This afternoon, the Texas State Senate is debating House Bill 2, a hugely restrictive anti-abortion bill that would ban late-term abortions. A vote may take place tonight, so the capital gallery is currently at full-capacity. Meanwhile, state troopers have been searching through bags to confiscate tampons, feminine pads, and tissues before spectators have been allowed inside:
“Bruce Banner, the incredible green man, in fact married his beloved Betty Ross in a church and a Catholic priest presided at the ceremony,” he writes in the full-page article. “There are other indications dispersed among the hundreds of comic strips dedicated to him that are said to unequivocally reveal his faith.”
Batman, too, is Catholic, Vallini determines, offering as proof that Bruce Wayne’s mother was Catholic and noting a sequence depicting the character as a young boy is depicted saying his prayers by his bed. Again, though, Adherents.com brings the writer’s finding into question. The website arrives at the conclusion that the Dark Knight is a lapsed Catholic or a lapsed Episcopalian, stating, “there is some disagreement among fans as well as among writers about whether the character is a mostly lapsed Catholic or a mostly lapsed Episcopalian. There is universal agreement that the character is not an active churchgoer in any faith.”
But there’s at least thing on which L’Osservatore Romano and Adherents.com can agree: Superman is _definitely_ a Methodist.
As Man of Steel, with its spiritual themes, soars toward a $590 million worldwide box-office haul, the Vatican’s official newspaper has turned its attention to the faiths of other prominent superheroes, asking in the headline, “Is the Hulk Catholic?” The answer, according to L’Osservatore Romano writer Gaetano Vallini, is yes, and he points to the [...]
Though once considered more of a learned skill than an elevated art form, mixology has gone one to become a phenomenon. Whether you’re a purist and revere the classics or prefer the thrill of spirited invention, concocting cocktails is a marriage of science and innovation. Australian creative agency The Monkeys has taken that concept a step further with Mixionary, a series of color-blocked posters that celebrate the most beloved cocktails through deconstructed screen prints.
Created in collaboration with the beverage company Diageo, Mixionary sees classic cocktails like the Vodka Martini and Bloody Mary represented in color blocks that vary in size according to their volume within the drink. A Gin & Tonic becomes alternating blocks of cool grey and bright green while a Cosmopolitan juxtaposes the brightness of cranberry juice and a twist of lemon with the pale puce of Smirnoff vodka. From far away, each print resembles a stretched out homage to Josef Albers or a modern movie poster devoid of graphics and titles. It’s a genius idea that begs for further renditions. Check out more here.
The image above left is a photo backdrop in the visiting room at Woodbourne Correctional Facility in New York. It's one of many unusual paintings found in prison visiting rooms around the United States. Their function is to make family photos more pleasant. Alyse Emdur photographed these scenes and compiled images sent by inmates into a book, titled Prison Landscapes. Above right, James Bowlin holds a fake trout bass at the US Penitentiary in Marion Illinois. BLDBLOG posted an interview with Emdur.
Fantastical scenes are actually much less common—from what I gather from my correspondence, realism is like gold in prison. That’s the form of artistic expression that’s most appreciated and most respected, so that’s often the goal for the backdrop painter.
WITH the Supreme Court’s decisions last month to let same-sex marriage go ahead in California and to strike down part of the Defense of Marriage Act, it may come as a surprise that in a majority of the 50 states, no laws prevent employers from discriminating against gays and lesbians in the workplace. You can be harassed, demoted or even fired for being gay, lesbian or transgendered in Ohio, Virginia, Florida and 26 other states. In the words of Rea Carey, director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force,
The cruel irony of last week’s Supreme Court marriage decisions is that an LGBT couple could get married one day, and on the very next day, because we still don’t have federal laws to ban employment discrimination, those same individuals could be fired from their jobs.
