firehose

charmeleons:

damn right

thewomenofwar:

Franziska Scanagatta disguised herself as a man in order to attend Austria’s Military Academy in 1794. She served in both the 1797 and 1799 campaigns during the French Revolution and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant in 1800. She left the military the next year and married a fellow Lieutenant with whom she raised four children. She was granted a special pension by Kaiser Franz II when he learned of her service.

alexsegura:

Lauren Bacall

s_ _ _ _   _outh

sonic mouth

smash youth

Today’s print edition of the International Herald Tribune is a journalistic artifact. That’s because the paper is being re-christened the International New York Times, starting tomorrow.

James Gordon Bennett Jr., a wealthy American, founded the IHT in Paris in 1887; his father started The New York Herald in 1835. Bennett Jr.’s paper, then the European edition of the New York Herald, was designed to cater to the international elite.  ‘‘At a time when America was just beginning to feel its power in the world, he was a publisher who looked across the oceans much more than most of the publishers of his time,’’ explained New York University journalism professor Mitchell Stephens in 2012. (Bennett Jr. was also in self-imposed exile in Paris after a disgraceful drunken episode involving urinating in either a grand piano or a fireplace.)

Bennett’s motto for what he wanted to cover: “Names, names, names. News, news, news.”

In 1924, the paper, by then a kind of hometown newspaper for American expatriates, became The New York Herald Tribune; in 1967, with ownership shared by the Washington Post and the New York Times, the paper was renamed the International Herald Tribune. The Times bought out out the Post’s share in 2003, calling the IHT “the global edition of The New York Times.”

It was a fiscally disastrous move—the New York Times spent $65 million for the Washington Post’s share, and then hemorrhaged money for years afterward. A plan former executive editor Howell Raines said he hatched to rebrand the paper as the international edition of The New York Times was shelved after Raines was ousted that year. This February, the name change was announced as “part of a larger plan” to focus on the company’s core brand, which has also included the sale of regional papers and online properties.

Today, the (now profitable) IHT—soon to be the INYT— has an interactive feature including the reflections of Serge Schmemann, the editorial page editor; a Suzy Menkes slideshow of fashion through the years; a selection of Art Buchwald columns, editorial cartoons dating back to 1896, and more.

There’s also a timeline of the paper’s front pages throughout the decades. Here are a few of the most memorable:

Queen Victoria’s passing, 1901

The stricken Titanic, 1912

Archduke Francis Ferdinand is shot, 1914

The Hindenburg explodes, 1937

Germany surrenders, 1945

Martin Luther King is killed, 1968

September 11, 2001

Barack Obama is elected, 2008

Looking ahead, the New York Times Company is hoping to capitalize on readers worldwide: About a third of the visitors to The New York Times’s site come from abroad, but only 10% of its paid subscribers are international.

Larry Ingrassia, assistant managing editor for new initiatives, said in an Oct. 13 article about the Times’s strategy that he wants to add more international digital subscribers—the “political, business and cultural elite of the world,” he called them.

In some ways, that sounds an awful lot like James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s mission in 1887.

The Hindu

Americans Win Economics Nobel For Market Insights Wall Street Journal Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller have won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their research into asset prices. Photo: Getty Images. Three American scholars won the Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering work in ... Nobel laureate downplays prospect of US debt defaultXinhua Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller warns of 'bubbly' global home pricesSydney Morning Herald Three Americans win Nobel Prize in economics for market researchThe Globe and Mail Bloomberg -Boston.com -Hindustan Times all 627 news articles »

FULL TIME: TIMBERS WIN 1-0. Portland is in first place in the Western Conference and sits tied with New York in the race for the Supporter's Shield. Green and yellow smoke billowing from the North End and on the South end scoreboard, the conference standings show Portland on top.

#BullpenCop

jaded-mandarin:

Daniël Mijtens. Detail from Portrait of James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, Later 3rd Marquis and 1st Duke of Hamilton, Aged 17, 1623.

What our correspondent also understood, sitting there in his basement bathtub, was that the literature of creativity was a genre of surpassing banality. ... Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves.

Wicky Tse sent in the following photograph of a sign in the Xujiahui district of Shanghai:

The topmost wording reads:

Xújiāhuì pàichūsuǒ 徐家汇派出所
("Xujiahui local police station")

Next comes five big characters and a large comma:

huāqián yuèxià shí 花前月下時,
("when [you're] in front of the flowers and beneath the moon,")

That is followed by this warning:

qǐng zhùyì nǐ de kuàbāo 请注意你的挎包
("please pay attention to your purse / shoulder bag")

Probably every native speaker of English who reads the first English clause ("When you are getting off with your lover") will do a double-take. If they could read the equivalent Chinese, they would be even more dumbfounded.

