Cary

Just spray every two weeks to keep pussy contented and playful. 

via

(Image credit: Casey Barber)

It's a sad, sad tale, and one that's no doubt caused a few New Year's tears over the years — being saddled with an allergy to Champagne and feeling a little left out during the Auld Lang Syne toast.

That's the case for one of my very dear friends, with whom we've been ringing in the New Year for the past decade. While he's content to raise a bottle of Sam Adams in lieu of a Champagne flute, this year I've decided to give him something special and bubbly that mimics the festive feel of a sparkling wine without the pounding headaches. (Spoiler alert: It involves beer!)

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A shameful demonstration during the funeral of Rafael Ramos, one of the NYPD who were killed last week. Some comments follow..

1. If the police want to protest, when they are off-duty and out of uniform, I say go for it. This is America, where everyone is entitled to speak their minds.

2. However, when they are in uniform, and carrying a badge and a gun, they are not entitled to speak as individuals. They are members of the NYPD, and they must respect the chain of command, which includes the elected leader of the city, the mayor.

3. There are good reasons for this. When you depend on the police to keep the peace, you want to know that they will protect everyone equally, without regard for their political opinion. If I were to be arrested and I was wearing a button that said "God bless Mayor De Blasio" or "The police are assholes," both of which are protected speech, how confident could I be that the police would treat me the same as someone wearing buttons more sympathetic to their cause.

4. What about cops that are assigned to protect the mayor? Have they said if and when they will turn their backs on the mayor if someone tries to harm him?

5. If it were allowed to persist, then I would want my own police force to protect me from the ones who have political opinions different from my own. I believe it used to be this way before we decided it would be better to have one apolitical police force.

6. All this because the people we employ as police couldn't be professional in a time of great emotion. Maybe they did it impulsively. Maybe they'll come to their senses.

7. Not that it matters, but what exactly did the mayor do or say to so upset them? Perhaps he empathized with citizens who feared that NYPD wasn't up to the job, or worse, they simply murder citizens and expect impunity. The latter is what it looks like to me. The video of Eric Garner's death recorded a murder. His death was ruled a homicide by the coroner. This was worse than the murder of the two police officers, because it was done in the name of justice, and because there is no penalty for the murderers, so no disincentive to do it again. Garner was unarmed, and no threat to anyone.

8. There will be more marches in the city. There was a hiatus, possibly out of respect for the grieving police (the mayor did ask that there be no demonstrations) or perhaps it was the Christmas holiday. But especially since the police made such a clear political statement at the funeral of Ramos, and because they outrageously blame the demonstrators for the deaths of the officers there are certain to be marches to emphasize that police killing citizens without recourse is still unacceptable.

9. Who will police those marches? Will any of the police be cops who turned their back on the mayor? We're supposed to trust them? What if they decide to have a political demo of their own while the citizens are marching? What then? We live in a police state as long as the police feel they can try to control political expression. Perhaps we always have lived in a police state in NYC, but now it's become evident because we have better communication tools. Whatever it is, if the police thought through the consequences of their disrespect for the mayor, then they are playing a very ugly and dangerous game with our freedom and our lives.

This bi-colored northern cardinal has female plumage on its right, and male plumage on its left. Called a "gynandromorphs," these animals are rare in nature. Rarer still is the chance to study one for extended periods of time — but researchers recently had such a chance with the bird you see here.

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The black swallower, Chiasmodon niger, is a species of deep sea fish in the family Chiasmodontidae, notable for its ability to swallow fish larger than itself.

doyoulikevintage:

1947 Timbs

The Snake River and canyon near Twin Falls, Idaho 

The first hijab wearing news anchor on American television.

the left side of our plane
watched the sunset
a slash of pink as long
as everything
while i leaned my head
against the right side window
above a chain
of snowy mountains.
and the day is gone,
the decadent feel of ice
melting in my mouth
and everything hiding just beneath
the sound of the engines
carrying us through time.
the beginning is like the end
the wheels unfold like wings
the cities are thousands of gold bulbs
the windows are painted with rain
slipping from sleep
like someone i was kissing
and upon the ground again.

Sure they seem like a great idea to keep your kids in line, but these creepy dolls have an evil and mischievous side

The post Fun Times With The Elf On The Shelf appeared first on Strange Beaver.

The exterior of the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan (photo by Linda/Flickr)

The Edsel and Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan, a wealthy suburb north of Detroit, sold a Paul Cézanne painting for $100 million last year, the historic home’s 2013 tax forms recently revealed. According to the Detroit Free Press, the large landscape painting “La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue du bosquet du Château Noir” (circa 1904) was sold privately to an anonymous buyer who had had made two previous unsolicited bids to acquire the work. Money from the sale will go toward establishing a new endowment devoted to funding conservation and restoration projects at the property.

“This was really a once-in-a-lifetime offer,” Kathleen Mullins, the president of the Ford House, told the Free Press. “The family thought it was a way to guarantee the estate would be taken care of the way Eleanor would have wanted.” The Ford House has been open to the public since 1978, two years after Eleanor Ford’s death, and receives some 60,000 visitors annually.

The Ford House already has an $86-million endowment that covers nearly all of its $3.8-million annual operating costs. The endowment created with funds from the Cézanne sale is expected to generate between $4.5–5 million annually for restoration and conservation work.

