firehose

“You’re more than welcome to come to our reception at the officer’s club,” Edward said, as Natalie added, “There’s an open bar.” “You know what,” the president responded, “you don’t want me at the reception. Everybody would have to be magged [checked by security]. Congratulations and thanks for your service."

Before Sanders emerged as a serious challenger to Clinton, and Trump’s unlikely foil, a look at his history as a socialist in Vermont.

Californians have spent December experiencing the effects of the Pineapple Express. For the most part, we've been happy to get all that rain. But in 1846, the Pineapple Express had a quite different effect. It contributed to the horrible fate of the most infamous California-bound party in history.

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Knecht said it all started when police responded just before 7 p.m. Monday to a report of a man entering the south-side home, opening fire and fleeing. A middle-aged woman died at the scene. While officers were dealing with that, police were called to a house in a quiet cul de sac in the northeast to check on the well-being of a depressed and possibly suicidal man, Knecht said. "The male was not located and there was no response, and nothing suspicious was noted at the residence." But neighbour Moe Assiff said a man and a woman sitting outside the house in a white car seemed very concerned. He said he went up to the car and talked to the man to see if everything was OK. "He looked very shaken up like he had seen a ghost. He paused and he said, 'No, it's personal,'" said Assiff. Knecht said police received new information after midnight that prompted officers to return to the house where they found the seven bodies. He didn't say how the victims died or what prompted police to return.

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emporioefikz:

Amazing Metal Sculptures in West Oakland

huskyhuddle:

buzzfeed:

After Her Fiancé Left Her At The Altar, This Bride Took The World’s Best Photo Shoot

Too awesome not to share

Probably one of the greatest cocktail hits of our lifetime, the Cosmo is the perfect example of how fickle our booze culture can be, a drink that is for a brief moment all the rage, and then just as quickly as it came, becomes a joke that most people wouldn’t dare order.

We're beginning to agree with Werner Herzog's low opinion of chickens' intelligence.

According to research published Tuesday by the Robert Koch Institute, fruit bats are almost certainly to blame for the current Ebola outbreak, which has claimed 7,800 lives so far.

Few people want to take advice from the Russians these days – unless you’re interested in waging non-linear warfare against a neighbor or wrecking a relatively decent economy in a few easy steps – but one can’t deny that Russians have an intimate knowledge of winter.

The extortion of Hal and Fran Finney has further exposed the rather bizarre and often criminal element that continues to hover around bitcoin, a digital currency that grew out of the Internet underworld but has since expanded into the mainstream.

At The Whitlock Academy, you'll finally learn how to get on top of your shit.

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has done a lot this year. He split with professional wrestling, performed interpretations of Siddhartha and Rumi, cuddled some cute kitties, and welcomed Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee into his band for its new record, Monuments To An Elegy. All of that was pretty mellow, at least in Corgan terms, but then he decided to end 2014 in the most spectacularly Corgan way possible—by talking about how he is a “dangerous artist” in a politically corrupt world on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ radio show. He also railed against the “dinosaur media” by selling “Fuck You Anderson Cooper” T-shirts after the CNN host dared make fun of Corgan’s uncool hobbies on television. But he also ended a long-simmering feud with Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson, so maybe the closing days of 2014 are bringing a sense of calm and respite into Corgan’s heart ...

If you don’t know what a land blub is, you haven’t been paying attention. Land blubs were simply one of the hottest trends of 2014. They are reviews of land, usually attributed to famous authors, that are used to promote that land to prospective buyers and/or visitors. But the reviews have had all the “R”s removed from them, which is why they are called “land blubs” and not “land blurbs.”

Here are the TOP TEN LAND BLUBS OF 2014:

10. “This was a wondeful piece of land” –Saul Bellow

9. “Pobably my favoite land I saw in a long time” –Karl Ove Knausgaard

8. “How could I say no to the chams of this wondous land?” –Joyce Carol Oates

7. “Gotta say, I’d live on this land in a heatbeat” –Lena Dunham

6. “This land will make you laugh, will make you sigh, will make you beak down and shed authentic human teas!” –Jonathan Franzen

5. “How lucky I was, to visit this pefect land. I can’t wait to do so again, I think about it twenty-fou/seven” –Miranda July

4. “The whole time I was on this land, I asked myself: Am I deaming? This must be a deam. But the tuth was, I eally was on this land — and it made me vey vey gateful” –Oprah Winfrey

3. “I couldn’t put down this land. It’s tuly exceptional. Please, please, spend time on this teific land … you will be changed, pehaps foeve” –Maureen Dowd

2. “And the awad fo Best Land goes to … this land, ight hee! Hooay fo this land! Hip, hip hooay! Tee-hee, I’m a bad boy” –James Franco

1. The best land blubs

Whether chatting with our co-workers or making small talk at a party, in 2014 it seemed one thing was always on our lips: TOPICS. Topics are the building blocks of any good conversation — they keep the chit-chat moving forward while reminding us of what we’re talking about.

