Russian Sledges

Jonathan O'B1 has added a photo to the pool:

The Museum of Craft and Design is currently organizing a cardboard exhibition titled Elevated Corrugated, a group exhibit featuring ten artists working exclusively with cardboard to create fantastically innovative and breathtaking sculptures of various scale.

Great Art in Ugly Rooms

seananmcguire:

sandandglass:

President Barack Obama at the White House Correpondents’ Dinner. 

And then the President’s field became fallow…

A number of recent books have lauded the connection between walking — just for its own sake — and thinking. But are people losing their love of the purposeless walk?

Ahhhh—my favorite character—the em-dash. You can type it on any platform. Macs and Linux makes it easy. PCs only really let you easily do it if you have a number-pad on your keyboard, which is mindbogglingly dumb. Anyway, it goes as follows. Mac: Option+Shift minus, or however you want to say it. It’s the easiest of all the platforms, and you basically just hold down the Option and the Shift keys simultaneously, then tap minus.

Lolita Cocina & Tequila Bar (Boston, MA) What's the deal: This Back Bay resto & bar is dark, vampy, and gothic -- but unlike those kids who listened to a lot of The Cure back in high school, you'll actually want to hang out around Lolita. Their 50+ tequila list is loaded with the usual suspects of blancos, reposados, and anejos, split up into categories such as "The Good Stuff" and "Crazy Expensive!" (like Cuervo 250th Anniversary, for a casual $275). On top of that, there's some of the best margs around in varieties like spicy cucumber (serrano chilies, muddled cucumber) and spiced apple (fresh green apples, cinnamon, peach, lime). Soak it all up with a lobster enchilada or crispy pork tacos. What you're drinking: Any tequila off "The Good Stuff" list

Anna has a problem. She looks over eighty but she is in fact only twenty five. Days before, after a break up with her boyfriend she gratefully signed the lease on a new apartment. After all, Vienna like any other big city can be a lonely place. Yet the apartment hides a secret - the old Viennese apartment is a creature with never ending appetite, living off the youth of its residents. This spooky tale is brought to us courtesy of Glacier Films.

fat-birds:

zakuromochi:

The other day, my friend and I went to the owl cafe in Osaka, called Owl Family Osaka. We had a 60 minute time slot, the beginning of which we were given detailed instructions about the manner and way of handling the owls. After the instruction, we were able to play with the owls.

The women running the establishment were really friendly and were so loving to the owls, they really helped us to understand the owls that we interacted with!

There were a few owls we were allowed to handle in our allowed time, while some others were in an area where they rested.

It was a really great experience!! The owls were very well behaved and were incredibly friendly. There is also a really cute little owl goods shop in the cafe~!

You should definitely visit someday if you have the chance!

Here’s their blog: http://blog.livedoor.jp/owlfamily/

oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my gohhhdddddd

AMSTERDAM — The doughnut, that classic deep-fried American snack, is going forth to do battle with European national treats in their homelands: the Belgian waffle, the Austrian strudel and the Danish ... Danish.

After beating a retreat in the 1990s, American restaurant chain Dunkin' Donuts has been quietly building up its presence in Europe and now has 120 outlets, mostly in Germany but also in Russia, Spain, Bulgaria and most recently, Britain.

drakontomalloi:

Albrecht Dürer – A plate from the Four Books on Measurement. 1525

This is just insanely gorgeous to me.

Keytar Bear was attacked in two separate incidents on the streets of Boston. Keytar Bear brings joy and happiness to Bostonians on the streets with his cheerful songs and amazing talent. As Bostonians, we are responsible for putting a smile back on his face. I'm hosting this fundraiser, not only to help out Keytar Bear with his bills, but also to show him what he means to the city of Boston.

Ohhh Lulu Sewing Patterns & Supplies

The Anna Bralette - my personal favourite.

Greta High Waist 6-Strap Garter Belt

Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever. I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.

hodad

Sounds fun

Original Source

THE epic film is back. So far this year, “300: Rise Of An Empire” and Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” have been released, and we can look forward to “Hercules”, starring Dwayne Johnson, and Ridley Scott’s “Exodus”, featuring Christian Bale as Moses. With Paul W.S. Anderson’s “Pompeii” erupting in British cinemas, it seems that Hollywood is once again obsessed by spectacular reconstructions of the ancient or mythical past, where muscle-bound men perform heroic deeds while wearing loincloths and sandals.

