firehose

sandandglass:

Graham Norton talks to Monty Python.

Ah, the joy. :)

Snapchat's response to its data breach is more troubling than the breach itself.

The NFL needs to rethink its playoff seeding structure.

We're required to remind you that these strong takes are PARODY. Sorry, not sorry. All spelling errors are intentional, we think. -Ed.

Wildcard weekend is the best weekend in sports history. Better then the olympics, better then the March Madness, better then the coolest war even. We've got games folks all day Saturday and Sunday, and with all this talk about how unfair it is to make the 49ers leave there Priuses and there healthy restaurants and travel into REAL america- Im actually advocating for a different type of reseeding come playoff time. Teams with the best FANS should be awarded by getting to have home playoff games. Heres how wildcard weekend would actually play out:

NFC

1 Seed- Philadelphia Eagles host the

4 Seed- San Francisco 49ers

The Eagles have the best fans in sports handsdown*. Even during the McNabb era there was more vomiting going on in the stands then the field. Alot of people mistake there passion for insantiy but here's a secret: theres no difference on Sundays. Other teams are afraid to come in to Philly because the fans are so creative with their chants. (You'll never believe what word they rhyme with "Romo.") They call it "Lincoln field" because a guy named Jackson is always dropping the ball and it looks like its top is blown off- no offence.

The San Francisco 49ers are known as a bit've a wine and cheese crowd so they should never get to host a playoff game account of theyd spend the whole game showing the out of town guests there energy effecient windows, herb garden inside the redzone, and compost heap where their QB should be. Fitting that fans from San Francisco would spend all day trying to convince someone that a record is actualy better, and wont listen to anything anyone else brings to the table but enough about there music collections. The 9ers would travel to Philly and instead of wine and cheese theyd get treated to Wild Irish Rose and velveeta- in other words theyd get served.

*-handsdown their throats puking onto 12 year olds

2 Seed- New Orleans Saints host the

3 Seed- Green Bay Packers

The Saints franshise has demonstrated exceptional padlevel in cleaning up there act over the past 7 years IMO. Ever since Green Day played that concert in the Super Dome and made all the old Saints fans pack up for Houston, it seems that theyve really gotten there act together. Theyve gone from a franchise who was to busy pinning there dogs ears back to worry about their own IMO. But now their fans are amongst the colorfulest in the league now: Theres the Saints pope, the saints guy with the big hands and yes Ive personally been to a Saints game before. Its a great place to watch a game allthough there were more then one time where I found myself in almost a stand you'r ground situation against the lady taking my concession order but all in all a enjoyable experience.

Packers fans are like your basic Co-op. All the women have hairy legs, you pay a bunch of money to get a part ownership but dont get anything back, and there leader might be a gay guy no offense. I personally dont think Arron Rodger is a homosexual because hes very good at athletics and especially football so he cant be gay in my opinion, thats why. They call Packers fans cheese heads because there hair smells like mold 300 days out of the year and the state motto is "the stinkier the better" is included in all Wisconsin wedding vows and condom instruction booklets. I only put them above the 49ers because if you go to a Packers home game your going to see some REAL fans- stone cold shirtless in -10 degree weather the way God intended us to watch football which at MY living room i crank AC up fullblast and everyone has to take there shirts off during a Lambeau playoff game. Dont like it? theres the door.

AFC

1 Seed- Kansas City Chiefs host the

4 Seed- San Diego Chargers

The Chiefs fans get a bad wrap just because there all overweight, they wear Zubaz to weddings, and they try so hard to be Seahawks fans that people are starting to call them B-eattle. Well I'll tell you one thing about the Chiefs fans- they have this guy:

We only know a couple thing's about this fella; his name is certainly Doug and he is either a magician or a genius (Its Kansas City hes definitely just a magician) on account of he managed to sneak in a tallboy of budlight despite his tiny jorts and a belly shirt. That is a crotchbeer and we all know that the onlything better then a lukewarm budlight on gameday is wiping a couple curly hairs off the can before you take that first sip.

If you live in San Diego odds are you dont know that your city even has a football team because you spend all your time going to the zoo to steal animals to bring with you to a BYOD-show in Tijuana. I under stand that. I really do. However if you want to host a playoff game Im sorry but you have two options- option 1 is to move your team to Pittsburgh so that there fans can take over your franchise- you can even bring your culture with you and have terrible towels that are beach-sized instead of using the hand towels they use in Pittsburgh for there one recreational activity that involves the exact same amount of sun tan lotion. Option number two is comitt to using Danny Woodhead and grow your fanbase organically instead of chemistry experiment Ryan Meth-ews breaking bad towards the sidelines instead of downhill.

2 Seed- Indiana Colts play the

3 Seed- Cincinatti Bengals on a neutral field. Like really neutral. Like in Swisserland somewhere and the game isnt televised

I dont think there are two worst fanbases in the entire NFL no offense to the Arizona Cardinals. Supporting the Benglas is literally like paying taxes to Kim Jong Un except instead of having a team of wild dogs to kill his relatives he hires them to play Cornerback for his football team. Bengals fans could all honestly be convicted of money laundring given the fact that they financially support Pacman Jones and Vonteze Burfict. Look it up, by definition it is illeagal.

