firehose

Well, this is rather cool. Artist Serafín Álvarez's ongoing project "Case Study: Sci-Fi Corridor" takes a close look at corridors from science fiction movies, including blockbusters like Gravity and Independence Day, classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Metropolis,and cult classics like Lifeforce and Starcrash.

Read more...

An anonymous reader writes: Amazon is now offering an ebook subscription service — $9.99/month gets you access to 700,000 titles, both self-published and traditionally published. The funds are gathered together, Amazon takes its cut, and the rest is divided up based on how many times a given book was read. Some authors like it, and some don't, but John Scalzi pointed out that this business model is notable for being different from how the writing industry has worked in the past: "[T]he thing to actively dislike about the Kindle Unlimited 'payment from a pot' plan is the fact that it and any other plan like it absolutely and unambiguously make writing and publishing a zero-sum game. In traditional publishing, your success as an author does not limit my success — the potential pool of money is so large as to be effectively unlimited, and one's payment is independent of any other purchase a consumer might make, or what any other reader might read. In the traditional publishing model, it's in my interest to encourage readers to read other authors, because people who read more buy more books — the proverbial tide lifts all boats. In the Kindle Unlimited model, the more authors you and everyone else reads, the less I can potentially earn. And ultimately, there's a cap on how much I can earn — a cap imposed by Amazon, or whoever else is in charge of the 'pot.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tessa Arias of Handle the Heat thoroughly researched how different baking pans, ingredient ratios, and amounts of dough-chilling time affected the result when baking chocolate chip cookies. She reported her findings in a four-part “Ultimate Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies.”

Arias presented all the best aspects of her research into a recipe for “Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies.”

images via Handle the Heat

via Flowing Data

David West compared KG blowing in his ear to Lance blowing on LeBron: "I think Lance's was more sensual. That was an aggressive one."

— Michael Lee (@MrMichaelLee) December 29, 2014

It's the little things that separate a good NBA player from a great one. Attention to detail is one of these facets. David West has been in the NBA for 11 years, and he understands the difference between a sensual ear-blowing and an aggressive one.

Aggressive

(H/T @BenGolliver)

Sensual

	Courtney shared this story from Outside Magazine: Articles Feed:
	This is all interesting, but I'm still hella dubious of the "intensely processed patty" as a food, no matter what's in it. I'm still kind of weirded out by tofu and I *like* tofu.

---

I dumped meat a few weeks ago, and it was not an easy breakup. Some of my most treasured moments have involved a deck, a beer, and a cheeseburger. But the more I learned, the more I understood that the relationship wasn’t good for either of us. A few things you should never do if you want to eat factory meat in unconflicted bliss: write a story on water scarcity in the American Southwest; Google “How much shit is in my hamburger?”; watch an undercover video of a slaughterhouse in action; and read the 2009 Worldwatch Institute report “Livestock and Climate Change.”

I did them all. And that was that. By then I knew that with every burger I consumed, I was helping to suck America’s rivers dry, munching on a fecal casserole seasoned liberally with E. coli, passively condoning an orgy of torture that would make Hannibal Lecter blanch, and accelerating global warming as surely as if I’d plowed my Hummer into a solar installation. We all needed to kick the meat habit, starting with me.

Yet previous attempts had collapsed in the face of time-sucking whole-food preparation and cardboard-scented tofu products. All the veggie burgers I knew of seemed to come in two flavors of unappealing: the brown-rice, high-carb, nap-inducing mush bomb, and the colon-wrecking gluten chew puck. Soylent? In your pasty dreams. If I couldn’t have meat, I needed something damn close. A high-performance, low-commitment protein recharge, good with Budweiser.

I took long, moody walks on the dirt roads near my Vermont house. I passed my neighbor’s farm. One of his beef cattle stepped up to the fence and gazed at me. My eyes traced his well-marbled flanks and meaty chest. 
I stared into those bottomless brown eyes. “I can’t quit you,” I whispered to him.

But I did. Not because my willpower suddenly rose beyond its default Lebowski setting, but because a box arrived at my door and made it easy.

Inside were four quarter-pound brown patties. I tossed one on the grill. It hit with a satisfying sizzle. Gobbets of lovely fat began to bubble out. A beefy smell filled the air. I browned a bun. Popped a pilsner. Mustard, ketchup, pickle, onions. I threw it all together with some chips on the side and took a bite. I chewed. I thought. I chewed some more. And then I began to get excited about the future.

It was called the Beast Burger, and it came from a Southern California company called Beyond Meat, located a few blocks from the ocean. At that point, the Beast was still a secret, known only by its code name: the Manhattan Beach Project. I’d had to beg Ethan Brown, the company’s 43-year-old CEO, to send me a sample.

And it was vegan. “More protein than beef,” Brown told me when I rang him up after tasting it. “More omegas than salmon. More calcium than milk. More antioxidants than blueberries. Plus muscle-recovery aids. It’s the ultimate performance burger.”

“How do you make it so meat-like?” I asked.

“It is meat,” he replied enigmatically. “Come on out. We’ll show you our steer.”

Beyond Meat HQ was a brick warehouse located a stone’s throw from Chevron’s massive El Segundo refinery, which hiccuped gray fumes into the clear California sky. “Old economy, new economy,” Brown said as we stepped inside. Two-dozen wholesome millennials tapped away at laptops on temporary tables in the open space, which looked remarkably like a set that had been thrown together that morning for a movie about startups. Bikes and surfboards leaned in the corners. In the test kitchen, the Beyond Meat chef, Dave Anderson—former celebrity chef to the stars and cofounder of vegan-mayo company Hampton Creek—was frying experimental burgers made of beans, quinoa, and cryptic green things.

The “steer” was the only one with its own space. It glinted, steely and unfeeling, in the corner of the lab. It was a twin-screw extruder, the food-industry workhorse that churns out all the pastas and PowerBars of the world. Beyond Meat’s main extruders, as well as its 60 other employees, labor quietly in Missouri, producing the company’s current generation of meat substitutes, but this was the R&D steer. To make a Beast Burger, powdered pea protein, water, sunflower oil, and various nutrients and natural flavors go into a mixer at one end, are cooked and pressurized, get extruded out the back, and are then shaped into patties ready to be reheated on consumers’ grills.

“It’s about the dimensions of a large steer, right?” Brown said to me as we admired it. “And it does the same thing.” By which he meant that plant stuff goes in one end, gets pulled apart, and is then reassembled into fibrous bundles of protein. A steer does this to build muscle. The extruder in the Beyond Meat lab does it to make meat. Not meat-like substances, Brown will tell you. Meat. Meat from plants. Because what is meat but a tasty, toothy hunk of protein? Do we really need animals to assemble it for us, or have we reached a stage of enlightenment where we can build machines to do the dirty work for us?

Livestock, in fact, are horribly inefficient at making meat. Only about 3 percent of the plant matter that goes into a steer winds up as muscle. The rest gets burned for energy, ejected as methane, blown off as excess 
heat, shot out the back of the beast, or repurposed into non-meat-like things such as blood, bone, and brains. The process buries river systems in manure and requires an absurd amount of land. Roughly three-fifths of all farmland is used to grow beef, although it accounts for just 5 percent of our protein. But we love meat, and with the developing world lining up at the table and sharpening their steak knives, global protein consumption is expected to double by 2050.

That’s what keeps Brown up at night. A six-foot-five, pillar-armed monument to the power of plant protein, with a voice that makes James Earl Jones sound effeminate, he became a vegetarian as a teenager growing up in Washington, D.C., after his family bought a Maryland dairy farm. “I began feeling very uncomfortable in my leather basketball shoes,” he says. “Because I knew the cows. I’d pet them all the time.”

