bernot

nevver:

Make it happen

By Stacy, who blogs at maraglen.tumblr.com.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

In America’s colonial era, thousands of people were buried in a cemetery that is now the Green in New Haven, Connecticut. The Center Church on the Green, as it is called now, was built in 1814 right over top of a section of the cemetery! They set up pillars in the cemetery, and built the church on top, then put fill dirt around the church to make it ground level. That left a “basement’ of sorts for the remaining graves, complete with their original headstones. And it is there still. But that was only part of the large cemetery on the Green. What of the bodies outside of the church?

Yet in true Poltergeist-fashion, when in the 1820s the graveyard was relocated to the new Grove Street Cemetery, only the headstones were moved. By some estimates there are between 5,000 to 10,000 souls still buried below the Green, although one was disturbed during 2012's Hurricane Sandy when a tree was dislodged from the ground, and a skeleton was found coiled in the roots. Specifically, a skull was spotted just before Halloween with its jaw swung open as if in a silent howl, while a spine and rib cage remained attached.

You won’t see that, but you will see plenty of pictures of the Center Church on the Green and its underground cemetery-turned-crypt that is open to visitors, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Allison Meier)

A “vandal” has stepped in and taken artistic liberty with one of Banksy’s latest works and it’s kinda clever in a sophomoric sort of way.

Local police in Kent, England say — without irony — that they are looking for the person who illegally drew a big penis on Banksy’s illegal piece, which originally depicted a woman staring at an empty plinth (where a work of art would normally be displayed). With the alteration, she appeared to be gazing at a big dick. But not for long.

Officials quickly went and cleaned up the mural which luckily for Banksy fans, had already been encased in plexiglass, so only the clear protective barrier was damaged, not the actual piece on the wall.

Last month in the United States, a California man was convicted of defacing a Banksy in Park City, Utah and was orderd to pay thousands of dollars or face jail time. If the same rules applied in the UK, a certain seaside municipality might have found itself facing similar punishment.

(Photo: Pohutukawa, Banksy)

The post Banksy Mural Dicked appeared first on ANIMAL.

fandomsandfeminism:

bluemantle:

Recently my grandmother found out I’m queer. Her response was to tell me that she disapproves of me living with my “friend” (i.e. my girlfriend) and that I should give up my vile queer ways and become a Christian (Lol). She even sent me a bible.  Here are its remains, which I made into black-out poetry.

Poem 1: Bisexual (from Leviticus 19:9)— “Have sexual relations with her.  Have sexual relations with him.  Have sexual relations with both a woman and a man.  Have sexual relations with yourself. Vomit on everyone who does not respect you.”

Poem 2: Fisting (from Judges 8:5)— “water/ lap the water/ drink/go down to drink/your hands/go down/I give into your hands/go down/encouraged/down/on the seashore/the whole hand/your hand/inside/I get to the edge/and shout/grasping/crying out/Beth/Beth/Beth/Beth/Beth/God/I came”

Poem 3: A Letter to the Exiles (from Jeremiah 28:13) — “Ze said: ‘Do not let lies name you, nor harm your heart. Gather. Raise the sword against them. They scorn and reproach, for they have not listened— again and again have not listened.’ “

Poem 4: Child (from Ezekiel 16:22) — “Your father and your mother rubbed salt in. No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough for you, for on the day you were born you were despised. Live! Grow.  I looked at you and saw you were enough.”

Poem 5: Father (from Ezekiel 16:22) — “You never adored us. You became very angry. You took some out on us. Your sons and daughters were not enough? You slaughtered— in all your detestable practices— our youth.”

Poem 6: Misandry (from Acts 27:41) — “Dangerous men should be broken.”

Fucking beautiful.

The script that I used to make that course assignment about Facebook pronouns ("Sex, age, and pronouns on Facebook", 9/19/2014; "More fun with Facebook pronouns", 9/27/2014) can trivially be focused on any other words — so here's "the":

And "this":

Also "those":

And "that" (though the determiner version is mixed with the complementizer):

And "which":

For some reason, "these" doesn't show an age effect:

We may get a clue about what's going on from "and":

And also "or":

But "but":

"The true story of Stronzo Bestiale", Parolacce 10/5/2014:

Would you read a paper written by Stronzo Bestiale (Total Asshole)? A dose of mistrust would be justified: the name says it all. Yet, in 1987, professor Bestiale, supposedly a physicist in Palermo, Sicily, authored major papers in prestigious scientific peer reviewed journals such as the  Journal of Statistical Physics, the Journal of Chemical Physics and the proceedings of a meeting of American Physical Society in Monterey.