Do you know what you call a Bengals fan with a warrent? A Colts fan. Indianpolos is a refugee city of all of Ohios criminals where they get together to vote ridiculously and put leftover Golden Corral sirloin in tupperware with impunity. While the Bengals fans are over a barrel handing money to fund their back 7's drive-by hobbys, the Colts are funding the worlds largest illeagal perscription drug operation in their owners box. The only thing positive I can say about the citys of Cincinatti or Indiana is that they're not at least literally located 100 feet deep in the middle of the water in lake Huron like their citizens dreams are, no offense.

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• Kelly: Watch for these signature plays during Wild Card weekend

• Super Bowl odds for every possible matchup | NFL coaching tracker

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andrewvanbuskirk:

theuppitynegras:

Angelique, were we not just discussing this exact topic yesterday?

San Francisco Chronicle

Rand Paul: James Clapper and Edward Snowden should 'share a prison cell ... Daily Caller Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul claimed it would be “enlightening” for National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden and intelligence director James Clapper to “share a prison cell,” noting “the law has to be applied equally.”. Sen. Rand Paul to File Class-Action Lawsuit over NSA Spyingkvor Senator Rand Paul launches class action law suit challenging constitutionality of ...Daily Mail Sen. Paul says he's suing over NSA policiesHouston Chronicle Wizbang (blog) all 136 news articles »

Roscoe Bartlett—more than once labeled “the oddest congressman”—found himself gerrymandered out of office a year ago and retreated to a remote property in the mountains of West Virginia where he lives with no phone service, no connection to outside power and no municipal plumbing.

The apps are so laden with quirks that I’ve long held a deep-seated fear that perhaps some of my data has not been saved. As of last month, I am all but sure of it.

"The Hippy Bloggers" currently has 75,000 likes. Conrad wants to get that number to a million. By his math, that many likes will put his revenues past $50,000 per month — $600,000 per year.

Kevin Dowell (formerly of Wo Hing General Store, Zero Zero, Rio Grande, Starlight Room, and many other places) has taken over the cocktail program at Mission restaurant and brunch epicenter Foreign Cinema, as well as at the casual bar Laszlo in the front of the building. That means 3 new cocktail menus: One for each venue and a third for brunch drinks. And they all launch tomorrow, January 4. Customers drink a lot of cocktails at both venues, but this venus and its clientele aren't on the cocktail snob circuit, so Dowell has made an effort to keep the drinks in balance between friendliness/ease of use, interestingness, and speediness to execute. Foreign Cinema's dinner menu is split into Originals, Classics, and Friends - those made by people Dowell's worked for. On the first menu he posts cocktails by Joel Teitelbaum, Brooke Arthur, and Scott Baird. Stranglehold Diplomatico Rum, Lime, Orgeat, Rittenhouse Rye, Angostura This drink is a riff on the Trinidad Sour, except it uses 1/2 ounce of Angostura bitters rather than an ounce or more. It has that nice spice from the Ango and added rum to bring up the proof. Lady Grinning Soul Reyka Vodka, Grapefruit Cordial, Lemon,...

[Visit Alcademics.com for the full post.]

Before writing titles like Birds of Prey, Secret Six and Batgirl for DC Comics, Gail Simone had a brief tenure at Marvel, working on Deadpool, the Deadpool-spinoff Agent X and the kid-friendly Gus Beezer one-shots. It’s been more than 10 years since those titles first saw print, but now she’s headed back to the House [...]

theodp writes "After being punished by Google for manipulative SEO tactics, a contrite Rap Genius says it's back in Google's good graces. 'It takes a few days for things to return to normal, but we're officially back!' reads a post by the Rap Genius founders. 'First of all, we owe a big thanks to Google for being fair and transparent and allowing us back onto their results pages. We overstepped, and we deserved to get smacked.' Rap Genius credits some clever trackback scraping programming for its quick redemption, but a skeptic might suggest it probably didn't hurt that Rap Genius' biggest investor, Andreessen Horowitz, is tight with Google."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the Narrative.ly piece, Print Ain’t Dead in NYC, text and photographs by Lawrence Schwartzwald.

Per a tweet, Chris Berman thinks two teams from the AFC are going to face off in the Super Bowl, which is a bold call since, you know, that isn't allowed.

UPDATE: Just a twitter typo:

IT WAS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE RT @xmasape: actually it's on whoever runs the twitter account. he picked KC-SF pic.twitter.com/lZOEPqDJcl

— SB Nation (@sbnation) January 4, 2014

But it was fun to imagine.

You can bet on the odds of every potential Super Bowl matchup between the 12 teams remaining. From Broncos-Seahawks at 9/4 down to Saints-Chargers at 200/1, Vegas has set the likelihood of every potential possibility.

