IKEA Monkey

John Mulaney has a long and storied history with Saturday Night Live; as the co-creator—and frequent breaker—of Bill Hader’s beloved Weekend Update correspondent Stefon, Mulaney spent six years on the show’s writing staff, filling it with some of its strangest, funniest jokes of the last several years. Outside the…

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1993 was a time when seemingly every network was trying to get in on the sketch comedy craze. Saturday Night Live was already an institution at that point, Fox was trying to compete with In Living Color and The Ben Stiller Show, Canada had The Kids in the Hall, and future cult favorites MADtv, The Dana Carvey Show, …

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It just feels like freedom.

AWESOME!

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The post #876 Taking off your bra after wearing it for hours appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Remember the summer of 2016? It seemed like everywhere you looked, people were outside, the sun shining on the back of their necks as they looked into their phone, hoping to catch a Pokemon. It was simpler then. In the time since, Pokemon Go has seen a drop in popularity, but it remains a game that millions still play across the world and the developer, Niantic, hasn’t come close to finishing the game. Pokemon Go is nowhere near its final form.

This is why fans are thrilled at the latest announcement of two new legendaries. Like last year’s fall legendaries, Latias and Latios, who were introduced way back in Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire will be available to catch around the world before they disappear again. Latias is in Europe and Asia and Latios is available to capture in North America, South America, and Africa. On May 8, the two monsters will switch spots until they fly off on June 5th.

Here’s the announcement from Niantic:

Drawn to compassionate spirits, the Eon Pokémon Latias and Latios are known for being highly intelligent, and are able to communicate telepathically with humans. They are also stealthy and extremely fast in flight—with Latias able to use its down to refract light to make itself invisible and Latios able to overtake jet planes. Make sure you encounter these special and elusive Pokémon while they roam during this limited time!

Niantic went on to say that the Pokemon (which will be found in raids) will be susceptible to “Pokémon with moves that are particularly strong against Psychic and Dragon types, such as Tyranitar and Mawile.”

The Raids definitely add a community aspect to the game that was missing before, so it’s going to be fun heading to a Gym with a couple friends and catching some legendaries while we can.

(Via Digital Trends)

I had been slowly making my way through Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, but on the advice of a Twitter pal, I backtracked and started reading it aloud to my kids. Which has been amazing…reading this story out loud really feels like we’re harkening back to the time of Homer.

One of the things we’re discussing as we go along are the repeated epithets…the descriptions of gods and people that are used over and over in the poem. Zeus is often not just Zeus — he is “the great Thunderlord Zeus” — and Dawn (the Greek goddess of the dawn) is almost never just Dawn, as Wilson explains in the introduction:

Dawn appears some twenty times in The Odyssey, and the poem repeats the same line, word for word, each time: emos d’erigeneia phane rhododaktulos eos: “But when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared…” There is a vast array of such formulaic expressions in Homeric verse, which suggest that things have an eternal, infinitely repeatable presence. Different things will happen every day, but Dawn always appears, always with rosy fingers, always early.

Wilson combats this precise repetition, which can sound antiquated to modern ears, by varying the epithets according to the context:

The formulaic elements in Homer, especially the repeated epithets, pose a particular challenge. The epithets applied to Dawn, Athena, Hermes, Zeus, Penelope, Telemachus, Odysseus, and the suitors repeat over and over in the original. But in my version, I have chosen deliberately to interpret these epithets in several different ways, depending on the demands of the scene at hand. I do not want to deceive the unsuspecting reader about the nature of the original poem; rather, I hope to be truthful about my own text — its relationships with its readers and with the original. In an oral or semiliterate culture, repeated epithets give a listener an anchor in a quick-moving story. In a highly literate society such as our own, repetitions are likely to feel like moments to skip. They can be a mark of writerly laziness or unwillingness to acknowledge one’s own interpretative position, and can send a reader to sleep. I have used the opportunity offered by the repetitions to explore the multiple different connotations of each epithet.

The appearance of Dawn has already become a source of comic relief while we’re reading — “here she is again, with the roses!” — and I was curious to see Wilson’s differing interpretations, I gathered all the appearances of Dawn from the text:

The early Dawn was born; her fingers bloomed.