And 2014 offered an abundance of topics. Think about it: What happened in 2014? Answer: More than 1,000 topics. From the weather to the latest news, 2014 kept throwing out topic after topic after topic … sometimes it seemed like there were too many topics! But that’s what made this year so topical: Its one-of-a-kind things to talk about.

Here are the TOP TEN TOPICS OF 2014:

10. The latest topics

9. “Didja hear about the topic?” “I did, let’s discuss it together”

8. “I’d like to remind you of some key topics”

7. (TIE) Funny topics / International topics

6. The news

5. Sports

4. Riveting topics

3. Classic topics

2. Some of the best topics of 2014

1. Holla at ya boy for the topics

 

 

 

As many, many Ira Glass-adoring novice Agatha Christie NPR fans did, I listened to Sarah Koenig's crime podcast Serial and agreed strongly with Joe Streckert's take on the final episode, which left a lot open in the story of Hae Min Lee's murder. But one key stumbling block in figuring out what happened came from Koenig and Co.'s inability to get much information out of Jay, the state's key witness against Adnan Syed at trial. Koenig had some big questions about Jay's story that were, frustratingly, never answered. And it didn't look like they would be. Until yesterday, when The Intercept published the first in a series of in-depth interviews with Jay, where he explains what's behind the holes in his story. It's worth a read for Serial purists, and it's also interesting to see what Jay's willing to say on the record to someone else, that he didn't divulge to Koenig:

Why is this story different from what you originally told the police? Why has your story changed over time?

Well first of all, I wasn’t openly willing to cooperate with the police. It wasn’t until they made it clear they weren’t interested in my ‘procurement’ of pot that I began to open up any. And then I would only give them information pertaining to my interaction with someone or where I was. They had to chase me around before they could corner me to talk to me, and there came a point where I was just sick of talking to them. And they wouldn’t stop interviewing me or questioning me. I wasn’t fully cooperating, so if they said, ‘Well, we have on phone records that you talked to Jenn.’ I’d say, ‘Nope, I didn’t talk to Jenn.’ Until Jenn told me that she talked with the cops and that it was ok if I did too.

I stonewalled them that way. No — until they told me they weren’t trying to prosecute me for selling weed, or trying to get any of my friends in trouble. People had lives and were trying to get into college and stuff like that. Getting them in trouble for anything that they knew or that I had told them — I couldn’t have that.

I guess I was being kind of a jury on whether or not people needed to be involved or whatever, but these people didn’t have anything to do with it, and I knew they didn’t have anything to do with it.

That’s the best way I can account for the inconsistencies. Once the police made it clear that my drug dealing wasn’t gonna affect the outcome of what was going on, I became a little bit more transparent.

Also discussed: growing up in Baltimore in the '90s, which Jay describes as a community "where people would have their house firebombed and still tell the police they knew nothing about it rather than to try to make some sense of what’s going on. And that’s not necessarily me—but that is my family, that is my uncles and cousins. It’s where I’m from." This, I think, provides some necessary context for the story—and for Jay's narrative—that seemed blatantly missing from the podcast, and perhaps even explains why Jay was so difficult for Koenig to get on the record in the first place. Read the whole thing here.

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An anonymous reader writes: Anthony Ferrara, a developer advocate at Google, has published a blog post with some statistics showing the sorry state of affairs for website security involving PHP. After defining a list of secure and supported versions of PHP, he used data from W3Techs to find a rough comparison between the number of secure installs and the number of insecure or outdated installs. After doing some analysis, Ferrara sets the upper bound on secure installs at 21.71%. He adds, "These numbers are optimistic. That's because we're counting all version numbers that are maintained by a distribution as secure, even though not all installs of that version number are going to be from a distribution. Just because 5.3.3 is maintained by CentOS and Debian doesn't mean that every install of 5.3.3 is maintained. There will be a small percentage of installs that are from-source. Therefore, the real 'secure' number is going to be less than quoted." Ferrara was inspired to dig into the real world stats after another recent discussion of responsible developer practices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan has lined up interviews with the San Francisco 49ers and Atlanta Falcons, per Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News.

Ryan was recently fired by the Jets on Black Monday along with general manager John Idzik after the Jets finished at 4-12. Ryan was on the hot seat for over a year after the Jets missed the playoffs for the last four seasons, putting together an unimpressive 26-38 record in that span. Ryan finished his career with a 46-50 record in the regular season in six years with the Jets.