In his twenties he became a vegan. “It wasn’t emotional. It was a question of fairness,” he says. “ ‘Why are we treating our dog so well and not the pig?’ As you get older, you try to become more coherent.” He was already thinking big. “I wanted to start a plant-based McDonald’s.” Instead, he went into the alternative-energy business, working on fuel cells for Vancouver-based Ballard Power Systems. “Somehow energy seemed like a more serious thing to do. But the food idea kept eating at me, until finally I said, ‘You know what, I gotta do this.’ ”

Brown’s aha moment came in 2009, when the Worldwatch Institute published “Livestock and Climate Change,” which carefully assessed the full contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGs) of the world’s cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, horses, pigs, and poultry. An earlier report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had pegged that contribution at 18 percent, worse than cars and trucks. That’s shocking enough, but the Worldwatch study’s authors, two analysts from the World Bank, found that the FAO hadn’t taken into account the CO2 breathed out by our 22 billion livestock animals, the forests being felled to make room for pasture and feed crops, or the total impact of the 103 million tons of methane belched into the air by ruminants each year. When everything was tallied up, Worldwatch estimated, livestock were on the hook for 51 percent of GHGs.

That was all Brown needed to hear to put the plant-based McDonald’s back at the top of his agenda. Forget fuel cells. Forget Priuses. If he could topple Meatworld, he thought, he could stop climate change cold.

Brown’s first breakthrough came when he discovered Fu-Hung Hsieh, a food scientist at the University of Missouri who had perfected a way to turn soy protein into strips that chewed like chicken. (Top secret, can’t tell you, but it has to do with heat, kneading, and cool water.) Brown founded Beyond Meat in 2009, and in 2012, its inaugural product, Beyond Chicken Strips, began wowing the gatekeepers of the food world.

“Most impressive,” said Food Network geek Alton Brown. “It’s more like meat than anything I’ve ever seen that wasn’t meat.”

“Fooled me badly,” Mark Bittman admitted in his New York Times food column. It also fooled Twitter cofounder (and vegan) Biz Stone, so he invested in the company.

So did Bill Gates, whose Gates Foundation backs potentially world-saving innovations. “I tasted Beyond Meat’s chicken alternative,” he wrote online, “and honestly couldn’t tell it from real chicken.” Gates quickly realized the blockbuster potential. “Our approach to food hasn’t changed much over the last 100 years. It’s ripe for reinvention. We’re just at the beginning of enormous innovation.”

Gates sat down with Brown in 2012 and gave him some tips, which the entrepreneur took to heart. As Brown recalls, “He said to me, ‘If you get this thing to cost less than meat, and you get international quickly enough, then this is huge.’ ”

The scalability is there: Beyond Meat’s manufacturing process uses a small fraction of the land, water, energy, crops, and time that making real meat does, and it requires no new technology. And the timing is right. Whole Foods has enthusiastically sold Beyond Chicken Strips, which retail for $5.29 for a nine-ounce bag, from the very beginning. And although Brown wouldn’t disclose sales numbers (“Our competitors definitely make use of this type of information,” he says), Beyond Meat expanded from 1,500 to 6,000 stores in 2014, including mainstreamers like Safeway.

Even the fast-food industry is coming around. When Chipotle added shredded-tofu Sofritas to its burrito options at a few California restaurants in 2013, sales outstripped expectations. Half the Sofritas buyers, Chipotle found, were meat eaters. Chipotle is now rolling them out across the country, the first new item it has added in ten years. One rapidly growing restaurant chain, Veggie Grill, an all-vegan West Coast eatery, offers seemingly familiar fast-food items like Mondo Nachos and Crispy Chickin’ with meat replacements made from soy and gluten.

But you can’t fix climate change with fake chicken. Although the 21 billion cluckers around the world consume vast amounts of crops and choke waterways with their manure, their impact is dwarfed by the 1.5 billion head of cattle. It takes about 9,000 calories of edible feed to produce 1,000 calories of edible chicken and 11,000 calories of feed for 1,000 calories of pork—a far cry from the 36,000 calories required for 1,000 calories of beef. More important, cattle and their ruminant cousins—sheep, goats, buffalo—produce geysers of methane during digestion. One molecule of methane traps 
25 times as much heat as a molecule of CO2, so each cow produces the annual GHGs of a car driven about 9,375 miles. Per pound, that’s eight times more than chickens and five times more than pigs.

There are, of course, lots of good arguments for raising cattle sustainably: it’s easier on both the animals and the land. But it’s no solution when it comes to global warming. Grass-fed beef generates significantly more methane and has nearly twice the carbon footprint of its grain-fed kin.

If Brown was going to tackle climate change, he had to hack beef.

Beef flavor has never been all that difficult to approximate—some salt, some aroma molecules, and bingo. The juiciness and the chew are the real challenges. The meat industry acknowledged as much in a 2006 trade publication: “Meat texture is supremely important. Texturized vegetable protein, something that could be quite a commercial threat to us … has, so far, made little impact,” wrote the meat scientist Howard Swatland, author of Meat Cuts and Muscle Foods. “This is because food technologists so far have been unable to extrude their plant proteins into anything resembling real meat. The taste and colour can be faked quite easily, but the texture cannot. In a way, therefore, it is the texture of meat, and the fact that many of our customers love to eat it, that keeps us all in business.”

Muscle is made up of bundles of long, thin fibers wrapped in tough connective tissue, like shrink-wrapped logs. Scattered through the fiber packets are tiny pockets of fat, which the body draws on for energy. A lot of the joy of meat is the feeling of your teeth punching through these bundles, the fat and juice squirting as you chomp.

Plant proteins, on the other hand, are not aligned or bundled. They’re more like random piles of sticks. They have none of the tensile strength or moisture-retention properties of muscle, which is why earlier generations of veggie burgers fell apart and lacked the release of rich, juicy fats. The only exception is gluten, the protein found in wheat, which has some amazing qualities. It forms a spring-like structure that can expand and contract, making dough stretchy and retaining moisture in its matrix of interlinked proteins. But those long proteins also like to curl in on themselves like a nest of snakes, which prevents digestive enzymes from getting at them. When that partially digested gluten makes it into the gut of someone with celiac disease, the immune system mistakes the intact proteins for evil microbes, freaks out, and strafes the intestine with friendly fire. Even those who don’t have an adverse response to wheat often find the concentrated gluten in veggie burgers to be digestively challenging.

For Brown, gluten was out. Also becoming less popular with consumers was phytoestrogen-heavy soy, the other mainstay of both veggie burgers and Beyond Chicken. But top food scientists had labored for years to come up with palatable soy- and gluten-free meat substitutes, with no luck. Plants just didn’t want to be meat.

It was time for a paradigm shift. In the fall of 2013, Brown hired Tim Geistlinger, a biotech rock star who had been working with the Gates Foundation to develop antimalarial drugs and a yeast that makes clean jet fuel out of sugar. Geistlinger fits the Beyond Meat mold: brainiac science geek who bikes on the beach every night and recently completed his first Tough Mudder. (“I was one of the only non-meat-eaters on my team,” Geistlinger says, “but with access to compounds like these, it’s a no-brainer.”)

Geistlinger, chef Dave Anderson, and the other Beyond Meat scientists began a series of marathon sessions in the lab, trying to do what cattle do: transform short plant proteins into long, succulent fibers. Their legume of choice was the yellow pea, whose protein is readily available—both to the body and in the marketplace. Pea starch is used by the food industry as a natural thickener for everything from sauces to deli meats. In the past, after the starch was isolated, the protein was discarded. Win-win.

Pea protein is the new darling of the no-soy health-food set, but it has a powdery mouthfeel and no structural integrity, so it has never starred in its own production. “Without fibers you can have something that’s hard and dry or mushy and wet,” Geistlinger says. “They’re fairly mutually exclusive.” Early last year, Beyond Meat released a pea-based product, Beyond Beef Crumble, that approximated the look and feel of cooked ground beef and made a decent taco filling, but it wouldn’t hold together and had no chew. Geistlinger decided he had to create fibers from the material—that is, do something to make them line up and link together to mimic muscle.

