Missteenwordpower

(YouTube link)

What happens when you combine NH4Cr2O7 and HgSCN and expose it to fire? A portal to hell opens up and the most dreaded denizen of the deepest slime is awakened. Whatever these chemicals are, they are dangerous, and the reaction is even more dangerous, so don't ever do this. But it is a guaranteed way to make a class of children yell "Kraken! Kraken!" no matter what their language. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Tigger an orphaned kitty has found an unlikely surrogate mum in Harley the Bulldog.

The two-year-old grumpy Bulldog and tiny little orphaned kitten have become inseparable. Their unlikely bond developed when Tigger – who is just two weeks old – was found alone and abandoned in a church.

He was handed in to a vets office in Cheltenham, England where trainee nurse Clare Evans instantly fell for him and decided to take him home.

Evans introduced him to Harley the Bulldog and was amazed when Harley, who is unable to have pups herself because of a tumor on her spine, took on the role of surrogate mum.

The bond between the pair has grown so much that Harley is even producing milk, giving him tongue baths and protecting him from Evans’ other dogs.

Evans’ parents have agreed to adopt Tigger who luckily live right next door, so the two can continue their unique relationship.

The post Grumpy Bulldog Adopts Tiny Kitten appeared first on A Place to Love Dogs.

Just out today, the "Boys" shirt on Seth Bogart's (Hunx and His Punx) online store Wacky Wacko. They're pricey, but Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!: Darby Crash next to Little Richard next to Freddie Mercury next to Lou Reed?!? SWOON-WORTHY.

Click here to see all the Wackies. Stream Hunx & Punx new album Street Punx on Onion AV.

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The deadpan charm that defines Japanese pop purveyor Shintaro Sakamoto is in full effect in his new video—and the song isn't bad either (it's actually the B-side of his latest single). As on his 2012 debut, How to Live with a Phantom, Sakamoto combines light funk, breezy bossa nova, and Have a Nice Day-style pop.

In the clip, three skeletons dance to the tune, presumably because they're glad to be back "from the dead" (or they just like a good groove). There's nothing scary here; no zombies, no vampires, just slow-moving, smiling bones.

I've always had a thing for skeleton imagery, especially the plastic, plaster, and sugar-encrusted Dia de los Muertos variant, so I found it all pretty irresistible. At times, the skeletons look more alive than sleepy-eyed Sakamoto, who could give Buster Keaton a run for the money in the great stone-face sweepstakes.

The single, "Don't Know What's Normal b/w "From the Dead," is out now on Other Music Recording Co (orig release date: July 9). More information here.

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Never Heard of 'Em: Betty Davis by Anna Minard

Anna Minard claims to "know nothing about music." For this column, we force her to listen to random records by artists considered to be important by music nerds.

They Say I'm Different

(Just Sunshine; reissued by Light in the Attic)

I know I get paid to write this column, so I hope I don't get fired for this, but: PUT THE MOTHERFUCKING PAPER DOWN RIGHT NOW! What are you doing?! Stop reading these words—STOP! If you are doing anything other than running to the store this second to get a copy of this album, you are doing life wrong. Fix it! I promise, your ears are going to get such a boner! And you won't be the same after. Go, go, go!

Phew, okay, so now we're on the same page. You're listening to Betty Davis, I'm listening to Betty Davis, we're both entering another dimension, all the pain in the world is slowly receding from our minds. Maybe, like me, you can't help laughing out loud with utter happiness and appreciation. Hey, ears, say all the instruments in their best sex voices. Just relax. This is going to be spectacular. Then Betty Davis and her fierce, hoarse growl or her glowing croon comes in and says stuff like "I'm gonna shoo-b-doop all night" and screams, "He was a biiiiiig freak! Flim flam floozy fantasy" and "They say I'm different 'cause I'm a piece of sugar cane." And then the warm funk washes over or the backup singers come in to shoop-shoop you to your happy place.

This is the precursor to every bit of more contemporary sex-positive feminist music that makes me stand a little straighter and dare people with my eyes to just try some shit. I'm sure Salt-N-Pepa rapping, "'Cause every time I hear the noise comin' from your lips/You're gonna feel the rotation in my hips" and Alanis Morissette wailing, "Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?" owe every bit of their existence to this explosion of grace and grandeur and warm horns and musical groans. No one can ever top Betty Davis's sing-song, "I used to say all kinds of dirty thi-ings..."

Also, can we talk about the album art, here? Holy shit, this outfit! And I don't know what she's holding, but at first glance they read as weapons. Which, I mean, she doesn't need weapons to kick your ass; they're just for decoration. I'm not sure this album art can be topped, either.

