CLEVELAND—With the 11-time NBA All-Star making no move to take out his wallet after receiving his Reuben from the counter, sources at Earl’s East Side Market confirmed Thursday that Cavaliers forward LeBron James was clearly expecting the deli to give him the sandwich for free. “Thanks, guys—so, all set?” said James, who reportedly looked around at several deli employees before slowly taking a couple small steps toward the door. “Yeah...looks delicious, as always. Well, I gotta go get ready for the game tonight. Thanks again.” At press time, after another customer had gone up to the cashier to pay, James abruptly grabbed a small bag of chips and quickly walked out.
The Patriots are looking at five weeks and four games without quarterback Tom Brady after he was suspended for his involvement in the DeflateGate scandal. Prior to Thursday, there were two quarterbacks behind Brady in Jimmy Garoppolo and Garrett Gilbert. The former is expected to start, while the latter was waived shortly before the Flynn signing, according to Shalise Young of the Boston Herald.
That said, this has "nothing to do with the Brady situation," according to a follow-up Tweet from Russini, and has everything to do with the Patriots wanting a veteran quarterback for camp. That makes sense, but it also stands to reason they wanted someone better than Gilbert as insurance.
For his career, Flynn has completed 61.3 percent of his passes for 2,541 yards with 17 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. He seemed to get something of a raw deal with both Seattle and Oakland, being immediately replaced by rookie quarterbacks before ever getting a chance to start.
At this point in his career, Flynn is considered a capable backup and not much else. He was exactly that for the aforementioned Rodgers for multiple seasons, tossing nine touchdowns and five interceptions in limited playing time during that stint of his career.
In Las Cruces, New Mexico, there’s a library with no books, but a great story; a library with nothing to read, but that you have to check out; a library for people who just want to take a few minutes to sit down and get lost — in a good kitten. Becky Garcia is the kitten librarian. Actually, she’s the receptionist at the Dona Ana County office building, where a couple years ago county officials installed a little kitty condo in the lobby. The cats are from a local shelter and they’re available to any employee looking for a moment of purr bliss.
This itty-bitty tailgating house is nicer than a lot of actual houses.
Georgia Southern has a new option for tailgaters this coming season: For a fee, you can party in a small house that looks like a Gulliver's Travels version of a Southern antebellum mansion. From Georgia Southern's website:
The suite can accommodate dozens of guests with almost 400 square feet of indoor entertaining space that includes four flat screen HD satellite TVs, wet bar, air conditioning and a private bathroom. You also have the ability to move the party outside with satellite television, outdoor furniture, exterior beverage refrigerator and propane grill.
(Picture: Georgia Southern's website)
Sure, when you think "tailgate," you think of something outside. But, I mean, I really want to party in that tiny little house. It's a cool idea on par with South Carolina's tailgating cabooses.
Canada’s supreme court has struck down a law that restricted medical marijuana users from purchasing or consuming the substance in any form except dried leaves. Under the law, which allows people with prescriptions to buy, grow, and smoke marijuana in its original form only, extracting resins or other active chemicals from the plant for cooking or external application could lead to criminal charges—as Owen Smith, who worked for a medical marijuana dispensary in Victoria, was reminded when police arrested him in possession of marijuana cookies, teas, and oils in 2009.
That arrest led to a legal case against the Canadian government because, as Smith’s employer at the dispensary later told reporters, it was “quite absurd that [the] government would essentially force patients to smoke this plant instead of using all the other alternatives, which are much more medically beneficial to many patients.”
The Canadian government appealed to its highest court after several lower courts sided with Smith. Today’s ruling should settle the matter once and for all. The country’s health minister is “outraged” and said the government will continue to push back against the “normalization” of marijuana in society. But parents of sick children for whom marijuana has been therapeutically useful are now happy that their kids can take doses in different forms.
Viola, you’ve been vocal in the past about feeling marginalized as a nonwhite actor in film, saying many of the roles you’d been offered were “downtrodden, mammy-ish” women. What most appealed to you and scared you about playing the lead in a Shonda Rhimes drama?
