Paulahmartin

You're looking at it: Our new $100 bill, the product of more than a decade of research and development, and the most sophisticated piece of currency technology in U.S. history.

The note, which debuts today, includes two new features to thwart counterfeiters: (1) a "3-D" blue ribbon woven into the paper that, when tilted, shows 100s moving side-to-side or up-and-down; and (2) a camouflaged bell, seen within the copper inkwell above, that turns green when the bill is tilted. Larry Felix, the director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, called it "the most complex note the United States has ever produced."

But when it comes to currency art, the United States is still a second-tier talent. Our greenbacks are iconic, but in a world of dazzling polychromatic designs, they're stubbornly one-note.

Perhaps nothing that rolls out of our ATMs will ever compete with the patriotic phantasmagoria of Kazakhstan's currency, which looks like what would happen if you gave Robert Rauschenberg the keys to the Office of Printing and Engraving.

Let's start with the Kazakhstan 5,000 Tenge (about $32), the winner of the 2012 International Bank Note Society's Note of the Year. It has all the hallmarks of a Kazakh note: a combination of portrait (front) and landscape (back) orientation, a smattering of world-class security features woven into the art and the ink, and a sort of fever-dream-ish collage of national icons, from the Kazakh Eli monument, the president's residence, the national emblem, national flag, and, for good measure, two doves hovering over a pair of panthers.

It's weird. It's confusing. It's amazing. More serene, perhaps, is the 10,000 Tenge note, named the bank note of the year in 2011 by IBNS.

And here's Kazakhstan's nomination for the 2013 awards: a silhouette of the country opens up onto the Irtysh River while a holographic band along the right side displays a "stylized yurt." Below, more doves, more monuments, and four antelope outlines with four different colors.

America's new $100 bill is a respectful modulation of a theme, but the fantasy worlds conjured on the Tenge notes are a qualitatively different art form. All Kazakhstan's currency does is look classy, evoke complexity, change its outfit every year, and win every award. It's like the Meryl Streep of international bank notes.

I’m pretty sure he died

What has our nation become?

via

Eatliver

It’s not that thrill-seekers don’t expect they’ll be elevated to great heights on roller coasters like the Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit at Universal Orlando, but even the person with nary a shred of fear might get restless when stuck vertically at 150 feet in the air for three hours. Twelve passengers on that ride were rescued last night after an apparent technical glitch froze the ride in place near its summit.

Passenges spent a little under three hours on the ride after it got stuck at 7 p.m., reports the Orlando Sentinel. Officials say the theme-park guests weren’t in any danger, but we can’t imagine waiting for rescue crews to move the car to a horizontal position at the top of the ride was an entirely enjoyable experience.

The riders were able to walk off the ride finally at about 9:45, and they’ll be the last visitors the coaster sees for a while.

“We’re not going to reopen the ride until we know what happened and we’re sure it won’t happen again,” a Universal Orlando spokesman said.

One person was taken to the hospital with neck pain, ostensibly from having to hold it parallel to the ground for hours on end.

This isn’t the first time the 17-story ride has had issues — it was closed for two days in August when a woman was injured after the car she was riding in stopped suddenly.

We had the video embedded here but it has an evil auto-play ad, so check out the source link below if you’d like to view the footage. We wouldn’t wish auto-play anything on our very worst enemies.

Previously in overly long rides:Woman Stuck On State Fair Ride Picked A Bad Day To Conquer Her Fear Of Heights; Six Flags Superman Roller Coaster Apparently Cursed By Kryptonite, Gets Stuck Yet Again; Nothing Quite Like Being Stuck 150 Feet In The Air For 2 Hours To Put You Off Roller Coasters

Technical glitch traps 12 on Universal’s Rip Ride Rockit for hours [Orlando Sentinel]

From a fascinating column at Salon:

At a time when most Americans were uninformed, misinformed, or simply afraid of Islam, Thomas Jefferson imagined Muslims as future citizens of his new nation. His engagement with the faith began with the purchase of a Qur’an eleven years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s Qur’an survives still in the Library of Congress, serving as a symbol of his and early America’s complex relationship with Islam and its adherents...

