Zackc43

I loved MALM's second album. IKEA or death

This happened before last night's series-clinching win over the Rays and it is mesmerizing.

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The New York Times Magazine cover story this weekend was about Daniel Radcliffe, better known simply as the boy who played Harry Potter. It's an interesting read if you like learning about celebrities who seem pretty grounded and only just a little bit tortured by fame. You learn that Radcliffe is hyper aware of his fame and really sorry about how much it puts people out. You also learn that he loves our brand of football over here in the States.

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This happened somewhere around 2 a.m. EDT this morning, so maybe you missed it. This is rookie lineman D.J. Fluker doing all he could—and then some—to make sure Raiders linebacker Sio Moore doesn't get to Philip Rivers on this play. Unsurprisingly, Fluker was flagged for a personal foul, but holy shit. (Moore sat out a few plays, but later returned.)

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via http://www.loveyougood.com/post/48349925755/gif-friday-uno-moralez

Anyone ever tell you a joke that was so bad you couldn’t help but laugh, and then wish there was a word you could use to describe the situation? Well now you can. There are a whole bunch of foreign words that have no English equivalent, and untranslatable words have been a Tumblr and Reddit mainstay, but now you can add eleven more words to those lists with descriptive and vivid illustrations by Ella Frances Sanders.

Check out the other ten below.

pic and info: fastcodesign

The Emmy gave her away. Brilliant.

sandandglass:

A couple planned to get married on the lawn near the Jefferson Memorial but their wedding was cancelled because of the government shutdown. So Stephen Colbert decided to marry them on his show.

Grandfather of the year

by David Atkins

If the Republican shutdown of the government is getting you down and making you feel hopeless about humanity and the country, here's something that should lift your spirits:



Remember that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. The Dixiecrats fought to keep slavery. They lost. The Republican Party fought to prevent Social Security and to deny the New Deal. They lost. The Republican Party fought against Medicare. They lost. The Republican Party fought to stop Obamacare. They lost. The Republican fought to stop marriage equality and gay rights. And they're losing.

It may take some time, and it may take a lost generation economically to seal the deal. But they're going to lose this fight, too, as they've lost all the rest. Their revanchism will ultimately be short-lived.

If, in the broad arc of American history, the civil rights movement inevitably spawned the Reagan Southern Strategy backlash, which in turn must be undone by the same Millennial generation that Reaganism bankrupted, then so be it. It will have been worth it. We'll suffer our lives with a worse economy and worse prospects than our parents, but all the while we'll gladly dance at gay weddings on the interred remains of the political ideologies that caused the mess while giving our own children a better future. Let the Koch brothers' fortunes comfort them when worms are eating the remnants of their bodies and their souls await whatever punishment a potential afterlife might have to give, even as their descendants are taxed on their inheritance by a generation of happy warriors who will gladly cast their greedhead parents as the villains of history.

And we'll give a happy salute to all the amazing members of the previous generations like this grandfather, who stood and fought the good fight their whole lives even as their square conservative counterparts tried and failed to drag the nation into the mud. In the end, this child and his grandfather will shape the future even as his mother's cruel, narrow beliefs are despised and ultimately forgotten in the sands of time.


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Aimai over at No More Mister Nice Blog has some interesting observations about the current budget and debt ceiling standoff. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here’s an excerpt:

To refresh everyone’s memory we passed the 14th amendment because we were about to accept back into political life our former rebels and traitors–these men, once they were back in public life, were quite likely to repudiate the war debts of the victors or to once again engage in sabotage of the union. That is what this neo-southern confederate rump is doing: they are sabotaging the US Government and using the budget to do so. They are both smarter and more cowardly than the previous batch of Confederates. Let’s hope the current President can save the Union.

A guest on Chris Hayes’ program last night (a former official in the Reagan administration, IIRC) made a related point about the GOP morphing into a neo-confederate insurrectionist party. As we all know, Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” used the civil rights movement as a wedge to coopt the Dixiecrats. This former Reagan administration official argued that the Dixiecrats coopted the GOP instead, implying that “reasonable Republicans” like himself were then left behind.

