firehose

A three-legged dog comes to the rescue of a fellow dog in this cute video uploaded by PetTube.

via AOL On Pets

Steven Showers was arrested for erecting a large neon sign in his front yard last summer to communicate his belief that Mitt Romney (and all Mormons) are racist. He eventually went to jail for three weeks and the sign was turned off. So what did he do right when he got out?

Mayor Charlie Hales' office has some good news for school districts warned earlier this year to expect only only partial allotments of arts tax money meant to help them hire new teachers: After a string of court rulings declaring the $35 tax perfectly legal, city hall has decided to send out full allotments as promised.

"The consensus here at City Hall is that the risk is now low enough," spokesman Dana Haynes says, we can revert to the original plan."

The word went out in an email today from policy adviser Noah Siegel to school superintendents:

Dear friends,

I am pleased to report that after extensive discussions and consultations, Portland City Council has decided that we will be able to disburse the Arts Education Access Fund for this year in the full amount. This means that Council will not take any action to amend the existing MOUs for this year, and disbursement will continue as planned (the first installment in fall 2013, the second in early spring 2014).

It is the view of a majority of Council that after three court rulings in our favor, the risks are now sufficiently low to implement fully the measure passed by voters in November. We very much appreciate your understanding of our earlier predicament during a difficult budget cycle, and the spirit of cooperation that prevailed.

Your willingness to shoulder the risk together allowed us to move forward.
The mayor understands that this process has not aligned perfectly with your hiring schedules. That said, he hopes that all the districts will now be able to hire art and music teachers at the full levels outlined in the MOUs. Given that revenues for the schools have been collected in full, it is of the highest importance that we maintain good faith with the voters by making sure this translates into teaching positions.

Thanks to those of you who presented budgets to the Arts Oversight Committee. It is their job to report to Council on implementation of the tax, so we appreciate your ongoing engagement.
I am very happy to deliver such good news. Best of luck to everyone in the new school year.

At least one of those challenges, by tax law professor Jack Bogdanski, is still alive. Bogdanski has appealed a defeat in Oregon Tax Court. But Hales and city commissioners are feeling good enough that they're willing to tear up a deal made in May: an offer of half of the money promised, with contingencies for how to pay that money back if it never materialized.

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Billionaire investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett expressed his love for AMC's Breaking Bad along with his professional admiration for antihero Walter White's business acumen at the AMC show's final season premiere in New York yesterday. "I’m a huge fan,” the 82-year-old chairman and CEO of of Berkshire Hathaway told a BuzzFeed reporter. "Not only is the story compelling—it’s a really an interesting story—but the acting is superb." He then praised the work done byleads Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Anna Gunn, whose acting skills he compared to Meryl Streep's.

While discussing a sketch—involving Berkshire-owned See’s Candies peanut brittle as a stand-in for Blue Sky crystal meth—that Buffett filmed with Cranston and Paul for a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting earlier this year, the former richest man in the world laughingly described unlikely meth kingpin Walter White as "a great businessman ...

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The folks behind Pacific Rim haven't exactly been silent on what they'd do with a sequel, with Guillermo del Toro already promising a kaiju/jaeger hybrid monster and more digging into the implications and consequences of humans drifting with the kaiju hivemind. All that depends, however, on the movie's performance at the box office: no one's really certain that Pac Rim will make more than it took to create and promote, and if it does, it'll be primarily up to the film's pull at the international box office. Fortunately for the hopeful, Pacific Rim just bagged Warner Bros. biggest opening in the Chinese movie market in history.

You've probably heard of the placebo effect, where people's ailments improve when they believe they've been given medicine — even if that medicine is just a sugar pill. Now a new study suggests that the placebo effect can be invoked by advertisements, too.

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Falling beer consumption in the US over the past several years has been attributed mostly to an economic downturn that’s squeezed middle class families. Beer shipments rose instead of fell last year, the first time since the financial crisis, a hopeful sign that the beer-guzzling economy was finally recovering.

Even so, new American drinking habits may be taking hold. According to a new survey by the polling firm Gallup, the proportion of Americans under the age of 30 who said beer was their preferred drink has fallen by 30 percentage points since the early 1990s. Today, only 41% of respondents under the age of 30 said they drink beer most often, compared with 71% in the early 1990s. More are choosing wine and to a larger extent liquor.

There are a few theories about why. One is that Americans are becoming more health-conscious and moving away from calorie-and-carb-heavy beer. (The rationale has also been applied to the fall in soda consumption and increase in bottled water sales.) A television ban of liquor advertising that expired in 1996, as well as the popularity of booze-heavy television shows like “Sex and the City” and “Mad Men,” may have rekindled a US cocktail culture (paywall).

