IKEA MonkeyIt must be so difficult being a person who has no other context for struggle
Ellen Pao’s been interim CEO at Reddit for more than six months now, but just like any new gig at the sewage treatment plant, she’s still wading through a bunch of shit. Reddit announced yesterday that as part of a new harassment prevention policy, they’re banning five of the worst subreddits. Reddit users calmly responded by calling Pao a freedom-hating Nazi cunt who should be fired. Of course.
IKEA MonkeyThis looks really, really amazing. Corey - this might be our next "Searching for Sugarman"
No need to worry: The Wolfpack is not some kind of Hangover spinoff and it certainly has nothing to do with the shirtless werewolves of the Twilight franchise. In fact, the films that the documentary actually shares the most cinematic DNA with are Be Kind Rewind and Dogtooth. With its low-budget recreations of popular films, The Wolfpack is as charming as it is horrifying, taking a close look at the Angulo brothers, who’ve spent their young lives holed up in an NYC apartment by their parents. The film, which claimed the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, examines how the siblings used movies as way to stave off loneliness and get a glimpse of the world outside.
The Wolfpack opens in Chicago on June 19 (exclusively at The Music Box Theatre) and The A.V. Club has an opportunity for ...
IKEA MonkeyIt will be pasty and inoffensive, just like Colin Jost. Spoiler alert: The last thing you want in your lifeguard is pasty and inoffensive.
Netflix has acquired the exclusive rights to the first movie written by Saturday Night Live head writer and Weekend Update anchor Colin Jost, The Wrap reports. A coming-of-age story about high school graduates working as lifeguards, Staten Island Summer will star The Good Wife’s Graham Phillips and Mulaney’s Zack Pearlman as the prospective comers-of-age.
The Lorne Michaels-produced movie, which debuts on the streaming service on July 30, is packed with SNL cast members past and present: Bobby Moynihan, Will Forte, Fred Armisen, and Jost’s former co-anchor Cecily Strong all make appearances. (Sketch legend Method Man is also apparently on hand to lend his comedic acumen.)
Staten Island Summer is just the latest step in Netflix’s plan to become the internet’s preferred destination for yucks on demand, having acquired movies from Judd Apatow, Ricky Gervais, and former Saturday Night Live ambassador for cultural understanding Adam Sandler ...
IKEA Monkey"Yo, I'm going to look out of this window and you take my picture, I want to look thoughtful" - Tyrese and every single person who has taken a shot like this (me included, super guilty)
Do you want or need love advice from Tyrese? What about Rev Run? Doesn’t matter! You’re gonna get it.
IKEA MonkeyLove her, do not love this cover.
The upcoming More will be all Michelle Obama, all the time, because they got the First Lady of these United States to guest-edit the July/August issue. Watch for it peeking out of intimidatingly well-appointed beach totes soon!
IKEA MonkeyWhen Mandi was recovering from her surgery, I'd work from her house and also be there to help her with her recovery. We watched a lot of TV and one of the shows we'd watch was this show. It was so dumb and yet strangely full of ennui, like these three beautiful women and this doddering old man living together and pretending everything was totally cool when it was obvious things were weird. I feel like this memoir would be a good summer beach/pool read.
More details of Holly Madison’s juicy memoir about her life at the Playboy Mansion have come out, including her post-show relationships with fellow Hugh Hefner girlfriends Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson. After Wilkinson said she was no longer friends with Madison and Marquardt in an interview, Madison decided to call out her fakeness via text. Wilkinson replied: “WHO ARE YOU???? I DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU! WE WERE NEVER FRIENDS. IT WAS ALL JUST WORK.” Afterwards, Madison deleted her number and stopped speaking to her. “Kendra and I haven’t spoken since, and I have to say, I don’t miss her.” She also described the Kendra on Top star as having a “sense of entitlement” and a “hustler mentality.”
IKEA MonkeyATTN: DAVID :'-(
Brace yourselves for the river of cryface you are about to endure. A legally-blind woman from Putnam County, New York named Audrey Stone was crossing the street with her service dog, Figo, when a mini school bus began coming towards them. Figo sensed danger and immediately moved from the right side of Stone to her left in an effort to protect her from the oncoming vehicle. The dog was hit, and suffered a deep wound to his right leg which caused some of his fur to end up on the bumper of the bus and the pavement. Stone fractured her elbow and ankle, broke three ribs and suffered a head laceration. Both the 62-year-old woman and Figo are expected to recover.
IKEA MonkeyATTN: DAVID
Two adorable service dogs show up ready to work each day at a Minnesota high school, including picture day.