When newborn Dawn appeared with rosy fingers…

When rosy-fingered Dawn came bright and early…

Soon Dawn was born, her fingers bright with roses.

When Dawn appeared, her fingers bright with flowers…

When early Dawn appeared and touched the sky with blossom…

Then Dawn rose up from bed with Lord Tithonus, to bring the light to deathless gods and mortals.

When vernal Dawn first touched the sky with flowers…

But when the Dawn with dazzling braids brought day for the third time…

Then Dawn came from her lovely throne, and woke the girl.

Soon Dawn appeared and touched the sky with roses.

When bright-haired Dawn brought the third morning…

When early Dawn shone forth with rosy fingers…

But when the rosy hands of Dawn appeared…

Early the Dawn appeared, pink fingers blooming…

When early Dawn revealed her rose-red hands…

Then when rose-fingered Dawn came, bright and early…

On the third morning brought by braided Dawn…

Then the roses of Dawn’s fingers appeared again…

Dawn on her golden throne began to shine…

When Dawn came, born early, with her fingertips like petals…

The golden throne of Dawn was riding up the sky…

When rose-fingered Dawn appeared…

Then Dawn was born again; her fingers bloomed…

Then all at once Dawn on her golden throne lit up the sky…

…Dawn soon arrived upon her throne.

When newborn Dawn appeared with hands of flowers…

When early Dawn, the newborn child with rosy hands, appeared…

As she said this, the golden Dawn arrived.

…she roused the newborn Dawn from Ocean’s streams to bring the golden light to those on earth.

I think my favorite is probably “Soon Dawn was born, her fingers bright with roses” but I also appreciate the very first appearance in the text: “The early Dawn was born; her fingers bloomed”. Either way, what a great illustration of Wilson’s skill & the creative latitude involved in translation, along with a reminder for writers of the many different ways in which you can essentially say the same thing.

(The sunrise photo is from my Instagram.)

Tags: books   Emily Wilson   Homer   language   The Odyssey

A miles-long fissure has opened in Kenya’s Rift Valley. The split, which first appeared in late March following weeks of heavy rain and tremors and has continued to expand since, called attention to a longer-term, larger-scale geological phenomenon that’s imperceptible until it isn’t: Africa is splitting in two.

Over the weekend, a number of videos went viral featuring local news anchors from across the country reading off identical statements about the terrors of fake news, an unsettling glimpse into a Republican paradise where you can’t trust anyone except who the conservatives in the federal government tell you to trust.…

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Sea level rise is happening now, and the rate at which it is rising is increasing every year, according to a study released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

On religious holidays like Christmas, Passover and Easter, most Presidents honor the occasion by sending a message of goodwill towards all Americans and then taking a break from politics.

In an extensive report from BuzzFeed, cartoonist John Kricfalusi—the creator of iconic Nickelodeon series Ren & Stimpy—has been accused of sexually exploiting teenage girls, promising them careers in animation at his studio Spumco while allegedly grooming them for sexual relationships. One of the women, Robyn Byrd,…

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Issuance of the securities has doubled since last year

Subprime mortgage bond issuance has been almost nonexistent in the 10 years since those securities brought the world economy to its knees, but data from Inside Mortgage Finance show that the risky bundled loans are making a comeback in a big way.

Financial Times reports that subprime mortgage bond issuance doubled in the first quarter of 2018 compared to a year ago, going from $666 million to $1.3 billion. Furthermore, it quotes a financial analyst predicting that issuance for the year will hit $10 billion, which is more than double the $4.1 billion issued last year. For context, the value of American subprime mortgages was estimated at $1.3 trillion in March 2007.

Since the financial crisis, mortgage-backed securities have been almost entirely issued by government-sponsored mortgage facilitators Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Ginny Mae. And since the financial collapse, those organizations have refused to insure subprime mortgages. The Dodd-Frank regulation passed after the collapse put tight rules around subprime lending that for awhile effectively killed the practice.

But over the last couple years, specialty firms have jumped back into the subprime market, rebranding it as “noprime.” Investors hungry for bonds with higher yields have generated enough demand for those loans to be secularized, just as they were in the run-up to the financial collapse. The result is a rapidly expanding subprime mortgage market.