Another theory is that Americans are moving up the value chain in alcohol taste. Demand for high-end liquor is growing. This week, Diageo, the world’s largest spirits producer credited an increase in premium whiskey sales in the US for a rise in quarterly profits. Beer consumption has fallen about 10% over the past decade, but imported beer as well as craft beer sales appear healthy.

Whatever the reason, liquor makers are happy about it. Sales of distilled spirits have risen about 20% over the past decade. To borrow from an American drinking expression: Liquor is quicker.

MOSCOW—Citing a whirlwind month and a half in which he leaked classified details of a massive government surveillance operation, secretly fled from the United States to Hong Kong, and became a figure of national and global intrigue, sources confirme...

It's the superior life form in the universe... and it's made out of straw. Your move, clay Cybermen.

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The EFF posted a biting response to yesterday's Ninth Circuit ruling that heavily weights celebrities' right to privacy, and construes that right very broadly. From the EFF summary of the case: "The plaintiff, Sam Keller, brought the case to challenge Electronic Art (EA)'s use of his likeness in its videogame NCAA Football. This game includes realistic digital avatars of thousands of college players. The game never used Keller’s name, but it included an avatar with his jersey number, basic biographical information, and statistics. Keller sued EA claiming that the game infringed his right of publicity — an offshoot of privacy law that gives a person the right to limit the public use of her name, likeness and/or identity for commercial purposes. ... Two judges on the panel found that EA’s depiction of Keller was not transformative. They reasoned that the 'use does not qualify for First Amendment protection as a matter of law because it literally recreates Keller in the very setting in which he has achieved renown.'" The piece later notes that this reasoning "could impact an extraordinary range of protected speech."

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Tomorrow is the release party for Batman '66—a comic return to the days when Bats wasn't such a goddamn Grumpy Gus—at Bridge City Comics, which of course reminds me of the campy late '60s Batman TV series, and this hilarious vintage record recorded by Burt Ward (who played Robin) with a veeeeerrrry interesting cohort. From Dangerous Minds:

This song, believe it or not, is actually a collaboration between Burt Ward, better known as “Robin” on the 60s Batman TV series, and Frank Zappa. Long circulated on variously titled bootlegs, “The Boy Wonder Sessions” were recorded in 1966 with Mothers of Invention (and Velvet Underground) producer Tom Wilson at the mixing desk. Mothers Jimmy Carl Black, Elliot Ingber and Roy Estrada are present, however Zappa doesn’t actually play on these sessions, although he arranged and wrote most of the material recorded. Note the bit that sounds like Zappa’s later “Duke of Prunes” composition near the end.

Check it out, it's hilarious and screams Zappa!

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SWINTON. Via rouquinoux:

Tilda Swinton in Candy Magazine by Xevi Mutane. 

Antony Price burnished gold plissé lamé couture ‘Rolls Royce’ dress (which was made especially for Swinton and Candy Magazine).

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Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:

Appointments sell for 10- yuan ($1.60-6.40) in a country where the average monthly salary is equivalent to $580. A Beijing Morning News reporter found there were no appointments available on the Apple site for iPhone, iPad or iPod. They contacted one of the advertisers asking for an appointment the next day and were offered a choice of two local stores and two time slots. The reporter was sent login details for the booking by instant messenger, and was then able to access the booking on the Apple site to change the details to their own.

What the shit?

At the bi-monthly meeting of the Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail Project on Thursday, July 18, the Inner Southeast Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) learned that the project was “on time and on budget” at its halfway point.

TriMet Community Affairs Representatives updated CAC members with construction updates for the various areas of ...

Artigiano, the Southeast Portland food cart, successfully lobbied for a change in Oregon's liquor licensing rules for carts at the OLCC's June meeting in Bend.

In just a year, Treadway has taken this already exciting snack-and-cocktail spot and upped the ante even further with his unique mix of seasonally driven classics (like our favorite drink of summer, the grapefruit-and-tequila-based Paloma), modern spins on standards (barrel-aged mai tais), and fun, laid-back options like the smoky mezcal pickleback.

FUCK YEAH FURRIES

A redditor called EquinnoxX wanted to propose to his girlfriend, so he hacked an NES console-game cartridge called Contra so that it delivered the proposal in the course of the gameplay. He changed the character names' to his and his girlfriend's, and then modded the end text to be a marriage proposal (she said yes).
"The modified contra code is seen here in hexadecimal on the left and its (almost) ASCII representation on the right. You can see the ending screen text and the credits. That file is loaded and ready to be flashed to the EPROM chip that is loaded (you can see it in the 'Device Location' section on the right). A new NES cartridge is just 28 solder points away!"

Contra Proposal (imgur.com) (via OhGizmo)

Including those uploaded from the leading (but unofficial) client for Windows Phone. I sympathize with Windows Phone users, but this is what you get when you rely on private APIs.

"Your papers, please."

