firehose

amoying:

i know a shade of lipstick that would look AMAZING on you

Catholic Truth Society

Little Planets, Clement Celma

The Verge

Government health care IT official leaves USA TODAY WASHINGTON — The government's top health technology guru has stepped down from his role leading the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services through the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. When asked if Tony Trenkle, chief information ... 'A Miserable 5 Weeks,' a Resignation and Other HealthCare.gov NewsNextgov IT Chief Overseeing Obamacare RetiresWTMA Did we just witness our first firing over Healthcare.gov?Washington Post (blog) all 48 news articles »

I had a slight advantage over the other kids in my junior high Louisiana history class: Two of my great-aunts, Sue Eakin and Manie Culbertson, wrote our textbook, Louisiana: The Land and Its People. I was the only person in my class (and probably the only kid in the entire state) whose textbook was inscribed by its authors. Of course, this wasn’t something you brag about in junior high, and I knew it probably wasn’t wise to tell my teacher that my aunts first gave me their book when I was in the fourth grade, lest he think I had somehow already memorized the whole thing.

Sue, Manie, and my grandmother Joanne, members of the sprawling Lyles family, were all history teachers. Along with their nine brothers and sisters (including three who were lost in childhood), they were born in Cheneyville, Louisiana and raised in nearby Loyd Bridge on the banks of Bayou Boeuf, in a place named, ironically enough, Compromise Plantation. Their father- my great-grandfather and a man I’ve only known through family folklore as “Daddy Sam”- farmed cotton, 800 acres of land that he leased and subleased to African-American sharecroppers. Truth be told, Daddy Sam was also, in the strictest sense of the term, a “sharecropper;” he never owned his land or his home. The “compromise” was complicated. I mention all of this for a reason.

When I was in the fourth grade, along with my autographed textbook, Aunt Sue also gave me the first of many copies of the book 12 Years a Slave, and perhaps knowing that it was heavy reading for an elementary school student, she spoiled it and told me the story in her own words. Sue, a history professor, spent most of her career researching and editing 12 Years a Slave. Her name appears in bold block letters at the top of the book’s cover; the author’s name, Solomon Northup, appears in bolder letters below.

Sue loved telling Solomon Northup’s story. She knew it was riveting and important, and after first encountering the book when she was only twelve years old, she spent the next seventy-eight years of her life chasing it down. Sue’s children affectionately refer to Solomon as their “brother,” which seems appropriate. After all, they grew up with him.

Today, because of Steve McQueen’s film adaptation, the world is finally rediscovering Solomon Northup’s story. I’d been hesitant to write about the movie 12 Years a Slave until I actually saw it, but it hasn’t been easy. The reviews have seemed, at times, too good to be true. And although I didn’t grow up with Solomon at the dinner table every night like my cousins in the Eakin family, I’ve nonetheless felt protective over it by proxy. I know what it meant to Aunt Sue: the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of hours that she dedicated, her exceptional compassion for and care-taking of a story that she hoped to rescue from the footnotes of American history.

A few days ago, I saw the movie. At the risk of sounding even more hyperbolic than I already have, the reviews are right: 12 Years a Slave isn’t just the greatest film ever made about American slavery; it is, in many respects, the only film ever made about American slavery. It’s an actual bona fide masterpiece. It’s staggering, blood-curdling, and perfectly, jarringly honest in its depiction of the greatest institutionalized atrocity and criminal conspiracy in our nation’s history.