The part about the Dixiecrat takeover is true enough, but when disgruntled Republicans heap all the blame on their Bible Belt crazies, it conveniently lets a lot of guilty people off the hook. Like Reagan himself, who inexcusably launched his presidential campaign from Philadelphia, Mississippi (where the three civil rights workers were famously murdered in the 60s) and trafficked in blatantly racist tropes throughout his presidency. As did every single one of his Republican successors.

As MLK noted, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. The arc of the immoral universe is long too, and it bends toward insanity. Thus we behold the spectacle of the current Republican Party, with craven bagmen cowering before a phalanx of gibbering, bomb-throwing nutbags who are intent on bringing the whole edifice crashing down on the heads of the righteous and unrighteous alike.

The loons aren’t just from the former Confederate states either; they hail from Alaska, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, Arizona, Kansas, Colorado – even California. Patient Zero may have been caught the fever south of the Mason-Dixon line, but Republicans in every region avidly aided the spread of the infection by splicing Confederate grievances and religious zealotry with anti-government paranoia. Exhibit A: Michele Bachmann.

The Republicans transformed the traditional Bible Belt into a Sash of Insanity that stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. They built that.

Here's three Cleveland fans painted to look like Chief Wahoo, and TBS kept cutting to them.

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Partisan

This form of pole arm is basically a spear--often with an ox tongue blade--to which a pair of small axe heads were added below the dagger blade. To the thrusting stab of the spear was added the defensive use of the side axe blades and their cutting/penetrating potential. Later versions of the partisan yielded a gradual change in the axe blades, so that they became almost unrecognisable as such. Typical of this is the Bohemian ear-spoon, a form of partisan where the axes have been changed to serve as piercing spikes (primarily to be used against plate armour) with a ranseur-like function.

-Unearthed Arcana


Rancor


Rancors were large carnivorous reptomammals native to the planet of Dathomir. They were usually born brown, but in special circumstances, such as the mutant rancor, jungle rancor, and the bull rancor, their color may have differed. Although found on other worlds such as Lehon—where they were brought by crashed starships—Ottethan, Carida, Corulag, and Felucia, those from Dathomir were said to be stronger and more intelligent than others. They have been used for many things, ranging from mounts for the Witches of Dathomir to pets for crime lords such as Jabba Desilijic Tiure to being a source of food, and as a means of entertainment by dropping someone into its pit.

When I say D&D is fundamentally uncool, what do I mean anyway? The word "cool" has shifted around so much that it's hard to know. It needs explanation.

A key text here is Robert Farris Thompson's article An Aesthetic of the Cool, from 1973, the journal African Arts. What is cool to the Gola of Liberia? Thompson quotes Warren D'Azevedo:

Ability to be nonchalant at the right moment ... to reveal no emotion in situations where emotion and sentimentality are acceptable - in other words, to act as if one's mind were in another world.

You may protest that transportation through fiction, fandom or gaming is just that, putting one's mind in another world, but this misses the point. Cool implies that the other world is a calmer, less emotional place. To travel to another world in order to excite the passions is the opposite of cool. "Coolness" by Thompson's definition is a poised posture, a place without conflict. By removing expression outward, you remove the possibility of interruption or ridicule inward.

Other writers on the aesthetics of cool among African Americans and its general percolation out to the world culture - such Mintz, Billson, and Pountain & Robins - have remarked on its potential as resistance. For Black men in America, cool has been a way to negate the clownish features laid on them  by racist iconography, to mentally check out from an environment unresponsive to their dignity and needs. The appropriation of cool, in the service of musical and other aesthetic trends, is laid forth in Pountain & Robins' 2000 book, auguring in the hipster era. Ultimately for them, cool is a "permanent state of private rebellion," a state that vanishes once it calls attention to its own coolness.

This reminds us that D&D is "uncool" in a more superficial sense, that of the well-known American high school hierarchy with its "cool kids" and "uncool kids." But in any high school there are two kinds of cool kids. You have the popular kids who show their passions for socially approved costumes, games, and fields of expertise like cheerleading, school spirit and sports. Another kind, though, set their sights outside the high school walls. They are cool toward school but this form of resistance masks their passions, aimed elsewhere: alternative cinema, drama, music, art. In high school and college I played RPGs almost as much with a set of punk rockers as with the more overtly enthusiastic nerd crew. They were socially uncool and yet - in the anthropological sense - truly cool.