This is not a theoretical concern. About four in ten gays and lesbians report facing harassment and other forms of discrimination at their jobs. And if you are...Continue reading
Last February, Chevalier von Windsor posted a bunch of gorgeous, amazing photos from the UK's phone booth graveyard, near the village of Carlton Miniott (scroll right to the bottom). The contrast between the normally shiny and proud red call-boxes and these dusty, decaying corpses makes the photos work.
Here’s a fun little piece of Brooks Brothers history: a small pamphlet on how to dress for certain times of the day, titled Clothes and the Hour. My source at Brooks Brothers tells me they published this in 1912, but a quick Google Books search will pull up various advertisements for the pamphlet dating back as early as 1906. So who knows.
Anyway, apparently at that time, Brooks Brothers recommended that men wear bedroom slippers and dressing gowns at 8am in town (with dressing gowns costing up to $1,400(!) in today’s dollars). They also recommended negligee shirts in the morning made from lightweight silks, linens, cottons, or wools. A negligee was one of the four types of shirts men used to wear in this period - the others being the dress shirt, the work shirt, and the outing shirt. Dress shirts had bosoms, which could be plain, plaited, or tucked. As you’ll see in the “afternoon section” of this pamphlet, Brooks recommended dress shirts made entirely of white linen or ones that just had linen bosoms. These were typically starched in the laundry so that they’d set well. The other three types - the negligee, the outing, and the work shirt - were usually made without bosoms, and differed by what kind of materials were used. Either way, all shirts were made with a front-plait closing (what we might think of as “popovers” today), or a coat front (the style most of us wear, with the front of the shirt cut fully open so we can slip it on like a coat).
For afternoon wear in the city, men were recommended something still very familiar to us: a sack suit, dress shirt, gloves, cravat, and some kind of coat. Recommended coats included Chesterfields, Mackintoshes, Ulsters, and even vicunas. What would a vicuna coat cost in the early 20th century? $950 to $1,050 in today’s dollars for ready-to-wear, or $1,300 to $1,500 for made-to-measure. That’s pretty amazing when you consider that a custom vicuna coat today would run you anywhere between $50,000 to $100,000 (a price so shocking that someone recently published a book about it, which A Suitable Wardrobe recently reviewed).
So if you were ever hoping for a vicuna coat, you might have missed your chance by a hundred years.
Moments ago, we filed a new petition in the California Supreme Court against all of California’s 58 county clerks, and state officials, seeking to restore the enforcement of Proposition 8, the state’s constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a man and a woman. The undeniable fact is, the man-woman definition of marriage, as passed by a majority the voters, is still a valid part of our state constitution.
Yet county clerks statewide are lawlessly defying that law by issuing gender-neutral marriage licenses. We are asking California’s Supreme Court to restore the rule of law and the public’s confidence in the integrity of the initiative process.
The action we filed today contends that at least 56 of the 58 county clerks must continue to follow Proposition 8 because they were not parties to the recent federal lawsuit against Prop 8, and that the state’s governor and attorney general have no legal authority to order local county clerks to disregard the state constitution.
Our petition also reminds the justices that our opponents, the attorneys for the plaintiffs who challenged Prop 8, have repeatedly admitted that the 56 county clerks not involved in their case “are not directly bound by the injunction” issued by a single San Francisco judge against Prop 8. In fact, "super-lawyer" David Boies told the courts that “the scope of the injunction is quite limited”, and at least the 56 county clerks would remain free to “refuse a marriage license to a same-sex couple…without violating the injunction.”
The BBC have released a publicity photo of David Bradley as William Hartnell in costume as the first Doctor, taken from the forthcoming drama An Adventure in Space and Time, which will be broadcast in the Autumn as part of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary celebrations.
