Snob

via

 

One of my favorite adages is "An uncluttered desk is the sign of an uncluttered mind." It appears to be true that a messy desk fosters creativity. Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota cites three experiments in which a neat or messy setting influenced a person's thinking process. In one experiment, 48 subjects were placed in either a neat or a messy room, and told to come up with creative uses for ping pong balls.

Two assistants rated each idea on a one-to-three scale (from not at all creative to very creative). After adding the scores, the researchers found that those who worked in the messy room were more creative overall, and came up with more highly creative ideas, than those who performed the same task in the neat room. On average, those working in the pristine environment came up with as many suggestions as those in the messy one; their ideas just weren’t as innovative.

“Being creative is aided by breaking away from tradition, order and convention,” Vohs and her colleagues conclude, “and a disorderly environment seems to help people do just that.”

An interesting observation here is that the subjects did not select whether their experimental environment was neat or messy, so a person's natural messiness or creativity did not come into play. And a neat desk has its advantages, too. Vohs tells us of other experiments in which people working in a neater environment tended to be more generous and to select more nutritious foods afterward. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Ali West)

Aquí otro articulo sobre el paso de The Clash por España concretamente sobre el concierto de Madrid además incluye una mini entrevista. La publicacion es la efímera "Disco actualidad" desaparecida en 1981 y localizada en Zaragoza. El articulo todo hay que decirlo es feo ya desde su titulo "Una Bomba sin mecha", "Clash fue polvora mojada". Sobre la entrevista mas de los mismo preguntas bastante insulsas y se nota un desprecio por parte del redactor hacia la banda como vosotros mismos podréis comprobar. Tanto las fotos como el texto vienen firmados por "Jose Manuel Cuellar" actualmente en nomina de ABC y supongo que ya en aquella época bastante distante del discurso de los Clash.

[Photograph: water glass on Shutterstock]

Water makes up so much of what we eat and drink—why not obsess a little bit over getting the best-tasting water possible?

Note: To make measuring out the tiny quantities of minerals needed easier on you, we recommend first making a concentrated "electrolyte solution" and then adding just 10g (10mL or 2 tsp) of that solution to 1 L of distilled or otherwise purified water.

Calcium chloride is available from most homebrew or winemaking shops. Magnesium chloride is available as a dietary supplement. Go for the liquid form if possible; solid pills may contain bulking agents such as calcium.

Special equipment: Digital scale capable of 0.1 g resolution

Ingredients

serves makes 1 liter, active time 10 minutes, total time 10 minutes

• 2 liters distilled or purified water, divided
• 1.5 grams magnesium chloride (see note above)
• 1 gram sodium bicarbonate (baking soda)
• 1 gram calcium chloride (see note above)

Procedures

1. Combine 1 liter water, magnesium chloride, baking soda, and calcium chloride in a large bottle or jug and stir to dissolve to form electrolyte solution.

2. Add 10 grams of the electrolyte concentrate to remaining 1 liter of water to dilute. Serve or use for cocktails. Remaining electrolyte solution can be stored in a sealed container for future dilution.

A principios de agosto se celebró en La Coruña el Viñetas desde o Atlantico 2013. Muchos no habréis podido asistir a dicho evento y es por ello que han puesto a disposición de quien quiera escucharlas dos de las charlas que tuvieron lugar en el evento. Una de ellas podéis verla en un vídeo donde se hace mención a la situación de la mujer en el mundo del cómic y la otra es un audio donde se comenta cómo afectan al mundo del cómic las adaptaciones al cine de los personajes Marvel y DC.

El artículo La mujer en el cómic y el cómic en el cine – Viñetas desde o Atlantico apareció primero en GenComics.

 
While he was waiting on death row, John Wayne Gacy painted a number of portraits of cartoon characters, clowns and famous people, often at their request, including Lux Interior of The Cramps.