Edinburgh University Press has just published a book on the subject, “The Return Of The Epic Film: Genre, Aesthetics and History in the 21st Century”. The Economist talks to the book's editor, Andrew Elliott, a Senior Lecturer at the University Of Lincoln.

What would you say are the key elements that make a film an “epic”, rather than, say, an adventure movie?

There are as many definitions of epic as there are film critics to come up with them, so I hesitate to try to offer a complete definition of my own. However, I think what most people understand by the term...Continue reading

"I was brought up by my grandparents and I remember my grandfather used to change into three different suits a day," explained Mngadi.

urhajos:

Heaven & Hell Night Club in Paris, 1890s.

captoring:

splintercellconviction:

demonologys:

you people should  learn about the goetic demons like for example:

this is prince stolas, he is a long legged owl demon who teaches knowledge about astronomy and herbs to anyone who conjures him

whats not cool about an owl demon

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING THAT IS NOT COOL AS SHIT ABOUT THIS GUY

anyone up for conjuring a demon this weekend i wanna learn about astronomy from an owl man

God love him, he looks like “60 Minutes” just turned up on his doorstep.

Cherry pie

Moro Keris Sword

• Dated: 18th century
• Culture: Javanese
• Medium: steel, silver, wood

Source: Copyright © 2014 Historical Arms and Armor

Last Friday, the following article appeared in The Wall Street Journal:

"A New Way to Learn Chinese:  Entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh aims to bridge the gap between East and West by teaching Westerners how to read Chinese".

The article is preceded by a video that begins with this note:

Entrepreneur and author ShaoLan Hsueh has devised a simplistic method for teaching English speakers to learn to read Chinese.

It is true that her system is "simplistic", but it is not true that people who use it "learn to read Chinese", despite her repeated claim that "it works."

During the last year or so, I feel as though we've been bombarded with publicity for "Chineasy".  The creator of this alleged method for learning Chinese, ShaoLan Hsueh, seems to have unlimited access to the media.  Her efforts to promote the scheme got a huge boost from a successful appearance on TED in February, 2013.

Her performance on TED is prefaced by the following remark:

For foreigners, learning to speak Chinese is a hard task. But learning to read the beautiful, often complex characters of the Chinese written language may be less difficult.

Quite the contrary, Chinese is the easiest language I ever learned to speak, but the writing system is by far the hardest I've ever had to grapple with.

But ShaoLan Hsueh's claims that written Chinese is a snap have flooded the airwaves.  Here's another example (which mixes up spoken and written language):  "Be fluent in Chinese in a flash (card)"

In this puff piece we read, quoting Ms. Hsueh:

“It’s a key, a gateway, but it’s also cool and so much fun. If you spend just five minutes on this a day, in a year you will have the knowledge of an eight-year-old Chinese child."

Though this is a dubious goal for an adult, I'm certain that, using her methods, no one would ever reach it.

I have tried to ignore this embarrassing (for the Chinese language teaching profession) campaign for the past year and more, but now I no longer can do so, since dozens of people — many of whom are otherwise intelligent and perceptive — have written to me suggesting that we now have a panacea for learning Chinese, as though Ms. Hsueh had made some gigantic breakthrough in transforming the most daunting script on earth into child's play.  Far from it, anyone who deceives him/herself into thinking that using Chineasy is a magic bullet for learning Chinese will simply be wasting his/her time.

Here's what the director of the Chinese Language Program at a major American university says about Chineasy:

"I only watched the first minute of the video. What she is teaching is not 'reading'.  At best, it will enable one to recognize a few Chinese pictographic characters in isolation.  There is technology, but the content is all wrong."

I wasn't surprised to find ShaoLan on TED, because you get a lot of sentimental, schlocky things there, but what really astonished me is that ShaoLan and her "Chineasy" (I think it should be "Chinhard") are featured on the outside and inside front cover and first page (!!!) — a bit of overkill — of the current Thames & Hudson catalog.

I have published several books and chapters from T & H, which is one of the finest art, archeology, and design publishing houses in the world, so I was deeply puzzled to find ShaoLan's misguided notions for learning Chinese featured so prominently in the T & H catalog.  It took a bit of digging, but I finally realized that there is a simple reason why T & H accepted this volume and is promoting it so energetically, and it has nothing to do with Chinese language learning.  Namely, the clever, cutesy drawings of Chinese characters featured in ShaoLan's book are by the talented Israeli graphic designer, Noma Bar.

