IKEA Monkey

PHILADELPHIA — Welcome to the 27th and penultimate night of the Democratic National Convention. Two nights ago, my close personal friend, First Lady Michelle Obama gave a gorgeous speech that left a nation in tears. Four more years of Michelle, we cried! (Melania Trump no doubt took notes .)

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What makes kids food kid foods? Is it a malleable set-up that encourages children to play with their crackers and pasta? Or, perhaps, it’s brightly-colored packaging with the contents within written out into burst shapes. Certainly, the market has trended toward healthier options as of late, but there still is very much a place on the shelf for the kind of highly-processed, hand-held snack food you might only deem fit for an eleven year-old circa 1994.

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The revivalist soul outfit Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings has spent the past decade and a half slowly gaining critical and commercial attention, to the point where they earned a Grammy nomination for their most recent studio album, 2014’s Give The People What They Want. Still, they’re a long way from being a household name, so one might expect that a documentary about Jones would be a generic biographical portrait, introducing her and her band to a wider audience by providing a detailed history of her personal journey. That’s not what two-time Oscar-winning director Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA; Wild Man Blues; Shut Up & Sing) has in mind, however. Miss Sharon Jones! touches the usual bases, but at a gallop, as Kopple is much more interested in chronicling Jones’ recent battle with stage-two pancreatic cancer, which sidelined her for over a year as she underwent extensive ...

The apartments would be the latest in a string of residential and mixed-use developments erected or in the works along Milwaukee Avenue (or the "Hipster Highway," as it's been dubbed *cringe*) in the past few years. [ more › ]

A little throwback to the height of the Clinton-era culture wars for your Wednesday morning: In 1995, Wal-Mart pulled t-shirts featuring a Dennis the Menace character declaring “Someday a woman will be PRESIDENT!” from one of its stores because somebody thought it was “offensive.”

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On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton became the first woman nominated as a major party presidential candidate. It was a historical moment in the United States, and despite the controversies around this election, it cannot be underplayed. Unless you’re designing the front cover of a major newspaper on Wednesday.

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Ronnie Music Jr., 45, used his 2015 windfall to buy the drugs, then supply it to others who would resell it at a profit, authorities said.

Scorned fans of "The Bachelorette" took to social media to complain that WLS-Ch. 7 aired Monday's game between the Cubs and the White Sox in the time slot typically reserved for "The Bachelorette."

"I invited 7 people over to watch the Bachelorette and now @ABCNetwork is airing the Cubs game instead....

They're not above occasionally peeing in the pool.

If you’re not from the northeastern United States, “Wawa” may mean nothing to you. Know this: this chain of stores makes some of the best sandwiches you’ll ever eat, and has a passionate, devoted following. If you love their hoagies as much as I do, here’s how you can get those flavors at home.

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Donald Trump this weekend defended longtime friend Roger Ailes, the ousted chief executive of Fox News who is accused of sexually harassing at least two dozen women. Trump also questioned the motives of some of the women.

"I can tell you that some of the women that are complaining, I know how much...

Chris Sale wasn't at U.S. Cellular Field to speak for himself Sunday.

The White Sox suspended the All-Star left-hander for five days and fined him an undisclosed amount after he destroyed some 1976 throwback jerseys the team was supposed to wear for his start Saturday.

That left some teammates and...

Warner Bros. Pictures’ Comic-Con panel included the first Wonder Woman trailer for the first-ever film featuring the DC Comics heroine front and center. Monster filmmaker Patty Jenkins directed the movie, which stars Gal Gadot as the Amazon princess who tries to conquer a world war, which is first revealed to her by Chris Pines’ military officer after he crash-lands on her sheltered home island.

The trailer reveals Wonder Woman’s lasso and shield in action, with a little humor thrown in for good measure. A twist on the Wonder Woman theme song plays during the trailer’s end. It’s also nice to see some color in her costume (more evident in the movie’s new poster), which was darker than dark for her appearance in Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman.

And, sure, the feminist bits are a bit on the nose with the secretary/slavery gag in the new clip, but it’s refreshing to hear a woman playing a pop culture icon tell a dude, “What I do is not up to you.”

The Illinois Republican Party on Wednesday revoked the credentials of a Donald Trump delegate from Chicago who has used a social media handle of "whitepride" for "publicly made racist comments and threats of violence."

Lori Gayne, an elected Trump delegate from the city and west suburban 5th Congressional...

What its like to drive in Chicago.

 Today is Prince George’s third birthday, and as is tradish, Kensington Palace released new portraits of his squashy little noodle face. (When will he be too old for me to call him a squashy little noodle? I am MUCH older than he is, so… doing some math… carry the four… add in the nuclear weight Read More ...

Installing a pole in an Australian home may sometimes attract curious guests.

Sometimes, nature calls at the most inconvenient times—like at night after you’re already settled into bed. The last thing you want to do at midnight is stumble into a dark bathroom, stub your toe, and trip over a million things as you try to figure out where the toilet is. [ more › ]

A video that shows an unarmed African-American man lying in the street with his arms in the air doesn't tell the whole story of what happened when North Miami police shot the man earlier this week, a union official told reporters.