That he owned a Qur’an reveals Jefferson’s interest in the Islamic religion, but it does not explain his support for the rights of Muslims. Jefferson first read about Muslim “civil rights” in the work of one of his intellectual heroes: the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. Locke had advocated the toleration of Muslims—and Jews—following in the footsteps of a few others in Europe who had considered the matter for more than a century before him...

As they set about creating a new government in the United States, the American Founders, Protestants all, frequently referred to the adherents of Islam as they contemplated the proper scope of religious freedom and individual rights among the nation’s present and potential inhabitants. The founding generation debated whether the United States should be exclusively Protestant or a religiously plural polity. And if the latter, whether political equality—the full rights of citizenship, including access to the highest office—should extend to non-Protestants. The mention, then, of Muslims as potential citizens of the United States forced the Protestant majority to imagine the parameters of their new society beyond toleration. It obliged them to interrogate the nature of religious freedom: the issue of a “religious test” in the Constitution, like the ones that would exist at the state level into the nineteenth century; the question of “an establishment of religion,” potentially of Protestant Christianity; and the meaning and extent of a separation of religion from government...

Although we have since learned that there were in fact Muslims resident in eighteenth-century America, this book demonstrates that the Founders and their generational peers never knew it. Thus their Muslim constituency remained an imagined, future one. But the fact that both Washington and Jefferson attached to it such symbolic significance is not accidental...

The citations above are excerpted from a recently-published book: “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an” by Denise A. Spellberg.  I've requested the book and hope to review it some time in the future - sounds interesting.

Reza Aslan could not have hoped for better publicity for his new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth than a Fox News interview in which host Lauren Green asked the highly respected historian and writing professor at the University of California at Riverside, "You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?"

Aslan's calm and lengthy, but ultimately devastating, response to the idiotic question has been celebrated nationwide as an example of how to counter bigotry. Yet, as the Amazon page for Zealot — currently the top selling book on the site — reveals, plenty of readers of what seems to be a fundamentalist/Evangelical persuasion are furious that a Muslim published a book about Christianity's origins.

Of particular ire is the notion that Aslan hides his faith, though, in fact, he points out that he is a Muslim in the opening pages of Zealot. Many of these critics appear to also think that because the work contradicts the New Testament, it is somehow a work of opinion, not history. Among the one-star reviews below (which have been truncated but not edited in any other way; the titles, in bold, are also original to the reviews) is one by John S. Dickerson, who penned a much-cited philippic against the book on the Fox News website.

absolute crap

This book is written by a muslim who is hell bent on destroying the legacy of jesus in favor of his beliefs about muhammad and makes up a bunch of crap and claims to be a historian which he is not. Imagine if a christian wrote a book about muhammad having sexual relations with his 10 year old bride (which he did).

-Pen Name

Not a trained historian, posing as an unbiased historian

Media reports have introduced Aslan as a "religion scholar" but have failed to mention that he is a devout Muslim. His book is not a historian's report on Jesus. It is an educated Muslim's opinion about Jesus -- yet the book is being peddled as objective history on national TV and radio. 

-John Dickerson

unimpressed both from a literary and philosophical viewpoint

By the time he got around to his Muslim background I had grown weary... The author strikes me as an Iranian hysteric in search of some religious dogma to quench some personal family problems.

-Conan

A little honesty would be nice

It is too bad this book is being pushed by the secular non-believing nattering nabobs.

-Christopher W. West 

author of lies

This author clearly has an agenda to present. An agenda that if changed to an analysis of Mohammad would earn a Fatwa.

-J. Medsker

Anti-Christ

I would not recommend your book to anyone.

-Joan Smiley

Shocking revelations?

If you believed the fictional writings of the Da Vinci Code this will be an enjoyable read.

-Corey Mayfield

Aslan no historian

Aslan not a historian.

