archimaps:

Proposed site for the 1883 World’s Fair between 110th and 125th Streets, New York City

Games are often left unfinished. Sometimes they’re too difficult, too vast, or too repetitive to see all the way through to the closing credits. To The Bitter End is The Gameological Society’s look at those endings that are worth fighting for—or at least worth reading about.

The Holy Spirit’s a tricky figure to come to grips with. For those not down with catechism, the Holy Spirit is the binding agent in Catholicism’s three-formed conception of god. God the Father is the cell itself, a container for all things. God the Son is the mitochondria, a separate entity from the cell but a crucial engine. And the Holy Spirit is the nucleus, the ineffable spirit in all things, a binding agent, the cream in the Oreo. According to Thomas Aquinas, the Holy Spirit bestows seven gifts to mankind. Courage, wisdom, awe—all of humanity’s coping ...

New sign at #Guantanamo warcourt: No #GoogleGlass — or any other "visual enhancement device." #campjustice http://t.co/0krLgdoDxF—
Carol Rosenberg (@carolrosenberg) August 19, 2013

Don’t bring your Google Glass to Camp Justice at Guantánamo Bay. A sign outside the US military court now informs visitors that “visual enhancement devices,” from binoculars to Google’s wearable computing device, aren’t allowed inside.

The sign is undoubtedly a reaction to Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, who attempted wear Google Glass last week around the US Naval base known as Guantánamo Bay. She was allowed to record on some portions of the base, but was denied permission to take it into the detention zone, where she hoped to conduct interviews using Glass.

Reporters at Guantánamo must agree to extensive “ground rules.” All photographs and video have to be submitted for a security review before they can leave the military zone. Images of inmates’s faces are banned, and soldiers can only be photographed with express consent.

Camp Justice isn’t the first place to have forbid Google Glass. The gadget has been banned for British drivers and in a number of bars, as well as movie theaters and banks.

Divekick offers some helpful tips before matches ⊟

The advice isn’t always useful, but I’m happy there’s a fighting game giving players real-life tips like these. Even if that game has some maybe racially offensive bits due to it parodying other titles in the genre.

Another one of my favorite tips, even if it’s not technically true: “Wins only count if you finish with a super.” This releases tomorrow on Steam/Windows, PlayStation 3, and PS Vita — it’s $9.99 on PSN, or $7.99 if you’re a PS Plus subscriber.

BUY PS Vita, upcoming games

About 3,000 years ago during the Iron Age, the Assyrians were a major power in the Middle East and North Africa. Their military might was terrifying. And now, a new archaeological finding reveals more about this fierce but vanished empire's defensive strategies.

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In 1939, shortly after Ray Bradbury graduated from high school, he started a zine called Futuria Fantasia. It featured a lot of his early fiction and some essays, and you can read all first four issues online at Project Gutenberg.

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OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

The property, originally built among Kent orchards, was commissioned by Morris in 1860 from the young left wing architect Philip Webb as a home for his new wife Burden and anticipated large family.

After Morris's day, it passed through a string of private hands and lost almost all the beautiful furnishings designed for it.

Nevertheless it has produced a string of surprises, including traces of wall and ceiling paintings in almost every room. "Basically every white surface in the house is suspect – there will be colour underneath it," Breslin said. "Why have three clashing patterns when you can have six, seems to have been their motto."

In the drawing room, intended by Morris to be "the most beautiful room in the world", panelling was removed to reveal paintings by Burne Jones and probably Rossetti, and some by Morris including roses on a blue background which may be his first attempt at a repeat flower pattern.

Such patterns, manufactured by his company, would by the end of the century cover half the middle-class walls and sofas of England.

In one painting a dog curled up under a chair has turned out to be a wombat, and therefore almost certainly Rossetti's work: he was bizarrely obsessed with the animals, and once owned one as a pet – it died after reputedly eating a box of cigars.