For a while the team got nowhere. Geistlinger kept tweaking the chemistry—“taking shots on goal in a constructive way,” as he puts it—and Anderson kept playing around with the results. Nothing. “Early on we thought we were close,” Anderson remembers. “So I brought in an In-N-Out burger. We tried the In-N-Out and it was just chew, chew, chew, and then we tried ours. I was like, ‘Wow, we’re not even close.’ ”

Eventually, Geistlinger suggested trying something radical—the big Beast Burger secret, which involves a certain combination of temperature, pressure, timing, and chemistry that he could tell me about only in veiled terms. “The food scientists had been arguing to go in one direction, because that’s how things had always been done,” he recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, this is a different protein. I think we should push this in the opposite direction.’ They were like, ‘Why would you do that? You can’t do that.’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s just give it a shot.’ And sure enough, boom. It was immediately apparent. We tasted it right when it came out, and we just went, ‘Wow! We’ve never had that before.’ It was awesome. You could see the fibers. You could feel them. And it didn’t get dry in your mouth! All these problems that we’d had just went away. Later that day, we met with our CFO and I said, ‘Here, try this,’ and he said, ‘Holy shit! What is that?’ And I said, ‘That’s the same stuff. We just changed two things.’ It turned out much, much better than we ever thought it was going to be.”

To perfect the nutritional formulation, they worked with Brendan Brazier, a two-time Canadian ultramarathon champion who created the Vega line of vegan performance foods. After playing around with the burger, Brazier became a convert. He liked the taste, but he loved the 24 grams of protein, 4 grams of fiber, and 0 milligrams of cholesterol in every burger, which left beef (19 grams of protein, 0 grams of fiber, and 80 milligrams of cholesterol) far behind.

“It’s so nutrient dense,” Brazier told me. “I plan on using several per week.”

The Beast Burger will have its coming-out party in select Whole Foods in January. Is it as delicious as a quarter-pound of well-marbled, inch-thick USDA Choice? Hell no. Good ground beef, lovingly grilled at home and served piping hot, packs a juicy succulence that this Beast lacks. In flavor and texture, the current Beast reminds me of the Salisbury steak of my youth—not exactly something to celebrate, but not terrible, either. “It’s a different kind of chew,” Anderson admits. “To me it’s a better chew. A beef burger is very gristly.”

The prototype Beast was so packed with micronutrients that it smelled like a Vitamin Shoppe kiosk. Taste testers made it clear that they’d gladly sacrifice a soupçon of supplement for a blast of beefiness. The new iteration is good enough that New York Mets captain David Wright, who stopped eating red meat years ago after noticing that it made him feel sluggish, will endorse it—part of Beyond Meat’s aim to woo red-blooded athletes—and it’s only going to get better.

“Why just look at soy and pea protein?” Brown says. “Why not look at every plant and see what has the best amino acid profiles and what can be produced the most cost-effectively? It turns out there are a lot of things you can get protein from.”

“What’s exciting to me is that we now have a completely different set of proteins that we can tune,” says Geistlinger. “We’re looking at yeasts and algae, which both have amino acid profiles that are superior to beef. We made something that used yeast from the brewery across the street. It came out like bratwurst!”

The issue of Frankenfoods raises its head. When I told Geistlinger that I was skeptical of processed foods, especially ones produced by novel techniques, he pointed out that Beyond Meat uses no artificial ingredients and employs the most time-tested of cooking methods (heat and pressure). “Our process is gentler than making pretzels,” he said. “Getting that browning on a pretzel requires chemically changing the bonds in the molecules. That’s more harsh than what we do.”

Grilling meat also involves chemical changes, of course, but ones that have been tested for many generations. Mark Bittman, for one, is going to stay off the faux-meat bandwagon for now. “I think we have to evaluate each of these products individually,” he told me. “Some fake meats can easily pass for ‘real’ meat, but in many cases that’s because ‘real’ meat has been so degraded by the industrial production of animals. Still: the best direction for most of us is to eat unprocessed food of all types; fake meat hardly qualifies.”

Health aside, some of my friends were just weirded out. Why turn plant proteins into burgers and dogs? Why not just eat them as peas and soybeans and seeds? To which I say: taco, chimichanga, empanada, crepe, pierogi, wonton, gyoza, stuffed roti, pupusa, pastie, pig in a blanket, croque monsieur, pastrami on rye. Culture is a lump of flesh wrapped in dough. If you want to save the world, you’d better make it convenient.

You’re still wondering about that shit-burger, aren’t you? Here’s what I know. Every year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention teams up with the FDA to check for antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the meat sold in American retail outlets. In 2010, the most recent year for which data has been released, they purchased 5,280 samples across 11 states and tested four states’ for fecal bacteria. They found it in 90 percent of ground beef and ground turkey, 88 percent of pork chops, and 95 percent of chicken breasts.

If this shocks you, then clearly you haven’t been watching YouTube videos of slaughterhouses in action, where the high-speed slicing and dicing of 300 to 400 head of cattle an hour saturates the air with a fine fecal mist. Really, the amazing thing is that 10 percent of our ground beef—even the organic stuff, which is largely processed in the same manner—manages to escape contamination, and that anyone eats it at all.

The part that really terrifies Meatworld? Millennials are already bailing on beef.

Every generation skews toward vegetarianism in high school and college, only to regress as life gets more complicated. But the newest graduates aren’t coming back. “We’ve definitely seen interest in vegetarian as well as vegan food rising steadily on college and corporate campuses, but so has interest in eating less meat in general,” says Maisie Ganzler, VP of strategy for Bon Appétit Management Company, which provides food services to many top universities and corporations, including Duke, Johns Hopkins, Yahoo, and Google. If you want to know what America’s next generation of thinkers is eating, just ask Bon Appétit. “For us, vegan isn’t about niche appeal,” Ganzler says. “We try to offer a lot of vegan options in the cafés for our high-tech clients. Millennials are more meat conscious, and vegan appeals to a variety of growing populations.”

As vegetarianism goes mainstream, factory meat’s one advantage—that it’s cheap—disappears. “There aren’t any obstacles to us underpricing beef as we scale up,” Brown says. “The industry is large and established, yet it’s facing huge cost challenges. The price slope for beef since 2010 has been pretty steep. We’re already competitive with certain grades.”

There’s no reason that Beyond Meat can’t have extruders all over the world churning out affordable protein patties and even a plant-based “raw” ground beef that’s red, pliable, and designed for cooking. Once that happens, Brown won’t let U.S. supermarkets slot him into the hippie aisle anymore. “As soon as we have our ground beef ready, they need to put it next to the animal protein.”

He’ll have to catch Impossible Foods, founded by Stanford University biochemist Patrick Brown and also backed by Bill Gates, which in October revealed a raw “ground beef” featuring bioengineered “plant blood” designed to approximate hemoglobin. The patty turns brown and savory as it cooks. Although the costs are not yet competitive and the flavor is a work in progress, Impossible Foods expects to have its meat going head-to-head with ground beef next year. “Livestock is an outdated technology,” says Patrick Brown.

Considering the speed of change, the money and smarts being thrown at the problem, and the desperate need, it seems likely that sometime in the next decade, Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods or another rival will perfect vegetarian beef, chicken, and pork that is tastier, healthier, and cheaper than the fast-food versions of the real thing. It will be a textbook case of disruptive technology: overnight, meat will become the coal of 2025—dirty, uncompetitive, outcast. Our grandchildren will look back on our practice of using caged animals to assemble proteins with the same incredulousness that we apply to our ancestors’ habit of slaughtering whales to light their homes.

I was thinking about that on the kind of crackling fall day when absolutely anything feels possible, back at my neighbor’s farm, eyeing my four-legged friend. The leaves on the Vermont hills were a shimmering metallic curtain of bronze and rust, the sky limitless, the pasture speckled with goldenrod. A week of daily Beast Burgers had left me wildly energized and clearheaded, and I liked the feeling. “I don’t know what I ever saw in you,” I told him. He blinked back at me and uncorked a fragrant burp.

Contributing editor Rowan Jacobsen (@rowanjacobsen) wrote about the Colorado River in July 2014.

emmersdrawberry:

fuckyeahfeminists:

smallrevolutionary:

misselaney:

Natural Black Hair Tutorial!
Usually Black hair is excluded in the hair tutorials which I have seen so I have gone through it in depth because it’s really not enough to tell someone simply, “Black hair is really curly, draw it really curly.” 