*****

There’s a reason Aunt Sue was drawn toward Solomon Northup’s story. He spent most of his twelve years in captivity along the shores of the same bayou, Bayou Boeuf, that she and her family considered their home. He picked from the same cotton fields as her father. She knew the children and the grandchildren of the white families who enslaved him and the children and grandchildren of the slaves who toiled alongside him. I try to imagine how she must have felt when, while visiting a neighbor’s home at the age of twelve, she discovered a well-torn copy of Northup’s book and read, for the first time (albeit only briefly), about the terrible things that occurred in her own backyard. It must’ve seemed like a great mystery to her, an unsolved crime, maybe even a betrayal, this old book that told a story everyone around her seemed all too eager to forget. Sue wouldn’t find the book again until she was in college at LSU. Quoting from The Daily Beast:

A few years ago, Aunt Sue told another amazing story about what she experienced after inviting the Southern University choir to perform in Bunkie. Here she is, full-throttled, sharing another incredible story, in her own voice:

The movie 12 Years a Slave, because of its unflinching and unapologetic depiction of the brutalities and cruelties of a not-so-distant past, has understandably provoked a discussion about the lasting legacy of slavery.

*****

Without question, Louisiana and most of the American South have refused to adequately and honestly confront and acknowledge the legacy of slavery. We spend millions of dollars marketing our plantation homes as sleepy, nostalgic, and beautiful destinations for weddings and tour groups, and we spend millions more incentivizing renovations of these homes under the pretense of historic preservation. And maybe that would be okay and understandable, but at the same time, we’re scrubbing all vestiges of slavery from these plantations. With few exceptions, it is almost impossible to find a plantation in Louisiana that preserves its slave quarters with the same diligence and care as it does its main house. And again, with few exceptions, you’ll likely never hear anyone in the Louisiana tourism industry admit that plantations, for the most part, were actually concentration camps. That thousands of African-American families also lived, worked, and died in these places, that hundreds of African-Americans were brutally murdered in these places, that the majestic oak trees in the brochures were once used for lynchings, that right beyond the immaculately manicured gardens there are long-forgotten cemeteries.

No, instead, these are beautiful historic homes on the river or the bayou, the ideal location for a wedding of rich white people whose idea of a good time is to dress up in seersucker suits and summer dresses and imagine themselves to be Southern nobility. I’ve been to a few of these weddings, and it’s been surreal every time.

When I was a kid, another one of my great aunts and another member of the Lyles family, Aunt Betty, owned a plantation on Bayou Boeuf, and I’ll readily admit: I thought it was a magical and mysterious place. But after spending a few weekends there and really exploring the whole property, it also terrified me. Outside of the main house and the cottage Betty built for herself, death was everywhere. Old slave shacks that were collapsing in on themselves, tiny one-room structures that had once housed twenty people. Near the bayou, unmarked headstones older than anything in my hometown that were mildewed and sinking into the ground.

There is no dignity in this. And as much as we may try to gloss it all over, to convince ourselves that we’re justified in presenting and marketing and incentivizing a simulacrum of plantation life, there is also no escaping it: These are concentration camps. We either preserve all of the story or we demolish all of it.

*****

But our misplaced nostalgia for plantations is not the only and certainly not the most important thing that Steve McQueen’s adaptation of 12 Years a Slave should force Louisiana (and, indeed, the entire country) to confront.

Louisiana is the prison capital of the world. Quoting from The Times-Picayune:

The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.

And although nearly 65% of Louisiana is white, the vast and overwhelming majority of prisoners in Louisiana are African-American. In New Orleans, one in seven African-American men are either in prison or on parole or probation.

160 years after Solomon Northup published his book, a black man in Louisiana is more likely to spend his life in prison (and often for the flimsiest reasons) than he would be in any other place in the entire world. A black man in Louisiana is disproportionately more likely to be executed or to end up on death row for the same crime committed by a white man than he would be in any other place in the entire world. Quoting from Vincent Warren, the Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights:

In Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison, home to all men on death row in the state, those sentenced to death spend their final years locked in their cells alone for 23 hours each day. During summer, death row inmates are kept in their cells even though the heat index regularly exceeds 110 degrees. The prison does not provide them with clean ice or cool showers, but it does provide the public with tours of death row and the lethal injection table.

