firehose

ROUND ROCK, TX—In a remarkable demonstration of expertise, Round Rock Express designated hitter Manny Ramirez reportedly wowed his triple-A teammates Friday with his expansive knowledge of basic geometric shapes.

Dear Portland City Commissioners:

Just a quick note to let you know that the city council of Whitehorse (just the largest city in northern Canada, so don't get it twisted) is making you guys look like JUNIOR VARSITY. Why? Because they have a TV commercial... and YOU DON'T. Just because you got elected doesn't mean you can sit on your cans and stop trying to look necessary! ADVERTISE HOW IMPORTANT YOU ARE TO THIS COMMUNITY, people. Don't take it for granted. Otherwise you'll just keep letting those fluoride-hating, reservoir un-capping hippies run right over you.

Sincerely,
Wm. Steven Humphrey

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A Japan Airlines 787 Dreamliner on the way to Tokyo has landed in Boston, returning to its originating airport after a reported fault. An early report suggests a problem with the plane’s fuel pump could be to blame. But whatever the case, Boeing’s flagship airliner is starting to look star-crossed. And its investors are anxious: Boeing’s share price fell in after-hours trading on the report that the JAL plane was returning to Boston.

Peter Wilson of Boston’s WBZ tweeted that a JAL 787 landed safely at Boston’s Logan Airport just after 6 pm EST. Few other details are known. Wilson included this photograph.

But it is potentially the latest problem in an unusual spate of incidents involving the Dreamliner. On July 12, an Ethiopian Airlines 787 caught fire at London’s Heathrow Airport, forcing the closing of all its runways. In an announcement today, British authorities said a small lithium ion battery had possibly been the reason for the fire.

The battery’s chemistry—lithium manganese dioxide–is different from and actually regarded as far less flammable than the main battery technology used on the Boeing planes. The Dreamliners mainly use lithium cobalt oxide batteries, which are the most flammable of the core lithium ion chemistries on the market, and were responsible for fires aboard two other 787s in January. The latter fires resulted in the grounding of the entire Dreamliner fleet until they began to return to service in May and June.

But the UK authorities recommended that the lithium manganese dioxide batteries—used in the plane’s emergency locator transmitter—be disabled until they can be better investigated. US officials so far disagree—they say that the transmitters, using precisely the same batteries, have already been flown for some 50 million miles without incident, and so urge more contemplation before any action.

“Hello, This is Jack you were. Zedy from the city of Somerville with information related to the city’s annual heartbeat festival, scheduled for Friday evening and Saturday and Davis Square. The festival will be getting Friday evening, July 19th from 6 to 10 PM, with live music and 7 Health park in Davis Square. On Saturday, July 20th from 11 AM to 6 PM. Craft fenders live music on several stages and local artist will set up through Davis Square. The events are free. The with small donation is suggested for Saturday’s festival several road closure is indeed towards will apply as follows, beginning at 8 AM. Davis Square will be close to all vehicle traffic. West found traffic from Highland out will be diverted right onto call a job, left on to Winter Street, and back on the Holland St. East Bound traffic from call a job will be diverted right onto Winter Street, left on the camera have. And on some Assaf. East Bound traffic from home. Tree will be diverted. Axion run out and on some Assaf closure is, will remain in effect on Saturday until 8 PM. And, N. B. T. A bus this rope Davis Square will be re routed. If you have any questions. Please Visit, www, dot, Summerville Arts Council dot org, or call 311 Thank you.”

Neko Case just helped Funny Or Die “launch” its new video series, the Dressing Room Sessions, with a totally awkward performance. It’s a lark, of course, but the clip below finds A.V. Fest headliner Case, Undercover veteran Kelly Hogan, and the rest of Case’s band crammed into a vintage store’s tiny dressing room, ostensibly to premiere the band’s new single, “Man.” Watch it if you like Case, Hogan, or footage of fake shoppers rolling their eyes.

For those who actually want to see Case perform “Man” along with a number of other songs, tickets for A.V. Fest are on sale now. On sale now, goddammit! 

