“We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.” —Anais Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays
Remember the old lady who sued McDonald's for millions because she burned herself by spilling hot coffee in her lap? It never happened. What actually happened was much more sordid, and the deliberate distortion of the story -- which is ultimately about a company that caused repeated, horrific and preventable injury to its customers -- is a tidy story about how corporations have convinced us that they are victims of out-of-control tort lawyers.
Read the rest
Start with a bottle of french champagne because they use thicker glass and that’ll make for a cleaner annulus or ring of glass. Take the bottle to be sabered and turn upside down in ice for at least 10 minutes. You want the neck as cold as possible. Meanwhile we’ll review some physics. Due to a secondary fermentation inside the bottle, Carbon dioxide produced by live yeast builds up pressure typically in the range of 5 to 6 atmospheres, that’s 90 pounds of pressure per square inch which translates to 620 kiloPascals. In other words, a corked champagne bottle is a bomb waiting to go off. The point is focus and control the blast to get at the stuff inside. This can be done by applying a sharp blow here where one of the bottle seams meats the lip of the bottle or annulus…stop snickering! This is serious business. Said blow must be focused, resulting from a smooth, rapid movement of a metal object. I’ve seen it done with a lawn mower blade but why use such a rare object when you’ve got a saber hanging around?
While craft coffee hasn’t permeated culture in the same way craft beer has, it’s taking cues from breweries that routinely offer up collaborative beers for special occasions—or, in the case of the metal-loving Three Floyds, bands it cites as inspiration. The Chicago-based coffee roasters at Intelligentsia have previously taken a page from this book by collaborating with musicians—most notably Wilco and Anticon. For its most recent collaborative roast, Intelligentsia has paired itself with St. Vincent’s Annie Clark to offer up “Bring Me Your Mugs” (a reference to “Bring Me Your Loves,” from St. Vincent’s most recent album) in select locations.
“Bring Me Your Mugs” was created after mutual admiration lead to Intelligentsia sending Clark various samples for a possible signature blend, with Clark settling on the Costa Rican Flecha Roja, notable for its fruity flavor. Though it’s only available from select Intelligentsia stores ...
Today we have a lovely calendar from E D. Pinaud’s Parfumerie, circa 1899. Interspersed among delicate illustrations we find very practically-minded advertisements for the company. What results is a pretty hilarious combination of spring flowers and ad’s for dandruff shampoo. this is just one of many French mini books we have over here at U I Special Collections, stop by and see them. Oh, and always remember: BEWARE OF IMITATIONS!!!
ED. Pinaud, Calendar. Paris: 1899. Charlotte Smith Miniature Collection, uncatalogued.
came up in conversation, at work; creeped everybody out
Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne got all soft inside when he thought about how the botfly larva in his scalp was eating his tissue and turning it into a new organism. It was of him, like a child. His friend Sarah Rogerson was a little less charmed, and they both were surprised by the creature that ultimately emerged from his head.
“For that vast continent, in all its diversity, you get that one fucking tree.”
via firehose
Last week, Africa Is a Country, a blog that documents and skewers Western misconceptions of Africa, ran a fascinating story about book design. It posted a collage of 36 covers of books that were either set in Africa or written by African writers. The texts of the books were as diverse as the geography they covered: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly divergent styles, by writers that included several Nobel Prize winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orange sunset over the veld, or both.
“In short,” the post said, “the covers of most novels ‘about Africa’ seem to have been designed by someone whose principal idea of the continent comes from The Lion King.”
What makes the persistence of these tired and inaccurate images even worse is that we’re living in an era of brilliantbookdesign (including this lovely, type-only cover for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah; her novel Half of a Yellow Sun begins the collage above). So why is it so hard for publishers of African authors to rise beyond cliché?
I asked Peter Mendelsund—who is an associate art director of Knopf, a gifted cover designer, and the author of a forthcoming book on the complex alliances between image and text—to help me understand how the publishing industry got to a place where these crude visual stereotypes are recycled ad nauseam. (Again and again, that acacia tree!)
He points first to “laziness, both individual or institutionalized.” Like most Americans, book designers tend not to know all that much about the rest of the world, and since they don’t always have the time to respond to a book on its own terms, they resort to visual clichés. Meanwhile, editors sometimes forget what made a manuscript unique to begin with. In the case of non-Western novels, they often fall back on framing it with “a vague, Orientalist sense of place,” Mendelsund says, and they’re enabled by risk-averse marketing departments.
“By the time the manuscript is ready to be produced, there’s a really strong temptation to follow a path that’s already been trod,” he says. “If someone goes out on a limb and tries something different, and the book doesn’t sell, you know who to blame: the guy who didn’t put the acacia tree on the cover.”
He adds that the underlying issue can be more pernicious: “Of course, there are the deeply ingrained problems of post-colonialist and Orientalist attitudes. We’re comfortable with this visual image of Africa because it’s safe. It presents ‘otherness’ in a way that’s easy to understand. That’s ironic, because what is fiction if not a way for you to stretch your empathetic muscles?”
