firehose

Alan Gendreau excelled as a college kicker, but he abruptly quit the game after graduating last year. Now he's back. He's out. And he's looking to make it in the NFL.

Sean Parker's over-the-top wedding is sending a terrible message—and a wonderful one.

Selling $40 studded iPhone covers and $300 floaty dresses to the “upscale homeless.”

Uh oh.

natgeofound:

Travelers look at a glass dome on a stainless-steel train car, April 1947Photograph by Willard Culver, National Geographic

Nice.

Renowned movie poster designer Olly Moss, who last year illustrated a variant cover for DC’s Before Watchmen: Moloch #2, was hired by Marvel Studios to create a wrap poster for Thor: The Dark World. As the name suggests, the print is given to the cast and crew to commemorate the completion of filming (Paolo Rivera was commissioned to create the one for Captain America: The First Avenger).

As you might expect, what Moss came up with is stunning, with each of the principal cast members receiving posters featuring their characters. Although it’s a little tough to tell, the above images appear to show Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, Anthony Hopkins’ Odin and Jaimie Alexander’s Sif Idris Elba’s Heimdall. Chris Hemsworth’s Thor can be seen below. The personalized nature is a nice touch, but the best thing about the posters is that the teleportation plume — I don’t know, is that what we call it? — takes the shape of Thor’s hammer.

OK, that may not be the best part, as Moss says,”And they paid me with a real Mjolnir!” You can see it for yourself on his blog.

The first trailer for Thor: The Dark World arrived overnight. The film opens Nov. 8.

“

When injured Marines who were visiting Boston Marathon bombing victim Celeste Corcoran told her about the Paralympics Sunday at Boston Medical Center, she told them she’d never been a runner because she used to get “the most horrible shin splints.”

“So I was like, ‘Hey, I don’t have shins anymore,’” Corcoran, a 47-year-old hair stylist from Lowell, Mass., is heard saying in a YouTube Video of the encounter. “‘I won’t be getting shin splints. I can do this.’”

”

-

Boston Bombing Amputee No Longer Fears ‘Horrible Shin Splints’

not The Onion

Welcome to Boston

Submitted by: Unknown

Tagged: swimming , pool , mastiff , dogs Share on Facebook

BOSTON—After fellow students at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth expressed surprise at Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s alleged role in last week’s fatal attack, a shocked Tsarnaev told reporters today that his...

BOSTON—Following a string of highly publicized breakups, sources confirmed today that singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is now dating the 22-foot Watertown, MA Sea Hawk pleasure cruiser in which alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev sought sh...

Second time wasn't the charm: Old Town's gay-friendly burger joint/bar Hamburger Mary's permanently closed over the weekend. WWeek broke the news, which was confirmed on the spot's Facebook page after service on Sunday night:

Well, I guess the time has come, as the rumors are a-spreadin'. Hamburger Mary's Portland is closing her doors at this location tonight right after Charity Bingo ends. The evil landlords finally won this battle. More details to follow tomorrow, but stop by and give us hugs and do a shot with us, as our hearts are heavy. We love you, Portland!!!

This most-recent Portland outpost of the national chain opened in Old Town in 2010, after many persistant rumors of its location kept fans guessing for months. (The "original" PDX Mary's, located at SW Taylor and 9th Avenue, was a landmark for the local LGBT community in the '70s and '80s.) Hamburger Mary's, perhaps best known for its inclusive drag nights, still operates nine other locations nationally.

UPDATE: Per another Facebook update, Hamburger Mary's is hoping for yet-another Portland resurrection: "We are looking to relocate and for a new investor... We love you so much, Portland and we do not want to go away for good. We wanna stay in Old Town where we belong!!"
· Hamburger Mary's [Official site]
· All Previous Hamburger Mary's Coverage [Eater PDX]

Image of Hamburger Mary's courtesy Facebook

ANDERSON, IN—While he was selling mentally unstable customer Bernie Lovell a brand-new hunting rifle earlier this afternoon, local gun show vendor Mark Palmer joked with the new firearm owner and insane man about how he “sure hopes” he...