The expression "huāqián yuèxià" 花前月下 ("in front of the flowers and beneath the moon") derives from a heptasyllabic quatrain entitled " Lǎo bìng" 老病 ("Old and Ill") by the famous Tang poet Bo Juyi 白居易 (772-846), the first two lines of which read:

Zhòu tīng shēnggē yè zuì mián, ruòfēi yuè xià jí huā qián
昼听笙歌夜醉眠， 若非月下即花前。
By day listening to music and song, by night in a drunken sleep;
If not beneath the moon, then in front of the flowers.

Abbreviated as "huāqián yuèxià" 花前月下 ("in front of the flowers and beneath the moon"), this line has become a chéngyǔ 成語 ("set phrase" [often rendered as "idiom" or "proverb"]) indicating an ideal setting for a couple in love.

"Huāqián yuèxià" 花前月下 ("in front of the flowers and beneath the moon") is not the only Chinese expression that yields the Chinglish translation "getting off". Witness this road sign (from China-Mike.com):

The sign actually says:

zhǐ zhǔn línshí tíngchē xiàkè 只准臨時停車下客
Temporary stopping only to unload passengers.

The creative class has never been more screwed. Books about creativity have never been more popular. What gives?

Two men were walking down a street in Northern Philadelphia when they made a very big mistake — according to two police officers who detained them, locked one man inside a squad car, and searched them, all while making racially derogatory comments.

theatlantic:

The Shutdown Will Ruin Scientific Work in Antarctica

Three American research stations in Antarctica will be put in “caretaker status” and all research suspended as a consequence of the continuing US government shutdown, the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) has announced. The timing couldn’t be worse. The period from October to February is when Antarctica is at its least inhospitable, and as many as 700 scientists descend on the continent during the research season.

“Caretaker status” means all non-essential staff will be sent home and planned research cancelled. The stations will only be staffed enough “to ensure human safety and preserve government property, including the three primary research stations, ships and associated research facilities.” USAP received its last round of funding on Sept. 30. It expects to run out of cash by Oct. 14.

The ramifications of this decision are enormous.

Read more. [Image: Alister Doyle/Reuters]

Bastards ALL.

Late last night, an app that's sure to irritate Snapchat launched.

StealthHunter writes "It turned out that just by setting a browsers user-agent to 'xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide' anyone can remotely bypass all authentication on D-Link routers. It seems that thttpd was modified by Alphanetworks who inserted the backdoor. Unfortunately, vulnerable routers can be easily identified by services like shodanHQ. At least these models may have vulnerable firmware: DIR-100, DI-524, DI-524UP, DI-604S, DI-604UP, DI-604+, TM-G5240."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Square Enix's upcoming augmentation, Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut, will include all three DLC packs for the base game and be cheaper if you own the original release on Steam.

For those that already own Deus Ex:HR and its Missing Link DLC, $4.99 will net you a download for the Director's Cut. Fans that own only the base game will need to pay $9.99, while newcomers will pay $19.99.

Director's Cut will offer developer commentaries and a New Game+ mode that carries over upgrades from past playthroughs. Director's Cut will hack into Steam's database on October 22 in North America and October 25 in PAL territories. If you prefer to stick with consoles, October 22 will also see the launch of Director's Cut on the Xbox 360 and PS3 for $30 and on the Wii U for $50.

Upgrade Deus Ex: Human Revolution to Director's Cut for cheap on Steam originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 13 Oct 2013 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is what time lapse photography was invented for.

“Yeah, a lot of people are bugging their babies these days… I guess babies can’t be trusted…”

- Frank Reynolds

An anonymous reader writes "A citizens' group in Tokyo claims to have found elevated levels of radioactivity at 39 sporting venues earmarked for the 2020 Olympic Games. Expert and organizers are cautious about the findings but see no problem, as the levels do not pose an immediate threat to human health. From the article: '"It is difficult to have this debate unless we know for sure whether this radiation is from Fukushima or whether it is naturally occurring background radiation," said Pieter Franken, founder of the Japan office of the environmental monitoring organization Safecast."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Houston Texans fans finally cheered quarterback Matt Schaub on Sunday. Unfortunately, for Schaub, that applause occurred after he left a 38-13 loss to the St. Louis Rams with a leg injury.

I’ve taken a few runs at “Homestuck” now, at different times, to make sure I wasn’t just missing out because of being in the wrong mood or something. But regrettably I seem to be missing the gene or some such. I understand that hordes of people are into it, but I doubt I’m likely to be one any time soon.

(I’ll probably try again in a year or so, just to make sure. God knows, I had to try to read Le Guin’s The Dispossessed about six times before I finally got what she was doing and had my socks blown off. So maybe some time nearer the end of the decade…)

ETA: BTW, just as a point of general information… swearing doesn’t alarm me. Just because my YA writing is pretty squeaky clean, don’t think I’m bothered by rough language at all. I used to be a nurse, and nurses have a LOT to swear about. Peter has been trying over the past nearly-three-decades to reform me, but with only indifferent success. There are just times when only the word FUCK will adequately say what needs to be said. :)