That’s a reasonable diagnosis. But how to solve the underlying problem? Certain books are allowed to stand on their own; others—too often those by African, Muslim, or female authors—are assigned genre stereotypes. Mendelsund suggests that designers should start by initiating conversations with editors about what makes a book unique, so that they have something to respond to visually. And if that fails, and designers are pressured to use an offensive stereotype, Mendelsund says, “We can tell them that it’s racist, xenophobic, whatever.”
But change comes slowly. One day, Mendelsund predicts, there will be a best-selling novel by an African writer that happens to use a different visual aesthetic, and its success will introduce a new set of arbitrary images to represent Africa in Western eyes. “But right now, we’re in the age of the tree,” he says. “For that vast continent, in all its diversity, you get that one fucking tree.”
Hot on the heels of a post earlier this week about centuries-old guide for mixing watercolors, I stumbled onto this 18th century instrument designed to measure the blueness of the sky called a Cyanometer. The simple device was invented in 1789 by Swiss physicist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt who used the circular array of 53 shaded sections in experiments above the skies over Geneva, Chamonix and Mont Blanc. The Cyanometer helped lead to a successful conclusion that the blueness of the sky is a measure of transparency caused by the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. You can learn more at the Royal Society of Chemistry. (via Free Parking)
you know this is going to be the lamest black mass ever
An undergraduate student group has announced plans to hold a Satanic "black mass" on Harvard's campus Monday evening, freaking out Catholics and conservatives who probably figured the Ivy was a dark servant of Beelzubub all along.
Rossetti loved exotic animals and began to collect them with a passion after the tragic death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal in 1862. He had moved to 16 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, a house with a large garden that soon became a miniature zoo. Much to the distress of his neighbours, the list of animals grew to include two wombats, owls, kangaroos, wallabies, a deer, armadillos, parakeets, peacocks, a racoon, a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, a Japanese salamander, two laughing jackasses and a zebu or small Brahminee bull. He even made enquiries about purchasing a young African elephant.
The wombats had a special place in Rossetti's heart. In a letter to his brother he described the arrival of the first one as ‘a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness'. This drawing commemorates the short-lived second wombat. It is inscribed with a verse:
'I never reared a young wombat
To glad me with his pin-hole eye,
But when he was most sweet and fat
And tail-less he was sure to die'
The inscribed verse is a parody of Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh (1817): ‘I never nurs'd a dear gazelle / To glad me with its soft black eye, / But when it came to know me well / And love me, it was sure to die!' Instead of being layed to rest in the handsome tomb we see here, the unfortunate marsupial was actually stuffed and placed in Rossetti's entrance hall.
via firehose ("hi Russian Sledges" hi arggghhhhgghghhghjgjghjhkkjkjkjlbbb)
What if someone had already figured out the answers to the world's most pressing policy problems, but those solutions were buried deep in a PDF, somewhere nobody will ever read them?
Having already conquered Virginia, progress continued its march South on Friday, when Arkansas Circuit Court Judge Chris Piazza struck down the state's 2004 same-sex marriage ban. "Same-sex couples are a morally disliked minority and the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages is driven by animus rather than a rational basis," Piazza wrote. "This violates the United States Constitution."
Unlike judges who have done the same thing in other states, Piazza did not issue a stay on his ruling. Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, who has said that he does not personally oppose same-sex marriage, said that he would still appeal the decision, but he had not filed any objections by Saturday morning. So, Arkansas couples went ahead and got married.
The first same-sex pair to wed in the state was 27-year-old Kristin Seaton and 26-year-old Jennifer Rambo. The Associated Press reports that the two women exchanged vows outside a county courthouse in Eurkea Springs, having spent the night in the car after driving from their home in a town 150 miles away. "Thank God," Rambo said upon receiving her marriage license, apparently after someone questioned a clerk's right to grant it. Hopefully, the pairs that followed her only had to deal with normal levels of wedding stress.
This is everywhere, yes. But it's worth watching. Michael Sam, the first out gay player to be selected in the NFL draft, reacts to the news with his boyfriend and other friends. Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams.
The gay part I'm totally down with. Still having a hard time accepting that the Rams play in St. Louis and the Cardinals don't.
Come see some of the biggest and brightest names in origami show off their wildest creations at a free event at the Cooper Union in New York City from June 19 to July 4. Organized by a Cooper Union student named Uyen Nguyen, you'll see amazing piece after piece of origami created by 80 contemporary artists from 16 different countries. Over 120 works will be on display.
The exhibition, called Surface to Structure: Folded Forms, shows how today's artists have pushed the boundaries of paper folding to new heights. There's an Indiegogo set up where donations will go towards the set-up costs for this event. So far, they've raised almost $9,000 of their goal of $32,000. With 21 days to go, you can still help out.
Above: "Little Roses Kusudama" by Maria Sinayskaya
'According to the Post's translation, KCNA unleashed a barrage of racist insults at Obama, describing him as a "crossbreed with unclear blood" who had "the figure of a monkey."
'"It would be perfect for Obama to live with a group of monkeys in the world's largest African natural zoo and lick the bread crumbs thrown by spectators," the Post cited the commentary as saying.'