The next part of Black Hair In Depth will feature styles and ideas for designing characters and I will release it around February. If you would like to see certain styles, please shoot me a message!

YES! BOOSTINGGGG FOR MY FOLKS WHO WANNA/NEED TO KNOW HOW

this is amazing

In all the books and articles and resource page’s I’ve found not a single one provided specific information on rendering natural black hair. Most don’t go past rendering pale/white skin and it’s quietly accepted that you just move the hue slider and BOOM your done.

An anonymous reader writes Researchers from Moscow State University plan to build a database that will house the DNA of every creature known to man. The University has secured a $194 million grant for the project dubbed "Noah's Ark." The gigantic "ark," set to be completed by 2018, will be 430 sq km in size, built at one of the university's central campuses. "It will enable us to cryogenically freeze and store various cellular materials, which can then reproduce. It will also contain information systems. Not everything needs to be kept in a petri dish," MSU rector Viktor Sadivnichy says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bowing to pressure from Portland's business community, City Commissioner Steve Novick just announced a residential income tax is out—for the time being—as Portland struggles to find millions in new money to fix the city's roads.

Instead, Novick and Mayor Charlie Hales will revert to a "user fee" on Portlanders—one that's still tied to income. But Novick is explicit, in his announcement, that that's because income can be shown to have real ties to gasoline consumption.

“Gasoline use is one proxy for ‘road use,’' Novick says in the announcement, "and gasoline use varies somewhat by income level.”

As such, the user fee model tosses out exemptions for Portlander's at the low end of the income scale. People making $13,000 or less would have to pay $36 a year, with the fee topping out at $144 a year for people earning $82,000 or more. Here's the whole thing:

Novick says the model is good for $23 million a year. An existing fee structure for businesses is still on the table, and would rake in about the same.

The move away from an income tax has been rumored for weeks, and it's the latest sign Hales and Novick are striving to push through a proposal that won't be referred to voters. The Portland Business Alliance had railed against an earlier income tax proposal—one that was cheered by progressive groups throughout the city—and promised to put the tax to a vote.

The new "user fee" proposal will get a hearing before the city council on January 8. A vote is likely January 14.

But Novick's also making clear in today's announcement an income tax isn't completely off the table. In fact, if the new proposal is stymied—either by failing to pass a city council that's fairly divided on this matter or being referred to voters by some opposition or another—Novick says he'll put all his weight behind a progressive income tax. Under that proposal, couples making less than $35,000 would be exempt from paying, and wealthy Portlanders would assume a bigger share of the burden.

Here's what it would look like:

And here's Novick's take:

“My personal preference is for a progressive income tax, which is also the most popular option among Portlanders generally. But pursuing that option would involve a campaign that would not end until at least May, and possibly November of 2016 – which means postponing actual work to repair streets and make them safer."

It shouldn't be long now until we hear street fee opponents highlighting exactly what is terrible about this latest proposal.

For now, I've appended Novick's full announcement after the jump.

(Side note: I'm writing this from Michigan. You have no idea about bad roads until you've been to Michigan. I'm being completely serious.)

December 29, 2014— As a year of debate over city transportation funding draws to a close, City Commissioner Steve Novick today announced a two-part strategy to ensure funding for transportation maintenance and safety priorities.

“We are proposing a revised residential user fee, with a hearing on January 8 at 6p.m. and a vote scheduled for January 14. If that fails, either in Council or through a subsequent referral to the ballot, we will prepare to campaign for a progressive income tax in 2016,” Novick said. The proposed non-residential fee is unchanged.

The proposed user fee will vary by income, based on national statistics showing the extent to which gasoline consumption varies by income quintile. “Gasoline use is one proxy for ‘road use,’ and gasoline use varies somewhat by income level,” Novick said.

Under the proposed fee, tax filers in the lowest fifth of the income distribution would pay $3 a month; filers in the second fifth would pay $5 a month; filers in the middle fifth would pay $7.45 a month; filers in the second-highest fifth would pay $9 a month; and filers in the top fifth would pay $12 a month. The fee is projected to raise $23 million per year.

If the user fee fails, Novick said, he plans to propose a progressive income tax to be sent to the ballot in May or November of 2016. “What I would propose is an income tax that, for married filers, exempts the first $35,000 in income, and then applies graduated rates as follows: one-tenth of one percent of income between $35,000 and $60,000; two-tenths of one percent of income between $60,000 and $100,000; three-tenths of one percent of income between $100,000 and $250,000; and four-tenths of one percent of income above $250,000.” Such a tax is also projected to raise $23 million a year. That proposal includes a $5000 per dependent deduction and is tax deductible on the state and federal returns.

“My personal preference is for a progressive income tax, which is also the most popular option among Portlanders generally. But pursuing that option would involve a campaign that would not end until at least May, and possibly November of 2016 – which means postponing actual work to repair streets and make them safer. As the Mayor and I have repeatedly said, the longer we wait, the worse the problem gets. It seems possible that we could pass a user fee in Council that would not require a campaign, which would mean that we could get to work much sooner,” Novick said.

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Reddit user whatanasssss just discovered that her husband is a vile Internet troll who spends his spare time harassing teenagers on Tumblr. But it gets worse. She’s pregnant. Yes, in a few short months, the chronic harasser of women that she’s married to will become the father of a baby girl. In her disbelief, whatanasssss posted her experience to r/relationships:

[My husband] left the browser open on our laptop after he went to work this morning… I was disgusted at what I found. My husband is a troll. A really fucking nasty troll. He leaves horribly mean comments to all kinds of people. They're filled with racist slurs, awful insults… I was horrified. Completely horrified. My husband is a nice, gentle man who is supportive and kind. In our 9-year relationship, we've fought three times total. I never thought this is a behavior he would take part in.

This woman’s story is horrifying but her situation is by no means uncommon. Unless there’s a secret army of robot bigots out there who have outsmarted every CAPTCHA in existence, it’s pretty clear that Internet harassment comes from actual human men. Yes, cruel online messages are typically typed by fingers which are attached to human arms which are, in turn, attached to the human men that we all, unfortunately, must interact with at some point in our lives.

And they’re not all Mountain Dew-guzzling teenage boys with a budding “nice guy” complex, either. They’re the men that you work with, the men that you’re friends with, the men you’re related to and, yes, maybe even the man whose baby you are carrying. They know how to tie a tie and file an income tax return and that makes them even scarier.

So if this Reddit user’s experience has you rattled, you might want to double-check that the man you swap gametes with one day knows how to behave himself online. That’s why I’ve prepared a quiz for you comprised of five questions that you can ask the man in your life in order to determine the likelihood that he is an Internet troll. I can personally guarantee that this quiz is accurate with absolutely no margin of error, so if your man fails, then #DTMFA and move on.

If you think your boyfriend might be an Internet troll, ask him:

1) “What do you think of Seth MacFarlane?”

Start here. This is the troll-determining equivalent of the “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” question in Twenty Questions. It will quickly allow you to eliminate a wide range of possibilities in one fell swoop. The MacFarlane Query, as I call it, will help you understand what kind of man you’re dealing with and whether or not further inquiries are necessary.

Why Seth MacFarlane? Because Seth MacFarlane is what would happen if you gave your teenage brother $150 million and his own TV show. His brainchild Family Guy is the prize pony of so-called Equal Opportunity Offenders, people who justify being an asshole to minority groups because they are assholes to all of them. That mindset is presumably how MacFarlane convinced himself to squander his one shot at the Oscar-hosting gig by performing a musical number about the breasts of every actress in the audience.

If your man responds to this question with a blistering critique of MacFarlane’s politics, you’re in the clear. If he lights up and shows you his Family Guy box set, you should be worried. Your man has probably been mean to at least one woman on the Internet at some point in his life.

2) “Have you ever heard of Anita Sarkeesian?”