-Aman

The Author is a MUSLIM

This book was written from the perspective of a Muslim. What more needs to be said.

-JoeB

Worthless!

The author doesn't know anything about Jesus. He is a Muslim and not a historian. I highly recommend reading The Holy Bible to find out more about Jesus or the books One God One Message and All That The Prophets Have Spoken, again if you are truly seeking the truth about who Jesus is, why He came and what He did for you.

-Romans 1:16 "Jenny"

Nothing new, just old Islam

When the wolf laughs with the rabbits to discredit the tiger, it's only to eat them over the tiger's corpse.

-M. Bruno

Option for zero stars?

A good book for those seeking truth is Jesus the Messiah by Herbert Bateman. Or better yet, try reading a really good book, the Holy Bible.

-B. Spoon

How about having a ZERO star!

Nothing original! Lies, lies, lies, blah! blah! blah! I will question all that Random House (how ironic their name) publishes from now on and categorizes it as Christian History. The correct category is FICTION!

-iza

Anti-Christian Book Written By a Devout Muslim

This is not a Christian book.

-Alan B. Rogers

Just because something is marketed as disposable or flushable, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing for city sewer systems. In fact, many of workers are now begging us as a nation to stop flushing disinfecting wipes or those “use these when toilet paper just isn’t enough” wipes, because they end up clogging pipes down the line.

Those who operate city sewer systems say that although there’s that convenience factor of flushing wipes when you’re done, once the cloth-like material doesn’t break down like traditional toilet paper. After they leave your toilet the wipes continue on their merry way into the sewer system, where it can seriously gum up the works and cost cities big bucks to repair, reports USA Today.

It’s gotten worse lately as the market has become flooded with bathroom wipes, either as cleaning products or personal hygiene items for that oh-so-fresh feeling toilet paper can’t always provide.

“It’s getting to be more and more of a problem,” said the superintendent for the city of Sauk Centre, Minn. That city had to hire someone to vacuum out a lift station, resulting in a truckload of cloth material.

This kind of thing is going on everywhere, says Cynthia Finley, director of regulatory affairs for the National Association of Clean Water Agencies.

“Consumers are being told by the packaging that these things are flushable,” Finley says.

So what’s a savvy consumer to do? You don’t have to stop buying the wipes — just make sure you toss them out in the garbage instead of sending them shooting off into cloggy pipe land.

Wipes in the pipes snarling sewers [USA Today]

 

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is floating the idea that the U.S. boycott the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi if Russia doesn't send Edward Snowden back to us. "I would just send the Russians the most unequivocal signal I could send them," Graham said of an Olympic boycott on Tuesday, according to The Hill. "It might help, because what they're doing is outrageous."

This is horrible. The Olympics are about strength and beauty and sports—"building a peaceful and better world through solidarity, team spirit, joy and optimism in sport." The last American president to boycott a Russian Olympics? Jimmy Carter in 1980. And Lindsey Graham is no fan of Jimmy Carter. Carter was protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Did the Soviets leave Afghanistan? Yeah, eight years later. And then we ended up invading Afghanistan.

A Sochi boycott could mean Russia would do what the Soviet Union did in 1984—boycott our Olympics. Or those of our allies. The next summer Olympics is in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and the 2018 Winter Games are in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Which might mean we'd have to call in Mitt Romney to save them.

Don't do this to us, Lindsey Graham! You would know what consequences this not-very-effective-tactic would have if you'd spent hours trying to parse the terribly grainy footage of the 1984 Alternate Games. In the photo above, that's Mary Lou Retton, 1984 Olympic all-around champion in gymnastics. In the GIF at right, we see the great Soviet gymnast Olga Mostepanova, whose signature performances at the Alternate Games are barely decipherable. These two did not challenge each other for the title, because of politics that didn't even work. 

Luckily, Graham's usual ally, Sen. John McCain, is aware of this history. "There’s many things we can do, but I think the experience of cancelling the Olympics the last time around wasn’t very good," McCain said.

