Time Bandits (1981)

Yesterday, America's first cat café opened in New York City. Cat lovers, you now have only three more day to sip coffee and eat pastries alongside adorable cats! Purina One teamed up with the North Shore Animal League, the country's largest no-kill shelter, to create this pop-up café that's the temporary home to rescue cats. While the concept of a cat café has been around for a while, with Asia and Europe leading the way, this is the first time one has opened in the United States. Two permanent cat cafés are scheduled to open in San Francisco this year.

The concept is simple. Visitors pay an hourly fee or cover charge to sit and lounge with cats. This one, on 168 Bowery, is free. Sixteen cats roam the premises and you're welcome to pick one up and snuggle with it. If you fall in love with a particular one, you can even adopt it! (Read about each individual cat, here. Looks like "Sushi" is featured in the photo, above.) To get your feline fix, stop by the store from 10a to 7p each day till April 27. If you'd like to learn a little something, you can listen to different cat experts talk about cat health and behavior. The store's capacity is limited to just 65 people, so you may have to wait in line.

Cat Café website
via [Gothamist, LA Times]
Photos via [Tod Seelie/Gothamist]

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Des experts en informatique de la Carnegie Mellon University ont exhumé une dizaine de tableaux inédits d'Andy Warhol réalisés sur ordinateur par le maître du pop art au début des années 1980, a annoncé l'université jeudi.

Mountaineer Neil Gottlieb climbed to the summit of Uganda's tallest mountain, posted a rainbow flag, and claimed the peak in the name of gay rights. He then issued an open letter to President Yoweri Museveni:

On April 16, 2014, after a 6-day climb, I summited your country’s tallest peak, Mount Stanley’s 16,753 foot tall Margherita Peak, and mounted a gay pride flag at its summit in protest of your country’s criminalization of homosexuality. Your country’s highest point is no longer its soil, its snow or a summit marker, but rather a gay pride flag waving brilliantly, shining down from above as a sign of protest and hope behalf of the many thousands of Ugandans that you seek to repress and the many more that understand the hideous nature of your repressive legislation.

The wiser of us understand that humans possess certain unalienable rights. These rights include freedom to express oneself, freedom to worship one’s god or none at all and freedom to live and love as one is born. Despite this, you recently signed legislation into law that allows those born homosexual to be imprisoned for life. This is a disgusting, despicable act that threatens to ruin countless lives. If you had a son, daughter, niece or nephew that was homosexual, would you want her or him to be imprisoned for life? What if you have friends that are closeted homosexuals? Should they be locked up for the rest of their lives? If you were born gay, would you deserve to be imprisoned?

Gottlieb's letter closes by suggesting that if Museveni doesn't want that rainbow flag on Uganda's highest peak, he should climb up there and rip it down himself. In order to shield the mountain guides that assisted in the Gottlieb's climb, he notes that they had no idea what he was planning and didn't even know what the rainbow flag represents. (Via Gay Star News)

Read Gottlieb's full letter at his Facebook page.

RELATED: Gottlieb is the founder of California's Three Twins Ice Cream.

Anchor Distilling Co. brings Taiwan’s Kavalan whisky to the U.S. market Anchor Distilling Company announces the U.S. launch of Kavalan, the first whisky distillery built in Taiwan, with bottles of all seven expressions arriving on shelves April 25th, 2014: Kavalan Classic, Kavalan Concertmaster, Kavalan King Car Conductor, Kavalan Fino Sherry Cask, Kavalan Ex-Bourbon Cask, Kavalan Sherry Cask and Kavalan Vinho Barrique. Kavalan, which means “flatland people,” is named after the Taiwanese aboriginal ethnic group that originally inhabited modern-day Yilan County, where the Kavalan distillery resides. The warm sub-tropical climate of Taiwan ensures the whiskies mature faster than their Scottish, American...

[Visit Alcademics.com for the full post.]

Actress Aubrey Peeples will play Jem in the forth-coming movie version of Jem and the Holograms. If you’re wondering why she's familiar, Peeples plays the annoying reality TV star slash country pop singer Layla Grant on ABC’s Nashville.

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nitratediva:

Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946).

She makes seem perfectly natural to put on your stockings in a high kick. 

Free tagging: 

• Green Line
• Park Street

Neighborhoods: 

• Downtown

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• Crime

“I don’t see where the ashes of a couple of old lesbians is going to hurt anybody,” says 74-year-old Madelynn Taylor.

cbsnews.com

The Division of Veterans Services is reportedly denying access for her now-deceased wife's ashes to be laid to rest in a shared plot.