At night, in an effort to keep cool, the men at Angola sleep on the floor where they are exposed to fire ants. When they “misbehave,” they are moved to cells in the hottest tiers. Men have lived up to 28 years on Louisiana’s death row, and most spend at least a decade in these dehumanizing conditions waiting for court appeals to go through. That is their due process.

The problem is systemic, but rather than address the fundamental inequities, the conservative ruling class in Louisiana, led by Governor Bobby Jindal, continues to exacerbate these problems: We create incentives to incarcerate poor, primarily minority people by privatizing prisons. In Louisiana, prison is not about rehabilitation; it’s about profits. We deny $16.1 billion in Medicaid expansion funds and turn the keys of our robust public hospital system over to private corporations- not because it’s good policy, but because it’s good politics. We tie school funding to test scores and politicized teacher evaluations- without ever considering the real and direct connection between performance and poverty, the fact that Louisiana’s lowest-performing schools are those who have more than 80% of their students on the free lunch program. And instead of lifting those schools up, instead of investing in them and in the neighborhoods they serve, we divert that money to churches and unaccountable private schools, not because they actually do better but because they vote Republican.

I don’t know what, exactly, my Aunt Sue would have thought about the film adaptation of 12 Years a Slave provoking a discussion on racial and economic injustices or historical revisionism in contemporary Louisiana. She passed away a few years ago.

But I imagine that she would have relished in the conversation and celebrated the idea that, although Solomon’s story may be 160 years old, it’s still more relevant than ever.

Original Source

goghji:

GPOY

TriMet quarantined a No. 10 bus Tuesday after its driver was diagnosed with Whooping Cough, a serious and highly contagious respiratory infection that is especially deadly in children and older adults. Of course, news of the possible infection of the vehicle didn't come from TriMet, but from a photo posted Tuesday on Twitter. The 3:57 p.m. tweet appeared to be from a TriMet employee going by "Daily Cyclist," who photographed the bus with "caution" tape parked away from other vehicles at Southeast Portland's Center Street garage. Plastic yellow tape crisscrossed the front door of bus 2609. A hand-written sign read, "Do not enter. Infected bus."

Internet sleuths have found Call of Duty: Ghosts and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 share some strikingly similar sequences. Did Infinity Ward reproduce or re-purpose animations and assets from Modern Warfare 2 for Ghosts? It's hard to argue against this side-by-side comparison video.

We've reached out to Activision for comment and will update this post when we hear back.

Call of Duty: Ghosts scene very similar to Modern Warfare 2's ending originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 06 Nov 2013 18:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

When deciding what movie to go see, moviegoers are used to a rating system providing them with a few basic facts. The level of violence in the film, for example, and whether there’s sex or cursing. Now theaters in Swedish cinemas have added something new to their ratings system: Whether the film passes the Bechdel Test.

spider-xan:

Also, I was thinking more about why white women saying they’re boycotting ‘Pacific Rim’ and urge others to do so because it doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test and is therefore Terrible for Women and Feminism bothers me so much even though that’s their right to do so and I wouldn’t tell them not to do it, and now I think I know and can put it into words.

It’s really easy to throw away a film because of that test (which is flawed and used incorrectly in a lot of ways) if you’re a white woman and can easily find other films with white women who look like you and represent you, even if that representation isn’t as good in quantity and quality as white men (and yes, I’m specifying WHITE men and not just ‘men’ for good reason). If ‘Pacific Rim’ does nothing for you, there are plenty of other films that will generally do quite well for white women.

But as an East Asian woman, someone like Mako — a well-written Japanese woman who is informed by her culture without being solely defined by it, without being a racial stereotype, and gets to carry the film and have character development — almost NEVER comes along in mainstream Western media. And honestly — someone like her will probably not appear again for a very long time.

So you’ll understand why I can’t throw her and the entire film away as meaning nothing in terms of representation — because she’s all I really have right now. I can expect and push for better while still appreciating what she means to me. Mako Mori means more to me than the Bechdel Test if I have to compromise (and as a WOC, I have to compromise all the damn time, and no, I don’t like it), even if it would have been nice for the film to pass it as well. And don’t fucking dare accuse me of ‘accepting crumbs’ and how that will ‘bring down all women’.

