firehose

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Alfred Morris can't be stopped (en route to Chick-fil-A)

We already went over how Mike Shanahan's last day as the Redskins' coach was a paranoia-filled weirdness spectacular featuring the Redskins forcing media away from windows so they couldn't see what was going on outside.

But perhaps the best part is Alfred Morris' passion for Chick-fil-A:

Skins make media peer thru pull-down curtains, Shanny calls franchise NFL's "best," Alfred Morris can't talk bc he's gotta hit Chick-fil-A..

— Kent Babb (@kentbabb) December 30, 2013

But, Alfred, why the hurry? Surely you could stop to talk to the media on your way to Chick-fil-A, right?

No, Alfred was being wise:

Another Shanahan draft pick, running back Alfred Morris, also declined to speak Monday morning, saying he needed to leave immediately if he was to make it to Chick-fil-A before it stopped serving breakfast.

This is right up there with Rob Ryan's YOLO moment when he quit the Rams and immediately went to McDonald's without saying anything to anybody. Of course, it's possible Morris was really just using fast food as an excuse to ditch an awkward conversation about his coach getting axed, but we prefer to believe in his jones.

Nachos, not bullets.

Management at the recently opened Woodbridge, Virginia, location of country superstar Toby Keith's I Love This Bar & Grill tacked a piece of paper reading "NO GUNS PERMITTED" on its front door, which has — perhaps predictably — blown up into a big news story, deeply polarizing all kinds of people who will never ever eat at Toby Keith's I Love This Bar & Grill: For every Facebook post lauding the bar's "family friendly" decision, there's a somberly worded protest note invoking the Constitution. "Since you folks dislike the right to bear arms," one reads, "I will DEFINITELY not be going to your restaurant."

Like many other places, it's legal in Virginia to carry registered and permitted firearms, but ingesting alcohol and carrying guns at the same time is not. In Woodbridge, local laws allow business owners to set house policies.

Management says the ban is only in place for the purposes of insurance, not as any affront to personal freedom or as a political message, and the restaurant seemingly wants to get back to serving jumbo portions of nachos topped with three kinds of meat and all the fixins'. "While we understand and respect every person's right to own and bear arms," it explains, "we at Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill, with guidance from the State of Virginia and based on insurance regulations, have adopted a no weapons policy. It is our desire to provided a safe, enjoyable and entertaining experience for our patrons and staff." Woodbridge residents opposed to the policy, in the meantime, may do better to travel an hour north to Leesburg, where jambalaya is 10 percent off on Wednesdays for anyone who brandishes their Saturday Night Special.

Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill [Facebook]
No firearms policy at Toby Keith restaurant draws ire of gun rights advocates [Fox News]
Earlier: 10 More Discounts the Cajun Experience Can Give Its Gun-Toting Customers

Read more posts by Belle Cushing

Filed Under: leave virginia alone, guns, i love this bar and grill, open carry, toby keith, virginia

For five hard but rewarding years, Fallon Fox worked toward her destiny of going pro as an MMA fighter — and no one knew she'd once been a man. But then she was outed as transgender, and soon her opponents were playing “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” before she entered the arena.

Rene Ritchie tweeted:

It’s impossible for me to put into words how horrific the revelations about privacy violations have been this year.

If the Internet Age began in 1995 or so, then the Surveillance Age began in 2001. We didn’t feel the weight of it until 2013. But the run-up to now wasn’t just the NSA: it was also Twitter, Facebook, and Google wanting to know where you are, where you were, where you’re going — and who your friends are and what you’re thinking and talking about.

(Public/private partnerships are usually willing — see the defense and prison industries, and RSA — but whether they’re willing or not doesn’t really matter.)

* * *

If you wanted to create a modern total state you might concentrate on 1) constant war and preparation for war, 2) imprisonment of absurd numbers of young men, and 3) learning everything you can about what everybody everywhere is saying, doing, and thinking.

(For good measure you might also work to eliminate the ability of workers to organize and earn a living wage. You might block immigration reform — and demonize people from other countries — in order for corporations to retain super-cheap labor from people who can’t object. You might curtail voting rights, particularly for the less-than-privileged.)

The third thing — total surveillance — used to be difficult. Now it’s a piece of cake.

* * *

One way of looking at Google Glass: now the surveillance state can see through your eyes. Even when you blink.

* * *

The difference between the Internet Age and the Surveillance Age is that in the Internet Age you could choose what you shared. (Mostly.) Now all that is left is the illusion of choice.

I want to say that we gave it all away for cat pictures — because it feels like a mean thing to say, and thinking about this puts me in a mean mood. But that’s reductive and unfair.