No such person exists, it seems — the story emerges through email with one of Prof. Bestiale's co-authors:

I wrote to professor Hoover, now retired, to ask him the true story of Stronzo Bestiale. Here’s what he said. «At that time» he says «we were very active in the development of a new computational technique, non-equilibrium molecular dynamics, connecting fractal geometry, irreversibility and the second law of thermodynamics. [...]

[T]he theoretical picture of this technique was clear to me, so I wrote several papers on the subject along with some colleagues. But the reviewers of Physical Review Letters and the Journal of Statistical Physics refused to publish my texts: they contained too innovative ideas.»

This is nothing new: new discoveries in science are hard to publish because scientists are rather conservative, as discussed by the epistemologist Thomas Kuhn. Meanwhile, Hoover continues, «while I was traveling on a flight to Paris, next to me were two Italian women who spoke among themselves, saying continually: “Che stronzo (what an asshole)!”, “Stronzo bestiale (total asshole)”. Those phrases had stuck in my mind. So, during a CECAM meeting, I asked Ciccotti what they meant. When he explained it to me, I thought that Stronzo Bestiale would have been the perfect co-author for a refused publication. So I decided to submit my papers again, simply by changing the title and adding the name of that author. And the researches were published».

I wonder how widely this technique would work? Across the languages of the world, we can find thousands of authors' names in the same genre. There's Prof. Connard, who seems to have thousands of publications already; but the career of  Dr. Arschloch seems hardly to have begun — perhaps I would have better luck with LSA abstracts if I adopted her as a co-author.

And there are other sources of names, of course. "Should papers be retracted if one of the authors is a total asshole?", Retraction Watch 10/9/2014, mentions the possibility of pet co-authors:

In 1978, Polly Matzinger added her impeccably-named Afghan hound, Galadriel Mirkwood, to a Journal of Experimental Medicine paper to protest the use of passive voice in scientific papers.

And in the field of linguistics, we have precedent for the authorship status of household appliances:

"Dr. Alfred Crockus and Crosley Shelvador, M.D.", LLOG 9/19/2007; "Crosley Shelvador comes in from the cold", LLOG 9/20/2007.

howtoseewithoutacamera:

by Louis Faurer

New York, 1975

Infamous Stool Sample Matchbox

This was originally written on my FB page where I post pictures and links almost daily and which you immediately should follow. I remembered about the stool samples when I was writing this post about the Soviet medicine of my day.

*Warning: please don’t eat while reading this.

Soviet kids had to be healthy whether they wanted it or not. And healthy meant parasite-free. So once in a while, my school (and I imagine all the other schools in the area) put out a call for stool samples. By a certain deadline every child had to submit a matchbox full of you-know-what, tightly wrapped and marked with the name of a producer.

At that time (and maybe still) the Soviet toilets (in places with indoor plumbing but not in public restrooms) were different from the American model we are all used to. Instead of a small pool of water ready to accept your deposits, it was more like a vase with hardly any water at all. When done, a person would pull a chain and a waterfall coming down from the high-mounted tank (if the water was on that day) would flush the stuff down through the hole located in the front part of the toilet.
That technical aside was necessary to explain that at least our parents didn’t have to fish for floating crap, it was all right there, nice and piled. Clearly no 8- or 9- or even 12-year-old wants to have anything to do with putting their own crap in a small box, so that somber duty had to be fulfilled by our parents. Many years later, as a parent myself, I’ve done many disgusting things and touched some substances that would make a grown man gag (and they did). But even after thousands of diapers changed I am still not sure I could go ahead and do what my mom had to do. This is something that would make you think twice about having a child.
The next day, the matchbox was proudly delivered and submitted to school, securely wrapped in multiple layers of paper and plastic (we didn’t have zip-locks or any bags of that nature) and tied with a string, with my name proudly scribbled on it like a designer brand. To this day I have no idea if anyone did anything with those nuggets. You can imagine that a school with 800 or a thousand kids can produce enough crap to fertilize a small organic beet farm. (Note to self: submit this idea to the school district as an extra source of income in light of recent school budget cuts by Governor Brownback.)
I always imagined that a lab in lower circles of socialized healthcare hell, populated by medical school dropouts, dimly lit and smelling worse than a meatpacking plant on a summer day, did nothing else but unwrapped the packages and examined the contents for parasite eggs and the signs of dinners past.But in reality I think they just threw these boxes away and faked the results. After all, sooner or later the parasites show their ugly heads, if you know what I mean.
Epilogue: When we came to the United States we had to pass some medical tests (in addition to the overpriced testing we were required to do in Moscow before we left). Then we received a mail-in stool sample kit, which consisted of some Popsicle sticks and cardboard envelopes. I was tempted to send my stuff in a box, but reconsidered and just threw the kits away.