*facepalm* A boycott? WTF why. What is it exactly that we’re saying we don’t want? Heroines of color with their own stories. PSHAW get that crap out of here.

And apparently I’m going to take this opportunity to flail about the Bechdel Test? OOPS.

1) @sanguinarysanguinity has recently been smartly pointing out (here’s one post; here’s another) how the Bechdel test was never intended to be a test “for feminism,” it was a test initially created by a lesbian in the context of a comic about lesbians, and thus shorthand for determining whether a movie might reflect any hint of a community centered around women.  Everyone should go read her posts, they are very relevant! But basically, she discusses how now lots of discussion tries to twist the Bechdel test into something it was never intended to be.

2) It has often been a useful test for me, as someone who is just by default more interested in media with multiple women who have relationships with each other, but as it becomes more and more some ultimate “test for feminism” and thereby a fairly reductive tool, it is less useful (and again, as sanguinity says in her posts, it was not intended for this use). If Jane and Darcy talk about science for one minute at the beginning of Thor, Thor apparently is a more feminist movie than Pacific Rim? (Not slamming Thor, this is just an example drawn from two movies I’ve recently seen). That’s arbitrary. I think we can discuss lots about the feminist elements/female representation in each, or lack thereof, and I’m not saying we should pit movies against each other, but just that relying only on the Bechdel test is reductive of feminism (and media representation issues).

For example, yes Pacific Rim fails the Bechdel test. Pacific Rim is not perfect. There should be more women! The Russian and Chinese teams should have gotten a lot more to do. Mako and Sasha talking would have indicated that both roles were stronger/more present in the film. There could have been less focus on white dudes. But the above perspective by @spider-xan on Mako is important and should be listened to and considered by all people dismissing the movie in the name of feminism. (It doesn’t mean you have to like the movie! I more than understand someone who wouldn’t, because there aren’t more women or for any other reason. But your perspective =/= universally feminist). She’s a female lead of color who gets her own hero arc, and whose function is not to support or admire a man. Why would we want to send the message that we don’t want that? Why do we think that is automatically not feminist or anti-feminist, because it doesn’t meet this one arbitrary “test for feminism” (women minimally interacting)?

Let’s propose the Mako Mori test, to live alongside the Bechdel test (not to supplant it! My point is not that we shouldn’t care about women interacting—I care about this A LOT—but that isn’t the pinnacle of feminism or the only thing we should care about). The Mako Mori test is passed if the movie has: a) at least one female character; b) who gets her own narrative arc; c) that is not about supporting a man’s story. I think this is about as indicative of “feminism” (that is, minimally indicative, a pretty low bar) as the Bechdel test. It is a pretty basic test for the representation of women, as is the Bechdel test. It does not make a movie automatically feminist. (Many movies/shows would not pass it). 

2) Why are so few people talking about the fact that Pacific Rim DOES pass the Bechdel test as modified for race (two characters of color talk about something other than a white character) with almost flying colors?! Mako and Stacker both have their own arcs, and also have an arc TOGETHER, which gets multiple scenes and is one of the emotional centers of the movie. As far as I know, this is really freaking rare in any sort of mainstream media. And is also feminist, yes? Again, I’m not arguing that this should supplant women interacting, or that the fact that people of color interact means we should be quiet about the movie’s other flaws. Not at all! But the Bechdel test is NOT the be-all, end-all test for feminism. (And, to bring it full circle, as sanguinity says in her posts, it was never meant to be).

3) I will probably continue to use the Bechdel test, though honestly I really only find it useful for my specific purposes when using it among people who apply the same “spirit” of the Bechdel test—multiple women with prominent narrative roles who interact, because I like media that does this—and don’t apply it in the highly technical way it has come to be applied, where any random, short conversation between two women makes a movie/show pass “the feminism test.”