A panel took place last weekend at Comic Con France featuring writer and executive producer Mark Gatiss, during which a special minute-long trailer was shown to the audience highlighting Bradley's Hartnell, plus clips of the production of Doctor Who including those featuring Daleks and Cybermen. Talking about the drama, Gatiss said:
It's essentially the story about four people: Sydney Newman, the man who came up with the idea; Verity Lambert, the first producer; Waris Hussein, the first director; and the first Doctor, William Hartnell. I've been trying to do this for about twelve years, and it's a wonderful story of how our favourite programme came to be. Principally, it's the story of one person's journey through the programme. The biggest problem really is that there are lots and lots of stories to tell, and I had to focus in on very particular parts.
As previously reported, the drama's recreation of the TARDIS console was on display over the weekend. Gatiss commented:
It was obviously very important for us to recreate the original TARDIS as closely as possible. Actually a strange thing happened: in the original series when you go through the doors there are brass pillars which had been hired from a prop company called Trading Post 50 years ago. The design team went back to Trading Post and asked if they had anything like this, and they said "what, those, over there?" - the same ones from the original show! So we just put them back where they used to be!
Established in 1919, Radioshack is a "national retailer of innovative mobile technology products and services, as well as products related to personal and home technology and power supply needs." What that means is that it has kind of a double personality: it will sell popular consumer electronic products like Beats headphones and camcorders and other typical stuff but it will also sell the most obscure adapter and cable so that you can connect your blender to your Google Glass. Over 34,000 employees work across a retail network that includes approximately 4,700 company-operated stores in the United States and Mexico. The last time we talked about Radio Shack here was for their "The Shack" campaign, which has come and gone. Its most recent brand message, "Radioshack: Let's Play" was introduced this March with the purpose of establishing the retailer as "a neighborhood technology playground." With these two ideas in place, Radioshack has opened a concept store in New York to showcase said playground-ness and introduce a new logo. No design credit given, but the creative agency of record is Grey.
Logo detail.
"I am very excited about this store, which brings the essence of our new 'RadioShack: Let's Play' branding to the heart of Manhattan, and I am also thrilled about the support and very positive reactions of our neighbors," said Joe Magnacca, chief executive officer of RadioShack Corporation. "Our goal at RadioShack is to make our iconic brand relevant to new segments of the consumer market, while reinforcing our commitment to the strong and loyal base of customers who have known RadioShack for many years. We know that all of these consumers like technology when it makes their lives simpler, but they love technology when it makes their lives fun."
New logo pops up at the beginning of this product review.PR Newswire caption: "The new RadioShack concept store at 2268 Broadway in New York showcases the retailer's new branding, as well as numerous innovations that enable shoppers to easily find the products they need." My caption: This is the block where retailers with circles in their logo need to be.PR Newswire caption: "RadioShack's new concept store at 2268 Broadway in New York City has newly configured displays highlighting in-demand brands like Apple, HTC and Samsung, and carriers like AT&T and Verizon". My caption: If Macy's and an Apple store had a baby store it would look like this.PR Newswire caption: "RadioShack's new concept store at 2268 Broadway in New York City includes innovative fixtures such as this Speaker Wall that allows customers to listen to different models of audio equipment using music from their own Bluetooth-enabled devices." My caption: The logo on that leather loincloth is disturbing.Facebook ad — the one moment where the brand actually looks cool. Save for the obvious retouching on the headphones.
The previous logo is a retail classic: easy to spot, easy to remember, and simply executed with the thickness of the circle's stroke matching the thickness of the "R"’s serifs. Not the most terribly exciting logo but it represented the company quite well. The new logo completely crushes the subtleties of the old one with an extra bold, sans serif "R" and a much thicker stroke on the circle. If there has ever been a logo equivalent to a boob job and pumping collagen into lips, this is it. To be perfectly honest though there is nothing structurally wrong with the new logo — it's an "R" in a circle, you can't really screw that up — it's just that evolution-wise it's a pretty clumsy step.