The hot springs at the Lukacs Bathhouse have been in use, in one way or another, since the 12th century. According to Reuters, locals and visitors alike attribute the mineral-rich waters with a special healing power. Bathers flock to the Hungarian spa for its steam rooms, saunas, pools, and special treatments.

'Spirited Away' still via YouTube

There's a quote on Tumblr somewhere that says "Disney movies touch the heart, but Studio Ghibli films touch the soul." As sentimental as that is, it's also astute. It's surely part of the reason that anime fans across the world will testify that Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away is the best animation film of all time. On the 15th anniversary of its release in Japan, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi—translated as "Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away"—remains untouched by rivals for its blend of the spiritual, the realistic, the fantastic, and the human. For balancing all of those realms, Miyazaki was the master, and since his retirement, we'll continue to look on Spirited Away as the film that was the masterpiece of his life.

At its most basic, the film follows a little girl, Chihiro, on a journey to free her parents. She has to navigate the spirit world she gets trapped in by working in a bathhouse run by an overlord called Yu-baaba. Miyazaki said he'd decided to make it based on the ten-year-old daughter of friend, associate producer Seiji Okuda, who came to stay with him every summer. With this in mind, he made the movie for ten-year-old girls. This is exactly why it resonates so well with people of all ages and why Chihiro feels so real. How often can you say a film has been made for young girls, rather than money or mainstream audiences?

Many male critics described Chihiro as a "sullen" and "spoiled" girl, and continue to describe her as such. This is hardly a fair criticism, nor is it an accurate one. When we meet Chihiro, she's being driven away from her home and everything she knows to live in a new town. All she has to remember her friends is a bouquet. "The only time I got a bouquet and it's a goodbye present. How depressing," she says, only to be reminded by her mom that her dad bought her one for her birthday. She shrugs this off, understandably. Few ten-year-olds would behave so well given the upheaval. When the family exit the car, entranced by the lead up to the abandoned theme park that will soon trap them, Chihiro is "whiny" because her intuition is correct. She follows behind her parents, worried by the little shines and the appearance of the food with no vendor, warning that they shouldn't be there. These critics will see that she spends the remainder of the film laboring not only for their ignorance but also the fact that they ignore the voice of a young girl.

Still via Wiki

What sets her story apart is that Chihiro isn't forced to triumph over great evil and turn from a "sullen" creature to a good girl. Far better than that, it's a film about honest development. Miyazaki shows her slowly forcing herself to adapt to her environment and be open to the tasks ahead, quietly tackling them as best she can. She has trouble walking down the steps to the boiler man, Kamaji, but eventually manages to make it down. Kamaji keeps ignoring her, but she knows she must get a job at the bathhouse to survive in this new spirit world, so doesn't stop until he helps her. Her careful thinking and determination quickly reward her when she realizes a stinky spirit was actually a polluted river spirit who needed to be freed from all the junk surrounding it. The fact the film was made without a script only adds to this natural evolution of Chihiro. "I don't have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film," Miyazaki once told Midnight Eye. "It's not me who makes the film. The film makes itself, and I have no choice but to follow." The entire team must instead live the character's reality step by step, and you can feel this intuition.

Caught in the flow of narrative are some of the most beautiful stills in modern cinema, let alone animation. As critic Roger Ebert pointed out in his review of the film, each frame is made with an overwhelming amount of "generosity and love." Dozens of different creatures are made for each moment, every last detail penned by hand in the corners or background, where anyone else would make shortcuts. Importantly, we have time to breathe and live in Miyazaki's world. He said that these scenes where nothing really happens are called "ma," or "emptiness." "The people who make the movies are scared of silence, so they want to paper and plaster it over," he said. "They're worried that the audience will get bored. But just because it's 80 percent intense all the time, doesn't mean the kids are going to bless you with their concentration. What really matters is the underlying emotions—that you never let go of those." Interestingly, it's the "ma" moments that have become iconic as the film has aged—Chihiro standing on the balcony outside the bedroom looking out to sea, lost; Chihiro and her friends, No-Face, Boh, and the Yu-Bird sat looking lost on a train.

Still via Wiki

This beauty is universal, but of course there's subtlety that's lost in translation. Plenty of Japanese speakers have pointed out the visual clues in the film that non-Japanese speakers wouldn't know. When approaching the doomed theme park market in the opening, in one frame, we see the Kanji character, 狗 for dog, but this could suggest the homophone kuniku, which literally means "bitter meat," meaning something that requires personal sacrifice. Another character here for "bone" seems to hint toward an idiomatic phrase hone-nashi meaning to lack in moral backbone. When the father marches greedily through an arch, a Japanese viewer would note that some of the characters on it are back to front, supporting the unease Chihiro is also feeling. Some viewers have highlighted the repetition of the characters yu and me in the film since yume means "dream" in Japanese.