Original Source

Belgian artist Christophe Szpadjel, also known as the Lord of Logos, has recreated the logos of well-known technology companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and more in the style of heavy metal bands for Fast Company Design. You can view more of the redesigned company logos (including The New York Times and Walt Disney) at Fast Company, and browse Szpadjel’s portfolio of over 7,000 metal band logos on his Flickr.

images by Christophe Szpadjel via Fast Company

Filling the vacancy after former tenant Reveille suddenly disappeared from the West End's Blackbox, Imogene + Willie have landed in Portland at 1306 W Burnside. Coincidentally, I first heard of the brand from Reveille's Jess Carson, when he was carrying the cult denim brand. It's an interesting story, as far as brand identities go, with its founders' grandparents a huge influence, and steeped in Americana—it began in a former Nashville gas station, to give you some idea. Keeping a strong commitment to American manufacturing, they're among the crop of heritage brands in the making, making them a more-than-appropriate neighbor to Tanner Goods, with whom they already had a relationship. I see big potential for more collaborations in the future.

They have a video that tells the full story of their company—at 15 minutes it's a little exhaustive, but for the curious, here it is:

They're open as of Friday, if you wanna pop in and say hey.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Before it's the thing the NFL sells, football is a game, and a game most of us have played. We might have played it in middle school or high school or college or just chasing cousins around the front yard on Thanksgiving, two-hand touching or flag-pulling or bareheaded tackling in intramurals or pickup games or whatever the hell was going on in those Brett Favre Wrangler ads. But it's a game, and one we're familiar with, albeit a game that is both progressively more intricate and more brutal as it rises toward the abstracted extremes of complexity and violence and airless branded singularity it achieves at its highest level.

Because it is so difficult and so hard, football eventually sloughs most of us off along the way as players. If the fundamental pitch-and-catch game we love first is always there for us, there is also the inescapable fact that NFL football is a game virtually none of us could play. The NFL -- the vast and lucrative thing leveraged on all those unimaginable points of impact and various virtuosities -- is a different thing than the game we played and know, and we engage it in a different way and, inescapably, as different people. It's a TV show, finally, and we consume and engage it as that.

We'll get back to that. But first I want to tell you about Milt Singer's hands.

There's no reason why you'd know Milt Singer's name, even if he had played in the NFL. He was introduced to me as Milt Singer Who Played For The Giants, even though he didn't -- he played on the line at Syracuse during the first deep trough of the Great Depression, alongside his brother Walter, who did in fact go on to play for the Giants. That was more than half a century before I met Milt. The person introduced to me was a smush-faced and variously cauliflower-ed man well into his 70s; he'd had a family, a life, and yet he was still introduced as Milt Singer Of NFL Football. This was, clearly, how my grandfather -- who grew up in the same neighborhood as Singer and his brother -- thought of him, or at least how he thought this rumbly, old Jewish guy would seem most impressive to my babbling, brace-faced pre-tween self.

I remember a warm smile coming from a face that looked like a kind rockslide, and while I may be misremembering this part -- I was little -- I also recall a certain weariness from Singer as he listened to my grandfather reel off a 50-year-old football résumé. Mostly, though, I remember shaking Milt Singer's hand: a gargantuan Mickey Mouse glove carved from warm granite, fissured and cracked and broken and set and re-broken and re-set.

This was not a superhuman's hand, but something even more remarkable than that. It was a human hand that had been recast by suffering until it had become something different, something so unlike my own soft child's hands that I could not imagine one ever being like the other. Here is a Giant, my grandfather said, a small god from Jersey City. And the thick mythic fog of the old neighborhood rolled in as he spoke, the same vapor already burning off over that old neighborhood, revealing a landscape that in point of fact barely resembled the one my grandfather -- a tough and unsentimental and frequently unkind man -- could and did so frequently and lovingly describe.