The United States on Thursday condemned "ugly and disrespectful" racist comments directed towards President Barack Obama by North Korea's official KCNA news agency.
"While the North Korean Government-controlled media are distinguished by their histrionics, these comments are particularly ugly and disrespectful," National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told AFP.
Hayden was referring to a diatribe attacking Obama, published in Korean by KCNA last week, extracts of which were reported by the Washington Post on Thursday.
According to the Post's translation, KCNA unleashed a barrage of racist insults at Obama, describing him as a "crossbreed with unclear blood" who had "the figure of a monkey."
"It would be perfect for Obama to live with a group of monkeys in the world's largest African natural zoo and lick the bread crumbs thrown by spectators," the Post cited the commentary as saying.
KCNA has taken its often bombastic rhetoric to new levels in recent weeks, last month decrying South Korean President Park Geun-Hye as a "prostitute" in thrall to her "pimp" Obama, while declaring it was ready for "full-scale nuclear war."
The Fra Mauro map, a medieval European map, was made around 1450 by the Venetian monk Fra Mauro. It is a circular world map drawn on parchment and set in a wooden frame, about two meters in diameter.
The Fra Mauro map is unusual, but typical of Fra Mauro’s portolan charts, in that its orientation is with the south at the top, one of the usual conventions of Muslim maps, in contrast with the Ptolemy map which has the north at the top.
If you’ve ever owned (or met) a cat, the idea of using one like a sheepdog is absurd. Cats hate to be bossed, they’re too puny to scare a sheep, and they’d much rather take a sunshine nap than run around doing farmwork. Even though they have evolved to recognize their owner’s voices, studies say that they just don’t care.
Still, as cat shepherds go, Bodacious is at the top of his field. He’s assisted in lamb births, barbed wire sheep rescues and hypothermia resuscitations, to name a few. His owner, Irish farmer Suzanna Crampton, says she could not function without him.
Modern Farmer caught up with Crampton for a lively Skype call — punctuated with loud meows and the pings of the Cat Shepherd’s Twitter notifications.
Modern Farmer: So where did you find Bodacious?
Suzanna Crampton: Funny story, that. One day about five or six years ago, he wandered into a shop in Kilkenny. It was a novelty toilet seat shop, you know the type? Funny seats with barbed wire or fish swimming around on them. The store is gone now but these were boom times in Ireland. Anyway, he wandered in one day and we couldn’t track down his owners. The store owner couldn’t keep him so she asked me if I could. I’m always taking home strays so I was an easy mark.
MF: Why did you call him Bodacious?
SC: Years ago I was living in New York for a bit when some Texan people said to me, “God you’re a bodacious woman!” I thought it was quite rude at first, until someone told me what it means. Seemed like a perfect name for this cat.
MF: What did you first notice about his personality?
SC: He had absolutely no fear. Bodacious (some people call him Mr. B) was following me close pretty soon after I got him. One day I was letting the horses out and he stood his ground there, hooves clomping all around him. It’s not that he’s some dizzy blonde or stupid; he’ll get out of the way if there’s some real danger.
Is Bodacious really a good shepherd? I mean, he’s a cat.
MF: How does Mr. B get along with the sheep?
SC: The ones he knows, he’ll go up and headbutt them, have a conversation. Tell you one thing though — he’ll take no truck from no one. If anyone is getting too bolshy, he’ll reach out and give ‘em a right smack.
MF: Sorry, what’s bolshy?
SC: (laughs) Oh you know, being bold, acting up, stomping their feet and all that. He’s got a great relationship with the young lambs, kind of looks out for them. And when they’re full-grown and wise, the sheep have nice calm conversations with him. It’s just that in-between age, their teenage years, when the sheep get bolshy and out of line.
MF: Okay, here’s a tough question for you. Is Bodacious really a good shepherd? I mean, he’s a cat.
SC: (long pause) That’s a hard one to answer. I certainly couldn’t do this without him. When it’s 3 a.m. and I’m out there alone in the dark, waiting for a ewe to lamb and he’s sitting there in my lap purring, that’s what keeps me going. Psychologically he is very helpful.
MF: Got it. And he clearly gets along well with the sheep. But he can’t, you know, herd them, right?
SC: Well I suppose not. I’ve got a border collie that’s better for that sort of thing. But anytime there’s a crisis, like when a lamb got stuck in the fence, he’s right by my side watching over things. He’s helpful to me.
MF: He’s certainly building a name for himself.
SC: It’s true! He’s become quite the little celebrity. I’ve already been approached to write children’s stories about his adventures. Oh and he was on the radio after our lamb Smudge got hypothermia and almost died; I had tweeted out pictures of Smudge and Bodacious. That must have been a slow news day — we were a trending topic on Twitter!
MF: Do your other cats want to be shepherds too?
SC: Well they’re certainly jealous of all the attention this one gets. I don’t know though; it takes a real special personality to be the Cat Shepherd. They can’t all be Bodacious.
To read more about the Cat Shepherd’s adventures, check out the blog at Zwartbles Ireland.
Super Opinionated.
"Floating Diagonal Shift" Rebecca Gieseking