When I heard about this assignment, you can imagine: I thought I'd be getting some recording of 1930s film star Bette Davis, who is also a badass, but not when I imagined her singing jazz standards on some cheesy celebrity crossover record. This Betty Davis, who happened to be Miles Davis's ex-wife, just makes me explode with joy. It actually makes me get a lump in my throat, with a sort of pride in all womankind. Dudes of the world: You could never make anything as tough as this.

I give this a "seriously, you guys, I'm tearing up here" out of 10.

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But remember, he's not a White Supremacist, just a White Nationalist.

We've sent an email and a Facebook message to Krafft to confirm this is his handiwork, but he has not replied.

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If you haven't yet danced with DJ... wait, make that She-Jay Queen Mookie, at her monthly night at Pony, you are missing some serious magic. Every second Saturday of the month, Seattle's best little flower-shop-turned-punk-rock-queer-bar is transformed into a high-glamour, transcendental gender feast—an eclectic party that sounds and looks like it was born in a city like Tokyo or Berlin. Expect future drag—sans tacky suburban-mom wigs and fake tits—and a well-curated collection of late-'80s acid, early-'90s techno, disco that doesn't suck, contemporary electro and hiphop, and, according to the Queen herself, "a pinch of bitchy cunt tracks." Also sayeth the Mookie: "It is my duty as a disco shaman to be an example of frivolity elevated to a spiritual level." Trust me, after this shaman touches YOUR glitoris, you will be elevated to a whole new level, too.

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via http://www.kjefta.org/christian-brandt/#more-2908

If you know anything about Jay-Z, then you know he's got 99 problems, but a female certainly isn't one. As for what those problems are, a new Tumblr, probs99, is seeking to illustrate all of them so we can better relate with Beyonce's man.

The brilliant illustrations are created by Ali Graham.

Link Via Mashable

Lots of nerd-minded film reviewers consider one of the highest compliments they can bestow upon a movie to be something along the lines of "this movie made me feel like I was a kid again!" Frankly, I'd rather not ever feel like a child again. Nostalgia is grossly overrated, and childhood sucks—the reason you felt everything so strongly as a child was because you were ignorant. Why would you want to fetishize a film just because it reminded you of a time when you had no experiences?

That said, there is something about Pacific Rim that calls back to the movies of my youth: The Godzilla creature double features on Saturday afternoon cable most obviously, but also genre movies that had a beginning and middle and end and didn't seem to bother themselves with setting up franchises or cross-platform marketing opportunities (even if sequels did inevitably happen): Gremlins, Ghostbusters, Alien, Terminator, Predator. Those movies all took a single premise, exhaustively examined that premise in smart and surprising ways, and told a decent story as they did it.

And so while Pacific Rim didn't plunge me back into a state of ignorance, it did remind me of those halcyon days of genre. The first few minutes of the film set up the premise: In 2013, a giant monster attacked a city. Then another. Then another. Eventually, we started to call the whole species Kaiju. We humans pooled our resources and built giant robots (called Jaegers) to fight the giant monsters. That worked for a while. But gradually, the monsters started getting tougher, and the story picks up as all hope is quietly draining away: The monsters are appearing more frequently, and we've started to pull the plug on the Jaeger program. So the question is: Can a failed Jaeger pilot named Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) save humanity?

I'm not going to spoil anything for you.

I'm certainly not giving anything away when I say that Idris Elba walks away with this movie. As the leader of the dying Jaeger program (he's named, delightfully, Stacker Pentecost) Elba brings his full range of nuance and rage and authority. This is by far his best genre film work, blowing away his decent performances in Thor and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and Prometheus. Which is especially good news, because the male and female leads (Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi) are a pair of bad actors shoe-horned into a pair of dull characters. But then, aren't the main characters in these genre outings often boring? They're the set-up to the rest of the movie's punchlines and Pacific Rim has plenty of other eccentric characters to pick up the slack, including a pair of scientists played by Charlie Day and Burn Gorman; a shady underground figure conjured out of a 40s gangster flick by Ron Perlman; and an Australian Jaeger pilot named, yes, Hercules Hansen. Sure, a few of the jokes are a little too broad, but we're in the thick of summer movie-land, and sometimes broad works just fine. (At least they're just lame jokes and not the casual misogyny and racism of a Michael Bay film.)