In McLuhan's well-known distinction, roleplaying is one of the hottest of media, requiring hard mental and imaginative work to achieve the immersion that is its goal. Contrast this to "cool" media like television which ask for only open eyes. People who grow self-conscious or dissatisfied about roleplaying's hotness reach for the bottle of cool to cut it down.

By a nice coincidence, I recently returned to the RPG Site forum after some days absence to find an argument brewing, relevant to all these points. The initiating question was whether anyone enjoys playing RPGs in costume. As I pointed out last post, this activity is the quintessence of the FUDD (Fundamental Uncoolness of D&D) and so not surprisingly sparked off heated protestations. Many posters spoke of their desire not to look like even more a geek than they already were, under the watchful eyes of sarcastic co-workers or Bible Belt society.

But in an age of ubiquitous popularity of the Lord of the Rings films or Game of Thrones show, the uncool thing is not liking fantasy, but liking it in ... that way. That hot, immersive way that puts you at risk of disappearing entirely into the fantasy world, of regressing into childhood. That play-acting, masquerading, feasting and wassailing that Puritans have always sought to ban, that sensible people indulge in only at certain times of the year and in certain cities of the nation.

Bad enough you read the books instead of consuming media (getting hotter ... look what happened to poor Quijote). Bad enough you play a game where you take the role of a character (getting hotter ... look what happened to poor Black Leaf). But to run around wearing the costumes? To unselfconsciously declaim in a funny accent, your lineage as a noble dwarf? You're hot as hell and most people can't take the heat. They have to turn up the cool - in one of several ways.

Next: "We're Normal, Honest!"

English — along with a whole host of languages spoken in Europe, India, and the Middle East — can be traced back to an ancient language that scholars call Proto Indo-European. Now, for all intents and purposes, Proto Indo-European is an imaginary language. Sort of. It's not like Klingon or anything. It is reasonable to believe it once existed. But nobody every wrote it down so we don't know exactly what "it" really was. Instead, what we know is that there are hundreds of languages that share similarities in syntax and vocabulary, suggesting that they all evolved from a common ancestor.

Of course, that very quickly leads to attempts to reconstruct what said ancestral language might have sounded like. In the track above, you can listen to University of Kentucky linguist Andrew Byrd recite a fable in reconstructed Proto Indo-European. Archaeology magazine helpfully provides a translation:

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

Obvious, right? So how does one produce a scholarly mashup of English, Hindi, Urdu, and more, while accounting for six millennia of invention, sharing, and remixing?

There are a couple of different techniques. In the comparative method, researchers take two or more languages and start lining up their features side by side. What sounds do they share? What words sound similar? What rules do they have in common? Then you use what you know about the history of those languages to look at which ones descended from others, and to weed out words that were borrowed completely from unrelated languages thanks to trade or travel. Following the lines of descent, you can get an idea of the sounds and alphabets that the parent language originally had to work with.

The other technique, internal reconstruction, basically takes a single language and starts trying to work it backwards in time through itself. How did English distinguish itself from older Germanic languages and how has it changed since AD 500.

When you put information that you gather from both these techniques together, you can start to get a handle on what some really ancient, never-heard-by-anyone-living languages might have sounded like.

'

For instance, Wikipedia has a chart showing two different versions of the Proto Indo-European numbers. If you speak one of the languages descended from Proto Indo-European, these will likely look or sound familiar.

I'm loving this short film about two sixth-grade metalheads from Flatbush, Brooklyn.

There is a particular moment right before fame strikes a young musician – between the full flowering of talent and believing in a dream so pure and strong as to feel bulletproof – which at the same time is almost imperceptible as it is happening. This metaphysical friction is in full effect in a certain Flatbush, Brooklyn family basement. Unlocking the Truth, a metal band composed of twelve year old Malcolm Brickhouse and eleven year old Jarad Dawkins, is playfully arguing about which member can play a faster and more forceful rendition of their self-composed instrumental blast “Physical Therapy.”