DAVIS: There was absolutely no precedent for it. I had never seen a 49-year-old, dark-skinned woman who is not a size 2 be a sexualized role in TV or film. I’m a sexual woman, but nothing in my career has ever identified me as a sexualized woman. I was the prototype of the “mommified” role. Then all of a sudden, this part came, and fear would be an understatement. When I saw myself for the first time in the pilot episode, I was mortified. I saw the fake eyelashes and, “Are you kidding me? Who is going to believe this?” And then I thought: “OK, this is your moment to not typecast yourself, to play a woman who is sexualized and do your investigative work to find out who this woman is and put a real woman on TV who’s smack-dab in the midst of this pop fiction.
GYLLENHAAL: Isn’t it so much hotter to see a woman on TV who looks like an actual woman, someone whose arms aren’t perfect?
LANGE: (To Davis) Except your arms are perfect!
GYLLENHAAL: I was talking about mine! (Laughter.)
DAVIS: The thing I had to get used to with TV was the likability factor. People have to like you, people have to think you’re pretty. I was going to have to face a fact that people were going to look at me and say: “I have no idea why they cast her in a role like this. She just doesn’t fit. It should have been someone like Halle Berry. It’s her voice, and she doesn’t walk like a supermodel in those heels.” And people do say that, they do. But what I say to that is the women in my life who are sexualized are anywhere from a size zero to a size 24. They don’t walk like supermodels in heels. They take their wig and makeup off at night. So this role was my way of saying, “Welcome to womanhood!” It’s also healed me and shown a lot of little dark-skinned girls with curly hair a physical manifestation of themselves.
Liz: Here’s a guest post from Bernat at Wolfram, who has been putting the Wolfram Language on the Pi to work at a Smart Cities Hackathon in Barcelona. If you haven’t used the Wolfram Language before, this is a nice little glimpse into what it’s capable of: enjoy!
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On Friday, February 20, I had the pleasure of giving a talk to a group of young and smart individuals enlisted to represent Barcelona in the Global Urban Datafest. For this hackathon, the organizers offered one Raspberry Pi platform per team and a variety of sensors to capture physical parameters. Their list of suggested project topics included data acquisition and actuation, monitoring and management, security transport and mobility, the environment, and more. The event lasted three days and was locally organized by Anna Calveras and Josep Paradells with the help of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona’s City Council, iCity Project, Urbiotica, IBM, and Wolfram Research.
Early on, hackathon participants were oriented to the various tools available to aid them with development. I showed the hackathon participants that the Wolfram Language knows about thousands of real-world entities, and that everything in the language is a symbolic expression.
Using CityBikes API to get real-time data, it was easy to track usage in a bike-sharing system in a smart city. Importing and visualizing this data with GeoGraphics was straightforward:
Then I explained how I used a Raspberry Pi to digest Friday’s bicycle data overnight. The microprocessor was set up to compute the total number of bicycles available in different cities every 10 minutes from 3:30–8:30am CET:
European cities showed a valley in the number of available bicycles at 8am when people cycled to work. Citizens from New York and Mexico City were found to head back home around 5am CET.
Essential for this hackathon was the new Wolfram Data Drop, an open service that makes it easy to accumulate data of any kind, from anywhere, which works great on the Pi while connected to the Wolfram Cloud. The following is a dataset that I created for Barcelona’s bike-sharing system. Every 3 minutes the total number of parked bicycles is added to a Databin:
One of the cool features of Data Drop is that you can directly analyze this data through Wolfram|Alpha:
Another dataset that I created using a Raspberry Pi monitored the pedestrian flow happening at the front door of my apartment. If any movement was detected by a PIR motion sensor, the RaspiCam would take a photo, and a new entry would be added into a databin:
This appears in the Data Drop cloud like this:
The result was this DateListPlot of cumulative numbers of movements detected:
Then I showed how it could be set up to monitor my home hall’s activity in regular periods of time:
Certainly, this opens up a new world of possibilities. For example, you can use Data Drop to combine data from specific events from different devices. This was exactly what one of the teams did. They set up a Twitter account with ServiceConnect to inform people of the current air pollution in “La Diagonal,” Barcelona’s most important avenue. Every 20 minutes they checked the latest values of 10 gas sensors, and then generated and tweeted a ListLinePlot with a map of the sensors:
Other smart city projects involved the use of the new Machine Learning capabilities available in Mathematica 10, such as FindFaces to estimate the number of individuals in a bar, or BarcodeRecognize for a universal citizen ID card project. For most of the participants, this was their first encounter with the Wolfram Language, and yet they made useful, functional prototypes in just 48 hours. So I can’t wait to see what they are capable of with just a bit more practice. I wish all of them tons of happy, smart coding!