This question is particularly useful if your man is a video gamer and, if your man plays video games, your troll-dar should already be set to high alert anyway. On the Venn Diagram of the Internet, the intersection of trolls and male gamers is a particularly bustling one and there’s no one that male video gamers hate more than Anita Sarkeesian.

Ms. Sarkeesian is a feminist media critic who produces a YouTube web series called Feminist Frequency. In 2012, she successfully crowdfunded a series of videos called Tropes vs. Women in which she critiques the representation of women in video games. But this crowdfunding campaign also made her into a lightning rod for Internet trolls. (If you want to see a sample of the sort of people that harass her, you can read this blog post but, be warned, you’ll see every slur under the sun.)

So if your man is a gamer and you’re worried he might be a troll, try casually dropping her name. Does he instantly begin to foam at the mouth? I’m sorry, but you’re married to a troll. Does he look unusually agitated as he gives you a completely unsolicited twenty-minute long lecture about the harmful objectification of men? He’s probably a troll. Back away slowly. Does he recognize the name and say something that sounds feminist or, at the least, empathetic? You’re in the clear. Go ahead and make a baby with him.

3) “Which amendment in the Bill of Rights do you think is the most important?”

This is a fun question that every couple should ask each other just to build intimacy and to prepare to compete on game shows in the constitutional originalist dystopian future of my nightmares. Here’s a legend for his potential responses to let you know what they might mean in terms of his potential for trolldom:

Tenth: Your man is passionate about states’ rights. Racists and homophobes love states’ rights. Be afraid.  

Ninth: Your man picked the foundation for Roe v. Wade. Good egg!

Eighth: No “cruel and unusual punishment” for your guy! It’s unlikely that he’d be cruel to strangers.

Seventh, Sixth, Fifth, or Fourth: He’s really into criminal justice but probably not a troll. Breathe a sigh of relief.

Third: If he picks an amendment this useless, you should just dump him anyway even if he’s not a troll.

Second: Run. Seriously, just run! Your man might not be an asshole to people on the Internet because he’s too busy being an open-carrying asshole in real life.

First: This could be a huge warning sign. Trolls cite the First Amendment as frequently as college application essays cite “The Road Not Taken.” They think that it gives them the right to verbally harass, stalk, and threaten whomever they want without any consequences. If your man picks the First Amendment, just ask him to explain what it means. If he thinks it means that “it’s a free country” and “people can say whatever they want,” tell him to go back to the playground he learned his politics from and find a new boyfriend.

4) “Can I borrow your laptop really quick?”

Ask him this question when he’s in the middle of using it. And then count how long it takes for him to get his computer into a state where he’s comfortable handing it over to you. If he passes it over immediately with his email and social media accounts still open, you’re likely to be in the clear. This is a man with nothing to hide.

If he spends thirty seconds meticulously logging out of his email and social media accounts before handing it to you, there might be something going on with him and trolling is definitely on the table. It’s 2014, after all. Men don’t just cheat on you and watch too much porn anymore. They also obsessively track down and harass people who are different from them in order to feel the fleeting sense of control and superiority that defines their particular version of masculinity.

5) “Do you harass people on the Internet?”

I’ve saved the direct approach for last. If the indirect questions above are eliciting ambiguous responses, you might just want to raise the topic of Internet harassment in a more straightforward way. He might be offended that you’re asking him this question, but we’ve all just learned from Reddit that it’s best to be certain before you tie the knot and make a baby.

Original Source

Fox News

House GOP leader admits 'mistake' over '02 speech to white supremacist group Fox News Nov. 18, 2014: House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of La., right, with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Calif., left, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP). House Majority Whip Steve Scalise ... GOP Leaders Look For Steve Scalise White Supremacist Controversy To Blow ...Huffington Post House Republicans move to contain fallout from Scalise, Grimm controversiesWashington Post House GOP leader regrets speaking to supremacist groupThe Hill Daily Caller -Daily Political -Slate Magazine all 1,023 news articles »

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

---

So my (beloved!) ex-boyfriend's apartment caught fire this year, which was very sad, but Facebook made it worth it.

Jean & Scott, Episode 9 by Max Wittert

(Twitter: TallBlondNRich / Instagram: FionaSnapple)

See previous episodes:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Episode 7

Episode 8

Happy New Year…

Special thanks to Ari Rust for feedback and editing.

mikeyfriskeyhands:

My brother saved this document and everytime he gets angry at our neighbours for being loud he prints it to their wireless printer and you can hear the wife shout “Why the fuck would you print this AGAIN?!” to her son.

A healthcare worker who has just returned from West Africa has been diagnosed with Ebola and is being treated in hospital in Glasgow, Scotland.

When she’s not hanging out with her best friend Forbi, a very serene Siamese cat named Cleo calmly watches over three slightly nervous bearded dragons as they try to eat the lovely meal that Andre Costa, a biologist at Buriki Environmental Activities, specifically put out for their dinner.

via Tastefully Offensive

ABC News

Obama Tee Time Scuttles Soldiers' Wedding Venue ABC News Even the best laid wedding plans are never a hole in one. A pair of Army captains who'd planned their wedding Sunday on the 16th tee box at the Kaneohe Klipper Golf Course had to relocate the ceremony on short notice because President Obama booked a ... Obama apologises to newlyweds for Hawaii wedding moveBBC News Obama's golf game forces Army captains to relocate weddingWTSP 10 News Obama apologizes to couple that changed wedding plans so he could play golfFox News Latino all 645 news articles »

Jim Harbaugh is gone, and the 49ers will now begin the search for his replacement. Here are several candidates who would make sense in San Francisco.

The San Francisco 49ers are officially without a head coach. After four seasons that included three NFC Championship appearances and one Super Bowl appearance, Jim Harbaugh and the team officially parted ways. While Harbaugh is likely to land at Michigan, the 49ers will begin a search for his replacement. Despite a down season and general dysfunction of the team this year, Harbaugh leaves a pretty significant void to fill.

Following four seasons and a combined winning percentage near 70 percent, Harbaugh was more successful than the majority of head coaches who get a chance in the NFL. San Francisco is an organization that will be expecting similar success right out of the gate from his replacement. But, who will his successor be? Is there someone from within that the team feels can take control, or will there be an extensive interview process to determine who will operate under owner Jed York and general manager Trent Baalke?

At this stage of the process, the list of potential head coach candidates generally includes current offensive and defensive coordinators, NFL head coaches who could be fired or are on expiring contracts, college head coaches and an increasingly short list of former head coaches currently out of the league.

With months of speculation around Harbaugh's status, several coaches have already been mentioned as candidates. The list of potential replacements includes a couple coaches already on staff and several notable names. Here's a closer look at potential candidates.

Jim Tomsula

The current defensive line coach in San Francisco, Jim Tomsula is a favorite of the ownership and has been with the team since 2007. Tomsula took over the interim head coaching duties when Mike Singletary was fired prior to Harbaugh joining the team, and he was successful in the one game when he was in charge. When Harbaugh took over, it was reported that Tomsula was one of the few people that the ownership wanted to keep around when Harbaugh built his coaching staff.

Tomsula is an interesting candidate given how much he's liked within the organization. He's also a player favorite, and would likely have no problem leading a locker room that was reportedly upset with Harbaugh's methods from time to time. The big question with Tomsula is whether the 49ers would be able retain (if they want to) either offensive coordinator Greg Roman or defensive coordinator Vic Fangio if Tomsula is promoted above them.

Vic Fangio

There's less talk about Fangio, the team's defensive coordinator, taking over than there is Tomsula, but that doesn't mean he's not a candidate. Had the San Francisco offense performed even marginally better this year, we'd likely be talking about how the 49ers made the postseason on the back of a defense that performed way out of its league given the injuries on that side of the ball.

Patrick Willis and NaVorro Bowman were out for most of the year and Aldon Smith was suspended for much of the year. They had multiple injuries at the cornerback position and eventually ran out of nose tackles. Despite this, the defense was consistently great for much of the year and Fangio is a big reason for that. It stands to reason that the 49ers want to maintain as much of their defensive staff as possible, and promoting Fangio would likely be the best way to do that.