They would have to pry a stool sample out of my……….

by

The post too much mustard — turn down for watt appeared first on Football and Rational Thoughts.

it’s official, the new ghostbusters screenplay is moving forward with an all-woman team

i have ghostbusters 1 and 2 on blu-ray, dvd, laserdisc AND vhs. i watch each one every night and check to make sure NO ONE is taking those precious ghostbuster dicks away from me

room42:

Victory Theater, 209 West 42nd Street Photo by Langdon Clay

Circa 1978 (the year Pussycat Ranch was released)

A hunter got more than he bargained for when he shot a bear in the forest in western Siberia – he found his car ransacked the next day in an apparent “revenge attack”.

The man shot and wounded a brown bear while out hunting with two friends. On returning to his car the next morning, he found that it had been completely destroyed by the angry bear – while his friends’ two cars nearby were left untouched.

The three friends were on a hunting excursion in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, western Siberia, when the unnamed man shot a brown bear in the thigh.

The man believes the brown bear followed his scent to find his car overnight and wreak its revenge. His two friends’ cars, meanwhile, were left completely unharmed – and in the mud nearby, the men found bear prints.

A video below shows his stunned reaction as he examines his battered Ford. The front windscreen has been smashed, the seats torn out, the lights smashed in and the bumper wrenched off.

▼ The men circle the ransacked car.

It’s hard not to feel for the owner of the car, but spare a thought for the bear as well. If I had a bullet lodged in my thigh, I reckon I’d be pretty angry about it too.

Sources: The Siberian Times, Xinhuaxia News
Images: YouTube, Xinhuaxia News
Featured image: YouTube

• We go ghost hunting in our apartment – with bone-chilling results
• Move over itasha, here come itachoko – anime chocolates!
• “Business Nail” – the latest trend among young Japanese businessmen looking to get ahead
• Free Admission – Twelve of Tokyo’s Best Kept Secrets
• One brave young woman’s fight to replace shark fishing with ecotourism – We talk to Kathy Xu

Origin: Hunter finds his car trashed by wounded bear he shot the day before 【Video】
Copyright© RocketNews24 / SOCIO CORPORATION. All rights reserved.

When someone comes into my office, I want that person to adopt an attitude most conducive to a productive working relationship. And now I know what is the perfect design for that purpose: the Scorpion Chair (translation) by Vyacheslav Pakhomov. It costs 230,000 rubles, which is about $5,749 USD. 

-via OhGizmo!

A cute Buenos Aires exhibit featuring Barbie dolls modified to resemble various religious figures, Catholic saints, and mythological characters has been cancelled, reports the AFP. 

According to the gallery director, artists Marianela Perelli and Pool Paolini “were threatened by Argentine Catholic groups that were going to come the day of the opening” and “everything has been suspended for security reasons.”

Some Hindu leaders were not enthused by the “Barbie-fication of Kali.” The artists chose not to depict Muhammad to avoid wrath. The wrath came anyway, leaving the artists feeling bummed, “misunderstood” and “unfairly attacked.”

See the pieces from the show that never was here.

The post Controversial Jesus Ken And Virgin Mary Barbie Exhibit Cancelled appeared first on ANIMAL.

If you played in a band in high school or college, you always faced the conundrum of how to copyright your work. Sending something in to the US copyright office costs $45, which is big bucks for a high school or college band. So a lot of groups use the “poor man’s” copyright – mailing a copy of the album to yourself.