"Chinese made easy with 'Chineasy' by Noma Bar and ShaoLan Hseuh [sic --> Hsueh]".

For those who might be interested in ShaoLan before she became the savior of all those suffering souls who seek an easy path to learning Chinese, here are a few interesting things about her background.

First of all, she used to be called Heidi Hsueh and was "co-founder and executive vice president of pAsia, operator of the largest auction Web sites in Taiwan and China."  See "Cross-strait chameleon" in the Taipei Times (Monday, April 3, 2000), p. 18.

See also "Caught in China's web", Investment Week (Feb 21, 2000).

Before that, under the name Xuē Xiǎolán 薛晓岚, she wrote a book in Chinese on the art of using Word 7.0 entitled The Word Book 95.

ShaoLan's career as an internationally renowned Chinese language maven had its humble beginnings with a B.A. in Agricultural Chemistry from National Taiwan University.  Now she's everywhere!  Just do a Google search on her name, ShaoLan, and you'll see what I mean.  One thing that stands out in the countless articles about ShaoLan and her method for learning Chinese is that they usually feature her in unusual postures and poses.  I think this tells us something about the substance of her work.

In light of our discussions about nerds and geeks (e.g., here, here, here, and here), what are we to make of a wannabe Chinese language pedagog who is fond of calling herself an "entrepreneur" and a "geek"?

So what does this all boil down to in terms of Chinese language learning?

First of all, if you employ Ms. Hsueh's methods, you won't learn any real Chinese language.  You won't know the sound of a single Chinese word.  You won't even know the sound of a single Chinese character.  You won't learn anything about Chinese grammar or syntax.  You won't be able to speak or write a single Chinese sentence.  If you doggedly persist, you might learn to recognize a hundred or so individual characters, but you wouldn't know how to pronounce them or use them in any meaningful context.

What is worse, you will be subjected to a lot of assertions that are wrong.  For instance, on her TED talk, ShaoLan says that "A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters. You only need 1,000 to understand the [sic] basic literacy."  And on the Amazon preview for her book, her treatment of zì 字 ("character") and cí 詞 ("phrase" [sic] –> "word") (p. 13) is woefully inadequate.

In the Wall Street Journal article, "Ms. Hsueh describes why the symbol for the verb 'to come' looks like wheat — because wheat used 'to come' from Europe."

This is a hopelessly garbled misrepresentation of the idea that, more than three thousand years ago, the archaic character for "wheat" (mài 麥) was used to write the word for "come" (lái 來) because they sounded alike.  While we now know that the agricultural crop did come to East Asia from the west, it's an entirely different matter whether the Sinitic word itself was borrowed from a western source.  Nearly two decades ago, I wrote a very long and detailed proposal for considering the Sinitic word mài 麥 ("wheat") as having been derived from an Indo-European source. This is on pp. 36b-38a of "Language and Script: Biology, Archaeology, and (Pre)History," International Review of Chinese Linguistics, 1.1 (1996), 31a-41b.

Chinese characters are not easy, neither for Chinese nor for non-Chinese.  Chinese characters are hard.  Chineasy is an oxymoron.

[Thanks to Toby Blyth, Richard Warmington, Stephan Stiller, Mien-hwa Chiang, Stefan Krasowski, Lada Vassilieva,  and John Rohsenow]

Did you see Sew Caroline's new Tank Dress pattern that came out today? It's adorable!

It's a very simple design which is excellent for beginners. However, the absence of a dart means that bustier ladies (anyone over a C, I'd guess) are going to find it doesn't fit so well, with lots of drag lines underneath the bust.

The good news is that it's super easy to add them! Here's a quick tutorial for how to adapt the pattern with a Full Bust Adjustment (FBA), using the Fit for Real People approach. It also works for any other type of non-darted dress or top, like the Sewaholic Belcarra Blouse, the Megan Nielsen Eucalypt top/dress, or the Grainline Scout.



3. Mark three lines coming out of the apex

The first one should go from the apex up to the armhole, about 1/3 of the way up. The second should go vertically straight down the pattern from the apex. And the third goes at a gentle angle toward the side seam (you can just judge the angle by eye).






7. And here we are!

The adjusted piece. Sew up the dart before you sew up the rest of the dress, and the Tank Dress will suit you oh so much better!