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felixinclusis:

Martha Graham Google Doodle Initial Concept/Art Direction by Doodler, Mike Dutton. Animation by Ryan Woodward

The story of William McCoy sounds almost like a Prohibition-era version of Breaking Bad.

A mild-mannered shipbuilder, McCoy started smuggling booze along the Eastern seaboard during the early 1920s, only to become the top rum runner around.

He never touched his merchandise, never cut it with water, and shipped only the top-shelf liquors. In other words, he sold “the Real McCoy.”

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Flip back in time: Chef David Arnold mixes up a drink with a blazing-hot metal rod, a method similar to how bartenders used to make the flip cocktails that were wildly popular in colonial New England.

Courtesy of Sam Meyer

Such tales of renegades, rebels and raucousness pervade the history of rum. And to celebrate National Rum Day (yep, it’s today), we offer you five “rum-bunctious” anecdotes that made us want to give this spring break party beverage another try.

1. It’s A Food Waste Solution: In the 17th century, the world’s demand for sugar exploded, and Caribbean farmers found themselves with a growing problem: molasses. Making crystallized sugar leaves behind a dark, gooey liquid that no one wanted at the time. Some farmers were just dumping the byproduct into the ocean.

Then someone, somewhere — maybe in Barbados, maybe in Brazil — figured out that this industrial byproduct ferments if you mix it with some sugary water. Just like that, the rum business took off.

In essence, sugar farmers had hit the jackpot. They were growing a cash cow in their fields and then turning their trash into booze.

2. Spawn Of The Devil? Alas, though, many of the early Caribbean rums weren’t very good. “They were probably heavy, funky and grassy tasting,” says Wayne Curtis, author of And a Bottle of Rum, a breezy history of the drink. “It was really seat-of-the-pants stuff.”

In fact, one of the original names for rum was kill-devil — maybe because it tasted like the devil made it, maybe because it was strong enough to kill the devil. Who knows?

3. How About A Hot Metal Poker In Your Cuba Libre? Nowadays, we have cocktails made with liquid nitrogen, infused with bacon and even ones that youinhale. But bartenders in the 18th century were just as creative — or gimmicky.

One of the most popular cocktails in New England those days was the flip. The bartender would mix together rum, beer and some other flavoring — molasses, pumpkin, an egg, or perhaps some milk. Then he’d stick a scalding hot ball of metal into the drink.

The tool was known as a loggerhead, and it consisted of a long rod with an iron ball, about the size of an onion, stuck on the end. Bartenders would keep the loggerhead in the fire. And when they plunged it into the cocktail, the liquid would foam, hiss and “send up a mighty head,” Curtis writes in his book.

A few years ago, chef David Arnold of the French Culinary Institute invented a modern version of the loggerhead, called the Red Hot Poker. The metal rod heats up to about 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, and then Arnold dunks it into cocktails to caramelize the sugars and add a toasty flavor, the Cocktailians blog reported.

4. Nothing Says Cocktail Like Gunpowder: Legend has it that the pirate Blackbeard, aka Edward Teach, would mix gunpowder into his nightly glass of rum, light the cocktail on fire and guzzle it.

Curtis says that’s probably folklore. “But I suspect people may have added gunpowder to rum to improve its flavor,” he tells The Salt. “Gunpowder has a lot of carbon in it, which can absorb the bad-tasting compounds.”

This doesn’t sound like a great idea to us rum newbies. But one bartender in New Zealand has tried it, and the results are surprisingly good, Curtis says.

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A blood and sand made with Ben Simpson’s gunpowder-infused rum.

Smoke & Oakum’s Gunpowder Rum/Facebook.com

Ben Simpson at Motel Bar makes rum infused with gunpowder, leather and tobacco. Curtis has a few bottles of this Smoke & Oakum’s Gunpowder Rum in his liquor cabinet, and he likes it. “You don’t want to have a lot of it,” he says. “But I make Manhattans out of it. It’s got a lot of character.”