Behold the inflatable wonder that is Balloon Mario riding Balloon Yoshi. When is Nintendo going to make a Super Mario Bros. game that looks like this?

Remember that awesome Balloon Buzz Lightyear costume we posted about back in May? It was created and modeled by a gifted balloon-twisting artist name Jeff Wright. We just discovered that Jeff made this playful costume too. We are officially impressed.

The only thing missing is a balloon Koopa Troopa shell for Balloon Mario and Yoshi to kick around. That is, assuming Balloon Mario wouldn’t pop himself in the process.

[via Geekologie and Google’s trusty Reverse Image Search]

Following Orson Scott Card's plea for potential Ender's Game filmgoers to ignore his anti-gay activism, Lionsgate Studios released a statement that works hard to put further distance between the film, being marketed as the next Hunger Games-type Young Adult blockbuster, and the author of the book on which it's based. And here's one sign that the studio is, at the very least, seeing a potential boycott of the film as a threat to their project: the studio has pledged to host a "benefit premiere" of the film. Here's the statement, sent to The Atlantic Wire on Friday, in full: 

As proud longtime supporters of the LGBT community, champions of films ranging from Gods and Monsters to The Perks of Being a Wallflower and a company that is proud to have recognized same-sex unions and domestic partnerships within its employee benefits policies for many years, we obviously do not agree with the personal views of Orson Scott Card and those of the National Organization for Marriage. However, they are completely irrelevant to a discussion of Ender's Game. The simple fact is that neither the underlying book nor the film itself reflect these views in any way, shape or form. On the contrary, the film not only transports viewers to an entertaining and action-filled world, but it does so with positive and inspiring characters who ultimately deliver an ennobling and life-affirming message. Lionsgate will continue its longstanding commitment to the LGBT community by exploring new ways we can support LGBT causes and, as part of this ongoing process, will host a benefit premiere for Ender's Game.

Lionsgate didn't immediately return a request for more specific information on the planned benefit. 

In a way, the studio is right to ask viewers to separate their work from its creator. Ender's Game is not an anti-gay screed. The book (and potentially, the film) no doubt has fans who consider themselves LGBT or LGBT allies. And that's OK. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf recently made an eloquent argument for the value of artistic, historical works by creators with horrible ideas: 

[We] would be wise to stay open to the possibility that inhabiting the art of someone whose aesthetics or personal moral beliefs we find abhorrent might nevertheless end in our gleaning something valuable from the experience. The opportunity to learn in that way won't survive, for most students, in a world where rejecting bigotry is thought to require rejecting everything produced by every dead bigot.

And while, unlike Walt Whitman, the figure on whom Friedersdorf based his essay, Orson Scott Card is still very much alive, that argument holds artistically here. But the studio's decision to hold a benefit in the wake of an impending boycott speaks to another element of the franchising of the book: where the money goes. Seeing Ender's Game does not imply an endorsement of its creator's worldview. It could, however, work to his financial benefit. For some, that might feel like donating a portion of the ticket price to the National Organization for Marriage. 

In handling the issue of Orson Scott Card, Lionsgate could learn from their previous experience with the Hunger Games. They ran into a bit of a problem when a lawyer for the studio last spring tried to shut down an anti-hunger campaign started by a group of fans, pegged to the release of the first film. That campaign came from a spin-off of the Harry Potter Alliance, a group of fans who have previously done "mission work" in the name of the Harry Potter books and films. After an outcry from fans, Lionsgate completely reversed course and expressed interest in getting involved with the project.  

While the idea of connecting a piece of popular culture to a wider social issue is certainly not a new one, studios are still learning how to handle the socio-political associations imbued upon their properties by the people who take them to heart, especially when those issues are as charged as same-sex marriage. Ender's Game, as the next big Young Adult hope, is simply the latest experiment in negotiating that tension. 

It feels wrong, this verdict of not guilty for George Zimmerman. It feels wrong to say that Zimmerman is guilty of no crime. If he hadn’t approached 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, if he hadn’t pulled his gun, Martin would be alive.