That subprime mortgages would seep back into the market right now is curious, given the current state of housing. The slow pace of new home construction and few existing homes for sale has led to an inventory shortage that has pushed home prices well out of reach for many low- and middle-income prospective homebuyers.

This has led to a sellers market, where competition is fierce for the homes that are available, and moderately priced homes end up getting bid up to the point of unaffordability. Expansion of mortgage credit into subprime territory won’t alleviate the problem of an inventory shortage, but exacerbate it, as people with shaky credit might now have options to buy. This increases demand, pushes prices higher, and makes subprime lending even riskier.

That Wall Street would flirt with bad habits just 10 years after the same habits rocked the global economy is just the latest example of the United States trying to unlearn the lessons of the catastrophe.

Earlier this month, Congress deliberated a bill that would roll back parts of the Dodd-Frank regulation that sought to restrict risky lending practices and limit the impact of too-big-to-fail banks. Negotiations on the bill were interrupted by the omnibus budget that Congress has repeatedly kicked down the road.

However, with a budget deal reached to fund the government through September, Dodd-Frank repeal could become Congress’s focus once again.

Several of President Donald Trump's outside advisers have told him over the past week he requires neither a chief of staff nor a communications director, at least in the traditional definition of those jobs, according to a person familiar with the conversations.

It’s time for Melania Trump to man up.

All this taking separate motorcades and hiding out at Mar-a-Lago — at taxpayers’ expense — has gotten old.

Each day President Donald Trump’s alleged cheating saga goes on, it becomes increasingly difficult to feel sorry for his wife. We have bigger problems...

Between his new collaboration with Sting; an appearance at the Grammys; a new Netflix movie, Game Over, Man!; and a performance at Queen Elizabeth’s birthday party, Shaggy’s 2018 is shaping up to be surprisingly huge. Turns out, he’s as surprised as anyone at the year he’s having.

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When powerful men realize how privileged they are, women are far too often the losers. This is especially true for powerful male athletes.

Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham got into a Twitter battle with Parkland survivor David Hogg and his little sister after trolling Hogg for not getting into four colleges.

Baseball is back and so are the dingers.

Baseball is back, and that means dream-making and heartbreaking home runs have returned to us too. They’re fun to watch if it’s a walk off in your team’s favor or if you have no rooting interest, and they’re soul crushing if you were about to lock up a win before a beautiful dinger ruined it.

Welcome back to baseball season, where there’s a lot of feelings and just as many home runs. It’s a great time and you’ll hate yourself in 40 games or less. That’s a guarantee.

To celebrate the return of all kinds of home runs, we’re ranking all the best ones from the Opening Day festivities.

Ian Happ, Cubs vs. Marlins

This was always going to be number one, obviously. The very first pitch of the season? Against a team that definitely could’ve found better pitching in the offseason, which makes this even funnier?

Oh yeah, that’s number one. Plus it had the added benefit of making a local reporter jump into Lake Michigan in March because he didn’t think Happ had it in him. Never tweet your bets, folks.

Giancarlo Stanton, Yankees vs. Blue Jays (first)

This was not surprising but entirely satisfying. Even watching him with the Yankees can’t fully take away from the joy of Stanton hitting huge dingers at whim. John Sterling’s call aside, this was fun and made Opening Day feel complete in a “the house always wins” kind of way.

Eduardo Nunez, Red Sox vs. Rays

If you don’t like inside the park home runs you’re the cops.

His helmet falling off (shocker) really makes the moment shine.

Adam Jones, Orioles vs. Twins

The Orioles might not have the best outlook for the season, but they had a great Opening Day thanks to Adam Jones. That thing was gone the second it left the bat. It could be all downhill from here in Baltimore, but this was awesome.

Nick Markakis, Braves vs. Phillies

This isn’t too different from Jones’ walk-off for Baltimore but it has the downside of being attached to the Phillies completely blowing it thanks to Gabe Kaplar overthinking things. The unfortunate part is it probably won’t be the first time that happens in Philly but that shouldn’t completely take away from what Markakis did. No one saw it coming either, which always makes walk-offs fun.

Nelson Cruz, Mariners vs. Indians

ALCS Cy Young winner who? Corey Kluber will be just fine (... probably), but Nelson Cruz disrupted his Opening Day start with this absolute bomb. That was up there for a while!