New York Daily News

Marathon injury toll jumps to 260 Boston Herald More than 260 people have been treated at area hospitals for injuries, the Boston Public Health Commission reported — a jump from the 170 initially reported. “A lot of people were injured in the blasts, but didn't think it was serious at the time,” health ... Mass. health officials say 264 people were treated at hospitals after marathon ...The Republic Boston officials say 264 injured in marathon bombingToronto Sun AG: Charitable giving should be done carefullyabc27 walkermessenger -Town Hall all 42 news articles »

You won't see it advertised on billboards or television, you won't hear it mentioned in a carrier store, and your less technologically-savvy friends most certainly won't know about it — but quietly, HTC's done something extraordinarily important this month: it's broken AT&T's stranglehold on its nationwide LTE network.

I can't underscore enough what a big deal this is. It's a move that even Google, for all its money, power, and influence, didn't make with the Nexus 4.

Like T-Mobile and essentially every other carrier in the world that relies exclusively on a SIM to identify your phone on the network, AT&T will happily let a customer bring their own hardware — you don't need to buy an AT&T-branded phone to use the service. But since AT&T's LTE airwaves launched in 2011, the only flagship phones and tablets capable of actually using it have been AT&T-branded, meaning that you're subject to all the typical heartache that comes with owning carrier-branded equipment: pre-installed crapware, glacial firmware update schedules that are at the mercy of carrier testing and approval, ugly carrier logos, the list goes on. If you've wanted to avoid the mess, you've typically had to import a gray-market phone from Europe or Asia that only support HSPA or HSPA+, not LTE. That's no good, particularly on a congested network where you need as many technological advantages as you can get.

---

I did a double-take when I saw it

Apple took the first legitimate swipe at that LTE lock-in last November with the US launch of the unlocked iPhone 5. But there's Apple... and there's everyone else. Of course, the locked iPhone 5 lacks crapware, so it's not as big of a deal. And what if you don't want an iPhone? What if you prefer Android?

That brings us back to HTC, which has started shipping both 32 and 64GB versions of the superlative One — an early contender for the best phone of 2013, and arguably the best Android phone ever made — in a carrier- and bootloader-unlocked version that supports both T-Mobile and AT&T LTE. No strings attached. Go ahead, check it out. I did a double-take myself. And even more remarkable, it's sold for $574.99, $25 less than AT&T's full price for the locked, crapware-laden version of the same phone. I've confirmed with HTC that this unlocked version will get firmware updates according to its own schedule, not AT&T's; if history is any indication, that means you're likely to get Android 4.2 (and beyond) much faster.

It's upsetting that we've become so accustomed to carrier politicking that the notion of a great unlocked LTE phone from a top-tier manufacturer sounds absurd and improbable, but that's where we are.

Do yourself a favor: don't buy it from a carrier store

Of course, AT&T would prefer you not buy the unlocked version of this phone for obvious reasons: it can't get its own software in front of your face, it can't conform the phone to its own firmware update schedule, and it can't use hardware as leverage to sign you into another contract extension. And that's likely just one of a host of reasons that you won't see HTC heavily promoting this model's existence — HTC's relationship with AT&T, unfortunately, is still far more important than its relationship with end users. But the mere fact that this unlocked phone exists, and is being sold directly by HTC to customers in the United States, is an extraordinarily encouraging sign.

So if you're on AT&T, you're in the market for an HTC One, and you're not up for a deeply-discounted upgrade, do yourself a favor: don't buy it from a carrier store, buy it straight from the source. You'll end up with a far better phone, and you'll help send a message that this is how it should be.

• Related Items att unlocked One HTC Cellphones

“

“All I feel is joy,” said Dr. George Velmahos, chief of trauma surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, referring to his hospital’s 31 blast patients. “Whoever came in alive, stayed alive.”

Three people did die in the blasts, but at the scene, before hospitals even had a chance to try to save them. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer who police say was fatally shot Thursday by the suspects was pronounced dead when he arrived at Massachusetts General.