The idea is that if someone rips off your music you can take them to court with the unopened package, show the judge the postal date, open the package, and voila—you’ve shown that it’s your song.

It turns out such a recording—possibly the earliest known recording from The Velvet Underground, still sealed like a time capsule in the “poor man’s copyright” envelope—was uncovered this year. Posted on the Lou Reed Facebook page back in July, it was discovered when going through boxes at Lou’s office space.

The Velvet Underground was just starting out in 1965—it was a full two years before their album “The Velvet Underground & Nico” would come out, with its iconic songs and Andy Warhol cover. At this point they weren’t even called the Velvet Underground. It was just Lou Reed, John Cale and Sterling Morrison jamming out in their Ludlow Street loft.

But apparently in May of 1965 the band or Lou Reed recorded some songs and felt like it was necessary to protect their ownership of them. So Lou used the poor man’s copyright and mailed himself the tape. This is a full two months before what has been considered the first demo that the band recorded, in July of 1965.

Who knows what it contains? Perhaps Lou, who had already written “Heroin” and “Venus In Furs,” was trying to develop proof that he wrote the songs and lyrics before going in and recording a demo with the with rest of the band? Or perhaps it’s a previously unknown tape of some of the band’s first jam sessions?

Regardless, Lou knew of the package. In an interview during the 90s he said, “I’m not going to listen to it. I don’t want to hear these things any more.”

And that’s what made Lou so great—always pushing forward, searching for the next great sound.

Ed note: Aram Bajakian played guitar with Lou Reed for his final touring years. Read more about his experiences here.

At the turn of the 19th century in the U.S. and Europe, it became wildly popular — and that’s an understatement — for ladies to wear feathers and whole taxidermied birds on their hats. One ornithologist reported taking two walks in Manhattan in 1886 and counting 700 hats; 525 of which were topped by feathers or birds. Buzzfeed has a collection of vintage hats featuring birds; here are some of the ones that were most stunning to me:

At the time, not many people thought much of killing the birds. Europeans and their American cousins “didn’t believe they could put a dent in an animal’s population.” Birds seemed to be an “abundant, even inexhaustible” natural resource.  So take they did.  Millions of birds all over the world were harvested for hat makers for years. The Fashioning Feathers blog offers this example:

A single 1892 order of feathers by a London dealer… included 6,000 bird of paradise, 40,000 hummingbird and 360,000 various East Indian bird feathers. In 1902 an auction in London sold 1,608 30 ounce packages of heron… plumes. Each ounce of plume required the use of four herons, therefore each package used the plumes of 120 herons, for a grand total of 192, 960 herons killed.

Ornithologists started to sit up and take notice. One estimated that 67 types of birds — often including all of their sub-species — were at risk for extinction.  Not only were birds killed for their feathers, they were killed when their feathers were at their most resplendent. This meant killing them during mating season, interrupting their reproductive cycle and often leaving baby birds orphaned.

A campaign to end the practice began. In Europe the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds targeted women. They launched a sexist campaign accusing women of supporting the heartless slaughter of birds. Fashioning Feathers includes this image from a pamphlet titled “Feathered Women” in which the president of the Society calls them a “bird-enemy.”

Virginia Woolf went for the jugular, pointing out that — even though the image shows a woman swooping down to kill a bird — it was largely men who did the dirty work of murder and they were also the ones profiting from the industry.

Ironically, middle class women were at the forefront of the bird preservation movement. They were the rank and file and, thanks in part to their work, in the U.S. the movement led to the formation of the first Audubon societies.  The Massachusetts Audubon Society organized a feather boycott, angering hat makers who called them “extremists” and “sentimentalists.” Politicians worried out loud about the loss of jobs. Missouri Senator James Reed complained:

Why there should be any sympathy or sentiment about a long-legged, long-beaked, long-necked bird that lives in swamps and eats tadpoles.

Ultimately the Massachusetts Audubon Society succeeded in pushing through the first federal-level conservation legislation in the U.S., the Lacey Act of 1900.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

When he's not busy running the cocktail program at New York City's Marta, Erik Lombardo is giving us the rundown on all things spirits -- and showing us the best ways to drink them. 

Today: Erik shows us how to put the fall in our cocktails.