Apparently Gacy never actually listened to The Cramps but wrote (typos included) this on November, 15 1987:

I don’t look at people has hero’s nor do I write to lux interior as fan mail, we have just become friend via writing to each others, he expresses his view on things and I do the same. I don’t try to change people or get them on my side, I let them believe what they want and then if I get a new trial they will see where I am coming from. But I do answer some questions if I feel I can help them out by explaining it. By the way I have never heard Lux Interior music but I don’t pass judgement on it either as I believe his kind of musci make a statement too. I have hread he was dead too, but I think thats just bad rummor. I haven’t heard from him in a month or so but then thats not unusual for him. I just wrote to let him know that a painting he asked me to do is finished. He has been an admirer of my art work and owns four of them now, not including two I have just sent to him and the one I just finished.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Lux Interior and Ivy Rorschach’s McDonald’s job applications

By Alex Race  Published: August 28th, 2013  You'd think that by now, we as a species would have pretty much figured out sex, what with Hollywood and the Internet constantly pumping us full of messages on the subject -- and we all know that if there are two things that can be universally truste

 
In 1978 or 1979 (we’ll get to that in a minute), Tom Waits was touring Europe. He had a concert in Vienna the day after a show in Amsterdam. He showed up in Vienna and was greeted by two young men named Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, employees of ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk, i.e. Austrian television) with the proposal of shooting an interview while he was in town. Waits countered with a better idea.

As Barney Hoskyns tells it in Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits:
 

Waits and band flew to Holland for a short European tour that took in Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Vienna, London, Dublin, Brussels, and Paris. … In Vienna on 19 April, Waits was filmed by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher for a short documentary that incorporated live performances of “Sweet Little Bullet,” “Christmas Card,” and a loose-limbed take on “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” “He came in from Amsterdam saying he hadn’t slept all night, but he agreed on the spot to let us film him,” says Rossacher. “He said he didn’t want to do a proper interview but instead he wanted to tell stories.”

 
The film’s credit at the very end itself says quite clearly that it dates from 1978, but everyone else seems to think it was really 1979. For one thing, the video ends with a rendition of “On the Nickel,” which first appeared on 1980’s Heartattack and Vine.
 

 
The concert in the footage was at the Konzerthaus, specifically the Mozartsaal, which seats 704. The European tour was in support of 1978’s Blue Valentine, and in the footage Waits plays “A Sweet Little Bullet From A Pretty Blue Gun” and “Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis” off of that album. We get three songs from Waits’ 1976 album Small Change (“Jitterbug Boy,” “Pasties and a G-String (At the Two O’Clock Club),” and “I Can’t Wait to Get Off Work (And See My Baby on Montgomery Avenue)”). Waits’ rendition of “Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis” folds in a few bars of “Goin’ Out of My Head” when he gets to the Little Anthony and the Imperials line and ends with “Silent Night”—this was his usual practice in the late 1970s.

At the end of the video Waits does a slow dance with what Hoskyns calls “a Thai prostitute” in a joint called the Moulin Rouge on Walfischgasse in the city’s 1st district. The Moulin Rouge is still there, but that area is completely different today. Walfischgasse intersects with Kärntner Strasse, which is kind of like Times Square/42nd Street in more ways than one. In the 1970s it was a red-light district, but today it is one of the most commercialized avenues in Vienna. I love the footage in the middle where Waits tells the story of the saxophonist who can’t manage the bridge to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—few things are more “Vienna” than a little table crowded with beer glasses and stately little cups of coffee.

Embedding of the full video is disabled by request, so here’s a short clip but really, check out the whole thing.
 

O patrimonio artístico das antigas caixas, dividido entre a obra social de NCG e o propio banco, suma case sete mil elementos valorados en 116 millóns de euros. Unha petición online demanda a súa declaración como B.I.C. e o seu traslado á Cidade da Cultura.

 

The name Steve Ditko probably means very little to you if you aren’t a comics fan, but if you are, then the name is well known to you: Steve Ditko is the co-creator of Spider-Man, the original artist who envisioned the character along with Stan Lee. The worldwide smash of the Spiderman film franchise saw many Ditko-drawn Spider-Man classics republished and a concurrent growing fascination with the reclusive artist, who is still working in New York, at age 82.