Names themselves are important as a signifier of identity throughout. Chihiro's name literally means "a thousand" and "asking questions" or "searching/seeking." When Yu-baaba takes a character from Chihiro's name to cruelly rename her and sign the contract handing the girl over to her, Chihiro's new name, Sen, just means "a thousand." She's stripped of that meaning; she's herself, but there's a part of her that's missing. The other characters' names also have literal connotations. Boh means "little boy" or "son," Kamaji means "old boiler man," Yu-baaba means "bathhouse," "old woman," or "witch," and Zeniiba means "money witch."

As with any film that has quickly reached a cult status, you can fall down a hole of Spirited Away theories. One suggests that the whole thing is an allegory for child prostitution, with the bathhouse taking on more sinister undertones. Miyazaki did once say that Japanese society has become like the sex industry. Another reading is that the spirit world represents old Japan, one that is struggling alongside new Japan, the "real" world of Chihiro and her family. In this case, the moral of the story is that, like Chihiro, Japan should learn that both past and present worlds can exist alongside each other but must adapt and change. Some look to the opposing forces of gross capitalism and spirituality shown in the film. Chihiro is moving towns because her dad has a new job. When they approach the theme park, her dad comments that they were going to put a river there but didn't—they built a failed money-making venture instead. The other day someone tweeted asking Studio Ghibli what the relevance was of Chihiro's parents turning into pigs. They replied that the transformation is reflective of how people turned into pigs during Japan's bubble economy of the 1980s, which was followed by a 1991 crash, and once someone becomes a pig, he or she will gradually have the "body and soul of a pig," which "doesn't just apply to the fantasy world."

Image via Wiki

What anyone of any age can take away from Spirited Away is the importance of balance. There's no evil character, despite poor motives. Everyone has a good side or the potential for good—even Yu-baaba, as seen in her twin sister. The mud monster isn't actually terrible but underneath it all is a kama no kami, a "god of the river." The opposite of balance is excess, and as seen in the parents gorging themselves until they become pigs or the greed and wealth displayed in the bath house, nothing positive can come of it.

This delivery of sensitive spiritual and emotional messages made Spirited Away the highest-grossing film in Japanese history. It won awards across the world, including an Academy Award, an event that Miyazaki politely declined to attend because he was against American involvement in the war in Iraq. Significantly, it was with this film that he introduced hundreds of thousands to the films of Studio Ghibli, who might not have discovered the animation house otherwise. It's a rare film that young fans will keep with them and show to their children and grandchildren. Ultimately, Spirited Away showed how breathtaking, heartfelt, and serious animation can be; its lessons ones that Pixar, Disney, and other mainstream animators have still failed to genuinely realize 15 years later.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

Not much to say here that wasn’t said in the headline, but let’s talk it through anyway. So it appears that estranged wife of Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, has been friends with estranged spirit of Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, “for several years.” But according to TMZ, their relationship has evolved somewhat over the past few months, and that the two have been...“hanging out” a lot.

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Highlights Of Ted Cruz’s 2016 RNC Speech

It’s six seconds of footage virtually everyone with a reliable internet connection has seen dozens of times. A West Yorkshire teenager with a red “New York” T-shirt sits in a stationary vehicle and addresses the camera directly. “I’m in my mum’s car,” she says, as if she’s getting away with something diabolical. She punctuates this half-boast, half-confession with a memorable bit of onomatopoeia, apparently meant to represent the sound of a revving car engine: “Broom, broom.” Cut to the girl’s mother, trying to appear stern but clearly giddy to be part of the video. “Get out me car!” she shouts. Cut back to the girl, sighing with disappointment: “Awwww!” This little vignette of short-lived adolescent rebellion caught the internet’s attention in a huge way when Tish Simmonds first posted it to her Vine account on July 21, 2014. Millions upon millions of views ensued ...

In December of 2015, a woman named only as Jenny was a star witness in the case against serial rapist Keith Hendricks, who was eventually given two life sentences for his crimes. Jenny is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and when she took the stand, the trauma of being questioned caused a mental breakdown. She ran from the courtroom, saying she wouldn’t return.

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A black therapist who was trying to calm an autistic man in the middle of the street says he was shot by police even though he had his hands in the air and repeatedly told them that no one was armed.

The moments before the shooting were recorded on cellphone video and show Charles Kinsey lying...

Carpool Karaoke, the segment on James Corden’s Late Late Show, is a conceit that’s generally annoyed me, seemingly tailored to show off Corden’s singing skills among bigger stars like the type of person at actual karaoke who will do a Celine Dion ballad at 3 am and insists you stay silent for the duration.

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Finally a place for bees to relax.

I am not alone in saying that The Darjeeling Limited is perhaps my least favorite Wes Anderson movie (even though Ebert liked it). But it's Evan Puschak's favorite and he does an admirable job in raising my appreciation for the film.

Tags: Evan Puschak   movies   The Darjeeling Limited   video   Wes Anderson