Dakota and Caramel are two service dogs that work at Blaine High School in Blaine, Minn. Dakota works with Rebecca Thomas, a hearing-impaired teacher, and Caramel works with Vicky Camacho, a paraprofessional who works in special education. Both service dogs are listed on the staff page of the yearbook and have been featured for several years.
"I think it recognizes the important role that Dakota and her owner, Vicky, play in the lives of our students," Lynn Florman, head of the special education department, told Yahoo Canada. "There are also many students outside of the special education department that know Dakota and enjoy stopping to say hello to her. Sometimes the unique services they provide are not understood or valued by others, so seeing them recognized in such a public and memorable way as a yearbook sends a strong message to all that they are an integral part of the team that supports our students."
Dakota is such a popular pooch, she even had her own yearbook page after she had puppies.
[h/t: Yahoo Canada]
IKEA MonkeyI am also a big fan of shabu-shabu, which means "Swish swish" after the sound the ingredients make when you swirl them around in the hot pot.
Comic book interjections like “Bam! Kapow! Thwack!” are classic examples of English onomatopoeia. But if Superman were to come up against a Japanese superhero, he’d probably be KO’d by his rival’s sheer arsenal of sound effects. Japanese is a language extremely rich in onomatopoeia. These giongo and gitaigo, mimetic words which describe not only sounds but also more abstract concepts like blushing (“dere-dere”) or the sensation of a gentle breeze (“soyo-soyo”), are usually made up of two sounds or syllables which are repeated for emphasis. And while an online list of English onomatopoeia has only 757 examples, the Japanese giongo/gitaigo dictionary boasts a whopping 4500 entries.
One area where the onomatopoeia get strangely specific is when you’re talking about food texture. Take what English speakers would simply call “crunchy”—in Japanese there’s shaki-shaki (crunchy and juicy like a green apple or iceberg lettuce), pori-pori (a quieter munch, like cookies or Pocky), pari-pari (a crackly crunch like nori), saku-saku (a light, crispy crunch like tempura coating), kori-kori (soft and crunchy like broccoli), kari-kari (a dry crunch like toast or biscotti), and gari-gari (hard and crunchy like carrots or ice). If all this is making you feel a little peko-peko (the sound of a rumbling stomach), allow us to serve up 15 more linguistic morsels to sink your teeth into.
Puri-puri describes that feeling of snapping into a fresh shrimp or a plump hot dog. Bursting with juiciness and bounce, puri-puri evokes the springiness and slight resistance of collagen—which is why it’s also sometimes used to describe a young girl’s cheeks.
You know when a soft morsel of hot baked potato crumbles on your tongue and your mouth fills with a starchy steaminess? That’s hoku-hoku.
Fuwa-fuwa is one of the cutest of the food onomatopoeia, often squealed by girls to describe delightfully light and fluffy foods like white bread, marshmallows, or pancakes.
Fizzy and bubbly, shuwa-shuwa refers to the refreshing mouthfeel of a carbonated beverage like sparkling water or champagne.
We would probably never want to describe a food as neba-neba (slimy) in English, but it’s high praise in Japan. That’s because the Japanese lap up such gooey, viscous—or more technically, mucilaginous—delicacies as nattou (fermented soybeans), wild yam, and okra.
Mochi-mochi is the most meta of the onomatopoeia, as it comes from one food in particular: mochi. If you’re not familiar, that’s sticky rice pounded into a stretchy, chewy, glutinous ball. Mochi-mochi isn’t just limited to the ice cream-filled sweet, though—it can also describe a particularly dense, doughy bread.
Puru-puru seems like the perfect word to describe a blob of wobbly, wiggly gelatin.
People with trypophobia dare not do a Google image search for tsubu-tsubu—this handy term is used for clusters of tiny balls, seeds, or grains. Food-wise, that means sprinkles, caviar, Dippin’ Dots, or, the staple of Japanese desserts, sweet adzuki beans.
Giongo aren’t always appetizing; you can use pasa-pasa to talk about a food that’s lost all its moisture and flavor, like leftover rice that no longer sticks together, a dried up old orange, or stale bread.
Toro-toro describes rich, creamy fare that has melted from a solid to liquid—think grilled cheese, chocolate fondue, or a slow-cooked stew brimming with fat.
How about some ramen? You’ll want the noodles to be both tsuru-tsuru (slippery) and shiko-shiko (al dente). If they are, you’re sure to gobble them up with a loud zuru-zuru (slurp)—unless you’re a woman, in which case you might go churu-churu (a more feminine slurp). Just be careful not to get broth all over your face or you’ll be gido-gido (oily).
That’s a mouthful! Surely by now you’re pan-pan (stuffed).