Ryan remained a well-liked coach until the end of his tenure with the team, however, and many defenders will point out his playoff record of 4-2 with the Jets as well as how hard his team played for him even at season's end. Ryan had little offensive talent to work with during his tenure, especially at quarterback with Mark Sanchez and Geno Smith. In addition, the Jets have whiffed on multiple high draft picks and free agent signings in that time, so it's not a surprise that the Jets also dismissed Idzik.

The Falcons have also been linked to five other candidates than Ryan. It's a list that includes Seattle DC Dan Quinn, Denver OC Adam Gase, Patriots OC Josh McDaniels, Arizona DC Todd Bowles, and Detroit DC Teryl Austin. As for the 49ers, they're also linked to Gase, Quinn, McDaniels and Bowles. In addition, the Niners are also rumored to have interest in both Kyle and Mike Shanahan and their own defensive line coach Jim Tomsula.

These songs are examples of how art and science can come together to create something incredible. Musician Stef Conner learned to read several ancient Babylonian and Sumerian tablets written in cuneiform script, using historians' research to figure out likely pronunciation. Just listen to the results.

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NYPD Comic Book 1968

Jon thought it would be nice to create a Twitter account that gave a voice to all sports fans. So he made one, and then he tweeted out the password to everybody who wanted to use it. Everything fell into ruin.

I have identified what sports fans will crave in 2015: an opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions, connect brands with audiences, and find up-to-the-minute sources for sports scores, stats, news, opinions, & more. So in order to usher in the new year, I decided it would be nice to create such a thing:

hi everyone i made you a twitter account, @jonsfriends. password is prettygood. let’s all maintain a fun sports account for folks to enjoy

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) December 30, 2014

It's a Twitter account for sports fans, and who's in charge? Well guess what, it is you. Anyone on the Internet was invited to log in and use the account to tweet whatever they wanted.

As it turns out, it was rather difficult to maintain a consistent voice and properly serve our audience. This is the story of @jonsfriends.

11:09:00 A.M.

I took this screenshot the instant before I tweeted the account password to the world. Twitter suggested a couple of sample tweets to introduce ourselves to everyone, neither of which we elected to use.

Nicéphore Niépce took the world's oldest surviving photograph. It's barely a photograph by our standards, and by any technical measure it's a rather miserable attempt. It's a simple view from a window ledge, full of shadows that are only buildings because they're too straight to be anything else.

I doubt this bothered Niépce, because I don't think this is really a photograph of those buildings. It's a meta-photograph, a portrait of itself, a self-evident declaration: "This has been borne into existence." The first-ever photograph turned the lens upon itself; and now it was upon our first-ever tweet to do the same.

11:09:40 A.M.

Our first tweet. It was a non-sports tweet, and it was a harbinger of what was to come.

11:10:55 A.M.

Nearly two minutes into our Twitter career, we had managed to remain true to the mission in large part. Our follower count had nearly quadrupled to 86 sports fans, due in large part to a smorgasbord of sports predictions, discussions, and more.

The most intrepid among us had already explored the account settings by this point, and already, we had our first true profile pic. It would not be our last.

11:11:35 A.M.

Someone posted an emoji of a nice lady! I thought that that was nice.

11:12:40 A.M.

Three minutes and forty seconds in, an interlocutor took it upon himself, herself, or themself to forward a different agenda. Grøtris is a rather difficult thing to Google, but it appears to be some manner of Lithuanian rice dish.

I was of two hearts on this. On one hand, I envisioned this account to be a non-stop source of sports stats, news, rumors, scores & more, and this tweet did not serve these ends. On the other, I was delighted that folks were eager to participate at all. Perhaps what I wanted was not what was most important; perhaps this was not about me at all.

11:14:03 A.M.

After approximately five minutes and three seconds, it appeared as though one of our social media volunteers elected to take the account private. Shortly thereafter, our Twitter handle was a dead link. I feared the worst. While I acknowledge that Twitter's spam protocols may find it fishy to see a brand-new account tweet a hundred times in five minutes from all around the world, I wish they would install safeguards that would enable it to recognize either a) a collective of well-intentioned and passionate sports voices from around the web, or b) a single, very fast person.

11:18:45 A.M.

Nine minutes and forty-five seconds into our experiment, we bore witness to a miracle: somehow, @jonsfriends had risen from the dead. It had seemingly battled the balrog of Twitter security protocols and returned to us, clothed in a fun photo of a dog wearing a people sweater and a painting of Santa Claus brandishing a pistol.

