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50-Year-Old 'Boston Strangler' Case Might Finally Be Solved
George Zimmerman Offers To Just Plead Guilty And Pay Fine Or Whatever
Comedy: Newswire: Comedy Central to start selling its stand-up specials for $5 a pop
When Louis C.K. sold his self-produced special Live At The Beacon Theater on his own website for five dollars, he didn’t set out to change the distribution model for comedy. In fact, his next special Oh My God premiered on HBO (though it will go up for sale in the same form as Beacon in September). But that release strategy—and its million-dollar profit in less than two weeks—significantly influenced other comedians. Aziz Ansari and Jim Gaffigan tried the same approach with their own specials, and now Comedy Central is taking the experiment and turning it into a full paradigm shift.
Today marks the launch of CC: Stand-Up Direct, where many Comedy Central specials are now available to download for a mere five dollars. One-hour performances from John Mulaney, Nick Kroll, Anthony Jeselnik, Kristen Schaal, Eugene Mirman, Kyle Kinane, and others are available to stream and for ...
Read moreConvos With My 2-Year-Old: Episode 6 ‘The Pants’
“Once upon a time, there was a boy named Tony. He had no hair, no sunglasses and no seat belts.”
Warmland Films has released episode 6 of their web series, Convos With My 2 Year Old, titled ‘The Pants.’ It features 2-year-old Coco (as played by a grown man) declaring to her father that she will not get dressed for the day, until she gets to ‘read’ her book.
video via ConvosWith2YrOld
David Attenborough Narrates a Soccer Hooligan Brawl
A brawl between two gangs of European soccer fans gets the nature documentary treatment with the addition of choice David Attenborough narration in this video by DaleTheHorse. The original video is by Hooligan Wardrobe, a YouTube channel that celebrates the ancient art of soccer hooliganry.
via b3ta, Have You Seen This?!
Guillermo del Toro Gets a Nerd Drunk
firehose'2 shots of tequila and approximately 1/2 oz of fresh squeezed limes. Fill the rest of a pint glass with Mexican grapefruit soda.
You hand the drink to a sucker (seated) and then slam in an ample portion of kosher salt into the glass (causing it to fizz wildly). The recipient then must chug the whole glass but hold the last swallow in his or her mouth.'
Here's Guillermo del Toro making his favorite cocktail, "The Muppet." (If I'm right, the other guys on stage include Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, del Toro regular Doug Jones, and some lucky/poor nerd who decided to wear only his finest Joker t-shirt to meet del Toro.) Granted, I really, really liked Pacific Rim—but I also believe the experience of watching the film could be improved if, in lieu of previews, del Toro did this for each audience member.
Via Badass Digest.
jojothedickcopter: As I sashay through the valley of the shadow...
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As I sashay through the valley of the shadow of death
Film: Movie Review: Pacific Rim
firehose"His summer movie is a spare-part contraption, wedging together elements not just from Toho monster movies and giant-robot anime, but also Top Gun, ’90s disaster movies, Starship Troopers, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and Del Toro’s own oeuvre. At one point, the squadron’s stern leader (Idris Elba, commanding in a stock role) delivers a pep talk virtually identical to Bill Pullman’s inspirational speech in Independence Day. Everything about the movie feels a little secondhand.
Yet what Pacific Rim lacks in originality it largely makes up for in boyish enthusiasm—an infectious affection for cocky flyboys, titanic mechanical men, and (especially) the mythically colossal villains."
downside: Charlie Day's character sounds fucking terrible
Money hasn’t changed Guillermo Del Toro, it’s just increased the size of his sandbox. With Pacific Rim, the director of Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies has mounted his first bona-fide blockbuster, in which human-controlled robots wage war on an invading army of God-sized monsters. Every penny of the gargantuan budget is right up there onscreen, applied not just to the apocalyptic battles, but also to the little cosmetic details—the digs and the duds—of the film’s near-future world. Yet for all its expensive grandeur, almost too epic even for the vast canvases of IMAX, Pacific Rim is unmistakably a Del Toro creation. Who but this puckish Mexican auteur would think to include a mind-meld between a squirrelly scientist and a removed monster brain, or to cast Ron Perlman as a black-market bone salesman named Hannibal Chau?
In what feels like a corrective to current ...
Read moreBuild your own Adventure Time game
Build your own Adventure Time game originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 10 Jul 2013 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Apple Store is being built on top of 15th-century Spanish ruins
Apple is building a new store in Madrid right on top of 15th-century hospital ruins, and it's doing so with the local government's blessing. While constructing a basement for the new Apple Store, workers discovered deteriorated walls that served as the foundation of the Buen Sucesco hospital, which was demolished in 1854, according to a report from El País. But rather than halt construction and bring in a team of archeologists to survey the ruins, city officials came up with a plan that allows the store's buildout to continue.