The only person to reach a hospital alive and then die was one of the suspected bombers — 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

But the remarkable, universal survival one week later of all others injured in the blasts is a testimonial to fast care at the scene, on the way to hospitals, then in emergency and operating rooms. Everyone played a part, from doctors, nurses and paramedics to strangers who took off belts to use as tourniquets and staunched bleeding with their bare hands.

As of Monday, 51 people remained hospitalized, three of them in critical condition and five listed as serious. At least 14 people lost all or part of a limb; three of them lost more than one.

Two children with leg injuries remain hospitalized at Boston Children’s Hospital. A 7-year-old girl is in critical condition and 11-year-old Aaron Hern of Martinez, Calif., is in fair condition.

”

- Doctors: All Boston bomb patients likely to live - Yahoo! News

My friend Caitlin’s obscure academic blog has gone viral…

In 2008, Caitlin GD Hopkins collected 101 euphemisms for "died" from early American epitaphs. The epitaphs came from tombstones pre-1825, to qualify, the euphemism had to appear in the main text of the tombstone ("Here lies Fred; born 1801, laid himself to rest 1824"), not in the verse below it ("He was a nice guy"). It's quite a list:

Part 1: Died
Part 2: Departed This Life
Part 3: Deceased
Part 4: Entred Apon an Eternal Sabbath of Rest
Part 5: Fell a Victim to an Untimely Disease
Part 6: Departed This Transitory Life
Part 7: Killed by the Fall of a Tree
Part 8: Left Us
Part 9: Obit
Part 10: Slain by the Enemy
Part 11: Departed This Stage of Existence
Part 12: Went Rejoycing Out of This World
Part 13: Submiting Her Self to ye Will of God
Part 14: Fell Asleep
Part 15: Changed a Fleeting World for an Immortal Rest
Part 16: Fell Asleep in the Cradle of Death
Part 17: Fell Aslep in Jesus
Part 18: Was Still Born
Part 19: Innocently Retired
Part 20: Expired
Part 21: Perished in a Storm
Part 22: Departed from This in Hope of a Better Life
Part 23: Summoned to Appear Before His Judge
Part 24: Liv'd About 2 Hours
Part 25: Rose Upon the Horizon of Perfect Endless Day

All 101 of them are linked to photos of the headstones in the actual post:

101 Ways to Say "Died" (via Making Light)

Original Source

The end of the fucking world part II

By Dave Tach on Apr 23, 2013 at 1:30p

A South Carolina man was arrested last week and charged with trafficking 55 pounds of marijuana using a Pac-Man arcade cabinet, according to a press release from the Orangeburg County Sheriff's Office.

On Tuesday, April 16, federal officers and Sheriff's Office investigators arrested Luis Tyler after conducting a traffic stop in which they seized a Pac-Man arcade cabinet, marijuana and Tyler's vehicle. The arrest was part of an undercover investigation in which law enforcement officials say they observed Tyler accept delivery of the cabinet and its contents.

"Our efforts to make Orangeburg safe will not stop," said Orangeburg sheriff Leroy Ravenell. "We are and will continue to investigate the criminals in our community and make arrests. You may be looking for a high score but what you'll get is game over!"

You can see photos of the cabinet and its contents below.

• Source
• Orangeburg County Sheriff's Office

• Image Source
• Flickr user Sam Howzit

Foodbeast is reporting that, at select Southern California locations, fast food chain Carl’s Jr. is testing out a new dessert: the Hand-Scooped Strawberry Pop-Tart Ice Cream Sandwich. No word if this sugar-laden product will be available nationwide in the future.

image via Foodbeast

via Foodbeast

The new contender for world's most expensive cocktail is definitely a sipping drink. That's because you'll want to savor the smooth notes of the artisanal Hangar 1 vodka – and not choke to death on the surprise at the bottom, a big ol' four-carat ruby.