I will always remember Christopher Lee as that horrifying moment in the LOTR commentaries where Peter Jackson says he started to direct him on how to act like he’d been stabbed and Christopher Lee goes “no no peter dear, when someone is stabbed like this, THIS is how they look, they don’t make a sound, air just leaves them all at once” and peter jackson remembers in that moment that lee was in the secret service and just slowly backs away.
Police: Woman was killed after reuniting with onetime love interest; he committed ... Fox News SEMINOLE, Fla. – Authorities say a woman who flew from Colorado to Florida to reconnect with an old flame turned up dead days later, and her onetime boyfriend killed himself as investigators zeroed in on him as the prime suspect. Pinellas County Sheriff ...
Nike’s new, eight-year deal to serve as the exclusive apparel provider to the NBA was only announced yesterday (June 10) but has long seemed inevitable—and not just since March, when Adidas said it wouldn’t renew its contract with the league. No, this Nike deal feels like it’s been coming for years.
Adidas has been the sponsor since 2006, and Reebok owned the rights for years before it. Meanwhile, Nike has steadily taken over the market for basketball apparel and footwear.
Nike is rooted in running shoes, but basketball is also part of the brand’s DNA. It was Nike that signed a young Michael Jordan, and a year later released his signature sneaker, the still-popular and iconic Air Jordan I. The company also has claims on the original signature basketball sneaker, the Chuck Taylor All-Star, thanks to its acquisition of Converse in 2003.
Nike has now had 14 straight quarters of double-digit sales growth in its basketball products. Last year alone, it sold $340 million worth of its signature LeBron James sneakers, $195 million of its Kevin Durant sneakers, and $105 million of its Kobe Bryant models.
Although they don’t rival the total sales of running shoes or casual-athletic sneakers—the kind moms love—basketball shoes also happen to be one of the fastest-growing categories in athletic footwear generally. That kind of growth has a powerful effect when you own 90% of the market for basketball sneakers.
Nike’s NBA deal, which also covers the WNBA women’s league and the NBA’s development league, is valued at an estimated $1 billion, according to ESPN.
The sponsorship, which starts with the 2017-2018 season, also will set a new precedent. For the first time, the sponsor’s logo will appear on the NBA’s jerseys. That means every team jersey will carry a swoosh, which is obviously great for Nike, but works out great for the NBA as well: A recent report by Millward Brown, a brand-strategy consulting group, estimated Nike’s brand value as the highest in the apparel world, while a separate study of teens by investment bank Piper Jaffray found that Nike was the preferred clothing brand among upper-income US teens. That swoosh may very well help to actually sell more NBA jerseys.
The New York Police Deparment—a force that is infamous for its widespread surveillance of Muslims—is looking to beef up its number of officers who practice Islam.
The music REALLY swells about 70 seconds in and it's glorious. Honestly, Warner makes some salient points here, especially about Oliver mocking Trinidad and Tobago's culture, but someone needs to tell him that John Oliver isn't American. He did recently chug a Bud Light Lime, though. I can see how that would be misleading.
'Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said on Twitter that the Touch is expected to ship sometime in the first half of 2016, not long after the Rift itself. That’s welcome news to the slack-jawed bearded men who, judging by Oculus’ publicity photos, are the exclusive target market for the Rift.'