Aside from Spider-Man, Ditko was also the co-creator, again with Lee, of the cosmic Dr. Strange, who was my favorite comic book hero as a child. The comic panels of Dr. Strange were some of the most vividly psychedelic ever seen in comics, and they contrasted sharply with his rendering of Peter Parker’s drab world, which was almost Soviet in comparison.
 

 
In the mid-60s, Ditko began to chafe at Stan Lee’s dictatorial editorship of Spider-Man and eventually got Lee to agree to let him plot Spider-Man—unheard of at Marvel—while control freak Lee would write the actual dialogue suggested from Ditko’s stories. The arrangement did not last long. Spider-Man as originally written was very much a conflicted character as we all know, but the character also had a lot of anti-establishment appeal—he was a smartass—and this is one of the many reasons the character took off in the heady era of the ‘60s. At the time that Ditko’s grasp on Spider-Man tightened, so did his interest grow in the Objectivist philosophy of Russian-born novelist, Ayn Rand. When Rand’s humorless black and white moralizing started creeping into the Spider-Man stories, Lee balked and soon the two men were not speaking to each other. Eventually Ditko left, leaving behind a character that would go on to become a billion dollar enterprise. He would never draw Spider-Man again and has essentially erased himself as much as possible from the character’s history.

 
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that Ditko sees himself as a real-life “Howard Roark,” Rand’s fictional architect in The Fountainhead, a man who refuses to compromise his vision. Rand’s influence was even more obvious in his right wing vigilante character Mr A, who would throw someone off a building for disagreeing with him. His work became didactic, shrill, hectoring and rightwing his influence waned. Mr. A was like Bill O’Reilly as a superhero. What teenager wants to be yelled at by a moralistic superhero? In the opinion of many, his work degenerated into fascistic rhetoric and lunacy from the late 1960s onwards.

 

 

There have been almost no interviews, ever, with Steve Ditko. While really not a hermit or a recluse, he’s an intensely private person and refuses all interviews, although there are stories of him speaking to a fan ballsy enough to ring his doorbell, but always standing in the doorway, never inviting them into his studio. In his BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko, otaku British talkshow host Jonathan Ross tracked Ditko down in New York City and called the artist on the telephone. Ditko politely refused his request for an on camera interview. But when Ross (and Neil Gaiman) showed up on his doorstep, he did in fact entertain them, although not on camera.

 
Blake Bell’s Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, a coffeetable book published by Fantagraphics, is a wonderful and fascinating look at Ditko’s life and work. Kudos to Bell for putting together such a volume which was clearly a labor of love and unique erudition. I can’t imagine how much shit he had to go through to be able to put together such a book. I’m sure Steve Ditko was no help!

Below, Jonathan Ross’s wonderful BBC documentary Searching for Steve Ditko:
 

Patton Oswalt called it way back in 2007. During one of his stand-up gigs, which for your convenience is embedded below, the 44-year-old waxed philosophical about how the fast food nation enables defeatist American culture with gluttonous items, such as the KFC bowl, that pass themselves off as clever when in fact they are, to paraphrase Oswalt, failure piles in bowls of sadness.

And, since Wendy’s currently nabbed the number two slot in sales in the fast food wars, Burger King has unleashed the latest unimaginable item: Clocking in at 360 calories and 19 grams of fat, here comes the French Fry Burger, a standard beef patty topped with four of the chain’s French fries, for just $1.

Because ordering French fries on the side, taking the time to lift them with your meat crane and swallow them separately from your dubious sandwich requires too much effort, too much pain. Just throw it all down at once, yes yes, and if one can save a buck or two in the process, then U.S.A.

Now, onto Oswalt’s prescience:

h/t Time

Follow @BrianAbrams

Miller's Crossing, 20 Years Later Photographing (and finding) the exact filming locations for the Coen Brothers' New Orleans classic and comparing them to present day. [via mefi projects]

I made a thing! It's a simple music creation tool, called Bosca Ceoil (pronouced "bus-ka kyo-al", Irish for "Music Box/Accordion"). [Mac+Windows/Adobe AIR/Flash App]

I made this because I find other music programs really confusing and distracting. Too many panels, buttons and knobs! I wanted something really simple, something designed to work the way I tend to create stuff – a process that I suppose I could best describe as: make something super simple, and keep tweaking it until it starts to get good.