Pacific Rim would be worth it on the basis of pure visual delight alone. (Even the 3D is pretty good, although you probably won't miss that much by sticking with 2D.) The sets—from a government Jaeger base to a Hong Kong built around the bones of a fallen Kaiju to an underground shelter—are all so gorgeously designed that you'll wish you could freeze-frame an image in the theater. The mech-suits are slick (and they actually seem to make sense when they move, unlike the visual choppiness of the "live-action" Transformers, for instance) and the monsters make the last two decades' worth of movie monsters look sick in comparison. The robot battles can occasionally get too busy to follow (digital special effects just don't have the same sense of place and continuity that physical effects do) but there is always, in every frame, something beautiful or amazing or wildly imaginative to stare at. I just can't think of a prettier summer genre blockbuster.

The credit for the many successes of Pacific Rim—and there are so many more successes than failures—should go to director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro. I don't know how he managed to smuggle such a pure genre film through today's formulaic Hollywood machine. This is a movie that hits all the appropriate emotional beats without overdoing the schlock, that wears its heart on its sleeve without being dull, that introduces a whole sci-fi vocabulary without dragging the audience through expository hell, that examines the idea of a giant monster attacking a city from every single possible angle with a fan's sense of awe, that focuses relentlessly on the apocalypse without losing a sense of hope, that doesn't stop trying to make your jaw drop until the very end.

I almost want to fall prey to that awful nostalgia and say, with a sense of aw-shucks wonder, that they don't make summer movies like this anymore. Instead, I think it's a better, more hopeful idea to say that Guillermo del Toro proves that you still can make summer movies like this. Let's hope other filmmakers take him up on this challenge.

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Anna Minard claims to "know nothing about music." For this column, we force her to listen to random records by artists considered to be important by music nerds.

THE SHINS
Chutes Too Narrow
(Sub Pop)

This is what I should have been listening to in high school instead of a bunch of weird mix CDs I made out of a combination of my parents' music collection, stuff I downloaded via LimeWire because I heard someone mention it, the songs that came for free on the first version of iTunes, and my own strange Top-40-turned-gross-rock CD binder thing. Those things are so poorly curated, they point to some sort of pathological cool-blindness. They make me feel sick with embarrassment. (Seriously: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kid Rock, the Phantom of the Opera theme song, Fiona Apple, half the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, Daft Punk, U2, and some off-brand mom-and-dad folksters, all on one CD? Sure, says 15-year-old me!) But now it's the future! And I don't go to Montessori school anymore! And I get to start over! YAY!

Continue reading »

Filmmaker Robert Philipson studied the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century as part of his research for a course, and became intrigued with the hints of gay culture in the music of the era. That led him to produce two documentaries, first Take the Gay Train in 2008 and then a followup on lesbian performers, T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: Queer Blues Divas of the 1920s. He tells us how those of the New York City blues scene differed from black Americans on the outside, who were striving to become "respectable" citizens.

The blues community, however, had no such concerns about respectability, and that’s where Philipson found the most references homosexuality. Which is why, three years after “Gay Train,” he followed up with another documentary, this time focusing exclusively on female blues singers with lesbian proclivities.

As it turns out, the blues world was the perfect realm for people who were thought of as “sexual deviants” to inhabit, as it thrived far outside the scope of the dominant white American culture in the early 20th century. In Jazz Age speakeasies, dive bars, and private parties, blue singers had the freedom to explore alternative sexuality, and on a rare occasion, they even expressed it in song.

Those songs are still available to us, in lyrics if not in recordings. And the lyrics were risky, because same-sex relations could get you jailed. Read about Gladys Bentley, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and others whose racy lyrics made them stars, at Collector's Weekly. Link

"I couldn’t get the video of Single Ladies by Beyonce to play on the computer."  
Submitted By: Whitney

Now you don't even have to walk to the doughnut shop. [ more › ]

it’s for the greater good

                                

I guess.

                               

Last year, Leslie James Pickering, a bookstore owner and activist in Buffalo, New York, noticed something unusual in his mail, a confidential note reminding postal employees to copy all of his mail before delivering them.

The note was accidentally slipped into his mail deliveries and Pickering has just stumbled upon a little known postal spying program:

As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Ron Nixon of The New York Times reports: Link

(Photo: AP/Thanh Nien Newspaper, Kha Hoa)

In 1966, US Army doctor Sam Axelrad amputated the arm of Nguyen Quang Hung, a captured North Vietnamese soldier. Mr. Hung then spent several months recovering and working for the Americans:

"He probably thought we were going to put him in some prisoner-of-war camp," Axelrad said. "Surely he was totally surprised when we just took care of him."