Josh McDaniels

The current New England Patriots offensive coordinator, Josh McDaniels was considered one of the top candidates to land the San Francisco job prior to Harbaugh's hiring. McDaniels was reportedly scheduling an interview when Harbaugh finally relented and chose the 49ers. McDaniels has had nothing but success in his current role with the Patriots since then. His last effort at being a head coach was a disaster -- he was fired during his second season with the Denver Broncos following a 3-9 start and a videotaping scandal. However, his name is once again getting popular in head coaching discussions and he's a quarterback guy, which is important to the 49ers.

Adam Gase

Sure, Adam Gase has the advantage of having Peyton Manning as his quarterback, which translates to a certain amount of guaranteed success. But the current Denver Broncos offensive coordinator has played his part perfectly in recent seasons, including in 2013 as the architect behind Denver's record-setting offense. He's a marquee offensive-minded coach and the 49ers may need that. Gase briefly spent time in San Francisco during the 2008 season as an offensive assistant.

Jim Mora

Jim Mora, the current head coach at UCLA, is a name that keeps popping up due to his past connection with the team. He spent seven seasons as a 49ers assistant coach and is well-liked by the ownership. Mora hasn't had much success as a head coach in the NFL, though, sporting just a 31-33 record in four seasons with the Falcons and Seahawks. But, if he's looking to make a jump back to the professional game, the ties with the 49ers are there.

Other Candidates

The coaches listed above are notable names with connections to the 49ers, yet the search for a new coach likely won't be limited to just them. Niners Nation put together a comprehensive list of possible Harbaugh successors, including coaches from the NFL and college ranks.

Other potential candidates for the 49ers' job:

Darrell Bevell - Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator
Dan Quinn - Seattle Seahawks defensive coordinator
Teryl Austin - Detroit Lions defensive coordinator
Todd Bowles - Arizona Cardinals defensive coordinator
Jack Del Rio - Denver Broncos defensive coordinator
Pep Hamilton - Indianapolis Colts offensive coordinator
Hue Jackson - Cincinnati Bengals offensive coordinator
Gary Kubiak - Baltimore Ravens offensive coordinator
Kyle Shanahan - Cleveland Browns offensive coordinator
Sean Payton - New Orleans Saints head coach
Rex Ryan - New York Jets head coach
Mike Holmgren - Former NFL head coach
Mike Shanahan - Former NFL head coach
Kevin Sumlin - Texas A&M coach
Gus Malzahn - Auburn coach

It isn't easy to play football in paradise. The effort just might be worth it.

I am in a stadium built by the Chinese government in the Bahamas, watching an American football game.

Central Michigan is lateraling to almost complete the biggest comeback in bowl history.

When the Chippewas come up just short, the Hilltoppers eat Popeyes. There are no Popeyes in the Bahamas.

★★★

Bowl games make money. Since bowls are businesses, they choose the teams that will have the most viewers, which tend to be in the biggest conferences. Conference USA is not one of the biggest conferences. While bowls snap at the opportunity to sign contracts with large conferences, they are more begrudging about conferences like C-USA.

So C-USA stopped banking on other people and started a game. Conference commissioner Britton Banowsky acts as the league's head and the bowl game's president.

So why the Bahamas? The story starts with the success of the Battle 4 Atlantis, a college basketball tournament held on the island since 2010, played on an improvised court in a ballroom at the Atlantis resort.

"I've probably been to the majority of the bowls, and I can tell you this bowl experience will parallel virtually any bowl experience anywhere," says Banowsky. "Many of these student-athletes will never have the opportunity to come back here. So you're really creating something here that's special that you wouldn't have in one of the traditional places."

The Bahamas gets to put its name on TV, and when people see the Bahamas on TV, they want to go spend money in the Bahamas.

"From a publicity point of view, it's been really good for us," says Tommy Thompson, deputy director general of the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism. "People see the Bahamas as sun, sand, and sea. But there's much more to the Bahamas than just sun, sand, and sea. This event shows what people from the Bahamas can do when we put our minds to it."

The organizers and the Bahamas do not agree on all fronts. The television people want to put the game on Dec. 24, since there are no basketball games on Christmas Eve.

This puts kickoff 37 hours before one of the biggest moments of the Bahamian year: Junkanoo, the carnival-esque parade every Dec. 26 at 1 a.m. Why stage two huge events, both of which are logistical leaps and would draw tourists separately, at roughly the same time?

"The conferences impressed upon us that Christmas Eve would be a good day to try," says Harrison Thompson, the Bahamian permanent secretary of Financial Services.

The Bahamians realize that putting the game on ESPN against pretty much no competition would expose a lot of people to the Bahamas.

"We know that we will get our money's worth in terms of PR," says Thompson.

Now all we needed was somebody to pay to name the bowl game.

"We know our fans love chicken and football," says Popeyes director of communications Todd Burke. "It's a perfect marriage."

And thus, the Popeyes Bahamas Bowl.

★★★

This is the first postseason bowl played outside of the United States and Canada since 1937.

"Starting a college football bowl game is a tough putt anywhere," says Banowsky. "Starting one in a foreign country is a ridiculously hard putt. The things we take for granted in the United States are hurdles that have to be cleared here."

For starters: the majority of college football players and coaches have never needed passports.

"We started with only four or five guys that did have passports," WKU football operations director Greg Brohm says.

CMU got passports for every player in September, on the chance they'd end up in the Bahamas Bowl, one of the MAC's five guaranteed bowl bids for 2014. WKU had started paperwork, but scrambled in the final two weeks. WKU needed to wrangle player birth certificates from as far away as Alaska, and then they still needed help. Normally, getting a passport takes at least month, so the team reached out to the office of Kentucky U.S. Representative Brett Guthrie, which helped smooth the process.

"We had to actually bring a few guys to the regional passport office in Atlanta and sit there with them and have them fill out paperwork in the presence of the agency," says Brohm.

Despite the scrambling, each team was able to travel all of its roster, coaches, and staff. But passports weren't the only problem.

"Even the smallest details, like making sure you have a first down chain and goalpost are things we have to import," says Banowsky. "That's the trickiest part."

WKU's water and Gatorade don't make it to practice in time for their first day, forcing the team to start drills without pads and helmets.

"There’s just some kinks logistically with just things the local environment trying to work with the way they normally do things," says Brohm. "Once the kinks are worked out, this is going to be a great bowl site."

★★★

Atlantis Resort

The game's staging site is the Atlantis resort, a megapalace/waterpark/aquarium. Both teams stay here, as do all media, staff, Popeyes representatives, and every fan I talk to. On my third night, I discover two entire towers of hotel rooms I did not know existed.

"I know a lot of these guys probably see these Atlantis commercials all the time on TV and you always go, ‘That place looks pretty cool; I'll probably never go there,'" CMU coach Dan Enos said in a story on CMU's website. "And now they're all going to have an opportunity to go there."

Ads generally lie. That burger isn't as juicy as it looks in the Wendy's commercial. That Hyundai isn't the height of luxury. But the gorgeous Atlantis of the commercials is a lot like the gorgeous Atlantis of real life. The ads just don't mention that you have to wait 45 minutes to go on a 10-second waterslide.

Atlantis and the bowl system that led to the existence of the Popeyes Bahamas Bowl are gorgeous behemoths that have perfected the science of taking things people like and squeezing millions of dollars out of them. If you gave a tour of the Atlantis to the first person who built a hotel in the Bahamas, or if you made the person who organized the first Rose Bowl watch all 39 bowl games from the 2014-15 season, both would be awestruck at how the fun thing they did became spectacular and unrecognizable.

You can pay to swim with dolphins. There are world-class restaurants and luxury shops: Gucci, Ferragamo, Versace, and other brands I am primarily familiar with through rap lyrics. There is a casino, where you could hypothetically win money.

