in by way of the smack talking AI.

The interface is generally pretty responsive, but it can be a pain sometimes since there's no "undo" button once you put something in motion -- you just have the ability to "clear" the equation you're currently on. Also, it's strange that there's no ability to utilize the division operation, which would be useful on a constant basis.

The kicker is that Calculords is free, and supports itself through a variety of in-app-purchases that are generally inoffensive. For starters, you can purchase bonus rewards and the removal of ads for $1.99, which is more than reasonable for how long the game is. From there, you'll have access to a number of $1.99 card packs, which carry a variety of extra attack cards, usually of the powered-up/superior variety.

The good news is these cards are mostly optional and don't really throw off the balance of the game, since you still have to "draw" them randomly from your deck -- so even if you buy everything, you aren't guaranteed success. Having said that, I say "mostly," because without stronger cards, the game can feel a bit grindy, especially after the first battle.

Simply put, when you first encounter an enemy, it feels like you're fighting off insurmountable odds. One fight in particular had an enemy reducing my attack card deck down to a mere two cards before I could even do anything, then proceeded to instantly decimate the few units I was able to lay down in one turn. Before I could do anything, he blew me away the next turn with units that literally had double the stats of my own.

In order to come back and stand a fighting chance, I had to grind out five or six battles in previous levels instead, so I could muster up the experience and cards to take him on. It feels like this is to cover up the fairly low amount of stages currently in the game, and to elongate the progression a bit. While technically every fight operates using the same mechanics, new enemies help keep things interesting, as their units force you to learn and adapt new tactics -- it's just slightly annoying that this usually involves an advantage on their part.

Even with that occasional annoyance, Calculords is definitely still worth playing. It's a true testament to my enjoyment of the game that I kept at it, grinding my way through old battles time after time and coming up with new strategies along the way. The retro-centric charming visuals certainly don't hurt matters either if you're a fan of the style.

* 2014: The monocle returns as a fashion accessory (nytimes.com)
* Mr. Peanut issues a statement about this story (washingtonpost.com)

* 1970: By jove, the monocle has returned

* 1941: More monocles are worn (@derekwillis)

* “An early frontrunner for the greatest trend story of the year,” and more comments on Twitter (twitter.com)
* “I’m having trouble fitting my monocle over my Google Glass” (facebook.com)

“Someone at NPR is getting fired,” tweets B.J. Mendelson.

“I’m looking for the source of the photo but as with anything on Reddit I assume it’s fake until proven otherwise,” Mendelson tells me.

In more real estate news, Cayuga Capital, the management company of several neighborhood residential buildings, including 44 Berry Street, acquired permits to begin transforming the former St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church into 99 rental apartments and a parking lot. The company purchased the property in 2012, and was originally denied permission to build. The church originally opened in 1892, and was designed by architect Theobald M. Engelhardt.

More from Brownstoner:

New permits have been issued at 626-628 Bushwick Avenue, the former St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church and school, pictured above, to convert the property into 99 rental apartments by developer Cayuga Capital. An Alt-1 permit to convert it to residential apartments was filed in February 2012 and disapproved the following month. There is a partial vacate order in effect on the property.

But a new permit using the address 616 Bushwick Avenue was granted in November. The three-story church will be turned into a four-story one, although the height will remain the same. There will also be horizontal additions, according to the permit.

A one-story scaffold that had covered the front of the buildings for years came down in 2012. In August, a new permit to erect scaffolding was granted, and now netting and pipe scaffolding covers the church all the way to the top of the steeple.

In October, Cayuga put a 90 percent interest stake in seven Bushwick properties on the market for $14,000,000 through MNS to raise funds to complete the Bushwick Avenue conversion, as we reportedat the time. The school and church were designed by architect Theobald M. Engelhardt and completed in 1885 and 1892, respectively. The church space has also been used for parties and a movie set. Click through to the jump to see the church in its scaffolding shroud.

I want to be this dog.

Meet Silver the husky.

youtube.com

At first, he's like "what is this thing?"

youtube.com

And then it starts scratching his ear...

youtube.com

Then his head...

youtube.com

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Get your passport ready and pack your suitcase… After you finish reading this you’ll be running out your door.

Lake Atitlan, Guatemala.

mikeblue/mikeblue

Matthew Stallone/Matthew Stallone

Photograph by Reuben Wu/Photograph by Reuben Wu

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As a nod to the restaurant's first life as a burrito parlor, last week David Chang and Co. added a "seven-spice brisket ssäm" to the menu at Momofuku Ssäm Bar. But now it appears that the lunch menu has sprouted two more wraps: a rotisserie chicken version, and an "O.G. Momofuku ssäm" stuffed with pork shoulder, hoisin, black beans, and kimchi. Kate Krader snapped an impressive photo of the past and future colliding today. No word yet on whether Chang will continue to offer these, or if this was just a Throwback Thursday special.
· All Coverage of Momofuku Ssäm Bar [~ENY~]

Actress Tatiana Maslany plays several genetically identical clones in this series, but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t clearly stand out above the rest.

BBC America's sci-fi smash Orphan Black features several genetically identical clones, so it seems impossible to just pick out one of them as the best.