The pair's ashes would fit in one spot on the wall, not taking up any more space than usual.

cbsnews.com

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wetheurban:

SPOTLIGHT: Rappers x Pre-16th Century Art

Meet your new favorite Tumblr! B4XVI is gathering a collection of comparisons between pre-16th century art and famous rappers.

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Famed Japanese pop artist Murakami Takashi has made his first film, and it looks absolutely incredible. You've never seen kaiju like this.

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American Horror Story: Easter

The Baffler Foundation is a literary and educational non-profit seeking an Editorial Assistant to work on its new imprint, Baffler Books. This is a part-time position, requiring approximately 20-hours per week onsite at our modest office located near Inman Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

An international team of researchers have identified a previously unknown neurodegenerative disorder and discovered it is caused by a single mutation in one individual born during the height of the Ottoman Empire in Turkey about 16 generations ago.

This is probably the most egregious of all Chinese-English translation fails:

We saw the identical mistake on a giant banner outside of a cafeteria half-a-dozen years ago: see "Honest but unhelpful".

Here we have the same mistranslation: the Chinese characters are CAN1TING1 餐厅 ("dining hall"; 餐廳 in traditional characters). You'd think that a person would want to be really sure about the translation before investing in a brass plaque upon which to engrave it.

Google Image Search turns up some more examples.

This howler is so monumental that it has become an acronym, TSE, and has been translated back into Chinese and incorporated in a t-shirt design:

Source: the third and fourth items here.

fānyì fúwùqì cuòwù 翻譯服務器錯誤 ("translate server error")

Compare also "A Bus to Don't Know".

[Thanks to Sanping Chen]

Sloths spend a lot of time hanging from tree branches, often upside-down. In other animals, this would cause the liver and intestines to press down on the lungs and make breathing difficult. But sloths have developed their own solution. Rebecca Cliffe from Swansea University studies sloths at Costa Rica’s Sloth Sanctuary, and has done many dissections on dead sloths. She found the internal organs were held in place by a strange fibrous adhesions she at first thought was scar tissue. But all sloths have it, and the natural “adhesive tape” eases their breathing between 7 and 13%.

“For many mammals, an energy saving of 7 to 13 percent wouldn’t be particularly game-changing,” says Cliffe. In fact, some mammals like howler monkeys do regularly hang inverted without any organ-anchors. The difference is that “sloths have virtually no flexibility in their energy budget. They generate just about enough energy from their diet to move when and where required, but there is not much left in the tank afterwards. To a sloth, an energy saving of 7 to 13 percent is quite a big deal.”

They also take a very long time to digest their food, and they only urinate and defecate once a week. Most of the time, a sloth is carrying a third of their body weight in waste matter, which means that its stomach and bowels are very heavy. “It would be energetically very expensive, if not completely impossible, for a sloth to lift this extra weight with each breath were it not for the adhesions,” says Cliffe.

Ed Yong has more about the recently-released study of sloth anatomy, which is different from all other animals because sloths are weird.

(Image credit: Flickr user Cliff)

RSS or email subscribers: Can’t see the video? Click through to view it on the web.

Version 1 of the Moneta dress features a bodice that is fully lined.

If you’ve struggled before with lining sleeveless tops or dresses, we have a little trick to show you today to get a perfectly lined, clean-finished armhole, all by machine.

The secret is not sewing the armholes all in one go. You sew the front armhole, then the back armhole separately. The video and photos below show this with the Moneta dress, which is made from a knit fabric and sewn with a serger, but you can also use this trick on a woven garment with your standard sewing machine.

Watch the video above and follow these steps to try it out.

1. With right sides together, start by stitching the shoulder seams and side seams together on both the bodice shell and bodice lining.

2. Turn the shell right side out.

3. Place the lining inside the shell, with wrong sides together.

Note: For Moneta, the neckline is left open because a collar is sewn to it later. If you also want to clean finish the neckline at the same time, you can do that before step 3. Place the shell inside the lining with right sides together. Stitch the lining to the shell around the neckline. Turn the lining inside the shell, with wrong sides together, then continue to step 4.

4. Turn the seam allowance under at the front armhole. Press if you find it necessary. You only really need to turn the seam allowance under on part of the armhole.

5. Reach between the lining and shell layers and grasp the two seam allowances of the front armhole. Pull them out through the waist.

6. With right sides together, stitch the shell to the lining along the front armhole. Stitch from the side seam to the shoulder only, don’t try to sew the entire armhole.

The armhole is now finished along the front. Let’s move on to the back.

7. Just as before, reach between the lining and shell layers and grasp the two seam allowances of the back armhole. Pull them out through the waist again.

8. With right sides together, stitch the shell to the lining along the back armhole. Stitch from the side seam to the shoulder only, meeting the stitching of the front armhole.

9. Complete the second armhole in exactly the same way, and you are done!