After scanning that list, we think Chris Berman might want to rethink his decision-making:

Sunday Countdown Super Bowl picks: Key - SEA vs KC CC - SEA vs DEN TJ - DEN vs SEA Ray - CIN vs SEA Ditka - DEN vs SEA Boom - NE vs KC

— NFL on ESPN (@ESPNNFL) January 4, 2014

Unlike all of his counterparts, who predict one team from the AFC and one from the NFC will make the Super Bowl, Berman thinks that the Patriots and Chiefs will square off, which is a problem, because they're both in the AFC. We're not sure if this was just a mistweet or if the most unnecessarily prominent football-talky guy actually doesn't know divisions -- hey, Ryan Tannehill didn't either, remember that? -- but the tweet is still up about an hour after every single person called them out on it.

In the TV series Revolution (series 1, episode 6) some of the source code of the Apple II version of Prince of Persia is shown.

kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirk:

gokuma:

squigglydigg:

I THOUGHT IT WAS AN ACTUAL OWL SITING INSIDE A DRAGON FRUIT SKIN UNTIL I READ THE THING AT THE TOP

what the hell

what the hell

negotiation - 70’s Robot Anime GEPPY-X (Aroma - PSX - 1999)

cold fjord writes "Bexar Country in Texas has opened a new $2.3 million library called BiblioTech. It doesn't have physical books, only computers and e-reader tablets. It is the first bookless public library system in the U.S. The library opened in an area without nearby bookstores, and is receiving considerable attention. It has drawn visitors from around the U.S. and overseas that are studying the concept for their own use. It appears that the library will have more than 100,000 visitors by year's end. Going without physical books has been cost effective from an architecture standpoint, since the building doesn't have to support the weight of books and bookshelves. A new, smaller library in a nearby town cost $1 million more than Bexar Country's new library. So far there doesn't appear to be a problem with returning checked out e-readers. A new state law in Texas defines the failure to return library books as theft."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in 2012, when Canada's Harper government announced that it would close down national archive sites around the country, they promised that anything that was discarded or sold would be digitized first. But only an insignificant fraction of the archives got scanned, and much of it was simply sent to landfill or burned.

Unsurprisingly, given the Canadian Conservatives' war on the environment, the worst-faring archives were those that related to climate research. The legendary environmental research resources of the St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick are gone. The Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John's, Newfoundland: gone. Both collections were world-class.

An irreplaceable, 50-volume collection of logs from HMS Challenger's 19th century expedition went to the landfill, taking with them the crucial observations of marine life, fish stocks and fisheries of the age. Update: a copy of these logs survives overseas.

The destruction of these publicly owned collections was undertaken in haste. No records were kept of what was thrown away, what was sold, and what was simply lost. Some of the books were burned.

Hutchings saw the library closures fitting a larger pattern of "fear and insecurity" within the Harper government, "about how to deal with science and knowledge."

That pattern includes the gutting of the Fisheries Act, the muzzling of scientists, the abandonment of climate change research and the dismantling of countless research programs, including the world famous Experimental Lakes Area. All these examples indicate that the Harper government strongly regards environmental science as a threat to unfettered resource exploitation.

"There is a group of people who don't know how to deal with science and evidence. They see it as a problem and the best way to deal with it is to cut it off at the knees and make it ineffective," explained Hutchings.

"The other worrying thing is that no one seems to care a great deal about it. There is minimal political cost for doing these things just as there is no political cost to making bad decisions about ocean management."

Many scientists, including Hutchings and world famous water ecologist David Schindler, compared the government's concerted attacks on environmental science to the rise of fascism and the total alignment of state and corporate interests in 1930s Europe.

"You look at the rise of certain political parties in the 1930s," noted Hutchings, "and have to ask how could that happen and how did they adopt such extreme ideologies so quickly, and how could that happen in a democracy today?"

What's Driving Chaotic Dismantling of Canada's Science Libraries? [Andrew Nikiforuk/The Tyee]

(Image: Book burning, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ender's photostream)

Fighting erupted in the Ramadi area on Monday, when security forces broke up an anti-government protest camp. The violence then spread to Fallujah, and a subsequent withdrawal of security forces from areas of both cities cleared the way for militants to move in.

A small airplane bound for LaGuardia Airport made a miraculous emergency landing on the Major Deegan Expressway Saturday, first responders said.

hydrogeneportfolio:

Minimal Posters - Six Women Who Changed Science. And The World.

Yeah yeaaa, lemme go back in time and put these posters on my wall when I was 10!

Thanks sethasfishman for showing me this!

fencehopping:

Bull terrier puppy vs. crab

malformalady:

Ice washed up on a black sand beach Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon, Iceland

Photo credit: Mel Sinclair

eternal reblog

Challenging popular beliefs, a report by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that adults were actually far more likely to text or talk on the phone while driving than teenagers.

At the end of the day even the combined military might of the United States could not stand up to the relentless onslaught of cute, adorable sea otters. What on earth am I talking about? Just a few paragraphs in a 1,100 page bill. On June 14 the House passed their version of the National […]