It's not news that Richie Incognito is a jerk. If fans knew anything about the recently suspended Miami Dolphins guard before the revelation of his wild bullying and freelance terrorizing of teammate Jonathan Martin -- which was more recently revealed to have been ordered if not explicitly suborned by the Dolphins' coaching staff -- it was that Richie Incognito was a jerk's jerk, one of the nastier and more dysfunctional humans in football.

Incognito was kicked out of two different colleges for fighting anyone he could; he was released by the St. Louis Rams during a 1-15 season because he was extravagantly out of control on the field and off; he has long been considered, by broad consensus and whatever the opposite of acclaim is, the dirtiest player in the NFL. All of which is to say that you would not want Richie Incognito as a co-worker, or even left unsupervised around anyone you cared about. If you had not reached the conclusion that Richie Incognito is something of a sociopath before this story broke, it would be because you were insufficiently familiar with Richie Incognito and his body of work.

Right-thinking corners of the NFL discourse responded immediately to the story of Incognito's multiply objectionable cruelties more or less as you'd expect them to. That is, by decrying the NFL's steak-headedly retrograde machismo, pointing out that bullying is a complicated thing that can happen even to adults like Jonathan Martin, further pointing out that the NFL tends to not just humor, but nurture, players like Incognito until they become unusable for one reason or another. Our own Matt Ufford made an eminently reasonable case for a league-wide anti-hazing policy modeled on the one used in the United States Marine Corps. All good points, and all already being subsumed by a strange and sadly familiar backlash:

Said one personnel man (who's not alone): "Instead of being a man and confronting him, (Martin) acted like a coward and told like a kid."

— Jim Trotter (@SI_JimTrotter) November 4, 2013

Another: "Incognito is an A-Hole, however I'm pretty sure you would want him beside you if you are in a bar fight. Tough as nails."

— Jim Trotter (@SI_JimTrotter) November 4, 2013

Initially this was limited to criticisms of Martin. Shield-polishing herald of NFL mainstreamery Peter King wasn't sure anyone was to blame, but Kingishly credited the Dolphins for some strongly worded press releases and pushed the line that Martin was "mentally weak" with his usual line-toeing dispassion. Various NFL personnel types lined up to tell Sports Illustrated's Jim Trotter how much they abhorred Martin's cowardice in not handling his torment "like a man." These strong men, naturally, delivered their condemnations anonymously.

Lately and hesitantly, the recasting of the story expanded to include defenses of Incognito's good-guy credentials by his Dolphins teammates, if not quite his actions. Now, with sources in the Dolphins locker room explaining that Incognito was accepted as "more black" than Martin, there is some cover being provided for Incognito calling Martin a "half-nigger piece of shit" in a voicemail message. It has been reported, repeatedly, that Martin is biracial, which casts Incognito's slur as a bit of literal-minded racism. But Martin isn't of mixed race descent: A simple Google search reveals that his parents are both black, and both Harvard graduates. Had Martin gone to Harvard, he would have been the fourth generation of his family to attend. He went to Stanford instead, and earned a degree in classics.

This seems like an easy enough thing to get right. But even as this story continues to metastasize and implicate (many!) people beyond the ham-faced sociopath behind those creepy voicemails, there is a palpable sense of a frantic winding-down, a collective attempt at high-speed burial. The epitaph on this story is already legible, and Peter King is writing it, and it contains the words "man's game" and the expanded locution National Football League, which is how the sport's most abject and worshipful obfuscators refer to it when they want you to understand the league as they do -- as a thing bigger than any particular institutionalized horror or inherent vice.

This particular disgrace, which is about a bunch of difficult things, is being devoured by a stubborn and unshakeable reverence -- for a musty and deeply concept of toughness, for the idea that NFL players are somehow something more than men, and for the unabbreviated National Football League and all its masculine romance.