Though deaccessioning is a very frowned-upon practice at US museums, especially when the resulting funds are used for purposes than other acquisitions — see the recent drama at the Delaware Art Museum — the rules for historic homes are different. The guidelines of both the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the American Association of State and Local History (AASLH) allow for the use of funds from the sale of deaccessioned works in order to acquire other works, or to care for the existing collections. In the case of the Ford House, the collection, broadly defined, includes the 30,000-square-foot home, the furnishings and art it contains, the 86-acre estate surrounding it, and the historic car collection.

“From the standpoint of ethical standards, I think they went about this in the right way and worked hard to make sure the money won’t be used inappropriately by setting up a separate endowment,” Ford Bell, the president of the AAM, told the Free Press.

The discreet handling of the sale, through the Ford House’s seven-person board — on which sit six members of the Ford family and their attorney — was partly done out of consideration for the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), which at the time was fighting the proposed sale of its collection to help settle the city of Detroit’s debts. Now that DIA’s collection has been safeguarded, news of the Ford House’s huge sale doesn’t run the risk of emboldening Detroit’s creditors.

“I am very glad the Ford House proceeded with such caution,” DIA’s director, Graham Beal, told the Free Press.

Among the projects that the new endowment will help fund are the restoration of Jens Jensen’s landscape designs, restoring the house’s staff wing so that tours may visit it, and rebuilding lost structures like the boathouse and pergola.

Meanwhile, a replica of Cézanne’s “La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue du bosquet du Château Noir” will take the place of the original. Much of the Fords’s art collection was donated to the DIA, though originals by Diego Rivera and Henri Matisse remain at the house.

The $100-million sale of “La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue du bosquet du Château Noir” marks the second-highest price ever paid for a Cézanne. In 2011 the nation of Qatar spent $259 million to acquire his painting “The Card Players” (1892–93), which remains the most expensive artwork ever sold. The French painter’s auction record is the comparatively modest sum of $60.5 million that was spent at Sotheby’s in 1999 on the bright still life “Rideau, cruchon et compôtier” (1893–94).

Michelangelo, “The Creation of Adam” (circa 1512) (all images via Tumblr)

When most people are bored at work, they surf Facebook. Not so with Francesco Fragomeni and Chris Limbrick, two employees at the website creation startup Squarespace. On a particularly slow day at the company’s Midtown Manhattan office last month, they funneled their creative energy into a photographic homage to Michelangelo’s fresco “The Creation of Adam.”

Pleased with the wonderfully awkward result, they have embarked on a series of photographs taken with a cell phone and dubbed Fools Do Art. Using props found around the office and allegedly only working during breaks from their actual work, Fragomeni, Limbrick, and their fellow employees are taking on the masters of the Western canon. From Rembrandt to Frida Kahlo, no artist is too sacred to escape their tribute.

Rembrandt, “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” (circa 1632)

Leonardo da Vinci, “Mona Lisa” (1503–06)

Johannes Vermeer, “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (1665)

Elisabetta Sirani, “Timoclea uccide il capitano di Alessandro Magno” (1659)

Jan van Eyck, “Portrait of a Man in a Turban” (1433)

Unknown, “The Lady and the Unicorn: Sight” (circa 1500)

Hans Memling, “Tommaso di Folco Portinari” (1470)

René Magritte, “The Son of Man” (1964)

Andrew Wyeth, “Christina’s World” (1948)

Frida Kahlo, “Thinking About Death” (1943)

Edgar Degas, “Two Ballet Dancers” (circa 1879)

Walt Otto, “Blonde Beauty” (circa 1950s)

Jacques-Louis David, “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” (1801–05)

h/t Demilked

[unedited / video]

According to sources speaking with the Daily News, the cop who shot Akai Gurley in an East New York stairwell decided to text his union rep instead of helping the dying man.

After the rookie officer entered a darkened stairwell in the Louis H. Pink Houses with his gun drawn, the officers have said there was an accidental discharge, a ricocheting bullet hit Gurley, 28, in the chest. Gurley’s female companion ran for help and called 9/11. Because the two officers were known to be in the area, dispatch tried to contact them to respond. For six and a half minutes they were out of communication before finally making a radio call for help.

To make matters worse, the two officers didn’t know the exact address and they had been explicitly instructed not to patrol the stairwells in an exercise known as “verticals.” The head officer of the local housing command, Deputy Inspector Miguel Iglesias, had specified that any officer who enters a building should go no further than the lobby. Insiders say that the shooting could be construed as an accident, but the subsequent response may be considered a criminal liability.

Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson has expressed feeling troubled by the shooting and says there will be “an immediate, fair and thorough investigation.” Thompson is supposed to present evidence to a grand jury “as early as the end of this month.”

(Photo: Brian Blakely)

The post Cop Who Shot Unarmed Brooklyn Man Texted Union Rep Instead Of Helping appeared first on ANIMAL.

tastefullyoffensive:

My typical Friday night.

Took a picture of my neighbor’s cat for work. She is my favorite cat.

We decided that Kitty Hawkins deserved to get the World’s Best Cat Trophy for her general adorableness and special talent as a mouser. 

Doesn’t your cat deserve one too?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H1dRmmAgWE

This video is from the Nov. 10 snow/ice storm. It’s not as good as the original (which is nearing a million views) but still … everyone loves a good car-sliding montage.

The post Presenting the 2014 edition of cars sliding down a Duluth avenue appeared first on Perfect Duluth Day.