BBC AMERICA / Via bbcamerica.com

Shh, shh. No. Let me stop you right there.

fuckyesorphanblack.tumblr.com

bbcamerica.com

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Brides can now eat on brisket on the big day! Delaney Barbecue recently announced they are breaking the “chicken or fish” mold and getting into the wedding catering business. Nothing compliments matrimony like a selection of smoked meats, just don’t get sauce on the Vera Wang.

The catering menu covers everything from hors d’oeurves to barbecue faves served family style to pie. Even some veggie options make the list. And if a couple would rather have a traditional slice of cake over pecan pie (why?), the catering team will outsource to a local bakery.

Mazel tov! Yeehaw!

Vice President Joe Biden is ready to challenge everybody now.

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As you probably know, B.J. Novak is a writer and actor who got pretty famous working in both roles on NBC’s The Office — you’ll remember him as office douche Ryan Howard. Novak recently published a short-story collection called One More Thing, which I just finished reading a few weeks ago, and if you want my opinion, it’s a really good book. The tone falls somewhere between those old Woody Allen stories and George Saunders or Sam Lipsyte. It’s a little inconsistent by design, but it has lots of great moments; I thought the story “Sophia” was a total knockout. Anyway, one of the stories from that collection was featured on a recent This American Life. It’s called “Julie And The Warlord”; I’m not sure it’s one of the best pieces in the book, but I enjoyed reading it very much. It’s a surrealist story about the first date between a young woman and a warlord, in which the warlord explains to the young woman how his job works amid some inane small talk. The piece was read for TAL by Novak (as the narrator), Community and Mad Men’s great Alison Brie (as the young woman), and TV On The Radio vocalist Tunde Adebimpe (as the warlord). The audio is below; skip ahead to 7:02 to listen to the story, or just stream the whole episode. And cop Novak’s book here or ideally at an independent bookstore in your neighborhood, if you have access to such a thing. /sanctimony

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Daft Punk might be touring this summer. If you take nothing else away from this story, take away that. That is amazing news. If you caught the duo on their 2006 Pyramid Tour, you likely had your mind absolutely shattered. They haven’t toured, or even played a full concert, since then. The prospect of seeing them back onstage again is deeply exciting. But we will not get to see them onstage at one of the coolest possible places we could ever hope to see them: Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower. An Album Of The Year Grammy, it would seem, does not get you whatever you want.

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A couple of things people have been known to enjoy: hip-hop, Game of Thrones. So HBO, like some mad scientist/Cool Dad hybrid, is distributing a free Westeros-themed mixtape online this Friday. It’s called Catch the Throne and will feature Wale rapping the words “I’m tellin’ whoever messin’ with me / I can bring you that Khaleesi heat / Use my King, knack for words, as an actual sword / I can decapitate a rapper” and Big Boi doing a chorus that goes “dungeons, dragons, kings, and queens.” Never has something had such equal potential to be incredible or awful. Or incrediful.

Common is a contributor as well. The tracks will either be frequently or completely tinted by “layered samples of dialogue from the show and music from its dramatic, orchestral score.” (“What More Can I Say” vibes, anyone?) HBO’s goal in contracting 10 “hip-hop and Latin-music artists” was to “encourage more rap fans to watch the show,” the Wall Street Journal reports. The network’s marketing execs discovered somewhere along the line that celebrities (particularly in the hip-hop realm, I guess?) were really alerting fans to this must-watch Peter Dinklage jam, and decided a mixtape was the way to go. The WSJ, always trying to follow those racks, was unable to determine “how much the campaign cost or how much the artists are being paid.”

As easy as it is to laugh and WTF all over this, there’s actual, intensely specific data explaining Catch the Throne’s existence. Last year, the average viewership on GoT’s prime-time telecasts was 13.2 percent black, 9.2 percent Hispanic, and 76.6 percent white. But for HBO’s overall year, average viewership was 16.8 percent black, 12.3 percent Hispanic, and 72.9 percent white. “The channel’s prime-time black viewership has fallen in each of the past two years,” the WSJ adds, “while the percentage of Hispanic viewers is down slightly from two years ago.” There’s a race-agnostic wild card, too: “The mixtape is also part of a broader strategy on HBO’s part to attract more viewers generally.” Because DatPiff is the new HBO.

On to the necessary questions:

• George R.R. Martin = George Rap Rap Martin?
• Will the whole thing sound like “H.A.M.”? Is that a bad thing?
• Why haven’t the Wall Street Journal’s parents given it the talk about spoiler warnings yet? Pretty sad.
• Is anyone surprised Big Boi, he of the Dungeon Family, is reading the Song of Ice and Fire novels and getting ahead of the show?
• Will Catch the Throne be better than Cruel Summer? (Unlikely. Based on what the WSJ’s got, I’m guessing [a] what we see is what we get, as far as name-brand rappers go, and [b] only Big Boi’s song will be good.)
• Why did Wale allow the WSJ to get the impression that he doesn’t really watch the show? Not the time to be losing points, man.
• And why’d Common admit he’s only seen through the second season of a series he’s about to rap about? Why did he have to compare the Game of Thrones snippets in the songs to what RZA was doing with old kung fu flicks + Wu-Tang in the ’90s?
• Speaking of entertainment-themed hip-hop: How close to the Wild Wild West/Men in Black vortex are we going here?
• And does everybody know how high the bar is when it comes to Game of Thrones + hip-hop??