multitasksuicide

“Sing me a song, you’re the piano man / Sing me a song right now”

Ever since Billy Joel wrote those lyrics, America has been crazy about songs — and 2014 was no different. From pop music to rap, from jingles to opera, when we wanted to hear a nice melody coupled with lyrics, we listened to songs.

According to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, “2014 was one of the top five greatest years for songs. There were more than one hundred songs on the radio in 2014.”

So let’s celebrate the best of songwriting! Here are the TOP TEN SONGS OF 2014:

10. Regular songs

9. Pop songs

8. Wonderful songs

7. “Ooh, turn it up! I like this song!”

6. (TIE) Duets / Catchy songs

5. Loud songs

4. Billboard magazine songs

3. Raps

2. Songs that get stuck in your head

1. #1 songs

Click for the news round-up, stay for the cat video.

The post News Round-Up: Nails, Marty Friedman, Neurosis, Extol, DevilDriver, Broken Hope… and Car Bomb Singer Saves a Kitty from Drowning appeared first on MetalSucks.

nevvyland:

Somebody had to. Original

A well-meaning friend of Chad Chadwick called the Missouri City, TX police to say that he was afraid that Chadwick was having emotional difficulties; the cops lied to a judge to say that they had reason to believe Chadwick was heavily armed, then they sent a SWAT-team to his house (where he was asleep in the tub), beat 11 kinds of shit out of him, gave him permanent hearing loss, held him in solitary confinement, fraudulently accused him of resisting arrest, and tried to have him imprisoned -- he was acquitted, but a judge wouldn't punish the cops or the DA, because "There is no freestanding constitutional right to be free from malicious prosecution." Read the rest

The 10th/11th Doctor Sonic Screwdriver cutlery is dishwasher safe and runs $30/setting. (via Geeky Merch)

Housing Complex B, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 1968

(John Andrews)

If you’ve ever enjoyed rummaging through a box of old photos at a flea market, then you’ll probably enjoy this fantastic photo archive over at Flickr. Put together by The Boston Public Library, it has hundreds of albums centered on themes such as anti-war riots, aviation, and baseball. There are even collections for Victorian-era trade cards (advertising shoes and accessories) and war posters, for those who like vintage artwork.

Shown here are some beautiful images from the set titled "Boston in Winter," which documents how the New England city looked during the first half of the 20th century. There are lots of charming pictures of kids sledding down hills, families celebrating Christmas at home, postal workers sorting through holiday mail, men and women pushing their way through blizzards, and landscapes of the city covered in snow. Should your town be cold this month, may these images warm your heart as they did mine.

Happy holidays, everyone.

There’s no doubt about it: 2014 was the latest year to come down the pike in quite some time.

And what a year it was! Future historians will call 2014 one of the most amazing years we’ve ever lived through.

If you thought 2013 was incredible, well my friend, 2014 must have blown your mind. Everything 2013 had, 2014 had even more of: News events, cultural moments, and even scandals.

And what better way to celebrate this year than with the only lists you need: MY lists, the BEST lists that do the BEST job of summing up the year using LISTS.

Without any further to-do, let’s get started with my lists!

Our first category: NEWSMAKERS. These are the people who made the news what it is — on the headlines, on the nightly news, on the radio, and even on the internet.

Here are THE TOP TEN NEWSMAKERS OF 2014:

10. Classic newsmakers

9. Innovators

8. Headline-grabbers

7. Trendy people

6. People who were in current events

5. Bad boys who play by their own rules

4. Controversial newsmakers

3. Celebrities

2. Politicians

1. “Gotta love those newsmakers”

2014 will forever be known as “The Year Podcasts Were Invented.” Podcasts are like teeny-tiny radio shows you can listen to on your phone, with all the features of classic radio: Music, hosts who talk, and great conversations that leave us wanting more. Some of them even have curse words because it turns out there are no rules with podcasts, America when did we lose our way???

Anyhow, this is the first time I have ever featured podcasts on my year-end lists, and I hope you enjoy! Say — if you really like this list, why not mention it on your podcast? I’ll be sure to tune in and say “Thanks for mentioning my wonderful list!” (Just tell me what your podcast is called so I can download it onto my computer for free, and give me time to find your podcast because there are so many podcasts sometimes it’s hard for me to find a specific one.)

In the meantime, let’s dial up our modem and download the latest episode of … the TOP TEN PODCASTS OF 2014.

10. Pretty good podcasts

9. Interesting podcasts

8. That one podcast with the guy with the funny voice

7. “Did you hear the latest podcast? It’s cool.”

6. Podcasts about pop culture

5. Political podcasts that make you think about the real world

4. Podcasts that are almost as good as radio shows

3. Really long podcasts that give you your money’s worth

2. “Please donate to my podcast so I can keep mumbling about any ol’ bullshit that comes into my mind”

1. The greatest podcasts of all time

Knits For The Chill 169.

Marilyn Monroe.

Ethan Persoff has a website called Comics with Problems where he posts old comic books about VD, diabetes, segregation, birth control, poison prevention, etc. His latest find is a doozy. Read the rest

I introduced Armin Strom’s new “Pure “collection” a couple months ago, including a look at the Pure ‘Water’ and Pure ‘Fire’ models and some details on Armin Strom’s 3D-PVD finished calibers.  If you haven’t seen my intro to Pure yet, go ahead and click over now and get up to speed…I’ll wait for you, and then we can take a look at the other two models in the new Pure collection, the ‘Air’ and ‘Fire’.

Click through to read and see more

© Perpétuelle - First In Watches, 2014. | Serving Up New Luxury and Avant-Garde Timepieces Daily.
More Armin Strom

Marilyn Just Saw Your Outfit Modeled After Menswear Dog.