5. Maybe You Don’t Want A Little Captain In You: The marketing folks at Captain Morgan will tell you that the man behind their namesake liquor, Sir Henry Morgan, was a jovial, frolicking pirate who stole a few gold coins during the day and then threw back the spiced rum at night with his rollicking crew.

But the real captain was probably not the best drinking buddy, Curtis says.

"Captain Morgan was a brute and never shy about torturing people," Curtis says. Lionizing him on rum bottles is almost akin to having a dictator on a label, he says. "Morgan would go into a village, find who knew the most [about where gold was buried], and then torture them to death until he told them where the treasure was."

Throughout his career, Morgan destroyed 18 cities, four towns and 35 villages, Curtis writes. Oh, and he probably wasn’t even much of a rum drinker until after he retired in Jamaica, Curtis says. “He died a broken-down drunk at age 53.”

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Captain Morgan rum is, by volume, one of the top-selling brands of spirit in the U.S.

Rui Vieira/PA Photos/Landov

Today, Captain Morgan is one of the top-selling brands of liquor in the U.S. But if you’re just sticking to the Captain and the clear Bacardis, you’re really missing out, Curtis says.

"Rum is coming back for sure," he says. And he starts listing off some of his favorites: El Dorado from Guyana,Appleton Estates from Jamaica, Privateer from Massachusetts and Ron Zacapa from Guatemala.

The latter distillery has a rum that, because of how it has been aged, contains some ethanol molecules that are over 100 years old. Now that’s a taste of history.

third-worlding:

Taystee’s return inspired so many feelings: sadness that she got locked up again, happiness that she was back on the show, delight that her and Poussey could be besties again. But the conversation between Taystee and Poussey in the library was perhaps the series’ most intentional indictment of the system in the entire season, in which Taystee recalls the impossibility of “starting over” after prison. She had no place to live, clothes to wear or food to eat. It was impossible to find a good-paying job, and check-ins with parole officers loomed ever-present.

As described in depth in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, former prisoners with drug offenses on their record face insurmountable challenges. They may find themselves ineligible for food stamps, public housing (or any housing), federally funded health and welfare benefits and federal educational assistance — demerits which hit especially hard for mothers with children and for women of color, who already suffer discrimination in those sectors with or without a record. “Once labeled a felon, the badge of inferiority remains with you for the rest of your life, relegating you to a permanent second-class status,” Alexander writes. “Today a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or a black person living ‘free’ in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow.” Many will lose the right to vote or to hold a driver’s license.

Taystee, who owes the prison “$900 in fees,” is not alone with that type of debt — upon release, former inmates often are required to pay fees for parole or probation, jail book-in fees, jail per diems for pretrial detention, pre-sentence report fees and so many more. Missing a payment could land you back in jail.

Securing post-incarceration employment is really really really really hard. Employers are biased against applicants with criminal records, and prison time leaves gaps in employment history, training and education. Jobs requiring minimal training, like factory work, are sparse in this economy, leaving only the service sector.  Those who fail to get a job or return to the underground economy in desperation will usually end up back in prison.

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This is the best article on oitnb. Pls read the full thing!!

1970.

Salvador Dalí, Sophia Loren, Paul Newman, and David Niven.

Frozach Submitted

Breast implant explosives could be used in terrorist attack

Heathrow Airport staff have been warned that women could conceal dangerous explosives in their breasts. 

Headlines from a story at The Telegraph.

Both sets of my grandparents had basement rec-rooms that were clearly grasping after this magnificence. But this is the Ur-room, the thing that casts the shadow upon the wall of Plato's cave. It is the rec-room none of us would ever be allowed to behold, for none of us is pure enough for a rec-room such as this. If you want proof of the lapsarian hypothesis, look no further: the world is in decline. Everything is worse than it was. Oh, rec-room, you were too good for this world of sin.

Pink Basement [Branwynn/Vintage Ads]