There is a story to be written about the proudly advertorial, power-humping access journalism that predominates in NFL media, and which has defined the way this story has been covered by King and the NFL media's other alpha puffers. But that is a different story, and anyway, Spencer Hall already started writing it, and this seems to be about a bigger problem than that. What we see as this story slides toward its fade-out is not just the lazy rollout of old macho binaries -- strong and weak; hard and soft; like a man or devastatingly not -- but a greater capitulation to the old and overarching mythology of the NFL.

There is an actual reality under this reeking veil of beefy old truisms, a real hierarchy and a real concept of masculinity embodied in NFL locker rooms that is multiply haywire and not necessarily functional or even effective, but still real enough. It's not a thing that anyone writing about football really understands, and not just because they have not experienced the nightmare-frat-by-way-of-HBO's-Oz culture of the Miami Dolphins locker room.

That doesn't help, but these NFL advocates don't understand it because it is their business not to understand it. This myth-fogged and contradiction-punctured misunderstanding of what the NFL is -- the insistence on portraying players as both humble yeomen who put their lunchpails on one blue collar at a time and invincible demigods, and the parallel high-altitude character bombing of those players when they disappoint -- is the NFL's core product every bit as much as the games are. It is, more than any single thing, what NFL media sells. Incognito himself was the beneficiary of that earlier this year, thanks to a ludicrous I've Met A New Friend, And It's Me self-discovery puff piece on NFL.com.

This, in part, is why there has been so little practical assessment of whether Incognito really is the virus he seems to be. His whole career shows us a middling player who has not made any of the lousy teams that have employed him any better, who was the only player on the Dolphins offensive line having a worse season than Martin this year, and whose devotion to pushing the boundaries of traditional locker room hazing helped create a culture that was weakening the Dolphins before Martin released those creepy voicemails -- and who, in the words of one opponent, "played to maim" and was a bully any and everywhere he could be. But we can all agree, he was very tough. You'd want him in your foxhole, your bar fight, your decades-old metaphor for the same thing this always winds up being about.

Of all the things that are disappointing about watching this story collapse in the NFL media into a dozen ultra-abstracted encyclicals and bulls -- On Toughness, Man And Less-Man, On Boys And How They Will Be -- the foremost is how predictable it is. It's that shortsightedness that led the Dolphins to sic Incognito on Martin in the first place, and we see that shortsightedness again as this story about a specific cultural conflict and multi-front failure is reduced to a bunch of Alpha Grandpas grousing willfully into their laptops about Creeping Wussification and Talmudic parsings of Man Code. It takes a deep commitment to discussing things as they aren't, as they are romantically imagined to be -- to tell only one story, over and over again. A bunch of men, lost and starry-eyed amid the crevasses of callus in old Milt Singer's broken hands.

Here, again, is the folly and romance of my grandfather's awe, and the reason for Singer's seeming shame about it. It must have been strange, standing there as his old human self in a life not that unlike any other, listening while some other romantic fool insists on introducing him to strangers not as a man, but as a myth.

More from SB Nation NFL

• Breaking Madden: One team, 46 guys named Johnson | More

• Foles vs. Manning: Are 7 touchdowns created equal?

• PFT Commenter's Week 9 awards: Friends in Philly

• NFL Power Rankings: Tough week for top teams

• Ufford: The NFL could learn something from the Marines

lamantros:

kingjaffejoffer:

therincrowd:

trapprimordial:

bye

this is the best thing i’ve ever seen in my life. 

I laughed outloud in real life

Omg

Yesterday, the Washington Times announced that it was suspending Rand Paul's weekly column due to all the allegations of plagiarism that have circled the Kentucky senator.

But Paul's not going to go around acting all repentant about these charges. In fact, he's taking the whiny-baby riad, complaining about having to deal with the consequences of his actions to the conservative press:

In an interview with National Review Online on Capitol Hill, Paul was furious, especially with the press coverage of the allegations. “It annoys the hell out of me,” Paul said. “I feel like if I could just go to detention after school for a couple days, then everything would be okay. But do I have to be in detention for the rest of my career?”