Giancarlo Stanton, Yankees vs. Blue Jays (second)

This is last because what a show off. (Joking. Sort of.)

President Donald Trump's awkward farewell to trusted aide Hope Hicks set

Former “Clueless” co-star Stacey Dash ended her long-shot congressional bid in Southern California, saying the “bitterness” in politics and the “rigors” of campaigning have be detrimental to her family.

How’s this for a little snapshot of Justice in Donald Trump’s America? In Texas, a woman who voted illegally in the 2016 election (she was on supervised release after a felony conviction) was sentenced to five years for her crime, because nothing’s more sacred than protecting the vote from bad people. And in Queens, New York, a former concentration camp guard who lied on his immigration paperwork in 1949 is still living at home, because while ICE is busily deporting all the undocumented immigrants it can get its hands on, there’s no way to deport an actual Nazi war criminal who no other country wants either. America: A Land Of Many Contrasts.

Crystal Mason, of Rendon, Texas, doesn’t deny that she was on supervised release on a fraud felony when she voted in 2016. But she thinks going back to prison for five years is maybe a bit excessive, especially since, on her release from federal prison, none of the people supposedly there to help her transition back to life on the outside — including her probation officer! — mentioned that she’d be ineligible to vote until her full sentence had been completed. Her attorney, J. Warren St. John, has already appealed the judge’s decision (she opted for a bench trial), and hopes that, at the very least, she can be released on bond until the appeal:

“I find it amazing that the government feels she made this up,” St. John told the court. “She was never told that she couldn’t vote, and she voted in good faith. Why would she risk going back to prison for something that is not going to change her life?”

Mason said that when she went to vote at her usual polling place in 2016, she didn’t see her name on the list and was given a provisional ballot to fill out. Unfortunately, she didn’t read all the documents she got — a poll worker was helping her, so she skipped the fine print. That didn’t impress state District Judge Ruben Gonzalez, who asked her why she didn’t understand that since she had to sign an “affidavit” to vote, “There’s a legal connotation to that, right?”

Mason responded that she was never told by the federal court, her supervision officer, the election workers or U.S. District Judge John McBryde, the sentencing judge in her fraud case, that she would not be able to vote in elections until she finished serving her sentence, supervised release included.

Yes, yes, we know, ignorance of the law is no excuse. But for chrissakes, she served three years in federal prison on a tax fraud charge already — is five years for an illegal vote a proportionate sentence? Let’s not forget that Convicted Felon Dinesh D’Souza only served eight months in federal overnight jail after his own campaign criming, and that mining executive Don Blankenship went to Club Fed for all of one year after being convicted of conspiracy to ignore federal safety regulations — after a mine explosion that killed 29 miners. Still, we’re sure Ms. Mason will never, ever try to throw an election by one vote ever again.

In other news of Justice For Some, the Daily Beast updates us on the case of 94-year-old Jakiw Palij, the last known Nazi war criminal still living in the USA. He signed some documents under false pretenses too, but he was actually lying — he didn’t claim no one ever told him Nazis weren’t allowed to immigrate.

Palij served as a guard during World War II at the Trawniki forced labor camp, which also trained those participating in “Operation Reinhard,” a plan to exterminate every Jew in German-occupied Poland. He entered the country in 1949 without divulging his past and was later awarded citizenship, of which he was stripped by a federal judge in 2004 and ordered deported.

“During a single nightmarish day in November 1943, all of the more than 6,000 prisoners of the Nazi camp that Jakiw Palij had guarded were systematically butchered,” Eli Rosenbaum, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), said after the ruling. “By helping to prevent the escape of these prisoners, Palij played an indispensable role in ensuring that they met their tragic fate at the hands of the Nazis.”

So he’s been stripped of his citizenship and ordered deported, but there’s a little problem with sending him away: No other country wants him, not even to try him for war crimes. Germany, Ukraine, and Poland have all said no. So he continues to live in his apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he hangs up on reporters who call to ask him what he did during the war. DOJ investigators had evidence placing Palij at the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, but he insisted he hadn’t been there — instead, he said he was a guard at Trawniki, which was scarcely better, since that camp trained guards to go out and participate in other massacres, and to guard the trains to the extermination camps.