One tip: I found that the serged seams of the skirt were sticking out (not laying flat with the fabric), so I went around with my walking foot on my sewing machine and topstitched all of them down. Not only does it make for a smoother silhouette, but it also looks kind of cool and RTW.

I decided to err on the side of caution and make a 2XL to make sure it wasn't too clingy, but that turned out to to be an overcompensation and I ended up taking it in to what is probably an XL. Next time I'll just cut a straight XL!

 I've heard others mention cling-phobia with this pattern, and hopefully I can reassure you that it really can look great if you use a heavy knit, and also think about how you want to style it. For me, I have a sort of "double bump" on my hips, so wearing it with a shirt (which covers the top bump) ended up looking really great, although in all honesty I wouldn't wear it just with a top tucked in. If you take a look at the styling from the rest of the Curvy Sewing Collective I think we all ended up with some version of the same approach!


The best thing about this pattern is its versatility - you really only need this one knit skirt pattern! You could make it at various different lengths, out of different types of material, colour block... the options are endless.

Perfect for relaxing on these early summer days!

Some sewers collect thimbles or fat quarters, but I collect ideas for awesome pincushion projects, and I'm loving cactus pincushion tutorial!

Read more on MAKE

She wasn’t perfect. “Throw the ball,” her tough sports coach yelled at her. “Ahh,” she said, and she squeezed her eyes closed, and threw. The ball exploded. Then she fell down the stairs. “Oh no,” she moaned. “How am I supposed to do business at the bottom of the stairs?”

***

She wasn’t perfect. She had two different colored eyes, which is definitely a flaw and not a magnetic, compelling, unusual form of beauty.

“It makes you so special,” he told her. She shook her head.

“Bad special,” she said.

“Good special,” he said. She didn’t know what to believe.

“I don’t know what to believe,” she told him. “You think the thing I think is bad thing is good thing.”

“That’s good thing,” he said.

***

Oh no, she thought. I’m going to start blushing. It was terrible. It subtly drew attention to the beautiful colors blooming across her face, and also made her look vulnerable and childish and full of deep feeling, which was very bad for some reason.

“You’re fired,” her boss said through a mountain of briefcases. “I can’t have you blushing on the job!”

“She’s not fired,” said a voice nearby. It sounded like granite and honesty. “I’m an even more important Business Man and that blushing is a sign of her honesty and virtue.”

“Wha-wha-whaaaa?” her boss said.

“I’m giving you the business,” the granite-voiced man said. “But you can quit whenever you want, because I love you.”

She blushed.

***

She wasn’t perfect. Her mouth was, if anything, a trifle too full, like an overflowing Cupid’s bow.

“Would you…do you think you would like to go to the dance with me?” she asked sportsball captainback.

“That’s disgusting,” he said, sneering. “Your lips are beautiful and kissable and someone better than me is going to point that out to you in just a few years. Get out of my way.”

She cried out of her eyes. One of the eyes had a little freckle in it, which made her disgusting.

***

“No one will ever love me,” she told the guy who was older than her but not creepy older, just commandingly older, like maybe seven to nine years older and was also sort of her guardian or her teacher in some capacity, but again not in a gross way, like he wasn’t her teacher boss dad or anything, just a little more in charge than she was and also he had shoulder muscles. “I’m only half-elven [or half-vampire or half-dhampir or half-Watcher or half-Lycan or half-whatever amazing mystical race she was half a part of] instead of all the way, which gives me pretty much all of the same powers but none of the weaknesses and also I’m strong and beautiful. I’m a freak.”

He kissed her mouth with his mouth.

“Whaaa,” she was all like, because she was totally surprised that he had secretly loved her this whole time because he’d been so gruff and aloof and ten times harder on her than on any of the others, but it was because he had secretly loved her this whole time.

“I’ve secretly loved you this whole time,” he said with his mouth, then went back to kissing her.

***

I’ve always been different. I like books and animals better than people. Why, I don’t know. Maybe because books and animals are physically incapable of talking to me or having needs that supersede my own, so I can be in total control of them. Books can’t judge you or hurt you. They also can’t talk or eat or build a life with you, but whatever.

***

“You think too much,” her best friend who was this real free spirit who was always living in the moment instead of traveling back and forth through time like she did said. “That’s your problem. When the rest of us are just flinging ourselves through time and space with our brains entirely shut off, you’re always, like, off in the corner thinking, like, oh is this a good idea, what are the ramifications of my actions, and that’s why your life is such garbage.”