There are certain times of the year that are defined by specific flavor profiles, and autumn is undeniably the time for spice. Anise, clove, and allspice all seem to find their way into sauces and seasonings as the days grow shorter and the leaves fall from the trees. But there is one spice in particular that I find myself craving both in my food and in my drinks during the fall months -- and that is cinnamon. 

Using cinnamon for culinary purposes can be a confusing proposition, as any baker can tell you. There's Ceylon cinnamon, Chinese cinnamon, and Saigon cinnamon -- the choices are plentiful, and to make it worse, average purveyors won’t go out of their way to find out which cinnamon they are selling. Speaking broadly, there are four types of cinnamon (all belonging to the Cinnamomum genus, a cousin of laurel) that are sold in the market today: Ceylon cinnamon (C. verum), Indonesian cinnamon (C. burmannii), Vietnamese cinnamon (C. loureiroi) and, by far the most common, Chinese cinnamon (C. cassia), which is the one that you’ll find most often in the supermarket.

More: Skip the spice shop. Let Oaktown Spices decipher cinnamon for you.

The good news is, all of these cinnamons are appropriate for making a delicious syrup. Cinnamon syrup can be substituted for sugar syrup in a cocktail in order to give it an autumn cast, and can even be used in an Old-Fashioned instead of the more traditional sugar cube (try 1/4 ounce of syrup instead of one sugar cube to start). Rather than a simple syrup, cinnamon syrup is best with a rich sugar syrup, so using a little goes a long way. 

Start with 2 parts sugar to 1 part water, and bring everything to a low simmer in a saucepan. Once it's reached a simmer, add enough broken up pieces of cinnamon (my personal favorite is Ceylon, but it's up to you) to more or less cover the surface of the pan you’re using. Depending on the size of the pan and how much cinnamon syrup you’re making, this could be a little or a lot, so think about quantities before you start. Once they’ve simmered for a couple of minutes, remove the pan from the heat and cover until the entire batch until totally cooled. Strain into a clean glass jar, and store in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

Try cinnamon syrup in any classic tiki cocktail, particularly the Zombie. It’s also wonderful paired with grapefruit in any way, shape, or form. Or, as mentioned, replace the cube of sugar in your next Old-Fashioned -- then take a sip, sit back, and settle into fall. 

Photos by Alpha Smoot

It doesn’t get much more biopunk than this:

As hospitals in nations hardest hit by Ebola struggle to keep up, desperate patients are turning to the black market to buy blood from survivors of the virus, the World Health Organization warned. [...]

Blood from survivors, referred to as convalescent serum, is said to have antibodies that can fight the deadly virus. Though the treatment is unproven, it has provided some promise for those fighting a disease that’s killing more than half of those it has infected.

Full Story: CNN: Ebola patients buying survivors’ blood from black market, WHO warns

“My mom told me that if I didn’t want to get pregnant, I should put a potato up there, and I believed her,” the presumably mortified patient told the hospital staff.

We all know what happens to a neglected tuber: roots, and lots of them. In the young woman’s case, those dogged sprouts proliferated over a couple weeks’ time, leading to her intense discomfort and eventually making an, um, external appearance (we’re treading so lightly here). Thankfully, the dud of a spud was removed sans surgical intervention, and the woman was expected to recover fully. No further details were provided, nor needed.

Tasteless tater tot humor aside, the incident underscores two of the country’s social woes: high rates of unwanted pregnancies and insufficient sexual education. One in five Colombian teenage girls between ages 15 to 19 will become pregnant this year, and the country’s overall unintended birth rate remains high (abortion is illegal in most cases). Yet parents have fought against mandating sex ed in the schools, leading to bushels of misinformation regarding intercourse and conception.

Keep in mind, too, that plant-based birth control “methods” are hardly anything new. Here are some other all-natural contraceptive efforts that have been employed through the millennia: Olive oil. Pomegranate pulp. Ginger. Tobacco juice. And, uh, crocodile poop, which probably proved effective for a whole other set of reasons. (There’s a mashed potato joke in there, but we’re going to make you look it up.)

So, gnocchin’ boots: officially off the table.

The post Potato as Birth Control: Never a Good Idea appeared first on Modern Farmer.