IKEA Monkey\m/
IKEA MonkeySOUPING
[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2015/06/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/08/' filename='the-paracetamol-challenge-is-a-viral-teen-suicide-craze-that-doesnt-actually-exist-558-body-image-1433765420.jpg' id='64040']
Paracetamol. Photo by Sam-Cat.
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
Something has gone horribly wrong with our children. While the adult population has been busy engaging with brands and trying out unpronounceable vegetables in the sunlit world of hipsterdom, right under our noses some dark power is turning ordinary kids into monsters.
A few short years ago, they were happily snorting up designer drugs or rioting on the streets: doing things that might be dangerous, but are at least fun. Now they're all sallow, tubercular nihilists, bloodthirsty and self-destructive. If they were motivated by hatred, that would at least be understandable, but instead they're propelled only by a callous, vacant indifference. They don't care about society. They don't care about their own lives. They don't even want anything. Those who can are streaming out of the country to training camps in Syria, committing genocide out of sheer boredom. Their video games weren't exciting enough, and nobody's published a decent book in decades, so the only thing left to do is kill.
Meanwhile, those that stay here are waging another kind of campaign of takfiri extermination, a jihad across the desert of the psyche. The generation that had everything now wants nothingness; they're tumbling carelessly into the void. Their parents did so much to raise these kids, and this is how they're repaid: The kids are killing themselves, for no reason other than sheer spiteful ingratitude.
If you want proof, just look at the Paracetamol Challenge, the internet's latest youth culture craze. Not content with wholesomely dousing themselves in cold water, teens are now daring each other online to swallow lethal quantities of painkillers. It's the simplest sort of game: There's no high, and no achievement. If you win, nothing happens. If you lose, you die. If nothing else, it's a way out. In a world where every kind of fun or excitement has been ruthlessly commodified, turned into a sanitized product, it's not hard to see why the Paracetamol Challenge has taken off in such a big way.
Except, of course, it hasn't.
There's no real evidence to suggest that anyone has been taking overdoses of the drug after being challenged to do so online, anywhere, ever. There's certainly nothing to suggest that it's some kind of craze. Social media trends tend to be actually visible on social media; this one isn't. Of the thousands of tweets on the #ParacetamolChallenge hashtag, most are shocked adults squawking and condescending over the stupidity of the young; none are young people actually being stupid.
Which, when you actually stop and think about it, makes perfect sense. Kids are stupid, in the way that anyone from a plumber to a poet to a particle physicist tends to be pretty stupid, but they're not that stupid. Being a teenager is also generally quite shit, in a way that people looking back on the experience with the soft filters of analepsis don't tend to recognize. Much of the coverage of the putative challenge has focused on the tragic case of a 19-year-old who died after taking an overdose of paracetamol— in 2011, before the "craze" existed. The only other known victim is an unnamed teen in Scotland, whose hospitalization after an overdose has been attributed to the challenge.
When suicide attempts happen, it's generally because there's something badly wrong in someone's life. But it's not hard to imagine worried relatives desperate for an explanation deciding that it must all be the fault of the internet and that awful social media—as if Online were some possessive demon dangling human bodies like puppets, rather than a social field mostly coded by commercial interests. As if just being near a computer could make people think their lives are worthless.
The Paracetamol Challenge is a major craze, but it's not teenage psychology we should be worried about. In fact, something's very wrong with the adults. The story has been reported on, with ballooning panic, by the Daily Mail, the Metro, the Guardian, the Telegraph, and countless other publications. Despite it being utterly stupid and patently untrue, thousands of people are not just willing but almost eager to believe it. Like Satanic ritual abuse or Jewish blood libel, its structure is that of a fantasy. It isn't just a matter of people believing something untrue; they really want to believe it—and as psychoanalysts have known for a while, the false things we believe are often more important than the true ones.
Mass
credulity of this kind signals a society that has an uneasy relationship with
its children. In fact, our culture is suffused with images of kids killing each
other for no good reason. The Hunger Games films (whose audience seems at this point to mostly consist of
middle-aged cultural critics), for instance. The premise of the story makes no
sense, based as it is on the bizarre idea that the televised murder of their
children would make parents
less
likely to revolt. Just like the imagined game of pointless pill-popping, it's
the flimsy screen for a moment of perverted catharsis. Grown-ups are fucked up.
Related: Watch 'Exploring the Nazi Village of Jamel'
A lot of this probably has to do with guilt. It's hardly a secret that the older generations have left young people a world that's not fit for service. In a way, the fantasy is true. A lot of kids really are being goaded into humiliating, debasing, and sometimes endangering themselves; it's just not their peers that are doing it. It's brute economic necessity.