Guess what she thinks.

Breguet will debut a new Tradition watch model with a retrograde complication at Baselworld 2015. Located at 10 ‘clock, the seconds hand travels from 0-60 across the display, and then instantly jumps back to zero, every 60-seconds. The Tradition comes in variation of models, including a GMT and Fusee and Chain tourbillon, which all have the collection’s signature feature: the movement is showcased on top of the baseplate. Contrary to the configuration you see on the majority of timepiece, the Tradition line breaks tradition, by revealing the bridges, wheels, escapement, barrel and other components of the movement, which are usually...

In a short interview from September, Mel Brooks reflects on the history of Young Frankenstein, which he calls "his greatest movie" (an assessment that's hard to argue with, given how brilliant it was, though the competition is stiff!). Read the rest

Quick—what’s the most offensive thing you could say right now?

Whether it’s shit-gargling cunt, faggot cumtits, or something equally inappropriate, your brain’s basal ganglia helped you figure it out almost instantly. And if you didn’t blurt out what you were thinking, you can thank your prefrontal cortex, which plays a role in impulse control. For people with coprolalia, though, something in that neural circuitry has gone awry, and they can’t help letting loose with profane outbursts.

Coprolalia—from the Greek kopros meaning “feces” and lalein meaning “to talk”—is usually associated with Tourette syndrome [1], although it appears in only 10 to 20 percent of Tourette cases. It has also been documented in people with brain injuries from stroke, encephalitis, and cerebral malaria.

For people who have coprolalia, the vulgar vocal tics can be mortifying, not least because the utterances can be way louder than their normal speaking voice. You can imagine how uncontrollable swearing, the content of which may not reflect the person’s own opinions, can kill job opportunities and relationships. But research on coprolalia can tell us a surprising amount about ourselves and how we store and process language:

Coprolalics invoke the most inappropriate curses of their eras and cultures, and their vocal eruptions are contextually relevant in their inappropriateness. For instance, phoning an airline to make a reservation, a coprolalic patient blurts out, “there’s a bomb on the plane!” When he meets a black person, the same patient cannot restrain himself from exclaiming, “Nigger!” [2]

In other words, semantics matter. Earlier researchers weren’t sure if people with coprolalia repeated swear words because of their percussive sounds (see James Harbeck’s post about the phonology of cuss words) or because of their meaning. Putting that debate to rest, with meaning being the clear winner, is the case of a coprolalic man who was deaf before he learned to speak: he’d not only make obscene signs but also finger-spell swear words.

More generally, these studies suggest that the catalogue of what people emit in their coprolalic tics reflects what society at large finds most offensive. Take this list of the most frequently uttered coprolalic words in different countries [3]:

UK: fuck, cunt, bastard, piss, sod, cock, shit, prick

USA: fuck, shit, bitch, asshole, bastard

Denmark: kaeft (shut up), svin (swine), fisse (vulva), kusse (vulva), pik (penis), røv (buttocks), pis (piss), gylie (animal feces), sgu (by God)

Spain: puta (whore), mierda (feces), coño (vulva), joder (fornicate), maricon (homosexual) cojones (testicles), hijo de puta (son of a whore), hostia (holy bread)

Brazil: merda (feces), bosta (feces), filho da puta (son of a whore), bunda (buttocks), buceta (vagina), cacete (penis), caralho (penis), porra (sperm), vai tomar no cu (fuck off)

Words about body parts and bodily functions dominate over religious curse words. The differences in the UK and US lists are also interesting, showing what words their respective populations consider more obscene.

What’s more, coprolalic tics are pretty much never euphemisms, which might mean that we store the most offensive terms separately from the rest of our lexicon. Primal, hardwired connections to an exclusive library of curse words explains why euphemisms feel so much less powerful and provocative—and why fluently bilingual people with coprolalia involuntarily swear only in their native tongue. When we tone down our vulgarity for the sake of decorum or swear in a second language, even one we’ve mastered, we’re using different, more conscious neural pathways.

[1] For more information about Tourette Syndrome, visit the (US) Tourette Syndrome Association site or watch this hour-long BBC documentary.

[2] Kate E Brown and Howard I Kushner, “Eruptive Voices: Coprolalia, Malediction, and the Poetics of Cursing,” New Literary History 32 no. 3, 2001: 537–562.

[3] F Cardoso, CC Veado, and JT de Oliveira. “A Brazilian cohort of patients with Tourette’s syndrome.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 60 no. 2, 1996:209–212.

The HMS Ten celebrates the 10th anniversary of independent watchmaker Romain Gautier.  Similar to, though more classical looking than the HMS collection, the HMS Ten and features off-center hours and minutes, small seconds, partially open dial, and a hand-finished, in-house movement visible through display back.  The watch also keeps with Gauthier’s trademark ergonomic flat caseback crown.  The last watch I shared from independent watchmaker Romain Gauthier was the very impressive ‘Logical One’ back in 2013.  The HMS Ten is obviously not as complicated as the Logical One, but with its graceful arcs and circles defining the dial, it is worthy of a closer look.

HMS Ten is being made available in three limited editions of just 10 pieces each, each in a 41mm x 12.1mm case:  platinum case/blue dial, white gold case/champagne dial and red gold case/anthracite dial.

Click through to read and see more

© Perpétuelle - First In Watches, 2014. | Serving Up New Luxury and Avant-Garde Timepieces Daily.
More Romain Gauthier

Student Union Building, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1968

(Paul Schweikher Associates)

John J. Barton Apartments, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1968

(Evans Woollen)