When sports stories wind up in the headlines and network news, something’s usually very wrong. The news biz, whether print of TV, usually keeps athletes confined in the sports section.  So now we have the network anchors talking about Adrian Peterson leaving welts on the flesh of his son, age four, or showing us the video of Ray Rice coldcocking his fiancee in the elevator. Other NFL domestic violence stories, previously ignored (no superstar players, no video), are now mentioned since they fit the news theme.

These incidents all suggest that maybe football players are just violent people – men with a streak of violence in their dispositions. This personality trait that allows them to flourish on the field, but too often it gets them in trouble after they leave the stadium.

This is the kind of psychological “kinds of people” explanation that I ask students to avoid or at least question, and to question it with data. Conveniently, we have some data. USA Today has the entire NFL rap sheet, and it looks like a long one – more than 700 arrests since 2000.  Nearly 100 arrests for assault, another 85 or so for domestic violence. And those are just the arrests. No doubt many battered wives or girlfriends and many bruised bodies in bars didn’t make it into these statistics. Are football players simply violent people – violent off the field as well as on?

Well, no. The largest category of arrests is drunk driving  – potentially very harmful, but not what most people would call violent.  And besides, NFL players are arrested at a lower rate than are their uncleated counterparts – men in their late twenties.

This suggests that the violence we see in the stadiums on Sunday is situational (perhaps like the piety and moral rectitude we encounter elsewhere on Sunday).  The violence resides not in the players but in the game.  On every down, players must be willing to use violence against another person. Few off-the-field situations call for violence, so we shouldn’t be surprised that these same men have a relatively low rate of arrest (low relative to other young men).

But let’s not discard the personal angle completely. If we look at arrests within the NFL, we see two things that suggest there might be something to this idea that violence, or at least a lack of restraint, might have an individual component as well.  First, although NFL arrests are lower for all crimes, they are much, much lower for non-violent offenses like theft. But for domestic violence, the rate is closer that of non-footballers.  The NFL rate for domestic violence is still substantially lower than the national average – 55 NFL arrests for every 100 among non-NFL men. But for theft, the ratio is one-tenth of that – 5.5 NFL arrests per 100 non-NFL. Also on the higher side are other offenses against a person (murder, sex offenses) and offenses that might indicate a careless attitude toward danger – DUI, guns.

Second, some positions have a disproportionate number of offenders. The graphs below show the percent of all arrests accounted for by each position and also the percent the position represents of the total NFL roster.  For example, cornerbacks make up about 10% of all players, but they accounted for about 14% of all arrests. (The difference is not huge, but it’s something; there would be a very slight overlap in the error bars if my version of Excel made it easy to include them.)

The positions disproportionately likely to be arrested are wide receivers and defensive tackles. Those most under-represented in arrests are the offensive linemen.

This fits with my own image of these positions. The wide-outs seem to have more than their share of free-spirits – players who care little for convention or rules. Some are just oddball amusing, like Chad Ochocinco formerly of the Bengals. Others are trouble and get traded from team to team despite their abilities, like Terrell Owens of the 49ers, Eagles, Cowboys, Bills, and Bengals.

As for the linemen, the arrest differential down in the trenches also might be expected.  Back in the 1970s, a psychiatrist hired by the San Diego Chargers noted this difference on his first visit to the locker room. It wasn’t the players – the offensive and defensive lineman themselves looked about the same (huge, strong guys) – it was their lockers. They were a metaphor for on-the-field play.  Defensive linemen charge, push, pull, slap – whatever they can do to knock over opponents, especially the one holding the ball. Their lockers were messy, clothes and equipment thrown about carelessly. Offensive lineman, by contrast, are more restricted. Even on a run play, their movements are carefully co-ordinated, almost choreographed. Watch a slo-mo of the offensive line on a sweep, and you’ll see legs moving in chorus-line unison.  Correspondingly, their lockers were models of organization and restraint.

Maybe these same personal qualities prevail off the field as well. Those offensive lineman get arrested at a rate only half of what we would expect from their numbers in the NFL population. Arrests of defensive linemen and wide receivers are 50% more likely than their proportion on the rosters. That can’t be the entire explanation of course. Running counter to this “kinds of people” approach are the other hard-hitting defensive players – defensive ends and linebackers. According to the principle of violent people in violent positions, they should be over-represented in arrest figures just like the  defensive tackles and cornerbacks. But they are not.