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djempirical

h/t dj ripley

click through for sounds

Original Source

When Osama bin Laden and and Mohammed Atef played volleyball, the other al-Queda members insisted that they play on opposite sides, because they were both tall, good players. (via Reddit)

Varg Vikernes and his wife, Marie Cachet, have been released from French jail. The two weren’t officially charged with a crime after being nabbed earlier this week by police who suspected them of planning a massacre. Norwegian TV station NRK said, “Police were unable to identify specific terrorist plans or a terrorist target.” The Burzum frontman (who occasionally also goes by the name Louis Cachet) will still be required to appear in court to face accusations that he breeched French racism laws by making hateful comments about Jews and Muslims online. Everyone’s innocent until proven guilty, of course, but if what he’s posted on the Internet is any indication, he will probably lose that one.

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harmonicakind:

sharknado passes the bechdel test

let that sink in for a minute

Rob Liefeld has partnered with MMA fighter turned "Haywire" star Gina Carano to develop "Avengelyne" as a film that's being likened to the "Underworld" franchise.

ABC News

Lawmaker known for anti-terrorism work mulls 2016 bid USA TODAY SHARE 175 CONNECT 60 TWEET 22 COMMENTEMAILMORE. A New York Republican congressman best known for his work on homeland security issues says he's thinking about running for president in 2016. Rep. Pete King, former chairman of the House ... First Thoughts: A canary in the coal mine?NBCNews.com Peter King for president? NY congressman weighs 2016 runMSNBC Rep. Peter King: Would Run to Save the GOPNewsmax.com Fox News -Politico -CBS News all 46 news articles »

When assembling your wardrobe, what styles of shirts are best to buy first? What shirts can you do without? That’s what this list is for. The shirts you’ll want to have on hand at all times (and maybe buy multiples of) will rank higher than the shirts you could probably do without. Also, keep those collars a substantial but not over-sized semi-spread. Button down, cutaway, and tiny-sized collars are great for certain situations, but you just can’t go wrong with a nicely sized semi spread. Specific examples for each are shown below. Pics are clickable.

 

#1.  White, semi-spread, light to mid-weight Poplin/Pinpoint/Twill

Quick, think of a white dress shirt.  Yahtzee.  That’s the #1 shirt we should all have in our closet.  The collar does not button down on these, and they’re made from a mid to lightweight fabric.  Some call these “oxfords” even though that’s not quite right. It’s a shirt that’ll look just as good with a suit as it will under a v-neck with jeans.  It’s crisp, it’s clean, and you want a collar with enough beef  to look substantial. Melt your brain with the differences between poplin, pinpoint, & twill here, here, and here (scroll down a bit on that last one). Head here for a hierarchy of white dress shirt options, from cheap to splurge-worthy. A terrific mid-priced option is this one from Nordstrom. Will need a bit of tailoring, but expect it to go on sale this Friday (7/19) as part of the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale.

 

#2. Light Blue, semi-spread, light to mid-weight Poplin/Pinpoint/Twill

Pretty much the same thing as the white dress shirt at #1, only in a very pale, light blue color.  Not royal blue, not kinda light blue with grey buttons, light blue with standard off-white/bone colored buttons.  Slightly less formal than white, but still able to be dressed way up. It’s actually somewhat difficult to find a very pale blue dress shirt for a reasonable price. The Banana Republic option shown here doesn’t even come in Neck & Sleeve measurements.

 

#3. White, mid-weight to heavy-weight Oxford Cloth Button Down Collar

Honestly? Not a “dress” shirt. At least not most of them, especially if they’re cut in thicker, more rumpled cloth. But still needs to go on the list just because of its versatility. The OCBD (surprisingly, not  a member of WuTang) stands for Oxford Cloth Button Down.  And the “button down” part refers to the collar, not the fact that you button the shirt in front. A few lighter, pressed OCBDs can pull some duty at the office, but just make sure it’s not that much thicker than a standard poplin. The thicker the fabric, the less dressed up it can get. A workhorse for layering.

 

#4. White base, blue windowpane / tattersall

Lots of white and blue right?  Well, yes. An orange and green check just won’t go with as much stuff in your closet.  Meanwhile, a windowpane is just different enough from the usual striped shirts most guys default to.  When under a jacket of some kind, they’ll give your look a bit of depth.  And unlike gingham (we’re getting there) they’ve got plenty of white which is more business ready.  When it comes to the office, for patterns, Tic-Tac-Toe > Checkers.  And for the size of the squares, the ideal size is between a pencil eraser and a quarter.  The perfect example:  Ratio’s.

 

#5. The Bold Gingham

Color is up to you.  Black and white obviously offers the most contrast, but deep blue, red, even purple can deliver.  It’s a dressed up version of a dressed down pattern. Nordstrom’s house brand “Calibrate” is shown above, and those shirts are something else. Also part of the Anniversary Sale, coming up on Friday. How to wear it over here.