Ridiculously rich drinkers, or just wealthy people with pica, will want to head over to the White Barn Inn in Kennebunk, Maine. Starting in June, the frou-frou hotel and spa will be offering a libation that costs a rather obscene $40,000. The "Ruby Rose" is made with Hangar 1, a grape-based spirit distilled at an old naval airfield in Alameda, California, as well as St. Germain elderflower liqueur, fresh grapefruit and pomegranate juices and a splash of rosewater. The Portland Press-Herald reports that a New York jeweler is picking out the rubies, which a white-gloved server will drop into the cocktails before conveying them to purchasers on silver trays.

Yes, the White Barn is fully expecting to sell a few of these bank-account vampires, commemorations for the hotel's 40th anniversary. Here's maitre d' Matthew Swinford explaining why the inn could mix multiple orders of the potentially tooth-cracking cocktail, which would be "quite a feat in this economy" according to the Press-Herald:

Actually, Swinford thinks they could sell two. Remember, this is the White Barn Inn, where wealthy businessmen, celebrities and politicians seeking a lot of luxury and a little discretion can stay in the 620-square-foot Loft Suite (separate entrance, steam shower, marble bath with heated floors) for more than $800 a night.

And that's during the off-season.

For inn guests with "particular tastes," Swinford said, "the dollar amount is not the issue. It's the experience."

It's questionable how sound of an investment it would be to order this rare palliative. Four-carat rubies are selling online for a range of prices, like $7,000 for one in "good" condition and $40,000 for a "very good" quality one. But if any place in the country can afford to throw ducats at dubious stuff, it's the well-to-do Kennebunk, whose residents were recently in the news for paying a collective $150,000 to an erotically talented Zumba instructor.

Before news of the "Ruby Rose" surfaced, the world's priciest tongue-loosener might have been the $12,916 "Winston" at Club 23 in Melbourne, made from 1858 Cognac Croizet. Before that, it was probably a $8,830 cognac/herb liqueur/orange curaçao-based tipple at London's Playboy Club. For status-obsessed folks with cash to burn, both of those probably now look as appealing as cans of day-old Natty Light with dead gnats in them.

Top photo courtesy of Volodymyr Goinyk on Shutterstock

waderoush writes "Plenty of technology companies serve free breakfast, lunch, and dinner to their employees, but Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy says that's a form of mind control designed to get people to to work late. To keep employees happy, Duffy says, it's better to make them go home to their families for dinner. Some other suggestions from the San Francisco video monitoring startup: don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers). Keep your business model simple by making actual stuff that you can sell for a profit. And don't hire assholes. Why pay attention to Duffy's advice? Because Dropcam has a 100 percent employee retention rate — no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

San Francisco Chronicle

European Shares Jump Wall Street Journal A false tweet about explosions at the White House briefly sent financial markets veering on Tuesday, underscoring technology's role in tightly linking global markets and highlighting the potential pitfalls. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and oil prices briefly ... Twitter hoax rocks Wall Street, shows vulnerabilities - USA TodayUSA TODAY Market quavers after fake AP tweet says Obama was hurt in White House ...Washington Post AP News Service Hacked, Fake Tweet Says White House Attacked - eWeekeWeek WRGB -Wired -WWLP 22News all 445 news articles »

KFYR News Anchor A.J. Clemente Drops F-bomb in TV Gaffe (by golbalviralnewsn)

I'm user 4377 on App.net. But if you go there you will see that I've used it once. I check it every couple of weeks. It's not compelling to me as another social network, because I don't need another social network. I don't begrudge others that want to use it either. I am disappointed with what App.net is and that's not because of what App.net wants to be.

When ADN first launched, the communal discussion was about Twitter alternatives. Tent.is was the same.¹ I preferred the Tent approach because it is designed to be a decentralized and individually owned social network. But the reality is that Twitter has a meaningful foothold and in a social graph the depth of the graph matters. Twitter has that depth. They may overestimate their value to the world, but when some nut jobs blow up a city people flock to Twitter. That doesn't mean that ADN is a C-list actor though. However, it would be a shame if ADN just became a Twitter competitor. They've built a very interesting infrastructure for a generic messaging service. Yet, there are primarily Twitter clones built on top of it.