11:20:15 A.M.

Nothing stood in our way, and so we stood in our own way. We found it difficult to remain on-message and execute a cohesive social media strategy, as the above tweets indicate. Some were determined to right the ship; others cried out in despair.

11:21:26 A.M.

This was an era of mixed fortune. I found our new name to be rather inappropriate, as I believe the ideal sports account is appropriate for all ages and ought to engage its audience in a professional manner. And yet, we had finally achieved a sports-themed profile photo.

It was neat that San Francisco Giants outfielder Hunter Pence was the new ambassador of our brand. But he seemed to stare in the direction of our tweets, and I suppose the expression on his face was one of something other than delight.

11:26:30 A.M.

We wanted out. We wanted out. Our social media focus had drifted further into despair, and as it did, it seemed to drift further from an up-to-the-minute source for sports news, scores & more.

11:28:45 A.M.

If a name is an account's flag, ours was flown upside-down and at half-mast. "We have fallen," it said, "and we ought not be saved."

At this stage, an unwelcome interlocutor attempted to replace the account's profile art with a photo of an individual's butthole. Valiant efforts from a more noble political sect, who I will call the "dog people," flooded our photo feed with a stream of adorable dog photos and attempted to countermand the doings of the butthole sect at every turn.

And the true victim was the sports fan. A house divided against itself is incapable of offering sports scores & more.

11:29:40 A.M.

At this stage I had emerged, at least to some, as some manner of deity. Needless to say, I was both uncomfortable with, and unready for, this development. I had exercised no control over this account, having given it all away to my fellow social media managers.

The clouds had frozen and struck the earth like fallen battleships. The sky had turned to space. It was Dog Time.

11:31:00 A.M.

A third political sect emerged: those who wanted to return our Twitter account to what it was always meant to be. Perhaps a retweet about badge prices at the Masters and an arbitrarily-selected Darren Rovell tweet were not the sort of content that would satisfy passionate sports fans from around the web, but establishing our own voice would have to come later.

We were, for the briefest of moments, a source for sports news; a portal that connected sports fans with the news they desired.

11:35:10 A.M.

I thought the Grøtris Movement was long-dead, as we had heard nothing about the dish in more than 20 minutes. It had returned, complete with a visual aid. Was this a collective of several grøtris enthusiasts, or a single individual?

In either case, my frustration grew. Suppose you are a sports fan on Twitter who's on the hunt for the things you're passionate about. This wasn't sports engagement. It wasn't engagement at all, and if that person we're after stumbled upon our feed expecting sports and receiving grøtris content ... well, if that person were me, I'd be gone in a second, never to come back.

At this point, my dream of creating a fun sports account had more or less died. That isn't even a can of beer.

11:38:30 A.M.

This was a civil war, but it was not the binary struggle we Americans are so fond of. It more closely resembled feudal Japan, comprised of dozens of fiefs, each determined to unify the land. There were the Dog People, the Grøtris Movement, the Butthole Cabal, the unaffiliated vandals who tweeted things like "poop," and a mysterious sect that, for reasons unknown, worked feverishly to change all our account photos to those of canned peaches.

I did not understand the motive. Fear the beasts of the forests and fields all you like. At least, it can be said, we know what it is they want.

11:41:50 A.M.

We were muttering to ourselves. We were soliciting gastrointestinal medical advice, and we were receiving it. We were calling folks "dill weed" and other things I felt were unprofessional and absolutely inconsistent with the social media voice I had hoped to develop. And worst, the Butthole Cabal continued to pollute the entire experience. Nobody wants to see a photo of a person's butthole when they're on the hunt for up-to-the-minute sports scores, news, gossip, rumors, stats, analysis, and opinion from some of the most trusted sources from around the web.

I had no choice but to pull the plug.

11:44:20 A.M.

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

- Robert Frost

“What Makes a Video Essay Great?” is a video essay by Kevin B. Lee for Fandor Keyframe about the construction and impact of video essays by the likes of Lee, Tony Zhou, and more. Lee looks at both what makes a particular video essay popular as well as the several types of video essays with varying intentions, such as those made by academics.

The video essay is expanding our notions of film criticism and appreciation. But do these essays offer a key to let us out—or lock us in?

Lee also compiled what he considers to be the best video essays from 2014.

via Dorsey Shaw

​If you care at all where technology is taking us, you should be watching "Black Mirror." As many have already pointed out, the series strikes a chord not only because it’s unsettling, but also because it’s recognizable.