If this were a real article, a journal article, this final paragraph would be where the author calls for more data. But the trend in NFL arrests has been downward, and if fewer arrests means less data but also less domestic violence, that’s fine with me.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

The Supreme Court of the US today decided not to take a same sex marriage case.

The good news? The one from the 7th Circuit now stands, which means couples in WI can get married, which is awesome. With federal recognition of people getting married in states that allow it, it’s a better time to be same sex married than it’s ever been.

The bad news? SCOTUS ducked. Establishing the legality of same sex marriage through a Supreme Court ruling would have been the best option, just as it is with Roe v Wade. This leaves states that don’t allow marriage the ability to keep denying people their rights as US citizens.

The difficult thing is that this only delays the inevitable. I’m told a Circuit Court ruling that affirms the state bans is probably what SCOTUS are waiting for, but UGH. Enough already. Let’s get this done so that maybe we can start to deal with all the other issues the LGBTQ community faces: our homeless youth, trans underemployment, healthcare, suicide, etc.

But yes, for now, it’s good news, and I’m looking forward to all the happy wedding photos in the weeks to come, because it gives more people more rights. The arc of history, etc.

football as football

In a blatant act of aggression against the wallets of all fans of both football and that other football that features less scoring and a bunch of European dudes, Football As Football has opened up an online store where you can buy art prints, apparel, and phone cases featuring their iconic redesigns of NFL logos.

This malicious act is mitigated, however, by their generous decision not to have the designs printed onto badges and knit into chunky, warm, stripey scarves, saving at least one Kissing Suzy Kolber writer from going into massive amounts of debt and ruining his credit score by taking out a substantial loan for the express purpose of buying scarves.

I like scarves, is what I’m saying.

 
I posted these photos a few years ago from io9 writer Ron Miller‘s insane 1970s cosplay-esque photo collection. They need to be revisited again. If not just for the disco dust-era eye candy, then to draw...

Thorstein Veblen and Lena Dunham, together at last. Images via Wikipedia

The internet is always stupider than you think. When you’re telling a joke to an audience of anonymous online strangers, as long as the setup is believable no amount of absurdism in the punchline will give the game away.

Here’s an example: The week before Breaking Bad ended, I tweeted, “My uncle is a teamster and got a copy of the ending.” And I attached a fake script page that clearly demonstrated I had never seen the show. I referred to the main character as “Bryan Cranston from Malcolm in the Middle,” gave him lines like “Here goes nothing! Suicide!” and wrote in the AMC copyright information with a Sharpie. But people still got furious and demanded I immediately take it down. One guy said my uncle wouldn’t find work again. Another told me, “Teamsters are pieces of shit.”

So every once in a while I try to test the limits of that joke format. And on Friday, I struck the mother lode: I took a quote from economist/sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s seminal 1899 work The Theory of the Leisure Class and attributed it to Lena Dunham’s new book of essays, Not That Kind of Girl. I know almost nothing about Veblen; I just thought it was a funny way to say I don’t like rich people.

Obviously, Lena Dunham, who has chapters like “Take My Virginity (No, Really, Take It),” is not writing anything in the same universe as the Veblen quote, which critiques the cultural fallout of the Gilded Age while using words like “impinge” and “forfeiture” and “exigencies.” The joke made ten or so of my political science major friends smirk, which is all I thought it would do.

Then a miracle happened: It got retweeted by Instapundit, a conservative blogger who is read by a lot of relatively respectable people. That led to syndicated radio host and frequent FOX News contributor Tammy Bruce picking it up. She has since deleted the post, but she sent my joke along and added one word: “OMG.” All of a sudden, my joke was hopping around the right-wing Twittersphere, only nobody knew I was joking. As far as my new audience was concerned, that Veblen quote was the work of 28-year-old comedy auteur Lena Dunham, a known liberal.

These FOX News viewers were instantly angry with the Not That Kind of Girl author—not that it takes that much to get conservatives pissed off at Dunahm. She needed an editor; she had the audacity to use the word “exigencies”; she just wrote the world’s worst term paper. It was time for her to go down. This was the last straw. Comments generally fell into four categories, all of them convinced of the quote’s veracity. (Note: I reorganized these tweets to aid smoother categorization. They don’t represent the actual timeline.)