While Jarad is technically the drummer (he mastered the instrument by the age of two), he is convincingly demonstrating his guitar chops. Being the precoucious, and yet consummate, professionals that they are, the band wants to make sure that in a worst case scenario – say, a member fainting onstage – each could play the other’s instrument flawlessly. It is not atypical for Unlocking the Truth to practice for up to ten hours on weekends.

They are so immersed in their music that they barely notice anything going on around them, including their parents, who usually have to force them to stop practicing when it’s bedtime. While their classmates mostly listen to radio pop or rap, Malcolm and Jarad’s enthusiasm for metal was nurtured while watching generous amounts of WWE professional wrestling. But this is no passing phase for the two boys. The band has already written two albums, Madness and Paranoid, respectively, and recently auditioned for America’s Got Talent.

Amazingly, they manage to keep up good grades in school. So watch out, America – two smart, young metalheads from Flatbush are coming to a town near you in the near future.

You can check out the band's website here.

[The Avant-Garde Diaries, thanks Brenda]

I'll be honest: I had reservations about posting this phenomenal eBay listing of a black velvet painting of "Macho Man" Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth in the style of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, because I'd like to score it cheap for myself. But the creator of this masterpiece deserves to be compensated for its true value, and I'm sure one of you out there can bid this up to the price it deserves.

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Buying a new car in 2014? Check out the United Auto Workers list of union-made vehicles before you buy (PDF, see here if you don’t to link straight to it. This list will grow after the UAW-Volkswagen partnership in Chattanooga goes through.

The panic over Tarzan, Jane and Cheetah

by digby

Ronald Reagan apparently had his finger on the pulse of 2013 when he said
“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah”

People hate women and men who other men think are like women. And they hate them so much they even assume they smell bad. Seriously:

Why don’t people behave in more environmentally friendly ways? New research presents one uncomfortable answer: They don’t want to be associated with environmentalists.

That’s the conclusion of troubling new research from Canada, which similarly finds support for feminist goals is hampered by a dislike of feminists.

Participants held strongly negative stereotypes about such activists, and those feelings reduced their willingness “to adopt the behaviors that these activities promoted,” reports a research team led by University of Toronto psychologist Nadia Bashir. This surprisingly cruel caricaturing, the researchers conclude, plays “a key role in creating resistance to social change.”

Writing in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Bashir and her colleagues describe a series of studies documenting this dynamic. They began with three pilot studies, which found people hold stereotyped views of environmentalists and feminists.

In one, the participants—228 Americans recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—described both varieties of activists in “overwhelmingly negative” terms. The most frequently mentioned traits describing “typical feminists” included “man-hating” and “unhygienic;” for “typical environmentalists,” they included “tree-hugger” and “hippie.”

People who want to change things are often hated. Change isn't easy. Squeaky wheel and all that.

And anyway judging from the caricatured stereotypes here, which seem to have arrived via comic book, these "feelings" are all about sexual insecurity which is very hard to overcome. Hippies are considered to be effeminate men and feminists are considered to be masculine women. This patriarchal panic is the underlying basis of The Reactionary Mind and they've spent a lot of time and energy demonizing this threat to their dominance.

Feminists and hippie environmentalists unite --- accept being hated and do what you have to do. Being popular isn't required.


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Yesterday, we brought you a video clip of one of the frattiest bros we've ever seen firing up his brothers with a passionate and profane speech before a flag football game. Today, we bring you the work of reader Kevin, who is a hero. Kevin decided to take the music from the end of Al Pacino's famous speech at the end Any Given Sunday and pair it with the frat bro's speech. The results are fantastic.

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Today the Philadelphia Inquirer profiles Cade Massey, a professor at Penn's Wharton School of business. Already with a study under his belt arguing that the conventional wisdom of the Draft Value Chart is all wrong, Massey was contracted by an unnamed NFL team to study the history of the draft for market inequalities. He discovered something that won't come as a surprise to football fans: the draft is kind of a crap shoot.