With so many people competing for so few demeaning, underpaid jobs, the mere act of selling one's labor requires capitulating to demands far more senseless and stupid than any online challenge dreamed up by sadistic cyberbullies. Take, for instance, the plan to force young people to work 30 hours a week for a fraction of the minimum wage. The moronic internet challenge-y dimensions of all this are perfectly exemplified by Britain's Hardest Grafter, a proposed game show in which the penniless humiliate themselves for a year's minimum wage.
For those in school, Education Maintenance Allowances have been scrapped in England and Wales, while the combination of constant, rigid standardized testing and the blind chaos of academization provide an institutional mirror for the merciless caprice of an imagined cybernetic culture of death. In a time when the future is being torn apart to be repurposed as the supports for an increasingly rickety past, there's something almost comforting about the idea of the Paracetamol Challenge. Believing in it is a way for people to absolve themselves of responsibility. The kids are dying, it tells us—but it's OK, they're just doing it to themselves.
Follow Sam on Twitter.
IKEA MonkeyTRACY JORDAN
IKEA MonkeyThat is a CRAZY noise
IKEA Monkey!!!
IKEA MonkeyI'm sure this is a great use of money and not at all a better use of money than fixing roads and bridges or funding education
IKEA MonkeyWe have all been lied to
IKEA MonkeyClearly this is an efficient use of crime fighting resources
IKEA MonkeyAs a pricing analyst, this kind of pricing decision fascinates me, and I want to know more about it.
Speaking this week to analysts about the wholesale club’s quarterly earnings, Costco chief financial officer Richard Galanti answered a question about the company’s philosophy on the cheap chickens.
“I can only tell you what history has shown us: When others were raising their chicken prices from $4.99 to $5.99, we were willing to eat, if you will, $30 to $40 million a year in gross margin by keeping it at $4.99,” he explained, according to the Seattle Times. “That’s what we do for a living.”
In 2014, Costco sold 76 million of these chickens, just about one per club cardholder. Just like the $1.50 hot dog and soda combo (and other low-priced menu items) at the Costco in-store snack bars, they appear to be helping to get customers in the doors where they can make purchases on higher-margin items.
The price of chicken has remained flat in the last year, but that might change due to a recent outbreak in avian flu, though many of the chickens that have died or been euthanized were raised for egg production.
IKEA MonkeyAmazeballs
From the minds that brought us the hilariously amazing Apocalypse Pompeii, and the just-released time-travel saga Flight World War II comes the successor to 2-Headed Shark Attack: 3-Headed Shark Attack. This is real, and yes, it already looks amazing. I mean, check out the poster released back in April:
MORE HEADS MORE DEADS (!!!!!)
Here’s Asylum’s official synopsis:
The world’s greatest killing machine is three times as deadly when a mutated shark threatens a cruise ship. As the shark eats its way from one end of the ship to the next, the passengers fight the deadly predator using anything they can find.
Making its debut on Syfy during Sharknado Week (July 18-25), Karrueche Tran and Danny Trejo take on the starring roles opposite a three-headed mutant shark who — much like the occupants of an IMDb comment section — needs garbage surroundings to survive. 3-Headed Shark Attack also stars pro wrestler Rob Van Dam as a scrappy beach bum named Stanley.
Man, if RVD doesn’t Van Daminate a three-headed shark, then what are we even doing here?
IKEA MonkeyYeah, its going too far to arrest someone for this. What a waste of resources.
IKEA Monkeywat
A Christian, uh, hip-hop group called We Are Watchmen has made a song for Ted Cruz. It involves metaphors about “the Reds” and the chorus “Set it on fire,” which, fittingly, sounds a lot like “Kill it with fire.” Let’s just... dive right into this listening experience.
IKEA Monkeythat thing is over 1,000 calories with over 3,000 mg of sodium
IKEA MonkeyYou have my attention.
I wonder if you could do this but with milk and make a lobster cheese.
Summer’s unofficially arrived, and with it, lobster season. Next time you splurge on the crustaceans, bear in mind the best way to get all the meat out of them — and don’t throw away those shells, because you can use them to make a fantastic lobster butter.
IKEA MonkeyI'm gonna name my baby Fettucine Alfresno
Sadman, Ruckus and Princecharles are among the most popular “weird” names that adult parents have chosen to give their unsuspecting babies in 2014.
IKEA Monkeyoh god
IKEA MonkeyWTF?
IKEA MonkeyDon't even need to read article, just gonna eat more avocado
IKEA MonkeyMy kind of criminal
An Iowa City burglar was apprehended on Friday after robbing a store and leaving behind a trail of snacks.
IKEA MonkeyOh damn, that REALLY looks like a face/mouth going "bleeeeeehhhhhhhhh"