At a press conference in San Francisco today, the VR company Oculus revealed the consumer edition of its Rift headset, Silicon Valley’s latest attempt to have you apply electronics directly to your face. The Rift is an elaborate set of video game goggles that works in conjunction with an external sensor to plunge the user into an all-encompassing virtual world. It joins a long lineage of face-based devices like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, Google Glass, and those fidgety electronic goggles that came with 3D TVs a few years ago, when Sony et al. were trying to make 3D a thing again.
None of those predecessor products met with much success. Perhaps people do not like attaching electric gizmos to their face. Or perhaps, as Oculus believes, users will be willing to stuff their meaty craniums into a gadget to experience the “magic of presence.” That is the marketing term ...
Having finally accepted the awesome burden of omnipotent ruler of Heaven and Earth, 78-year-old actor Morgan Freeman has signed on to host a new guided tour of the Almighty. Called The Story Of God, the series will explore the many diverse manifestations of God humans have worshipped throughout the millennia by visiting famous religious sites such as Stonehenge, Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, India’s Bodhi Tree, and even a Texas megachurch. There, Freeman will smile and nod politely while the poor, deluded souls that worship at that particular location explain their brand of religious belief. After hearing them out, Freeman will reveal his true nature by popping in a DVD of Bruce Almighty, causing the parishioners fall to their knees and declare him the one true God. We assume, anyway.
The Story Of God is set to premiere on the National Geographic channel next year.
Over in Cajun country sits the small town of Rayne. Driving through town, you’ll see many murals depicting frogs in all their glory. One weekend a year, usually in November and now in May, Rayne pulls out all the stops for their annual Rayne Frog Festival.
The chronic loss of bladder control is a complicated problem, not least because of the social stigma attached. There are few options for managing the condition. Usually, people wear adult diapers or opt to get surgery done. Brightly, a new wearable, aims to change that.
Maybe it's the larger scope of enforcement, or a weariness over similar efforts that occur every year, or a rising awareness that this city's housing market feels crazily unfair. Whatever the reason, people are infuriated this year over the police department's push to get "entrenched" campers out of the Central Eastside.
Street Roots' Israel Bayer had sort of a here-we-go-again attitude when I talked with him late last month. After being out and about and witnessing officers sending people packing, though, he became convinced the effort was deeply troubling. Activists are holding up signs and calling cops "pigs" as they record the cleanups, and, weirdly, getting into skirmishes with small-town mayors. Longtime Portland City Council gadfly Joe Walsh didn't even bother coming into council chambers Wednesday morning. He sat out front of city hall with a bullhorn, accusing Mayor Charlie Hales of heartlessness (you could hear his garbled shouts from the building, but not really his words).
Even Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury, one of the city's top partners in the fight against homelessness, has voiced reservations about the effort, saying it doesn't make sense to push people around when they have nowhere to go. (Cops acknowledge that's happening, but say they need to encourage more "low-impact" living—not people setting up tent camps for days and weeks on end).
While all the energy and rage—and applause from plenty of people who want to move the homeless out of their 'hood—is going on across the river, there are also changes afoot downtown. As we report in this week's Hall Monitor, the Portland Bureau of Transportation is getting ready to expand the number of downtown blocks where people aren't allowed to sit during the day.
Starting July 1, PBOT plans to expands the "pedestrian use zone" on eight blocks, essentially eliminating from 7 am to 9 pm the ribbon of sidewalk where people are allowed to sit or lie down. There are already something like 32 of these downtown (depending on how you count the weirdly shaped ones). There's a map up above, with the existing no-sit sidewalks in orange, and the new ones in red. (Here's a rich and full-sized PDF version (complete with the hands-holding-a-charm-bracelet-covered-heart iteration of PBOT's $5,000 new logo), since our site is an image prison.)
That amounts to three stretches of sidewalk near MAX stops, the entire periphery of the big food cart pod at 10th and Alder, and the NW Hoyt-facing side of Powell's.
It could have been far more drastic than this. The Portland Business Alliance has been pressing the city to push the number of no-sit blocks up to roughly 120, but PBOT staffers found most of those requests didn't have any basis in reality. The bureau only expands the pedestrian zone if there are safety concerns raised by people sitting—like that they might fall into traffic or on the MAX tracks, or create tripping hazards on narrow or particularly crowded blocks.