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Turdblossom, meet your monster

by digby

A gentleman in Texas briefly became an involuntary drunk (at one point ending up in the hospital with a blood alcohol concentration of .37, despite not having imbibed all day) when a colony of brewer's yeast took up residence in his gut and started converting every starchy food he ate into booze.

Ever since our daughter's birth, my wife Alice and I have found ourselves shopping the "boys" section of the department stores for things like pyjamas and tees and rubber boots, this being the only way to get stuff that isn't pink, covered in glitter, hypersexualized (you should see some of the nighties they make for three year old girls!) and generally lame. After the latest round of this, Alice got fed up and came up with a great suggestion for re-organizing kids' departments:

I would like to propose this cost-saving and socially positive exercise:

1. Ditch BOYS and GIRLS

2. Replace with ADVENTUROUS, HEROIC, FUNNY, CUTE, CLEVER, EDGY, CASUAL, SMART. Have unisex in both, with some specific options in girl or boy body cuts only where necessary (you'd be surprised how few there are, really, and it might get boys wearing leggings and such, which would be AWESOME).

Manufacturing costs: lowered. Shopping experience: more interesting. This is the sort of thing they could A/B test with the website so easily, too.

I had to go to the Boys' section to get Poesy these clothes

kellysue:

themightyglamazon:

your-snowflake:

cherrispryte:

Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003)

I’m gonna reblog this every time.

Fred Rogers Real Actual Guardian of Childhood.

This chokes me up Every. Time. 

Redditor OspreyDawn, aka graphic designer Max O'Brien, spent the last several months creating the complete set of NFL redesigned logos you see above. This sort of thing happens periodically–here are some minimalist logos from January–but it's still a daunting task, and a good reminder that a. making good logos is really hard, and b. we may take our existing sports logos (ugly as many of them might be) for granted. Let's nitpick!

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Just as the Buttfumble couldn't have happened to any team other than the Jets, it had to be the Astros to bring you this piece of baseball history. Behold the Buttslide.

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I would say that’s pretty much got it. This one is particularly important:

Rule 4: Any attempt to stop mass casualty shootings is "political." Allowing them to continue is"non-political."

— davidfrum (@davidfrum) September 16, 2013

Of course, it’s not wrong to say that calling for better gun control is “politicizing” the tragedy. The proper response to the charge is “your point being?” Why should gun violence be the only major social problem that cannot possibly be addressed with an appropriate political solution? One can argue against gun control on the merits, but the idea that responding to horrible events with policies that will make future horrible events less likely is somehow bad manners or something is absurd. And the fact that even overwhelmingly popular gun control policies generally can’t be passed before or after tragedies is also politics.

The best man. 

(via derplodge)

As found in Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (1888), a collection of Puritan names chosen "to remind the child about sin and pain." My favorite? "Kill-sin Pimple."

20 Puritan Names That Are Utterly Strange

1. Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar. Son of Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar, born 1676.
2. Praise-God. Full name, Praise-God Barebone. The Barebones were a rich source of crazy names. This one was a leather-worker, member of a particularly odd Puritan group and an MP. He gave his name to the Barebones Parliament, which ruled Britain in 1653.
3. If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned. Praise-God's son, he made a name for himself as an economist. But, for some inexplicable reason, he decided to go by the name Nicolas Barbon.
4. Fear-God. Also a Barebone.
5. Job-raked-out-of-the-ashes
6. Has-descendents
7. Wrestling
8. Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith
9, Fly-fornication
10. Jesus-Christ-came-into-the-world- to-save. Brother of "Damned Barebone". I can only imagine this name shortened to "Save."
11. Thanks
12. What-God-will
13. Joy-in-sorrow. A name attached to many stories of difficult births.
14. Remember
15. Fear-not. His/her surname was "Helly", born 1589.
16. Experience
17. Anger
18. Abuse-not
19. Die-Well. A brother of Farewell Sykes, who died in 1865. We can assume they had rather pessimistic parents.
20. Continent. Continent Walker was born in 1594 in Sussex.

A Boy Named Humiliation: Some Wacky, Cruel, and Bizarre Puritan Names [Joseph Norwood/Slate]

(Image: Gallery of famous Puritans, Wikimedia Commons/Book Academy, Public Domain)