- Terry Cavanagh (creator of VVVVVV, ChatChat, and Super Hexagon most previously)

Sullivan's book was a hit. It was the single best-selling book of 1947, ahead of de Beauvoir, ahead of Sartre, ahead of Camus. People wanted to meet him. The press wanted to talk to him. He was also the plaintiff in a civil suit that could carry a heavy fine or even lead to time in jail. He had to appear in court, which was tricky, because Vernon Sullivan didn't exist. (SLTheAwl)

quotesoncomics:

You only need a point of view and something to say.

IMPORTANTE

 
Saint Jareth, Saint Elvira, Saint Morrissey, Saint Edgar Allan Poe and Saint Vampira are available for all your prayin’ needs for around $6.99 a pop by Etsy seller GreaserCreatures.
 

 

 

 

 
Via Neatorama

 

 
It’s normal for people to fantasize about having their own theme song. But thanks to the outlawed narcocorrido genre of Latin music, if you are a major drug smuggler or head of a Mexican drug cartel, you really do have your very own customized theme song.

It’s not enough to move millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs, intimidate rivals, scare journalists, accumulate a ton of flauntable personal wealth, and control large swaths of Mexico. One has to also be a modern-day folk hero and have ballads (corridos = traditional Mexican ballads) written about one’s criminal exploits.

Corridos originally used the medieval European ballad form to chronicle stories about heroes, revolutionaries, soldiers in the Mexican War, and outlaws like Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata. Drug smugglers view themselves as part of this lineage. The long-standing tradition of the corrido is anti-authoritarianism, with or without a drug culture to go along with it.

Cartel leaders pay Mexican songwriters to write glowing tributes to them, their organization, and superior products. It’s a great gig if you can get it… and don’t mind pissing off the leaders of other cartels, who might well kill you and your family for promoting the wrong side. Vice reported: “Sometimes narcocorrido singers avoid getting offed by getting songs approved by various cartels. Movimiento Alterado [another name for the narcocorrido genre] has sent songs to the Sinaloa cartel for clearance before releasing them.”

A norteño singer-songwriter from Monterrey named Edgar told me about the dilemma facing young artists. He left Nuevo Leon to start a Regional Mexican band in the U.S., where some of his relatives had already immigrated, because he didn’t want to write about the drug culture and no longer felt safe being a songwriter in Mexico.

Narcocorridos are banned from the radio and public performance in the states of Sinaloa and Chihuahua. This level of censorship is ludicrous considering the number of Spanish language radio stations in the U.S. with signals reaching far into Mexico, not to mention satellite radio and the internet.

Officials recently fined concert promoters in Chihuahua $8000 for allowing El Komander (Alfredo Rios) – whose catalogue was described by Latin Times as “one full of tall tales of pistol-packing drug traffickers and cartel dons” – to perform his work.

The fine was so high because Los Tucanes de Tijuana – whose shows have turned into shootouts in the recent past – were hired to appear at a music festival in Chihuahua City this summer and blithely paid the 23,000 pesos (about $1700) fine so they could play. Then the city raised the fine to 100,000 pesos ($7500). The mayor, Marco Quezada, said that he won’t issue another concert permit to the promoter who brought the narco-balladeers to town.
 

 
The template for the criminal folk hero is Robin Hood-like “generous bandit” Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of the illegal drug trade (along with Santa Muerte), especially in Sinaloa. Unofficial saint, because Malverde is just one example of local Mexican Catholic folk customs enraging and embarrassing the Vatican. He is said to have only stolen from the rich and helped the poor until he was killed by police in 1909.

The regular level of violence in this musical subculture far exceeds rap’s bad reputation. Singer Valentín Elizdale was murdered in front of hundreds of people in 2006 after a concert during which he sang lyrics insulted the Zetas cartel. Sinaloa’s beloved Chalino Sánchez, who performed mainly in southern California, was one of the major musical casualties of the drug war. He began writing narcocorridos to order at the request of his fellow inmates while in jail, and despite his weak voice, the song commissions kept coming once he was released. In 1992 when an audience member shot him during a concert, Chalino pulled out a gun and shot back. Unfortunately someone finally succeeded in murdering Chalino execution-style a few months later.