 

#6. White base, thin stripe

The stripes on these are razor thin. Not a double stripe of different colors (say, a light blue and dark blue next to each other), but just one color, real thin, evenly spaced. That white base is dominant, but the stripes add a bit of depth. Clean and mean.  Thicker striped ties look just fine worn over these.  Keep your stripes slim and you can even take some color risks like a pink or light green.

 

#7. The micro  pattern

Whether it’s a tiny check, tattersall, micro-plaid, gingham, or houndstooth, these are shirts that have two (three max) colors going on with a very small pattern. Not stripes, but something more geometric. From a distance they look solid, but up close they’re not. Lots of visual depth with these, and they often look great when you wear a suit without a tie.

 

#8. Thick/Bengal stripe

The stripes here are much thicker than the pin-stripe at #6.  Thick enough that from a distance, the shirt looks like it’s leaning more towards the color of the stripe, instead of the white base. Blue is a default, black stripes can work, as can red if you want a shirt with some punch.

 

#9. The Pink or Red Subtle Patterned Shirt

Pretty sure we’re all past the pink = YOU PLAY BALL LIKE A GIRL thing. Beware though. Some of us whiter dudes (y’know, us crackers) might not look so great wearing solid pink.  Lil’ too close to the skin tone.  So, harken back to #7, and maybe opt for a red micro-check on white. That’s not a  bad option for a similar look. It helps make the pink look less like flushed flesh.

 

#10. The Grey

A grey shirt with collar stay slots (not a floppy collared chambray) is a good shirt to have on hand for under black sweaters or black sportcoats/blazers.  Works surprisingly well with a navy suit as well. Not a bad getup to wear when grabbing a cocktail post sunset.  It’s still put together, has an evening out feel to it, but it’s thankfully still very far from clubby when tucked in and layered over.
.

Final Notes

• 2 is the magic number:  Less is more.  Two is sort of the speed limit when it comes to dress shirts.  Meaning:  Anything more than two colors or two different thicknesses of lines in a pattern on a shirt and things can get weird.  There are exceptions, but solids, and pattern shirts with just one color on a base are safest.
• Try and stick with all cotton:  Prices are rising (evidence is up above…) but limiting the level of poly used in your dress shirts will keep you cooler.  Sometimes synthetic just can’t be avoided, like in the shirts from Target.
• Neck and Sleeve = More dressed up:  Sometimes a S/M/L/ neck will fit.  Sometimes it won’t.  Try it on.
• No-Iron is up to you:  Some people love wrinkle free.  Some hate it.  Up to you.
• Collar Stays:  Always.  Unless it’s a button down collar.  Wurkin Stiffs are even better.

Anything missed?  What should have made the top 10 that wasn’t? A bit plain + boring? Maybe. But again, two is the magic number. Extra colors + thickness of stripes can make a nice shirt look cheap real fast. Plain isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Leave it all in the comments. Many thanks to Rietsh P. for sending in a request for a 2013 update to this list.

A group of satanists say they’ve given the controversial Westboro Baptist Church a taste of its own medicine, performing a same-sex ritual at the grave of the mother of the church’s founder. Members of the Satanist Temple performed on Sunday what its spokesman describes as a “pink mass” an admittedly made-up ritual, celebrating gay love, at the grave in Meridian, Miss. Spokesman Lucien Greaves doffed a headdress made of horns as two male couples, and a female couple recited scripture, lit candles and made out over the grave. Members then posthumously declared Catherine Johnston, the mother of Westboro’s founder Fred Phelps, a lesbian.

An anonymous reader writes "Comcast engineers want to put WiFi transceivers in rental cars, taxis, buses and even on humans to extend reach of its Xfinity WiFi network. They also detail an idea for offering incentives to drivers to move WiFi-enabled cars to areas where it needs WiFi coverage. The plan was detailed in a patent application published today by the USPTO (I wrote a story about it for FierceCable)." Speaking of extension, this sounds like a logical outgrowth of using wireless routers to grow the network. (I hope they choose their humans carefully, if this plan bears fruit.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An innocuous high rise in downtown Los Angeles, California, just sold for a record $437.5 million. That’s 2.5 times the price per square foot of comparable buildings in the area, which might seem surprising, given that there’s nothing special about the building itself. But there is something special about its tenants.