Here are the actual city rules:
B. The Director of the Bureau of Transportation may determine to designate a sidewalk area in the following situations:
1. All street corners where the pedestrian use zone encompasses the entire area bounded by the extended frontage lines and the streets.
2. Locations adjacent to high volume or high speed traffic with no parking or furnishing zone or with narrow sidewalks with no buffer.
3. Locations where a critical mass of pedestrians warrant a wider area.
4. Locations at Food Cart “pod” frontages that create queuing conflicts.
5. Locations adjacent to parking curb zones to four feet from the curb to allow for access and ingress/egress of parked vehicles.
6. Locations at designated loading platforms for bus, Light Rail, and Streetcar to reduce conflicts of cross traffic for access, loading, and queuing.
7. Locations adjacent to active transit trackways for Light Rail or Streetcar with no travel lane buffer.
PBOT's incremental expansion isn't drawing any of the heat of the police campsite enforcement. The bureau talked over its decisions with advocates, and they're largely pleased with the process.
"We wanted to be thoughtful and deliberate about this," said Bryan Hockaday, a staffer in Transportation Commissioner Steve Novick's office. "We really want to be able to make sure that people are safe and have access to the sidewalks."
That doesn't mean that PBOT's done designating. Hockaday says the bureau will continue to look at PBA's requests—and downtown blocks in general—to assess whether they need greater restrictions.
As I noted in the column, though, there's not much hard proof that even these eight blocks pose huge safety challenges, either. The city couldn't offer up a list of formal complaints or dicey incidents at any of these locations. And when I went and checked them out the other day, there were just two people seated on the sidewalk: Women eating their lunch on the curb near the food carts.
"He's a bro with no ho."—Republican US Senator from Illinois Mark Kirk, caught on an open mic during a Senate Appropriations Committee markup discussing his colleague Senator Lindsey Graham's "rotating first lady" comment.
If you guessed that Senator Kirk's office defended this horseshit by saying he was just "joking around with his colleagues," give yourself eleventy million points.
It continues to be a real mystery why Republicans aren't connecting with a majority of female voters.
"The company can build a high-quality, captivating immersion experience for major live events. The necessary elements are ... Thoughtfully curated follows to build the initial stream. Human editors."
Congratulations! You've reinvented live TV news.
Twitter can be indispensable, engaging, and fun for everyone on the planet, and make even more money in the process. So why isn’t that happening?
For most people, Twitter is too hard to use.
For most people, Tweeting is scary.
For most people, Twitter feels lonely.
None of this is a surprise, as Twitter was mostly built by and for its power users. The odds are high that if you are reading this, you are one of those Twitterers who has built lists and muted accounts. You quote Tweets and tag photos with ease, you have multiple group DM threads, and for anything remotely real-time, you turn to Twitter search before Google.
People like you bring incredible value to Twitter and your product experience should never be worsened. Your feedback to the Twitter team has quite literally shaped the product and your passionate opinions remind all of us that there is something really special here. Long live the raw feed and all of its serendipitous glory. Unfortunately, most of the features listed above are complications that chase normal users right back out the door they came in.
The good news is this is all fixable. However, an incremental and iterative approach to improving Twitter will not work. Instead, Twitter will need to take huge risks, deeply question its key assumptions, and launch materially new stuff early and often.
Twitter does have boldness in its bones. It took unreasonable ambition to go from a company where pundits asked “How will you ever make money?” to building a business that will rack up $2 billion in annualized revenue this year. In parallel, it has been no small feat to guide the company from being a wholly text-based service to one teeming with rich media and a growing video monetization business. Even buying Periscope shows the company has the capacity and appetite for taking risk.
But Twitter needs to be bolder still. It needs to place more bets with potentially oversized payoffs. It needs to question aspects of Twitter it has taken for granted. It needs to operate with smaller teams that require less permission to make change happen. Twitter can afford to build the wrong things. However, Twitter cannot afford to build the right things too slowly.