I thought libertarians were all about personal responsibility? Anyway, even the severely conservative commenters on National Review's site can't muster much compassion for Paul this time, calling him "unrepentant and arrogant," a "spoiled brat," and "pathetic." If Paul keeps whining about his "unfair" treatment like this, he might actually make the whole thing worse.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Looking to reclaim a little sense of wonder? Check out this breathtaking new footage of Swiss pilot Yves "Jetman" Rossy zooming around Japan's iconic Mount Fuji with an eight-foot-wide, rocket-powered, carbon-fiber wing of his own invention strapped to his back.

Read more...

Watch this informative and useful guide to an everyday activity that most people might overlook! Previously in Creeping Existential Horror

Paul Cornell talks about how the Doctor finds himself at a "Doctor Who" convention - and why Peter Capaldi should have been a woman.

The Gate One HTML5-powered terminal emulator and SSH client that goes without needing any browser plug-ins and supports many SSH/terminal features is working on bringing X11 support to the web-browser. The developer claims that this X11 support in the browser written in HTML5 will be fast enough to support video playback and he's made a video demo as proof...

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

This was the Katrina hellscape, right? Burn it down.

Voters in Harris County, Texas rejected a referendum on Tuesday that would have supplied $217 million for renovating the Houston Astrodome. The renovation would have turned the arena from a multipurpose sports stadium into a convention center and exhibition space. With 97 percent of precincts reporting, 53percent have voted against funding the renovation.

While voters did not explicitly decided to tear down the stadium, the failed referendum leaves it without any funding. As Judge Ed Emmett, a member of the Commissioners Court that manages the county, said according to the Associate Press, "If we can't spend tax dollars to repurpose the dome and there are no private dollars to repurpose the dome, then the only thing at that point is we can't leave it sitting there. So it would have to come down." That decision still has yet to be made.

A spokesperson for the National Trust for Historic Preservation told the Houston Chronicle, "Its legacy will live on even if it doesn't. It seems like it's fate is sealed obviously we are disappointed in the outcome."

"The Eighth Wonder of the World" was completed in 1965 and played host to the MLB's Houston Astros and the the NFL's Houston Oilers at various points throughout its lifetime, but has been closed since 2009.

Original Source

comixology:

So uhhh… hey.. shhhh… Sex Criminals #1 is now free on comiXology. 

Dont read it at work… or do, you NSFWorker, you. 

Apple — frustratingly — offers no easy way to export your texts and iMessages, and it should. Here are the best workarounds currently available.

With every Apple product launch, there are shortages of that product. So one talented developer built a tool to help people track where they could actually get their hands on new devices. Useful, right? Apple didn't think so.

From Virginia to Illinois to Seattle, gay rights, and really “sex” more generally, was on the ballot, and it won in a big way.

The stereotype of customer service is that it’s a race to the bottom—call centers in India, computers, or worse. But when you’re a hip eyeglasses brand with headquarters in Manhattan, you can convince graduates of places like Harvard and Yale to answer your phones, as well as former employees of Goldman Sachs, said David Gilboa, one of the founders of Warby Parker.

It sounds like a bad joke about the worst job market young people have faced in a generation, but it’s more complicated than that, Gilboa said at today’s Next Billion event put on by Quartz. Warby Parker’s customer service brain trust is coming up with new ways to answer customer questions, such as taking requests on Twitter and responding with YouTube videos that answer customers’ questions. It’s a strategy that apparently works for Warby Parker, which caters to the hip, young, tech-savvy portion of its market—but unless the job market gets even worse, it’s hard to imagine scaling up the practice for a large company or a mass market brand.

Deadspin Can You Ride A Bike In The City Without Being An Asshole? (No.) | Gizmodo Why Your Palms Get Sweaty When You’re Excited, Scared or Nervous | Jezebel Miley's 'Open Letter' to Liam Hemsworth: 'Sorry for Acting So Mad' | Kotaku Drunk Kids Steal Llama, Party With Llama

Read more...