Fit for any Mario lover! I must admit though, I love the way you turn it on and off by making Mario go down the tube. Very clever.

Via [Etsy] $180.00

But Mehlville's superintendent says his district lacks room for transferring students.

Mall walkers must find new place for their daily strolls as development deal stalls.

Excellent.
Via

image credit: laajala cc

The Antirrhinum, commonly known as the snapdragon, has been a popular garden plant for many years. Also known as the dragon flower, its common name derives from the resemblance of the flower to a dragon's head.

When laterally squeezed the dragon will open and close it mouth. Yet once the flower has died, leaving behind the seed pod, something a little more macabre appears. The dragon - just a visual metaphor after all - appears to have a skull.

Thanks,but no thanks

Much like Iraq and Afghanistan, the Vietnamese were developing nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. This later led to World War II.

NEWARK, N.J. – Ah, the photos of our youth. So wonderful. So awkward. Such are the photographs of NHL Draft selections each season, who must have their glamour shots taken as part of the draft process. Alas, the NHL and it’s photographers have gotten more and more conservative with their staging – see 2011 to 2012 , and weep for the halcyon days of Kirill Kabonov’s curtain jerking. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t some tremendously awkward and unintentionally hilarious NHL rookie photos this season …

The recent lawsuit filed by a former McDonald’s worker against her employers has drawn a lot of national attention to issue of paying wages on prepaid debit cards, with a some people not understanding why a business would push these cards over traditional payment methords, or why an employee would have such a big problem with the cards.

The NY Times has a pretty interesting piece on the topic, talking to various interested parties. Here’s what it boils down to:

1. Businesses like the cards because they save money.
The banks and card companies that provide payroll services via prepaid debit cards use cost savings as the main selling point. This calculator on the Visa payment solutions site shows how much a typical business could save each year by switching. For a business with 100 employees getting paid on a bi-weekly basis, it calculates around $4,200 each year in savings over traditional methods. A business with 500 such employees saves more than $21,000 a year, claims the Visa calculator.

However, in order to see the highest level of savings, the employer would need to get all of its workers using the prepaid card. This gets into the issue of personal choice that we’ll talk about in a few paragraphs.

2. Banks like the cards because they are laden with fees and largely unregulated.
You know all those financial reforms that the banks have been complaining about for the last three years? They basically didn’t do much to rein in the prepaid debit card business.

Like the inactivity fees that are now verboten on credit cards and standard debit cards. Not so much for prepaid. Payroll cards used by at least two dozen major retailers carry inactivity fees of $7.

Then there are fees like $1.50 to transfer money from the card to a checking account, $.50 to make a purchase using the card, $2.25 out-of-network ATM fees.

3. Employees hate them because they chip away at already meager paychecks.
Employers claim that these cards benefit many minimum wage employees who don’t have a bank account by giving them instant access to their money without the even higher fees usually charged by check-cashing businesses.

There is a kernel of truth to that, as there are approximately 10 million “unbanked” workers in the U.S. But should those employees with bank accounts be harmed because of the few without?

And so here we get to the issue of personal choice. While some employers claim that prepaid payroll cards are only one of the options available to employees, some businesses are making the cards the sole option.

The plaintiff in the suit against the McDonald’s franchisees says her repeated requests to have her money deposited in her credit union account were denied. Others whose employees say that workers can opt out of the card tell the Times that opting out is a laborious, confusing process.

If employers, especially small-to-midsize businesses, don’t force the payroll cards on all wage employees, they won’t realize the savings that makes the card worthwhile. But businesses have to realize that those savings are ultimately coming out of employees’ pockets and going to the card companies’ fees.

As a result, some employees are turning away from banks and debit cards.

One Taco Bell employee, who tells the Times that she was told by her employer to pick the prepaid card, said she realized it was less expensive for her to withdraw all of her wages once a month and then use cash — which she keeps in a shoebox — to pay for things.