Instead, we quite rightly love what the internet makes possible. We love when our calendars sync, we love having our photos in the cloud, and, most of all, we love talking with our friends.

And when I’m not writing blog posts I’m working on cloud software to sync your personal notes. I love this stuff too, same as everybody else.

If I believed that the internet has been subsumed by the surveillance state and there is no hope of turning it back, I’d have to check out of the internet. If I believed that the internet as a force for good has been entirely smothered by the fog of surveillance, I’d quit.

But I don’t believe that.

I think it’s immoral to believe that, because it means giving up when the stakes are high.

* * *

Here’s why I don’t believe it:

Fuck these guys.

I’ve spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep Google’s users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google faces… But after spending all that time helping in my tiny way to protect Google — one of the greatest things to arise from the internet — seeing this, well, it’s just a little like coming home from War with Sauron, destroying the One Ring, only to discover the NSA is on the front porch of the Shire chopping down the Party Tree and outsourcing all the hobbit farmers with half-orcs and whips.

That was a Google engineer angry over the NSA’s interception of Google traffic.

I’m not one of those people who suggest there are technological solutions to every problem. But the internet is technology, and it can adapt to new threats by using new technology.

But at the core it’s a people problem. People have to care enough to fight back. Google’s motto, its exhortation against evil, hasn’t changed — but in my mind Google is now the Fuck these guys company.

And I love that. It gives me hope.

(Obviously this isn’t the only bright light in the fight against surveillance. You can find plenty more. And it’s imperfect, because Google itself still knows way too much. But I accept that there is and always will be messiness. One step at a time.)

* * *

Carl Sandburg:

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

My hope — my expectation, even — for 2014 is that the fog starts to lift.

* * *

As much as I like using the fog metaphor, the thing about surveillance is that there is no actual fog. You can’t see it. It’s everywhere and gets in everything, and it still looks like a sunny day on the internet.

But still.

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If that's true (and television angles can create false illusions unless the camera is lined up directly on the yard line in question), and the pass went backward, it should have been ruled a lateral and a 7-yard run by Decker. More importantly, it would have knocked 7 yards off of Manning's yardage total of 5,477 for the season, which is just ahead of Brees' old record of 5,476.

A poll out Monday shows that less than half – 43 percent – of those who identify with the Republican Party say they believe humans have evolved over time, plunging from 54 percent four years ago. Forty-eight percent say they believe “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” up from 39 percent in 2009. At 67 percent and 65 percent, respectively, the numbers of Democrats and independents who believe in evolution have remained more or less the same since 2009. They’re also in step with the population nationally: Six-in-10 Americans say they believe humans have evolved. The gaping partisan disparity remains, the analysis states, even when accounting for “differences in the racial and ethnic composition of Democrats and Republicans or differences in their levels of religious commitment.” But the dip from 2009 is a telling indicator of the growing influence in the GOP of the oft-yoked tea party-type ideologues and the “religious right.”

It’s hard to imagine a moon perhaps the size of Titan — around 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across — getting torn apart. But it can happen, and the cause of it all is called tidal disruption. Terry Hurford is a planetary scientist at Goddard who studies tidal disruption as it relates to Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Gravitational tides alternately stretch and compress those bodies, causing cracking at the surface and interior heating. On Europa, the degree of distortion is about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in extent. It’s not as clear about Enceladus, but Hurtford roughly estimates it could be around 500 meters. But if a moon strays too close to its planet, the tides can stretch it to the breaking point. The threshold is known as the Roche limit. Once a satellite gets within that distance to its planet, the planet’s gravity is in charge and the moon literally can’t hold itself together.

Coach Pete Carroll revealed Monday that Harvin will return to practice this week, with the goal of playing in the Seahawks' next game.

tupacabra:

i don’t need a personal trainer i need a personal kanye

tavrissexual:

calm your shit barbie not everyone has white privilege like you do

paintdeath:

deep

Resolutions

To the female, mood-disturbed, toxic-personality, shit head abuser of Multco Library books (to wit, Dr. Amen's, Unleash the Power of the Female Brain UPC code 3-1168-11069-1332): you razor-bladed over 31 pages, several sections, out of our, MY book, probably sometime in Oct, Nov, Dec this year. May your razor blade slip, badly; may you NEVER get a personality, NEVER get a healthy brain, NEVER have friends, NEVER feel good, NEVER enjoy your work, NEVER have a decent night's sleep, ever, you waste-of-space, stupid, ghastly, selfish bitch.

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	Courtney shared this story from Offbeat Home:
	This is a great idea.

---

New Year's Eve fast approaches. Here's an awesome suggestion for a party drinking solution.

At our annual Yuletide party we serve a big bowl of non-alcoholic punch (ginger ale, pineapple juice, cranberry juice, and frozen cranberries) with a big bottle of vodka next to it.