The resort is large and isolated enough that leaving is difficult. Atlantis is a monopoly. Things are priced as such. I pay $19 for an average bottle of suntan lotion. Sandwiches at the Quizno's on site cost about twice as much as at a Quizno's stateside. Wi-Fi is $22 a night. I pay $15 a month in New York.

I anticipated this and purchased a 1.75-liter bottle of Jack Daniels at the duty free shop in New York. Instead of paying $7 a beer and $10-plus per mixed drink, I provided myself with two-thirds of a liter of Jack per night for the reasonable price of $50. A .75-liter bottle of Jack costs $90 from room service.

As you can tell, I am a smart, fiscally responsible adult who makes adult decisions.

My first night, I share a few free beers with other media and bowl staff, then head to my room. If I had neglected to purchase the Jack in New York, I probably would've had two or three beers each night and perhaps spent enough money to get super-drunk on a night I didn't have work things to do. Instead, I had the option to get super-drunk whenever.

About an hour later, I am in the casino with $100. I am a hammered in a building that teams of people designed so that the atmosphere and layout would ensure people play games in which they have mathematical disadvantages. A half hour after that, I am in the casino with zero dollars.

So I go back to my room. At this point, Two Or Three Beers Rodger would get to work transcribing quotes and call it a night. Two Or Three Beers Rodger isn't here. Drunk Rodger is.

Drunk Rodger goes into the suitcase where Sober Rodger set aside $200 in case I lost my wallet or got mugged or lost all my money gambling. Drunk Rodger grabs a few 20s and heads back to the casino.

Poor money management is not Drunk Rodger's only flaw. He also sucks at blackjack. Before flying down, Sober Rodger had learned all the strategies on when to hit and when to stand. Drunk Rodger decides to split a pair of sixes against an opposing face card. Drunk Rodger thought it would be cool to split because you don't get to do that often. Drunk Rodger has zero dollars again and falls asleep with his clothes on.

Even my decision to save money by buying alcohol in America ended up making Atlantis a fistful of dollars.

★★★

Once you've stepped on a plane to the Bahamas, the Bahamas have won. When a big sporting event is in the Bahamas, the Bahamas win a lot.

"Sports in the Bahamas is about what we call heads and beds. We get people in the hotel rooms," says Jeff Rodgers, marketing director of sports tourism in the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism. "You had to pay the government tax to get into the country. You had to pay the taxi. You had to buy food. You had to pay Atlantis for your room. You win because you got to enjoy your vacation. It's a win-win."

For Western Kentucky and Central Michigan fans, the opportunity to enjoy their teams in a beautiful destination is too good to pass up.

"My wife called me up and said, ‘Hey, you wanna go watch football in the Bahamas?' And my reaction was "umm ... yeah,'" says David Brown, a CMU alum who traveled with his four kids. "We needed a break as a family. If it had been in Idaho, I don't know if we would've gone."

Ohers were going to go to the bowl game wherever.

"We went to Detroit [for the 2012 Little Caesars Bowl, also between WKU and CMU]. We rode a bus all the way from Bowling Green in a blizzard," says J.J. Sloan, a retiree who worked for WKU for several decades. "This experience is nicer."

It seems more than half of the fans here are related to the players or coaches. The largest contingent seems to be that of CMU receiver Jesse Kroll, which has 11 members from Wisconsin. The expensive travel presumably turned off a lot of fans. At the stadium, I count no more than a few hundred from each team.

"The transportation cost and the lodging costs are all significantly higher," says Sloan. "The other bowls, you could say, well, why don't we do Christmas in Florida and we'll drive down. Not easy to do in the Bahamas. And Christmas is a family holiday. Most people are not in a position to bring a big family here."

The only more expensive destination would have been the Hawai'i Bowl, which was almost an option for WKU. Some fans who were willing to shell out thousands to go to the Bahamas say Hawai'i would've been too expensive. A WKU official says getting sent to Hawai'i would have been concerning.

The financial burden on fans comes back to hurt the teams. Teams typically hope to offset the cost of their bowl trips with ticket sales. The schools don't have to pay for hotel rooms -- those are comped by the game -- but they do have to fly players and coaches and equipment and pay for meals.

Bowl games give payouts to participating schools. Of the 39 bowls, the Bahamas Bowl is one of two that has not yet announced its payout. The MAC fronted $450,000 to Central Michigan, but in Western Kentucky's case, the bowl game is its conference's, so no similar payout has been announced.

★★★

It is obvious that there is a football game here. There are 200 large football players at the Atlantis enjoying the hell out of every moment.

They're walking around the casino, although their coaches have warned that if they lose their per diem, they won't have money for food. We only hear about one player gambling, but we see a few gawking. They're in the luxury shops, asking the Hublot employees if they're allowed to try on the five-figure watches. (No.) They're in the water park, giggling and yelling about whether you can swim with the sharks. (No.)

The one place they're not is the sportsbook. Just in case, the Bahamas Bowl is the only bowl you can't place bets on, as Bahamian law stipulates sportsbooks can't take bets on games being played in the Bahamas.

I often gripe about how unfair college football is for players who don't get paid. As I watch 300-pound dudes splishing and splashing, I can't. A trip to paradise with your 100 best friends seems like a good reward for a bunch of hard work. Everybody else here worked hard and saved up the boatload of money necessary to go on vacation. These players worked hard and got to be here too. Everybody's happy.

★★★

There is literally a bridge to paradise.

The Atlantis is on Paradise Island, a small key occupied by the resort, a few other hotels, and vacation homes of celebrities and billionaires. It's connected to New Providence, the larger island that contains the nation's capital of Nassau and the majority of the population, by a pair of one-way bridges that arc a hundred or so feet in the air to allow large ships to pass. Many parts of Nassau are far from manicured.

Lining the underside of the Nassau side of the bridge out of Paradise is a slew of food stands, all selling the same combination of fried fish and conch. The only new-looking thing about them is that each has a nearly identical sign with a tropical font, displaying the stand's name and that it proudly sells local Kalik beer. The people eating, drinking, chatting, and playing dominos at these stands are entirely local.

★★★

The Bahamas is a former British colony, so I assume the most popular sports are soccer or cricket.

I am wrong. The Bahamas might not be a part of the United States, but it gets American TV. And American TV shows football, basketball, and baseball more than soccer and cricket.

Football fans of the Bahamas come out in full force. I'd estimate local fans outnumber the contingents from WKU and CMU two-to-one, at least. Even though college teams are playing, every Bahamian with an NFL jersey wears it to the game. The most popular looks to be former Dolphins LB Zach Thomas.

"I've always been an avid Dolphin fan," says David Adderley, vice president of the Bahamas American Football Association. "Here, it's just like watching football everywhere else in the world. You've got your backyard barbecues, you've got your big screen TVs, a couple of them going on. Everybody jokes. Everybody watches."

Here in the Caribbean, I meet a man who chooses of his own accord to root for the Buffalo Bills.

"I started watching them when they were almost winning every year," says Quincy Smith. "Wide Right, all those years."

Smith plays wide receiver for a local team. He shows me his league title ring.

Elsewhere in the stands, Franklin White lifts up the side of his Steelers shirt to reveal a Terrible Towel tucked into his pants. Earlier, I spoke to Dave Johnson and Kennedy Stuart, brothers who run a youth league, about their Steelers fandom.

"We have more Steelers fans in the Bahamas than Pittsburgh," Johnson jokes.

The passion with which Bahamians talk football is impressive. I am laughed at for being a Jets fan. A Bahamian Packers fan goads the Lions fans in the CMU section about Sunday's matchup between Detroit and Green Bay.

"A lot of people love the game, because they were exposed to watching the game," says Stuart. "But they didn't know how to play. So there were a lot of injuries that were not necessary. A lot of things happened because we weren't properly structured."

"Some kids, they never know where their talent or strength lies, and we don't give them the opportunity to find out," says Vincent Grey Sr., who coaches baseball, but has a football-crazy 13-year-old. "They might want to play some football, but they never have the opportunity until they're older, and the skill level has passed."

Youth football requires infrastructure the Bahamas do not have.