Those who are out on the road, feeling lonely and so cold, need not fear: The full Gilmore Girlsreunionpanel from ATX is now available online exclusively through Entertainment Weekly. The almost two-hour long event features creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and stars Lauren Graham (Lorelai Gilmore), Alexis Bledel (Rory Gilmore), and Kelly Bishop (Emily Gilmore), who spend the panel in appropriately kitschy armchairs.
The conversation actually kicks off five minutes into the video and moderator Jessica Shaw chats with Sherman-Palladino, Graham, Bledel, and Bishop for a bit before inviting the rest of the show’s surprisingly large cast onstage at the 44 minute mark. The full panel includes the likes of executive producer Dan Palladino, Scott Patterson (Luke Danes), Milo Ventimiglia (Jess Mariano), Keiko Agena (Lane Kim), Yanic Truesdale (Michel Gerard), Liza Weil (Paris Geller), Matt Czuchry (Logan Huntzberger), Jared Padalecki (Dead Forester), and many more. In fact, pretty much ...
Today, Reddit's leadership banned a handful of the site's communities, also known as "subreddits," after deciding they didn't fall in line with its new anti-harassment policies. The rules were announced in May and marked a significant shift in the company's attitude towards moderation, which for years was essentially a bullet point that said "don't do anything super illegal." That laissez-faire approach incubated some of the nastiest places on the internet, including subreddits like "Fat People Hate" — one of the communities that was just banned.
So now that Reddit is taking more control, the site's angry trolls are ready to burn down the house. They're already calling it the next Digg, which is probably the most serious threat you can make to the people who run Reddit, who live in perpetual fear of becoming the next Digg.
"I think people will look back on this as the beginning of the end for Reddit."
"I think people will look back on this as the beginning of the end for Reddit," user "cardevioraphicticia" wrote in the official thread announcing today's bans. "I remember when Digg when down this road - it was about 5 minutes before I first created a Reddit account."
The great irony in all this hair-trigger martyrdom is that Reddit has always been friendly to censorship. For most of the site's history the most meaningful rules were created and enforced by its community moderators, who could be anyone that decided to create a subreddit. Reddit moderators have censored all kinds of material, including reputable journalism. It's never actually been a model of free speech, unless the ideal of free speech includes 6,000 nations run by the kind of tyrants who have the time and inclination to moderate internet message boards.
The First Amendment continues to elude internet trolls
Of course, it's not clear that a handful of moderators at Reddit (the company) are superior to a distributed community of moderators at Reddit (the community). The only sympathetic part of the outrageous response to today's bans is that expecting a small bureaucracy to manage such a massive community could lead to uneven or unfair results, especially if its definition of harassment is dubious. Part of that is Reddit's fault, because it's still afraid to go all the way and purge its most insidious cesspools of hate speech. The company says "we're banning behavior, not ideas:" a policy far too nuanced for angry trolls who mistakenly believe the First Amendment is essentially a license to, say, walk into someone's living room and mock them for being fat.
And really, that's what we're talking about here. A bunch of people who are mad that a private company (Reddit) isn't willing to tolerate vicious mockery and other toxic behavior in its living room. There is no grand censorship happening here, despite what these trolls want you (and each other) to believe. The reason the internet is so wild is that it's actually not like the town square. If you want to spew outrageously racist stuff, guess what, there are plenty of spaces online for you to express yourself. Ku Klux Klan message boards and 8chan will be happy to welcome you.
But if these people — the fat shamers, the white supremacists, the Gamergate zealots —constitute a critical mass of users who are capable of destroying Reddit by leaving it for another site, then what is Reddit's value beyond serving those keen for loathing and abuse? Who would be left to protect?
I'm optimistic this won't be the end of Reddit. But I hope, for once, Reddit's angry trolls make good on one threat: to leave and never come back.
I can't tell if that's black tape and white tape or just white tape colored over with a marker. Either way it's brilliant and I'm so happy to have seen it. If you squint, it really looks like he's wearing white socks and flats/Converses! Fantastic!
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