That’s because 624 S. Grand Ave—more commonly known as One Wilshire—is the biggest telecommunications hub on the US west coast, according to CBRE Group’s Kevin Shannon. In fact, the importance of this high-rise data center is only rivaled by two other data centers in the world, according to Shannon: 60 Hudson Street in New York City and Telehouse in London.

One Wilshire is home to telecoms like Verizon, Sirius XM Radio and China Telecom. It’s also home to colocation centers—data centers where different companies rent space to store servers—such as the one run by CoreSite. Not only that, it sits at one end of fiber optic cables that connect Asia and North America, with much of the low-latency traffic between the two continents coursing through its wires. It’s little surprise that stock brokerage Crowell, Weedon & Co. is also a tenant. Some companies that trade try to locate as close as possible to their servers to minimize the time required to transmit data.

One Wilshire’s new owner, GI Partners, made the acquisition through TechCore, a $1 billion fund they manage for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). Since launching in 2012, GI Partners boasts that TechCore “has acquired 1.7 million square feet of mission critical data center and office properties.”

GI Partners isn’t the only financial firm in the data center game;  it was owned by the Carlyle Group before being sold to Hines Real Estate Trust in 2007. In 2011, data centers raised $6.9 billion dollars in debt financing and $400 million in equity financing. Boutique investment firms like DH Capital are even beginning to specialize in data center investments. The race is on to become one with the cloud.

Lyft, one of San Francisco's most beloved new apps, isn't a bad idea if you think about it very briefly: the city's transit service isn't great, so let's make it easy to pay for a ride from your fellow man. But, surprise, when you let almost anyone be a cab driver, your fellow man is going to creep you the hell out.

Jay-Z has officially become Jay Z. The rapper has formally dropped the hyphen from his name, albeit so quietly that no one really noticed for a while. Mr. Z was first listed as Jay (no hyphen) Z in the liner notes for 2011’s Watch The Throne, and his name was recently changed on iTunes, but no one really pointed it out until Billboard this week. The publication says it got official confirmation of the punctuation switch straight from the rapper’s label, issuing notice to all the copyeditors out there. It’s not as big a nomenclatural story as Snoop Dogg changing his moniker to Snoop Lion, but it’s a bit of a shake-up all the same, maybe.

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OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

The difference between this and the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol Building is that Wisconsin is full of white people who are unlikely to be shot by police. I really hope these kids get out of this OK. :(

Original Source

In its latest effort to crack down on sexual assault offenders, the Air Force is now kicking all of them out of the military. By Stephanie Gaskell

Elmer T. Lee

Elmer T. Lee, 93, the iconic master distiller whose name graces one of the bourbons made at Buffalo Trace, died Tuesday after a brief illness.

He was a pioneer in making single-barrel bourbons, and brought his first -- Blanton's -- to market in 1984. He retired in 1985, but was convinced to return to work as brand ambassador and master distiller emeritus for Buffalo Trace.

"We have lost a wonderful friend today, and he will be missed terribly," said Mark Brown, president and CEO of Sazerac, parent company of Buffalo Trace.

"In the world of making really fine whiskey, the role of master distiller is pivotal, but Elmer's meaning to those he met, came to know, and worked with closely extended far beyond that of a master distiller," Brown said.

"Elmer defined, in the simplest terms, what it means to be a great American: hard working, self-made, courageous, honest, kind, humble and humorous."

Lee was born in 1919 on a tobacco farm near Peaks Mill, Franklin County, KY. During World War II he served as a radar bombardier on a B-29, flying missions against Japan through 1945. In 1946, he was honorably discharged and returned home to study engineering at the University of Kentucky, where he graduated with honors in 1949.

In September 1949, Lee began working in the engineering department of the George T. Stagg Distillery in Frankfort. By 1966, he became plant superintendent, then plant manager in 1969. In 1984, he introduced Blanton's, the world's first single-barrel bourbon.

Lee was inducted into the Bourbon Hall of Fame in 2001, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Whisky Advocate magazine in 2002, and a Lifetime Achievement Award and Hall of Fame induction from Whisky Magazine in 2012.

vgjunk:

Night Slashers is really good, and if you like punching zombies so hard all their flesh falls off you should play it (or read about it here).

Things you can do with a book: sculpt it, scrape it, turn it into a cave

Lady Jouster by AutumnCat on Flickr.