In 2009, during the construction of a light rail station next door to the Apple Store site, developers unearthed foundational ruins of the Buen Sucesco church — which was built in the early 1400's after the hospital was erected. Instead of removing the church ruins, or covering them up, they were left standing. The church ruins The ruins will be protected, but out of sight
currently sit behind glass in the light rail station, allowing them to remain visible to commuters and onlookers. But the Buen Sucesco hospital ruins at the Apple Store site won't end up available for public view like the church ruins next door. However, they will be protected, El País said. Jaime Ignacio Muñoz, who directs Madrid's heritage department, said in the report that the city has directed Apple to cover the hospital ruins and then build its store floor over the top of the ruins — essentially leaving the ruins out of sight, in the basement. In addition, the city is directing Apple to trace an outline into the store floor to show where the ruin walls are located below, Muñoz said.
Originally, the city was considering ordering Apple to build glass panels into the floor that would allow shoppers to see the ruins beneath them, but it dismissed that idea due to a "lack of great interest from a visual point of view," Muñoz said. "It's just foundations. The information that they suggest about the shape of the walls is more important." El País said the new Apple Store will be open in time for Christmas.
- Via Gizmodo
- Source El País (translated)
- Image Credit El País
- Related Items history retail spain madrid apple apple store architecture archeology buen sucesco hospital buen sucesco church buen sucesco historic sites
The Pentagon's Seven Million Lines of Cobol
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Post-Reader RSS Subscriber Counts
firehose"AOL Reader, Digg Reader, and The Old Reader currently do not report subscribers. Please help me pressure them to add a subscriber count to their User-Agent strings"
In the wake of Google Reader’s shutdown, I rewrote my feed-stats script to be more accurate and produce more relevant output formatting.
I was happily surprised to see the top stats for my site:
| Subscribers | App/Service | Reporting |
|---|---|---|
| 45,565 | Google Reader | Reported total |
| 16,000+ | Feedly | (See below) |
| 8,959 | NewsBlur | Reported total |
| 4,164 | NetNewsWire | Unique IPs |
| 2,765 | Feed Wrangler | Reported total |
| 2,574 | Feedbin | (See below) |
| 2,477 | The Old Reader | (See below) |
| 1,301 | Stringer | Unique IPs |
| 1,227 | Reeder (direct) | Unique IPs |
| 1,203 | Fever | Unique IPs |
Google Reader’s crawlers are still running, but as far as I know, nobody’s seeing the results, so they don’t really count.
Feedly does not yet report subscribers in its User-Agent string, but were receptive to the idea when I suggested it by email. They queried one of the database segments and reported that my current subscriber count is over 16,000. Given that they appear elsewhere to be the most popular new service, and they’re one of the few free options, this number is plausible relative to the paid alternatives.
Feedbin and The Old Reader both plan to add subscriber reporting soon, and gave me my subscriber count by email.
In addition to those, AOL Reader and Digg Reader currently do not report subscribers. Please help me pressure them to add a subscriber count to their User-Agent strings1 — it’s important for publishers to know how many people are invisibly subscribed behind one-to-many crawlers like these.
Anyway, total reported subscribers are split almost equally between Google Reader and non-Google-Reader options:
| 45,565 | Google Reader |
| 48,236 | All others |
I can’t reliably compare site traffic since I published an extremely popular post just one day after Google Reader’s interface and API were shut down, but so far, it doesn’t appear that site traffic is noticeably down.
Attention to the feed also appears healthy: this week’s sponsorship post generated a strong number of responses and may have been partly responsible for overloading the sponsor’s site shortly after it was published.
It’s still a little early to say for sure, but so far, it looks like most of this site’s former Google Reader subscribers have found alternatives and remained subscribers.
I’d love to hear from others: How have your subscribers fared?
-
The standard format is simply including “N subscribers” somewhere in the User-Agent. ↩
Film: Newswire: Rex Reed reviews movie he only watched for 20 minutes, presumably just before shoving head up ass
firehose"However, we will just presume Rex Reed is now an ass-ouroboros"
Rex Reed—who has enjoyed a long and famed career as a film critic thanks to his pleasantly alliterative name—physically lodged his head up his own ass yesterday, sometime after completing his review of horror anthology movie V/H/S 2. Of course, we do not actually know for certain that Reed’s face is currently nestled in the gnarled interior of his own colon, his perpetually aggrieved and haughty breaths echoing off his lower intestinal walls. This is because we decided to walk out on and stop paying any real attention to Rex Reed years ago.