First up: the obvious one. Ad hominems.

The second: criticisms of her editor. The marketplace had clearly failed.

The third: so many permutations of “did she get exigencies from a word-a-day calendar?” that I had to stop counting.

The fourth: This is just awful writing!

Finally, just as my joke was about to be canonized as the most controversial quote from Lena Dunham’s big debut, Andy Levy, who often appears on FOX News’s Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld, stepped in and told everybody where the quote came from. As far as I can tell from Twitter’s buggy notifications feature, he was the first person to “debunk” my joke after it got traction.

That’s when people started getting mad at me. One guy gave me the #tcot version of the scarlet letter by adding me to a Twitter list called “liberals,” even though I had made no meaningful political statement. I should get kicked off Twitter for my grievous ethical violation, I was told. There’s such a thing as “Twitter law,” people said, and my bullshit had violated it.

I swear my tweet wasn’t intended as a disinformation campaign. But the damage is done. I imagine there are one or two people who haven’t seen Levy’s tweet and are still pissed off that Dunham would write such things. Even now, that quote may be making the rounds via forwarded chain emails that are mostly about Obama taking our guns away. Sorry, everyone. It was only a joke.

Original Source

Kind of a pet peeve of mine.

It’s already October, which means Halloween is right around the corner. Have you picked out your costume yet? Trick-or-treaters in Japan were treated to some extra inspiration by Daiso, a discount store where everything is 100 yen (US$1), in the form of an impressive variety of Halloween lashes featuring cobwebs, haunted houses, and swirly stars. Early wearers of these accessories have been praising them for their high quality (but really, would you expect any less from Daiso?). Let’s take a closer look at these outrageous falsies!

Fashion-conscious Halloween fans in Japan have been flocking to Daiso to snap up the inexpensive accessories, and of course, everything lands up on Twitter, so we’ve been treated to up-close views of each product:

▼ There are two styles: Long, colorful lashes and black Halloween-shaped ones.

もう直ぐ10月ですねー！
いろんなお店がハロウィン仕様になってきて
テンション上がりますね！！！！

そんな中、今日ダイソーさんで発見した
ハロウィン限定つけまつげ！！！
100円でこのクオリティさすがです👏

皆さんも是非笑 http://t.co/m00x12fABj—
れやさんのお化粧記録垢 (@382Xari) September 26, 2014

▼ They also have halloween nails, but the lashes are where it’s at.

▼ That horror house pattern looks horrifying to wear.

ふふふハロウィンつけまつげかった http://t.co/F5XTxftw1f—
ロンたん紅楼夢売り子 (@1341S98) October 01, 2014

And even though Halloween is still nearly a month away, makeup fans in Japan have been trying out the new look. First up, the jagged black ones featuring Halloween shapes:

ダイソーのハロウィンつけま
いい仕事してる。 http://t.co/e2Jj6JRO2R—
どんぐり (@Nanairo1905) October 01, 2014

The colored ones aren’t as extreme, but still make a big statement:

100均のハロウィンつけまが気持ち悪かった http://t.co/JX78h2wKsK—
ぺてぃぐりーちゃぬ@花粉症ディオ下さい (@chanunikki025) September 27, 2014

Japanese Twitter users are getting inspired by these over-the-top lashes.

▼ Here’s an illustration featuring the cobweb falsies.

▼ This year’s Halloween costume?

Twitter (nemuru_muru)

Does anyone else think these eyelashes look more than a little uncomfortable, like having a bug balanced on your eyelid? Folks in Japan, will you be rushing out to your nearest Daiso to try out this inexpensive fashion fix? If so, show us the photos!

Source: Naver Matome

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Origin: Halloween lashes from the 100 yen store will add a bit of spook to your eyes
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The sandwich is named after the 4th Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, who is reputed to have invented it as a convenient way to eat while playing cards. He didn’t come up with the idea of putting meat or filling between two slices of bread, but he certainly popularised it and gave it his title.

According to the QI* elves on the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast, the Earl would have preferred to be the Earl of Portsmouth, but someone else got that title first. If he had got his wish, we might be eating portsmouths rather than sandwiches.

Do you know of any other interesting stories attached to foodstuffs, items of clothing or other things named after famous people?

*QI (Quite Interesting) is a quiz show on BBC TV.

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