That way those who want boozey punch can make their own punch boozey and those who don't have a delicious refreshment available sans alcohol.

How do you make sure YOUR guests don't get too wastey-faced? Or strike a balance between the drinkers and the non-drinkers?

Recent Comments

• justanothersciencenerd: Great idea! One of my friends did this with a bottle of spiced rum next to a pot of … [Link]
• Megan Finley: I did this for the first time at our last Shark Attackiversary party, because I had some people in AA … [Link]
• Aubrey: This is what we did for our wedding too. There were a lot of kids, so we served lemonade and … [Link]
• Jill: Our parties are always BYOB. At New Year's, I buy bubbly to share with those who want it, but on … [Link]

Join the discussion

	Courtney shared this story from The ToastThe Toast:
	" imagine just for a moment if the face of celebrity lesbianism in the mid-90s had not been Ellen and Anne (oh, Anne) but motherfucking Alice Walker and Tracy goddamn Chapman."

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Previously in Literary Trysts It Gives Me Great Joy To Think About: Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman totally did it.

There are precious few things in life worth knowing; the fact that celebrated American novelist Alice Walker and legendary folk singer Tracy Chapman had a romantic relationship in the middle of the 1990s is one of them. What. Yes. Hi. What. No. Yes. In a way, somehow I think I have always known. For a period of several years, the woman who wrote “Fast Car” and the woman who wrote The Color Purple regularly held hands and made out and arranged their dinner plans together, because we live in a world of great joy that delights in presenting the sorry, tired masses of humanity with improbable, perfect combinations.

This is the sort of fact that is not nearly as widely known as it ought to be. Tracy Chapman, it is true, in addition to looking like the lady fox from Robin Hood come to grinning, blushing life, is also a reserved and private sort of person, who does not go about regularly trumpeting the fact that she has known a Pulitzer prizewinner biblically, but it is nonetheless true and we ought to wake our own romantic partners up with a reminder of it every day. “Wake up, my love,” the partnered among us should whisper with every dawn. “Remember that Tracy Chapman and Alice Walker were once united in love and companionship and did the Jumble together on weekends.”

Right now a tumult of questions and feelings are fighting for ascendency within the labyrinth of your confused bowels; allow them to have it out. At some point in human history Alice Walker asked Tracy Chapman out on a date, and then they went steady. If they gave letterman jackets along with the Pulitzer (and I have no reason to believe they do not), Tracy would have worn Alice’s all through the winter of ’96.

“Where’s Tracy?” people who knew her would have asked at the time. “Where’s Tracy Chapman, who has the voice of the whole earth in her throat?”

“Tracy’s with Alice,” people who knew would reply. “Tracy’s with Alice Walker, who has written great and glorious words and has an intellect and a spirit of white-hot and dancing fire, her girlfriend, and they are eating frozen yogurt together.”

From an interview in The Guardian a few years ago:

I tell her people are still fascinated by her love affair with the singer Tracy Chapman in the mid-1990s. Moments earlier she had said firmly but politely that she didn’t want to answer any questions about her family life. (Her daughter Rebecca, from her marriage to Levanthal, published a frank memoir in 2000 in which she criticised the self-absorption of both parents after their divorce.) So I was surprised to see her face light up at the mention of Chapman. “Yeah I loved it too. Absolutely.”

Why was it kept so quiet at the time? “It was quiet to you maybe but that’s because you didn’t live in our area,” she answers with a throaty laugh. She has written about the relationship in her journals, which she plans to publish one day. So why did they decide against using their relationship to make a big social impact like other celebrity lesbian couples, such as Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, have in the past?

Laughing throatily, Alice Walker put down her giant ostrich quill and closed her Relationship Journal — the cover was a color of jewels that hadn’t been discovered yet — and closed her eyes. Her throat laughed some more. “Someday I will publish this,” she announced to her lovers’ reminiscences stenographer. He clapped, also with his throat. It sounded like a flock of flamingos taking to the sky all at once. 

She — they — were right to do it, of course, but imagine just for a moment if the face of celebrity lesbianism in the mid-90s had not been Ellen and Anne (oh, Anne) but motherfucking Alice Walker and Tracy goddamn Chapman. Imagine the men’s hats; imagine the tortoiseshell glasses; imagine the poetry readings and the matching, understated silver jewelry. It would have been a glorious world. I would have lived in it gladly and with my whole heart.

The idea seems to amuse her. “I would never do that. My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean? And it was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody’s business but ours.”