However, we will just presume Rex Reed is now an ass-ouroboros, much as Reed just presumed numerous things about a movie that he “reviewed” after watching a mere 20 minutes of it. Much like Reed, we are very busy and self-involved people, and we have no time to pay attention to these ...
Read more
Surgery price wars in Oklahoma City?
firehosevia Albener Pessoa
I don’t have deep background knowledge on this particular hospital, but here is a new and interesting article:
An Oklahoma City surgery center is offering a new kind of price transparency, posting guaranteed all-inclusive surgery prices online. The move is revolutionizing medical billing in Oklahoma and around the world.
Dr. Keith Smith and Dr. Steven Lantier launched Surgery Center of Oklahoma 15 years ago, founded on the simple principle of price honesty.
“What we’ve discovered is health care really doesn’t cost that much,” Dr. Smith said. “What people are being charged for is another matter altogether.”
Surgery Center of Oklahoma started posting their prices online about four years ago.
Click here to see the online prices at Surgery Center of Oklahoma.
The prices are all-inclusive quotes and they are guaranteed.
“When we first started we thought we were about half the price of the hospitals,” Dr. Lantier remembers. “Then we found out we’re less than half price. Then we find out we’re a sixth to an eighth of what their prices are. I can’t believe the average person can afford health care at these prices.”
Their goal was to start a price war and they did.
Their first out-of-town patients came from Canada; soon everyday Americans caught on.
Here is a bit more:
Dr. Smith said federal Medicare regulation would not allow for their online price menu.
They have avoided government regulation and control in that area by choosing not to accept Medicaid or Medicare payments.
I would like to know more about this example (maybe Cherokee Gothic can go buy something there), but the article is here and some further coverage is here. For the pointer I thank Jake Seliger and also Craig Fratrik and Timothy Miano.
Utah Prisons Finally Scrap Stupid Rule Requiring English-Only Visits
firehosevia Russian Sledges
For years Utah prisons have been unique in that they required inmates to speak with their visitors using only English, the fear being that anyone speaking in some godless foreign tongue could be dangerously scheming in front of the guards. Ain't that the American way: Instead of teaching the guards foreign languages, or hiring multilingual guards in the first place, let's just ban every language but English.
    
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Liquor company enlists army of bee slaves to build a honeycomb bottle
firehosevia Russian Sledges
"3B printing" groaaaaaaaaaaaaan
Insects, we are learning, are nature's Makerbots. First, MIT researchers enlisted 6,500 silkworms to print a silk pavilion. Now Dewars, the venerable whisky brand now owned by Bacardi, has marshaled an army of bees to 3D-print a honeycomb sculpture of a whisky bottle. The sculpture, which is designed to promote Highlander Honey Whisky, was coordinated by New York advertising agency The Ebeling Group. Fast Company takes a look at the challenges involved in so-called "3B printing," starting with the fact that the queen bee had to be sequestered to prevent her from laying eggs in the honeycomb. The project took six weeks to complete, two rounds of bees, and plenty of bee suits to protect the film crew. And while the bees were coerced into...
Is that Animal Crossing obsession turning you into an 'otaku' citizen?
Does Animal Crossing: New Leaf promote an 'otaku citizenship' ethic of obsessive collection for the sake of community? That's the theme of this week's PBS Idea Channel discussion.
3DS game Animal Crossing has been a worldwide smash hit, drawing gamers into its mechanic of collecting fruit, fossils, fish and other goodies. As mayor of a countryside town, players can trade their goodies for in-game cash, to be spent on municipal and household improvements, donated to the local museum, or gifted to neighbors.
Idea Channel's Mike Rugnetta, who hosts the weekly online culture show, asks whether this activity represents an ideal of citizenship based on otaku behavior patterns, which he describes as being somewhere between fan devotion and collection of things for its own sake. Does it promote a lifestyle and set of values in line with 'otaku' mores, especially given that the game carries no narrative separate from its own collect-and-grow mechanics?
Anyway, for the many Polygon readers (and writers) currently obsessed with Animal Crossing, it's a neat diversion.
Death Valley National Park to visitors: Stop frying eggs on the ground - Yahoo! News
firehoseamercia
Report: Nation Thinking About Big, Warm Piece Of Cinnamon Coffee Cake Right Now
firehosethis fucking day
Singing the Lesbian Blues in 1920s Harlem
firehosevia Russian Sledges
Our own Lisa Hix has written a terrific article about how Bessie Smith and other blues divas of the 1920s led not-entirely secret double lives as lesbians, occasionally taunting their audiences with revealing lyrics. For example, in the 1928 song "Prove It on Me," Gertrude “Ma” Rainey—known as “The Mother of Blues”—sang, “It’s true I wear a collar and a tie, … Talk to the gals just like any old man." While such lyrics might not seem like a big deal to us today, back then, pursuing same-sex relations could get you thrown in jail.