Narcocorridos, for all their dark, boastful, nihilistic, violent lyrics, sound…well, like cheerful polkas and waltzes. Trust me, I lived next door to people who played this music at top volume 24/7 for three years straight. A quick browse of the CD’s at a bodega or mercado reveals that most of the artists look like clean-cut pick-up truck driving cowboys, wearing tight jeans with huge belt buckles and cowboy hats. They do not resemble East L.A. cholos or Latin rappers in any way. If the Marlboro Man had a tidier Latino counterpart who was holding an assault rifle while surrounded by scantily clad women, he would be a narcocorridos singer.

Juan Carlos Ramirez-Pimienta, a teacher and scholar at San Diego State University, told Vice:

The narcocorridos react to reality. The cartels are at war, so the narcocorridos adopt a wartime propaganda message. They are meant to create fear in the enemy.

Composer Enrique Franco Aguilar disapproves of the drug culture and its glorification but loves corridos. Franco told music journalist Elijah Wald:

Too many of these “artists,” in quotation marks, only want money. But when you have a good interpreter the corridos can still have a very strong effect. Because the people believe in these artists. If the artists wanted, they could make a revolution. A great artist is more powerful than a politician.

The muy macho El Komander, waving lots of guns around after possibly raiding Johnny Cash’s closet, in “Mafia Nueva,” below

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Valentin Elizalde: Raw Live Narcocorridos

‘El Narco’: An Epic and Bloody Mexican Gangster Film

 

So, some lady wrote into Pat Robertson’s Super Happy Fun Time Fire and Brimstone Sing-Along Review to ask what she should do about her church having allowed her to drive a man from a nursing home to church without having told her he had the AIDS. You know, because riding shotgun in a car is a very well known way in which the virus is transmitted.

Now, when you first start to watch this, you’re going to want to commend Robertson on what seems like a menial grasp on reality. He does tell the lady that, unless she was planning on banging this dude in her car, that it’s pretty unlikely she’s going to contract anything.

But then…

Robertson goes on to explain how the MUST-HAVE item for all the fashionable gays in the San Francisco area is some kind of secret decoder ring that they stab you with when shaking hands with you, so that they can give you AIDS. Obviously.

Nevermind the fact that they would also have to stab themselves, and then hold the two cuts straight together for a rather long period of time for there to be even the slightest chance that someone could contact HIV this way. Nevermind the fact that if this were a real thing, it probably would have been reported on at least once in the history of ever. Nevermind the fact that it’s just bizarre to insinuate that gay people are collectively on some murderous rampage.

I just want to know–how does he even come up with this shit? Like, he has some kind of seriously wild imagination. Who would this even occur to? Does he just spend all day long having strange fever dreams about things that gay people may hypothetically do that would freak him out? It seems like a lot of work. He should probably stop that. It seems unhealthy.

image: D&T

Follow @RobynElyse

self portrait originally appeared on My[confined]Space NSFW on August 26, 2013.

image credit

Your grandparents probably slept like you. And your great, great-grandparents. But once you go back before the 1800s, sleep starts to look a lot different. Your ancestors slept in a way that modern sleepers would find bizarre - they slept twice.

We used to sleep in two shorter periods, over a longer range of night. This range was about 12 hours long, and began with a sleep of three to four hours, wakefulness of two to three hours, then sleep again until morning.

Why do we find free time so terrifying? Why is a dedication to work, no matter how physically destructive and ultimately pointless, considered a virtue?

If you start typing "why" into Google, the autocomplete gives you a glimpse at the various mysteries people want answers to, such as "why is space black?" or "why are people stupid?" or "why is there yellow discharge in my underwear?" XKCD's current comic, "Questions," shows a glimpse at some of these questions, culled from a big list of over 33,000 that XKCD's author, Randall Munroe, generated from Google API queries. In response, Reddit user GeeJo made his best attempt at answering every single one posed in the comic.

The new Superman and Batman movie will probably be a remake of Meet the Parents. Actually, Probably not.