And while ICE is going out of its way to find undocumented immigrants to deport — many of whom have no criminal records (remember, being without papers is a civil offense, not a criminal one) — the Justice Department and the State Department don’t appear to be making any particular efforts to persuade Germany, Ukraine, or Poland to take Palij. He can’t be prosecuted for war crimes here, since neither he nor his victims were Americans. You’re certainly not very likely to see Donald Trump pressure those governments, and so he’s likely to die right where he is, with only occasional reminders of his crimes, like the annual demonstrations held by New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind outside Palij’s home on the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

“You know, we’re throwing people out of this country who have been living here for 20 years and have families, and here we have a Nazi living in Queens,” Hikind told The Daily Beast. “How can that be? How is this possible?”

Kikind has called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to at least put Palij in an ICE detention center like any other illegal immigrant awaiting deportation, but nothing doing. No answer to a personal appeal to Jared Kushner, either.

It’s not too much of a surprise that ICE isn’t willing to detain Palij. They need room in their prisons for dads who’ve been here 30 years without so much as a traffic ticket (actually, he’s already been sent away), or a mom — separated from her daughter — waiting for a decision on her request for political asylum.

Maybe it’s just as well ICE hasn’t decided to detain an old Nazi camp guard. God only knows what he might teach them.

Yr Wonkette is fueled by incandescent rage and reader donations. Please click here to help us convert some of the former into text.

[Star-Telegram / Daily Beast]

Get yourself our readers’ favorite meat thermometer for $79 ($20 less than usual) during their blue and orange Thermapen sale. You guys love the Thermapen because it displays the temperature in 2 - 3 seconds, and is accurate within 0.7°F.

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In 2014, Lindsay Lohan filed a lawsuit against Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games, claiming that a trashy celebrity character in Grand Theft Auto V named Lacey Jonas was clearly an “unequivocal” representation of her. Lohan’s suit went into detail about the character’s clothes, saying the character’s “hats, hair…

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If you use a wheelchair, or other kinds of mobility aids or medical equipment, you might find people staring at your gear instead of looking at you. Elsie Tellier has two fantastic videos about how to dress up yourself and your gear, whether it’s to reorient people’s eyes or just to have fun.

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Get ready for more of The Comeback Kid (in a sense): Netflix has just announced a new stand-up special from John Mulaney. A press release teased the upcoming John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous At Radio City, which was filmed during Mulaney’s sold-out, seven-night run at Radio City Music Hall earlier this year. It’ll stream…

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“There is pride to be had where the prejudicial is practiced with precision in the trenchant triage of tactile terminations.”

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Ecuador’s government announced Wednesday it had pulled the plug on Julian Assange’s internet access at its embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has been living since 2012. Ecuador seemed to have had enough of Assange’s provocations online and appears concerned the 46-year-old’s social media conduct could have real-world diplomatic consequences for the South American nation that granted Assange political asylum and citizenship. In a statement Wednesday, the Ecuadorian government said Assange’s social media presence was threatening “the good relations that the country maintains with the United Kingdom, with the rest of the states of the European Union, and other nations.”

The Instant Pot craze shows no sign of slowing and, if you have one of the multi-cookers, you are probably experiencing a need to Instant Pot all of the things. As we discovered earlier this week, some things (pancakes) just aren’t meant to be pressure cooked. But a warm, sweet, and doughnut-like breakfast bread…

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Bagna càuda, one of the classic dishes of the Piedmont region in northwestern Italy, is a potent dip made from warm olive oil loaded with tons of garlic and anchovies, all cooked together until melted down. Paired with a beautiful vegetable platter, it's the ultimate dip. Read More

Netflix’s The Crown will be jumping forward in time a little bit for its next two seasons, but since stars Claire Foy and Matt Smith cannot do the same, the streaming service is recasting the central roles of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Olivia Colman was already named as the new Queen back in October, and now …

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Checkers and Rally's are running a deal on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 where you can get an All-American Cheeseburger for 69 cents.

The promo is good all day at participating restaurants with a limit of 10 discounted burgers per customer.

The All-American Cheeseburger consists of a seasoned and grilled beef patty, American cheese, pickles, ketchup, and mustard. It would normally run you about $1 or so.

Photo via Checkers and Rally's.