I'm not sure what's more enraging—the casual racial profiling or the presumption of guilty-until-proven-innocent—but it's getting hard to deny that the racists are in the driving seat of policy at the Home Office these days.

The racism is utterly, dismally, predictable when times are bad—frightened, stressed people with no economic security look around for someone to blame, and they can be very easily manipulated into blaming others. It's important also to remember that the 1930s were populated by people coming to terms with rapid technological change-induced future shock, and looking for certainty in the face of the future. Today, we have similar levels of future shock, largely social in nature: thanks to the internet we can't ignore other people whose views we find repugnant.

But racism isn't the key issue here. The real question we should be asking is not "what" but "why".

I have a new speculative hypothesis to stand alongside the Martian invasion and the bad dream. It is this: the over-arching reason for the clamp-down on dissent, migration, and freedom of expression, and the concurrent emphasis on security in the developed world, constitutes the visible expression of a pre-emptive counter-revolution.

The fuse for a revolution was lit by the global financial crisis of 2007/08, in a process that looked alarmingly close to triggering the Crisis of Capitalism (a hypothesized event which is associated with an ideology to which the current political elite of the USA and EU are for the most part highly allergic, for anyone aged over 50 spent their formative years under the bipolar tension of the Cold War). It sputtered briefly in the west in the form of the Occupy and related movements, but truly caught fire in 2009 with the failed Green revolution and in 2010-11 with the Arab spring—which were inflamed by the spike in global food prices caused by capital fleeing into commodities in the wake of the banking crisis. Meanwhile, the imposition of disaster capitalism in the west (as a purported "solution" to the debt-based spending bubbles various western governments embarked on during the boom years of the 1990s-2007) inflamed popular tensions in those countries, with results like this (undirected rioting) that never adhered to any political direction, but nevertheless terrified the ruling elite, leading to their retaliation via draconian punishments.

The wave of revolutions has so far been contained within the Arab world (a part of the globe which—I don't think this is any kind of coincidence at all—is suddenly becoming much less important to the energy geopolitics of the west, with the switch to fracking and renewables now under way). The policy of pre-emptive counter-revolution, facilitated by the imposition of the global internet panopticon, has clamped the lid down tight.

So, in summary: I believe what we're seeing is a move towards the global imposition of a police state in the developed world, leveraging the xenophobia that naturally emerges during insecure times, by a ruling elite who are themselves feeling threatened by a spectre. Controls on movement, freedom of association, and speech are all key tools in the classic police state's arsenal. What's new about this cycle is that the police state machinery is imposed locally, within national boundaries, but applies everywhere: the economic system it is intended to protect is transnational and unconstrained. Which is why even places that were largely exempt during the cold war are having a common police state agenda quietly imposed. There is to be no refuge, other than destabilized "failed states" where the conditions of life make a police state look utopian in comparison.

This system has emerged organically, from the bottom up, and is not the result of any conspiracy; it's just individuals and groups moving to protect their shareholdings in the Martian invaders, by creating an environment that is safe for the hive intelligences to operate in.

As to how I feel about this ...

I'm middle-aged and comfortable and have no great love for revolutions, even though I'd say that the imposition of a global police state deserves a place high on the list of complaints weighty enough to legitimize one. But revolutions almost invariably go bad. A few, like the Velvet revolution, turn out all right in the end; but many more provide opportunities for the vilest dregs of humanity to run amok. Only when the post-revolutionary society stabilizes and the convulsions subside do we get to see whether or not we're better off: and even if we are, that's scant comfort for the bereaved relatives of those who died in the process. As I said, I'm middle-aged, fat, and have health issues: don't look for me on the barricades. If it happens, I'll be over here wringing my hands and writing communiques calling for less smashing of skulls. Because? Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

Periodic Boing Boing contributor Michelle Catalano was internet-profiled and then raided at home by terrorism task force investigators who apparently found her internet browsing history suspicious, not that anyone's looking at the internet habits of innocent Americans, no, that's definitely not happening. :

It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history.

Cameron has set War Of The Worlds scribe Josh Friedman to write one film; Rise Of Planet Of The Apes‘ Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver to write another; with the third to be written by Shane Salerno, who wrote and directed the upcoming documentary Salinger and who previously worked with Cameron on a remake of Fantastic Voyage at Fox. The writers will collaborate with Cameron separately and co-write three separate movies with him. The three pictures will be filmed simultaneously with production beginning next year. The release of the first sequel will be in December 2016, with the second to follow in December 2017, and the third a year later. Avatar 2, 3, and 4 will be produced by Cameron and Jon Landau through their Lightstorm Entertainment banner. Lightstorm will work once again with Joe Letteri and his team at WETA Digital on the three films.

How the Philadelphia Eagles hired a training coach who applies the scientific method and statistical analysis to athletic development, which earned him a 5-year stint as the first civilian to train Navy SEALs.