She worried the edge of her lab coat with her fingers and took off at least eight pairs of glasses. “I know,” she said. “But I don’t know how to stop.”

Then her friend made out with her and she got better.

***

“You only thought that was a flaw this whole time,” his mentor that he thought was dead but totally wasn’t dead at all, at least not “dead” in the way you traditionally think of dead told him. “It was actually your secret strength. You don’t have any flaws at all and you’re going to destroy the bad guy so much.”

He totally did.

***

“Your legs are too long.” How embarrassing!!!

***

“I just want to be normal,” she said, even though she had amazing powers and a super-family and was mega-gorgeous and better than normal in every way and the entire book would be terrible if she were normal and she had no conception of what normal was to begin with.

***

“That’s your problem,” her friend said. Normally her friend was all crazy and doing shots and saying “Girl, you need to kick him to the curb,” but not now. Now her friend was being quiet and serious, so you knew it was a really quiet and serious moment. “You would do anything to take care of your friends. But when was the last time you did something to take care of yourself?”

It was true. She hadn’t showered in four years. Her house had exploded and she didn’t even care. She hadn’t eaten in four months, and she was dead.

***

“I just don’t know what to do with this,” her hairdresser moaned, comically letting his arms fall to his side. “Your hair is just so wild and unmanageable, a lot like you. It can’t be tamed.”

“Neither can I,” she said, and she roundhouse kicked him in the face, and then she ran outside to find a real man who could handle someone who played as hard as she worked.

***

“You’re so noble,” the villain sneered, because he’d totally expected him to do that noble thing he’d just done but he was totally secretly impressed. “Not like me. I do whatever I want. So why do I secretly admire and maybe even love you a little bit?”

“Whoa,” he said.

“Wait,” the villain said. “I didn’t mean to say that last part. What I meant was why does your goodness shine through the light of my evil deeds and make me wish I was worth of you somehow?”

“Wait,” the villain said again. “You’re noble in a bad way, not a good way,” but it was too late. He was secretly good now, and they were going to become heroic friends.

***

“I’ll make dinner,” she said. “Oh, no, you won’t,” all her friends chorused in unison, and they picked her up and carried her to her favorite restaurant, so even though at first she was a little upset they didn’t like her cooking it was okay because they still got to be together and go to her favorite restaurant.

***

She called and ordered a dinner that she ordered a lot from the same restaurant she always called for delivery. “I know who you are,” the voice on the line said. “I remember your order,” because that was his job.

“This is so embarrassing,” she said in her amazing apartment. “Someone remembers my order. I’m such a loser.”

“It’s just my job to remember orders,” the voice said, but it was too late. She was already booking an around-the-world trip with that guy from work she was always fighting with.

***

“It’s really hard for me to trust people,” she said.

“Me too,” he said. “It’s hard for me to trust people too.” He thought for a second. “Do you want to trust me, though?”

“Okay,” she said, and they did, and then they made out.

***

[Fritz Eichenberg's Heathcliff Under the Tree via]

Read more Flaws Only A Protagonist Could Have at The Toast.

GeekWire is reporting that the Washington State Attorney General has filed suit against a company that ran a Kickstarter campaign but has failed to deliver on their product or return any of the money. Source From the report: If you raise money via Kickstarter and don’t deliver products you promised backers, the government will come […]

Allen Pike on Chrome’s new option to hide URLs entirely, which I assume will be the default within a few months:

Perhaps URLs are just destined to be an implementation detail that the next generation of users won’t even know exists. Maybe I was crazy to think that URLs were a permanent part of our culture. Still, I’ll miss the damn things.

This change is probably a decent usability choice. It’s certainly self-serving, in that it’s clearly the best thing for Google: conceptually, you are no longer using the web. You are using Google full-time. The distinction between Google and everything else is blurred even further than it already was. As a developer and web enthusiast, this makes me sad.

But realistically, this is conceptually how most people use web browsers anyway, and it’s been this way for a long time. They’re just codifying this sad reality into the interface.

I’m interested to see if this makes phishing security better or worse, whether EV SSL certificates will be more necessary to be taken seriously, and what it does to the demand for premium domain names. If I were a domain-name squatter, broker, or reseller, between the flood of new TLDs and this, I’d be nervous.

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