On his Facebook page, Usagi Yojimbo creator Stan Sakai offers a glimpse into his process, showing the evolution of a single panel from rough sketch to final inks. Sakai’s historical fantasy, which celebrated its 30th anniversary this year, continues next month with the conclusion of Usagi Yojimo: Senso, the six-issue miniseries with a War of […]

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Daily Mail

Man shoots dead sick wife in hospital before killing himself Daily Mail A New Hampshire man shot his wife dead in hospital early Tuesday morning before turning the gun on himself, minutes after posting to Facebook that he was trying to help his sick spouse 'escape' from life on a respirator, according to reports. and more »

arcaneimages:

Ivan Simpson. Boris Karloff

Young Boris Karloff reminds me of someone, but I can’t place who. 

The Big Bang Theory‘s Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting is the cover story on the latest edition of RedBook, out next week, and she wants the world to know that she definitely isn’t a feminist because she likes to serve her husband. Sigh.

When asked if she considers herself a feminist, Cuoco-Sweeting replied, “Is it bad if I say no?”

Well, that depends – does she actually know the definition of feminism and disagree with it? If she’d answered yes to that, we’d still be disappointed but respect her decision. But here’s what she went on to say,

It’s not really something I think about. Things are different now, and I know a lot of the work that paved the way for women happened before I was around… I was never that feminist girl demanding equality, but maybe that’s because I’ve never really faced inequality.

Cuoco-Sweeting went on to say she isn’t a feminist because she cooks for her husband five nights a week, and that it makes her feel like a housewife. “I love that. I know it sounds old-fashioned, but I like the idea of women taking care of their men. I’m so in control of my work that I like coming home and serving him.”

Let me preface this by saying there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting the role Cuoco-Sweeting has for herself. She’s happy, and that’s great! But what I take issue with is misunderstanding that she’s free to make that choice, she you can have her acting job and then come home to be a housewife, because of feminism.

The most tragic thing about this interview is not that Cuoco-Sweeting personally doesn’t identify as a feminist (though that is also inarguably tragic in my mind), but that her words reflect the views of countless other men and women who believe the time for feminism is over, or that being a feminist means you also have to be a man-hating lesbian. The fact of the matter is, feminism fights for equality for all genders, and (at its very best), intersectional feminism fights for equality for all races, classes, ethnicities, sexualities, abilities, and more. If you say you are not a feminist, you are saying you don’t believe you think all women and men (and anyone who falls outside of that gender binary) deserve to be treated equally.

Cuoco-Sweeting is also expressing a couple of other popular problematic ideas about feminism here. By insinuating the need for feminism lies in the past, that all the “hard work” has already been done by women over the last century, she’s neglecting to notice all the ways in which women still suffer from inequality. Though she’s self-aware enough to recognize that this might be because she doesn’t suffer from any massive inequality herself, I’m willing to argue that this might be untrue. More to the point, we’d be hard-pressed to believe she never experienced inequality in her entire life. It’s more likely she just didn’t realize it because of what society and the media have taught us to accept as “normal.”

For example, working in the entertainment industry, Cuoco-Sweeting has to hold herself to specific standards of beauty that her male co-stars on The Big Bang Theory don’t. Also, as a woman in Hollywood (or in any job market), Cuoco-Sweeting has a statistically high chance of making far less money than her male co-stars over the course of her career. And outside of Cuoco-Sweeting’s immediate circumstances, her statement also ignores the fact that women across the globe suffer in horrible circumstances; that queer or Black or trans or differently-abled women live with far less privilege than she does; that feminism’s work is, in actuality, far from over.

Cuoco-Sweeting also fails to realize that feminists don’t want her to be ashamed of wanting to take care of her husband; that’s another one of those “popular problematic ideas.” Feminists want women to be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want it, in whichever way they choose. The reason Cuoco-Sweeting is able to hold down a million-dollar-an-episode job as well as cook for her husband five nights a week is thanks to feminism, but good feminism doesn’t look down on women who just want one thing or the other. Being a feminist means you get to choose to live however you want, and to also want that privilege for every woman.

It’s terribly sad to me that Cuoco-Sweeting has such a huge audience of impressionable girls (current episodes of The Big Bang Theory draw in approximately twenty million viewers per episode and more if you count those who pirate it), and chooses to make this her statement about feminism, obviously before educating herself about the subject. It is by no means her obligation to be a role model to young women, but she is in the public eye, and there’s no doubt that girls look up to her and what she says.

To compound this unfortunateness, Cuoco-Sweeting already plays a character on television that audiences are meant to laugh at because she’s “shallow” and “dumb” and “normal.” Feminism means you can be a waitress while trying to become an actress in LA and not like nerd things and everyone has to be okay with that. Maybe that’s something we could all do well to remember.

(via E!, image via Thibault)

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