As for the arm, Axelrad said his medic colleagues boiled off the flesh, reconstructed the arm bones and gave them to him. It was hardly common practice, but he said it was a reminder of a good deed performed.

Dr. Axelrad rediscovered the arm among his possessions in 2011. He recently returned to Vietnam to give Mr. Hung his arm back:

Hung was surprised to be reunited with his lost limb, to say the least.

"I can't believe that an American doctor took my infected arm, got rid of the flesh, dried it, took it home and kept it for more than 40 years," he said by telephone last week from his home. "I don't think it's the kind of keepsake that most people would want to own. But I look forward to seeing him again and getting my arm bones back."

Hung served Axelrad and his family lunch, shared memories and reflected on all the time that had passed. Axelrad said he was pleased to learn where and how Hung had been living for so many years, and to meet his children and grandchildren.

"I'm so happy that he was able to make a life for himself," Axelrad said.

Link -via Yababoon

Elvis on a Pez dispenser? Sure.

Zombie Steve Urkel? Why not?

A mash up between Gandhi and Groucho Marx? Sounds good!

It's hard to say if these tattoos are all on dedicated fans or people who lost bets, but whatever the reason for their creations, these 34 celebrity tattoos are beyond bizarre.

Link

We know beer is one of the oldest concoctions man has ever made, but it has been improved a lot over those thousands of years. Have you ever wondered what ancient beer tasted like? A collaboration between the University of Chicago and the Great Lakes Brewing Company aimed to find out. They used a 5,000-year-old recipe from a Sumerian poem to make a batch of ancient brew.  

To help ensure authenticity, they even used recreations of ancient wooden tools and ceramic fermentation pots based on artifacts found in Iraq in the 1930s, malted the barley on a roof, and hired a baker in Cleveland to prepare the bappir (“beer bread”) they used as the source of their yeast. And they heated the beer during the brewing process the old fashioned way: over a manure-fueled fire.

How did it turn out? Find out at Uncle John's Bathroom Reader blog. Link

Pavel Petel - High Heels Gym

Not all princesses are nice. Herr Nilsson, a street artist in Stockholm, painted Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty lying in ambush for unsuspecting pedestrians.

Link -via Hi-Fructose Magazine

Photos from Mahouarn., AnyDirectFlight, and barbara carroll.

This Xenomorph, part of the H.R. Giger 2009 art exhibition in San Sebastian, Spain, is so awesome that the only way to be sure that we can keep humanity safe is to nuke it from orbit. Photo via Orange

Photo: HeyItsWilliam/Flickr

French sculptor Auguste Rodin casted The Thinker in 1902, so it's time to update the iconic sculpture to reflect modern society's more ... um, bountiful image. Meet the Fat Thinker, for the Shanghai Sculpture Space exhibition in China.

I wonder what it's thinking about ...

Photo: HeyItsWilliam/Flickr

What do they mean? The more I study Shwa Keristead's mystics--the more I sink into their penetrating gazes--the less I understand.

Artist's Website and Gallery -via Ian Brooks

The Supreme Court this week overturned a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The federal government will no longer provide oversight in those states that previously required a voter to pass a "literacy test" in order to vote.

After the end of the Civil War, would-be black voters in the South faced an array of disproportionate barriers to enfranchisement. The literacy test—supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn’t prove a certain level of education but in actuality disproportionately administered to black voters—was a classic example of one of these barriers.

The website of the Civil Rights Movement Veterans, which collects materials related to civil rights, hosts a few samples of actual literacy tests used in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi during the 1950s and 1960s. In many cases, people working within the movement collected these in order to use them in voter education, which is how we ended up with this documentary evidence.  

In case you've ever wondered how hard it would be to pass these tests, you can try one from Louisiana at Slate (only the first page is shown here). There are also links to tests from other states. Link -via Metafilter

Last Tuesday would have been George Orwell's 110th birthday. To mark the occasion and comment upon the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dutch artists Thomas voor Hekke and Bas van Oerle decorated public surveillance cameras in Utrecht with birthday party hats. You can see more photos from the series at the link.

Link -via Junkculture

You'll be hearing more in the paper and on Slog from Marti Jonjak and me about Future Beauty. For now, I just wanted to let you know it opens tomorrow, and it's an exhibition of 80 gowns and garments visiting Seattle from the prized collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute. It's fascinating to see what Japanese designers have been doing since the 1970s to shape women's bodies—hint: they're over the hourglass—and it's beautiful.

Pictures from the press preview yesterday.

I posted lots more @jengraves on Twitter.

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