Anna Gunn, who plays Skyler White on “Breaking Bad,” wrote an op-ed for The New York Times this weekend called “I Have A Character Issue” in which she laments being the target of internet commenters. But she truly seems to have no idea why people hate her.

From Gunn’s piece:

I was unprepared for the vitriolic response she inspired. Thousands of people have “liked” the Facebook page “I Hate Skyler White.” Tens of thousands have “liked” a similar Facebook page with a name that cannot be printed here. When people started telling me about the “hate boards” for Skyler on the Web site for AMC, the network that broadcasts the show, I knew it was probably best not to look, but I wanted to understand what was happening.

A typical online post complained that Skyler was a “shrieking, hypocritical harpy” and didn’t “deserve the great life she has.”

“I have never hated a TV-show character as much as I hate her,” one poster wrote. The consensus among the haters was clear: Skyler was a ball-and-chain, a drag, a shrew, an “annoying bitch wife.”
…
At some point on the message boards, the character of Skyler seemed to drop out of the conversation, and people transferred their negative feelings directly to me. The already harsh online comments became outright personal attacks. One such post read: “Could somebody tell me where I can find Anna Gunn so I can kill her?” Besides being frightened (and taking steps to ensure my safety), I was also astonished: how had disliking a character spiraled into homicidal rage at the actress playing her?

Gunn’s conclusion turns into a parable about societally institutionalized sexism expressed through TV archetypes: The hate drawn by female characters like hers, Carmella Soprano and Betty Draper are manifestations of a preference that women stay submissive and not talk out of turn to their strong, stoic husbands.

I’m not trying to be dismissive here or belittle Gunn’s experience. Institutionalized sexism is real. We still have salary discrepancy, women not controlling their own reproductive rights—all kinds of terrible stuff. But Gunn’s argument here is way oversimplified. It pretends like “Sex and the City” never happened; that “Mad Men” and “The Sopranos” didn’t also receive a mountain of criticism for being sexist; ignores shows like “Orange Is The New Black” with strong female characters that are fantastically well received. And most of all, it ignores the fact that her character can actually be kind of annoying.

Since Gunn seems new to the internet, I’ll help explain: When you do something that a lot of people see, often times people who don’t like it will take to the internet to proclaim that you should die.

The internet is a big place, and it’s full of idiots. The idiots aren’t just hating on female TV characters. Gunn’s experience is something any internet writer or editor knows well. Pen an article on gun control after Sandy Hook? You’re gonna get death threats. Weren’t crazy about Thom Yorke’s new side project? Death threats.

This is especially true where anonymous commenting is enabled, but not always. Facebook fan pages for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Aurora, Colorado shooter James Holmes popped up after their atrocities. The James Holmes pages weren’t even protesting his innocence—they were just fools heralding mass murder either to be contrarian or because they were frustrated mass murderers themselves, or who knows why? The point is: You will most certainly find a vocal minority taking the wrong side of any issue online. Some idiots will always say Don Draper’s cheating is awesome. Or will take a character who is supposed to be kind grating at times for effective narrative tension on an expertly written and acted show and say that the “annoying bitch should die.” Again, the internet is a big place and the lowest common denominator is extremely low.

She should take heart, however, that in legitimate online communities like Reddit where comments are moderated and rise and in fall by decree of meritocracy, the smartest, most thoughtful comments usually rise to the top and the idiotic vitriol often gets buried. Spending an hour on Reddit is a cure for the internet blues. It’ll show you that the boneheads who want to “kill” Skyler White—or Anna Gunn as the case may be—are usually derided into irrelevance by a community of more enlightened peers.

So, no, we do not live in post-sexist world, just as we don’t live in a post-racist world. “Orange Is The New Black” doesn’t mean sexism is over any more than Obama becoming president means that racism in America is over. But in this particular case, Anna Gunn should know that people hate her because she did something that people saw. On the internet, it’s that simple.

Image: WBUR

Follow @alexandergmoore

French film Amélie (2001) is going to be adapted into a Broadway musical by American composer Dan Messe (Hem), who will be creating new music for the score. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is disgusted by these plans, but sold the rights anyway to support a charity.