Singing the Lesbian Blues in 1920s Harlem
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Is T-Mobile's new Jump plan a good deal?
firehoseonly if you buy a phone or more a year, and only if off-contract prices don't go down (protip: they already are)
T-Mobile just unveiled its latest "uncarrier" moves at a press event in New York City, and the new Jump plan was undoubtedly its biggest announcement. For $10 a month, customers can upgrade their phone twice every calendar year, a move that the company says will set it apart from competitors that make you wait two years to upgrade to a new handset. The question is whether or not this is truly a good deal, and the answer is: it depends.
Imagine you picked up a Samsung Galaxy S4 on T-Mobile today. The phone, which has a $579.99 list price, would cost you $99.99 down, plus $20 every month for 24 months, as well as an additional $10 per month for Jump. You're first eligible for a Jump upgrade after six months, and let's imagine you wanted to take advantage of it immediately. At that point, you'd have paid a total of $279.99 ($99.99 plus $30 per month for Jump and your standard equipment installment plan). Assuming you were buying another new, high-end phone like the Galaxy S4 without Jump, you'll likely be paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $600 for a new phone.
If you're confident you'll take advantage of the plan twice a year, every year, it's worth looking into
Obviously, you've paid less using Jump at that point, but there's a catch: T-Mobile will take back that Galaxy S4 when you upgrade. You don't get to keep the phone as a backup or sell it on the secondary market. For some people, this likely won't be an issue — messing around with selling phones on Craigslist or eBay can be a huge exercise in frustration. And Jump gives you insurance benefits as well. Given the fact that Verizon and AT&T charge $7 per month for comparable insurance plans while Sprint charges a whopping $11, the $10 Jump plan and its early upgrade benefits don't seem so bad. Particularly if you're the kind of person who subjects your phone to a lot of abuse (though you'll have to pay a deductible to replace a broken phone in all cases).
It's not as much of a sure thing as T-Mobile would have you believe
While there certainly can be an argument for Jump if you take advantage of it on a regular basis, things don't look quite as good the longer you wait. Let's say you wait a full year before trading in your Galaxy S4 — at that point, you'll have paid $459.99 for the phone and your Jump plan. That's only $120 less than the full retail price for the phone, and you still don't get to keep it. Sure, it's a pain to sell phones on the secondary market, but a former flagship phone can usually fetch far more than $120, even after a year of use. There's also the fact that flagship phones tend to be on an annual cycle — so you could get caught after six months having to make a choice between "upgrading" to a phone you don't really want, or losing value the longer you wait for that next phone to come along.
It's probably fair to say that Jump isn't always better than your other options for upgrading your phone — it's just different. If you're confident you'll take advantage of the plan twice a year, every year, it's worth looking into. If you're the kind of person who likes to have upgrade freedom without the hassle of selling used phones, or if you're prone to breaking your devices, it's definitely worth a look. But if you just want to upgrade your iPhone or Galaxy device every summer like clockwork, you might be better off saving your $10 every month and just making Craigslist sales part of your yearly ritual.
WSJ: Moto X will be available on all major US carriers, backed by $500M marketing blitz
firehose"under Google's ownership, Motorola has reportedly convinced the providers to dial back the amount of bloatware that will ship on the hardware" to be limited to just Google's
The upcoming Moto X smartphone represents something of a rebirth for Motorola, and Google is reportedly willing to spend top dollar to get that message across. According to The Wall Street Journal, Mountain View is prepared to spend upwards of $500 million on the marketing campaign for Motorola's customizable, assembled-in-the-USA flagship. That budget is said to cover the United States as well as some international countries where the Moto X will be sold. Motorola has already turned on the hype machine, recently placing a full-page ad in various US newspapers crediting the Moto X as "the first smartphone you can design yourself." Those customizations are said to include a choice of colors for the front and back as well as engraving options.
Availability of the Moto X is expected to be widespread for US buyers. All four major mobile carriers in the United States — Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile — will carry the Moto X sometime this fall, The Wall Street Journal report claims. Even better, under Google's ownership, Motorola has reportedly convinced the providers to dial back the amount of bloatware that will ship on the hardware. We've collected everything we know (so far) about Moto X and Motorola's other upcoming products here.
- Source The Wall Street Journal
- Related Items advertising google marketing carriers motorola mobility moto x Motorola Cellphones