This will probably be surprising to some of my Internet pals, but I listen to the ADN podcast. I read the ADN blog. I'm probably more plugged into ADN than most of the people posting on ADN. I'm just not interested in the social network. The people behind ADN are extremely smart, but the story everyone seems to hear is that it is a Twitter alternative.

ADN is unique in one way. It is an infrastructure of communication. It is not a social graph. It is a graph. It is plumbing for services. I listen to Dalton on podcasts and he talks about features that are truly inspiring. But there are very few other people talking about the same story. There are some interesting glimmers, but the true value of ADN is yet to be realized for me.

Let's take a walk through some applications built on the ADN infrastructure to highlight what I hope is its future.

Amy

Project Amy is a good place to start, even if it is another social app. It plugs ADN private messages into Apple's own Messages app. It gives messages a new, if not unique, set of plumbing. Sure, Messages also works with AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, and Yahoo, but Amy shows that at its heart ADN is infrastructure, not micro blogging.

Patter

Patter is the modern IRC. It's a thousand little discussion boards, both public and private. Patter is a service built on top of ADN for creating discussion "rooms." For example, there is everything from a Python room to a room that listens to an R.E.M. album every week together. That's pretty darn interesting.

Support App

The Support App is an interesting extentsion of the common social network. It tracks support requests made through ADN and the responses from the developer. It turns ADN into a bug tracker and support line. It still depends on ADN Alpha posts but in an interesting way.

Files App

Files App is built on top of the ADN file API. It taps into the file sharing feature recently added to ADN and Alpha. It's a little bit of Dropbox and a little bit of Droplr. It's a basic file manager but it highlights the value of the ADN file sharing service and the gaps in the Twitter image sharing option.

FileBase

FileBase is a Mac client for the ADN file API. It's a native app that looks a lot like the Finder.

Orbit

Orbit is a feature rich OS X menubar app for the ADN file API that behaves a lot like Droplr, or more precisely, how Droplr should behave. Drag files in and out of the menubar to upload and download. Right click to copy links or make files private. It is really a great little app on top of a great file sharing infrastructure.

AppNetDav

AppNetDAV is a webDAV interface to the ADN file service. It's a valuable option if you want to use the ADN file service with many iOS apps. While ADN is not well supported, webDAV is pretty common in the iOS world. Even apps like OmniFocus support syncing through webDAV. There's also a Github repo of the source.

Conclusion

I have hope for ADN rising above the low bar of social network. Social networks are at the long shallow part of the innovation curve. Like email, they've reach a point of minimum functionality needed to get the job done. However, if ADN can make good on building a public infrastructure for generic messaging, I see a bright future that has no resemblance to Twitter.

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1. Tent is pretty quiet now. Other than the occasional post by Mike Ash, my stream is mostly a time capsule from the past. ↩

“

While Lean In might see the scenario as women lacking the confidence of men, there is a pretty glaring alternative hypothesis: it wasn’t the women who were lacking confidence — but it was the men who were too confident. It’s not that much of a stretch to suggest that the men who were more confident in their ability were the ones less likely to do the hard yards in preparation before the surgery rotation. The end result? They didn’t perform as well.

And that’s the problem that runs throughout the book. Despite spending so much time citing research about the benefits of having women in leadership positions, a lot of its recommendations focus on, to put it bluntly, making women more like men, without proper consideration of whether that would actually be a good thing. As I read, I wondered: why is it the women who should be copying the men? Why can’t it be the men who could be well served by taking a page out of an entirely different book: that of the very women Lean In is advising to change? What it is about women that men could emulate to make our workplaces, our families, and our society in general a better place?

”

- It’s Not Women Who Should Lean In; It’s Men Who Should Step Back - James Allworth - Harvard Business Review

Catwoman the cat lady by *caanantheartboy

On Thursday night, I was in my living room working on my computer when I heard multiple “pops” coming from outside. At that point, I had no idea that I was about to become an eye witness to the biggest news story in the country.

riotclitshave:

Jesse’s very talented lizard.

lizardking90:

Peek-A-Boo

-Back To Earth - Artworks

kuklarusskaya:

Carrie Imler, PNB