“Our love is our own business, Tracy Chapman,” Alice Walker — the woman who invented Shug and Celie with her own brain — said quietly one evening in 1995, after they had finished wrapping one another in linen and reading Rilke aloud in their Hummingbird Maze. “It is the business of none but Alice Walker and Tracy Chapman.”

Tracy only gave her a smile, but there was a world within it.

“Tracy Chapman,” Alice Walker said, “Let us go and have dinner together, and hold hands, for we are in love. Let us go out and get muffalettas, and then let us return home again and make transcendent love the likes of which even the dead cannot ignore, and then you can accompany me while I receive the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts.”

Tracy nodded. “Let us do so. Let us take a fast car,” for Tracy could not resist the occasional topical joke. And Alice smiled, to see Tracy so pleased with herself. “Let us go get muffalettas.”

And they did.

Read more Literary Trysts It Gives Me Great Joy To Think About: Tracy Chapman and Alice Walker Used To Go Out (With Each Other) at The Toast.

gdfalksen:

Bavarian Charivari

A traditional hunter’s trophy called “charivari,” the silver ornaments worn with lederhosen in southern Germany and Austria.

Made with a silver standard no longer used in Germany, so most likely dates to the first half of 20th century or earlier. Made of real marten (wild weasel) jaw in fine silver 835 mount.

booooooom:

Stunning soft pastel drawings of Greenland by artist Zaria Forman. See the drawings here.

(via Petfinder Adoptable | Cat | Domestic Short Hair | Boston, MA | PICKLES)

oh pickles you a big boy yes you are

Pickles, AKA Catosaurus Rex is an absolute one-of-a-kind! He is a 3 year old, neutered male cat who was originally found abandoned in a cat carrier on the side of the road. Despite his tough start, he is just about the nicest kitty in the world. He especially loved giving hugs! He likes to be held and hugged and cuddled and would be happiest in a home with someone who enjoys the same. He loves to sleep in the bed! He is very cooperative for nail trimming! In case you hadn’t noticed, Pickles’ amazing personality isn’t the only amazing thing about him… he’s HUGE! He currently weighs about 20lbs. He is also FIV+. Cats with FIV can live a normal lifespan. Feel free to ask the adoption center staff for more information. If you think Pickles might be the right cat for you, email or come in to the adoption center to meet him!

The Pogues' Shane MacGowan is seeking a dentist to fix his famously bad teeth. In exchange, he has offered to appear in advertising for the dentist. "Shane is keen to find a dentist, so he can start in Hollywood film," MacGowan's girlfriend, Victoria Mary Clarke, posted to Twitter. MacGowan had dentures but apparently prefers not to wear them. (NME)

Science Continues for Trapped Australasian Antarctic Expedition:

erictrautmann:

For anyone wondering what I actually do on Greg Rucka’s and Michael Lark’s Lazarus comic series (published by Image comics, go buy consume thanks): 

In addition to some fairly basic layout chores on the letter column, I’m designing a lot of the computer-screen “interface” things. Because I’m nuts, I actually developed a working model of how the UI works on Carlyle corporate/military systems, and then altered it into a more consumer-friendly “shell” for The Post. 

Because I’m not at all obsessive. 

I’ve also been doing designs of the various Family “crests” and heraldry. (Michael did Carlyle, for the record, and thanks buddy for setting the bar so goddamn high.) 

As these Families are, in most cases, also business concerns, the heraldry ends up being derived from corporate logos. 

So, if one Family started out as a 19th century Australian mining concern, I end up having to design what that kind of advertising looked like, and how elements of it evolved into a more normal “logo” into the 1930s, then how it morphed further on into the 1970s, and ’80s, and then a 2005 “rebranding” effort, before finally distilling it down to a military-style insigne in the grim Lazarus future. Each crest ends up being designed based on four or five other designs no one is likely to see. 

Because I am not at all obsessive. 

It’s nice to work some of that stuff into the book, though—the “Retinac” advert in the back of issue 5 let me play with the Hock—sorry, HOCK (their internal branding info demands that it always be rendered in all-caps)—logo, which will in time be shown blended with the Bittner family insignia… 

One of the weird parts, though, is about how spot-on some of this stuff is. The side effects for the fake visual acuity drug? Taken from actual drug side effects in a visual acuity med on shelves today. 

This morning, a radio ad for a financial services company used a tagline almost verbatim from the creepy fake ad for issue 6.

From my e-mail to Greg about it: “THE WORLD IS AN ENDLESS ARMY OF SOULBLIGHTED LIZARD PEOPLE.” The creative process, ladies and gentlemen.

Seriously, though: if you think the world of Lazarus is awful and dark and bleak? You already live in it, gang. 

From the Mighty @mercuryeric.

The Carragher ad for Lazarus 6 is frikkin’ amazing….

Yoko Ono