"Historically, if a child has interest to playing football, at 12 or 13, they leave the country to go play football," says LaLisa Anthony, president of the Bahamian American Football Federation.

Anthony is not Bahamian. She's from Ohio. Her involvement stems from the fact that she picked up the phone when one of the kids who left the country came calling. Devard Darling moved to Texas in seventh grade and played six years in the NFL. Darling was interested in building youth football in his homeland.

A few phone calls got to Anthony. Anthony helped him form the BAFF, which led to a youth league on Grand Bahama Island and a U-19 team that played a qualifier for an international tournament. It lost 52-6 to Panama, which isn't exactly a powerhouse, but it was a start.

"We called it history in defeat," says Anthony.

The passion is here.

"Everybody talks about Michael Jordan, with the flu-like symptoms. Let me tell you something, my brother," Stuart says. "Bahamian kids will play with broken legs. We want to say, ‘We have talent, come check us out.'"

But passion alone doesn't eliminate obstacles. For starters, it's expensive. And it isn't sponsored by schools like in the United States, leaving the burden to people like Johnson and Stuart. They call their league a "non-profit self-help group."

"We're going through some growing pains," Johnson says. "Hopefully we get some assistance. If you don't have the equipment, what they need to continue to play, it may die out."

It's less expensive to play flag football, but there's no NFL for flag football. Plus, "the boys didn't want to play flag," Johnson says. "I don't want to run around with a guy trying to pull my pants down," Stuart chimes in.

And to teach players, you need coaches. But any potential Bahamian coaches have the same background as the kids.

"We want to get better. Nobody wants to be stagnant," says David Adderley, vice president of the BAFF. "The way to avoid that is to find experts to teach you. Experts to train the trainers, experts to coach the coaches."

Two days before the Bahamas Bowl, players from both teams put on a clinic for area children.

"They've been counting down the days," yells one parent when asked if her kid was excited.

"I had to sign the waiver as soon as it was printed," yells another.

For many, it's the first time they've been taught to throw a football or run a drill.

"They have no concept," says Chris Merritt, a Miami high school coach who has been brought in to run the clinic. "When they start off, it looks pretty bad. At the end of a five-minute drill, they look pretty good."

★★★

There are no Popeyes in the Bahamas. To make the chicken at the bowl events, Popeyes has shipped in friers from the mainland. To make matters worse, Bahamians are fanatical about one of Popeyes' primary competitors, KFC.

I see people with "I (heart) KFC" bumper stickers. One truck I see has a pair on his windshield. This man was so passionate about his preferred brand of fried chicken that he restricted his field of vision while driving to let the world know.

Some residents remember Popeyes, which had a franchise on the islands several decades back.

"They failed," exclaims Buddy B., owner of a seafood stand. "They could not beat Kentucky! You can't beat Kentucky!"

He laughed and clacked a domino to the table. As the owner of one seafood stand on a strip with 25 other seafood stands, Buddy understands the nature of frying food and selling it in a competitive market, and is maliciously gleeful about the fact that Popeyes did not succeed.

The day I arrive, I walk through a crowd of WKU players carrying stacks of Domino's Pizza, their post-practice meal. The day before, they had KFC. I regret missing the opportunity to capture 100 guys in shirts that say POPEYES BAHAMAS BOWL chowing down on chicken that was not made by Popeyes.

The stadium is Popeyes-ed out. Fans are given Popeyes shirts and Popeyes koozies and can take pictures in biscuit hats. There are more Popeyes flags ringing the stadium than flags of the Bahamas or the United States, like a sovereign nation.

[puts hand over heart] pic.twitter.com/vZob6Igprg

— Mike Tunison (@xmasape) December 24, 2014

For all their passion for KFC, Bahamians do not turn up their noses at free Popeyes. They beat their #TEAMSPICY and #TEAMMILD thundersticks, and a stand handing out a new flavor of wing outside the stadium has a line that stretches 40 or 50 yards.

★★★

Western Kentucky mascot Big Red shows up at an event with local youths.

"What is it? What is he?" one girl asks the closest American person she sees, a Central Michigan player.

"I don't know," he responds. "Ask someone from their school."

"I think it is a girl," she says.

Big Red raises its arms in bewilderment.

"I think you're a girl, because you have pretty eyes like a girl."

"You're a girl," a second girl says. "You're a girl!"

Big Red leans in, as if to tell the little girls a secret.

Big Red is all things to all people who experience Big Red.

★★★

The listed attendance is over 13,000. The stadium seats 15,000.

"It's probably not as much as we would've liked," says C-USA senior associate commissioner Alfred White. "But we understand it's a startup bowl in a foreign country and it's a sport that needs to get established here."

And even if there were 13,000 fans:

"What's weird to us is we bought a $40 ticket and nobody asked us to see a ticket," says David Buchanon, a WKU fan. "It's the weirdest security we've ever seen. And we're not supposed to be here either."

We're inside the Popeyes VIP tent, where there are trays of chicken and tacos, tubs of beer, and a stream of hors d'oeuvres.

"Have you had the conch fritters? With the sauce?"

It seems to be intended for game VIP's and Popeyes corporate. (Buchanon might just be great at getting places he's not supposed to. He's also on the field during the team trophy ceremony.)

WKU takes a 42-14 lead into halftime, and also scores the first TD of the second half.

"It's football," says White, the man with the Steelers towel. "The thing about football is that anything can happen."

CMU scores in the game's final quarter. CMU scores again. When CMU scores a third time with two minutes left, people perk up.

When CMU forces a punt and scores within a minute, everybody realizes something is happening. WKU runs the clock down to 10 seconds and punts.

"DOUG FLUTIE," yells Smith, the Bahamian Bills fan. "DOUG FLUTIE. HAIL MARY! HAIL MARY FULL OF GRACE, DOUG FLUTIE. JAILHOUSE BREAK. DOUG FLUTIE."

A lifelong Bills fan from the Bahamas at the biggest football game in his country's history yelling DOUG FLUTIE before a successful Hail Mary attempt is perhaps the strongest evidence I've seen that there is a god somewhere who listens to prayer.

A sports fan's brain has dozens of ways to react to wins and losses. We have nothing for "team down five touchdowns scores five touchdowns including a four-lateral Hail Mary/hook-and-ladder hybrid with no time left." That explains why people are crying.

CMU goes for a game-winning two-point conversion and misses. CMU fans are not mad with the decision to win rather than play for overtime.

Bahamian fans are disappointed.

"Your defense is playing well," one yells. "You can win in overtime!"

CMU fans wanted a win, and had given up on it long before. The Bahamians got 99 percent of the confirmation they wanted that the sport they loved but could never touch was, indeed, magic.

★★★

The decision to play the game on Christmas Eve pays off. America's eyes were on the Popeyes Bahamas Bowl.

"The way it ramped up at the end, that gives us a chance to have that play, to have the bowl game on display on SportsCenter," says White. "All day and all night."

Sure enough, SportsCenter leads its nighttime show with a prolonged block of Popeyes Bahamas Bowl coverage. It was a game between a pair of college football teams that barely won half of their games, but it got about as much airtime as a big NFL game or an NBA or MLB playoff game would have.

And every time the name "Popeyes Bahamas Bowl" is uttered, the investment from Popeyes and the Bahamas pays off a little bit more.

★★★

With the exception of a few hiccups, things go smoothly. And they will go more smoothly next year, and the year after that.

There is a contract for five more Bahamas Bowls. With each year, the phrase "Bahamas Bowl" will sound less foreign. It will become more a part of our college football vernacular.

Right now, it feels strange that there is a Bahamas Bowl, but if in 2020, the game's organizers opt not to continue, we'd feel strange about the absence of the Bahamas Bowl.

And as the Bahamas Bowl gets more established, the idea of holding a football game in a foreign country will seem less odd. Perhaps it's the beginning of a slew of overseas bowls.

Things that make little sense are often more fun. As the years roll on, the Bahamas Bowl will make more sense. We must cherish the 2014 Bahamas Bowl, the least sensible, most fun game I have ever heard of.

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