The one thing that does baffle me is the color palette. At first I thought the light red and shit brown were the problem of a CMYK file being put up for download. But, nope, the website, in all its RGB glory, uses the light red and shit brown color palette. It seems like a very strange choice to make deliberately. As far as the new stores, they look promising but still operate within that cheap shopping-mall-vibe that one associates with Radioshack. Overall, I will grant that the new logo and stores are more on cue for a younger, hipper crowd that has no associations with the Radioshack of yore and just wants to get the latest cool entertainment gadget without paying Apple-like prices, but… seriously, shit brown?
In the wake of recent revelations about NSA surveillance efforts, the co-founder of The Pirate Bay has launched a drive to crowdsource funding for a new mobile messaging app — one so secure that its creators say they couldn't turn over people's messages even if they wanted to. Hemlis (it means "secret" in Swedish), is being developed by Peter Sunde, one of the individuals behind The Pirate Bay, along with Linus Olsson and Leif Högberg. It's described as an easy to use messaging app in the vein of WhatsApp or iMessage, with one important twist: it uses end-to-end encryption to ensure that nobody can monitor your messages. "No one can listen in," the Hemlis site promises. "Not even us."
The app won't use advertising or sell user data, so to help bring the project to fruition the team is trying to raise $100,000 from potential users. The money will be put towards developing the apps themselves — iOS and Android are the targeted platforms — and the infrastructure needed for the system. While there's no demonstration of a working app on the site, there are several mocked-screens that show off a bright, iOS 7-style design. In an FAQ, the group also says they believe the core app itself should be free, but users will have to pay to unlock additional features like sending images.
Those interested in funding the project early will be able to get a headstart, however. Donations from $5 and up provide customers with multiple codes for the full, unlocked version of the app — one for themselves, and others to share with friends. The Hemlis team states that if they don't hit their goal all money will be returned, but they seem to be off to a quick start already: as of this writing, Hemlis has already raised over $18,500.
An estimated 30,000 inmates in jails across California are participating in a hunger strike to protest against solitary confinement and other conditions they say amount to torture.
According to a new interview with Mark Gatiss at Paris Comic Con, there could have been a live action Doctor Who episode, if 2005 to 2010 showrunner Russell T. Davies had followed through with the idea. Of course, the idea for a Tennant-era live episode never took off, and now we are left to contemplate what could have been.
Gatiss claims that he remembers Davies suggesting a live episode, like television shows from ER to 30 Rock have pulled off, while David Tennant was the Doctor. However, given the difficulty of attempting to pull together all the show's science fiction elements live, including the Doctor's confusing, wibbly-wobbly techno-babble, Davies gave up on the idea.
Matilde Moisant was the second woman in the United States to receive a pilot’s license. Moisant learned to fly at her brother Albert’s Moisant Aviation School on Long Island, along with aviator Harriet Quimby, and earned her license on August 13, 1911. Together the two pioneer female aviators and friends joined the Moisant International Aviators. Moisant made her exhibition debut at the Nassau Boulevard Aviation Meet in September where she won the Rodman-Wanamaker altitude trophy by flying her 50 hp Moisant monoplane to an incredible 366 meters (1,200 feet). She beat both Quimby and French pilot Helene Dutrieu. Moisant flew in meets throughout the country and Mexico until the early spring of 1912, often flying at higher altitudes than most male pilots. Then bowing to the wishes of her family, still recovering from the fatal crash of her brother John in 1910, Moisant scheduled her last flight for April 14, 1912, in Wichita Falls, Texas. It was almost her last performance of any kind as her aircraft burst into flames upon landing, due to a leak in the fuel tank. Moisant was pulled from the wreckage with her clothes afire but fortunately her heavy wool flying costume saved her from serious injury. During World War I, she performed fundraising duties (on the ground) for the Red Cross.
(information compiled by D. Cochrane and P. Ramirez)
What happens when backyard chickens stop making you breakfast?
NBC News reports on an outcry from critics of the backyard chicken movement who say hundreds of unwanted chickens are being abandoned by their city-dwelling owners when they stop laying eggs or become too cumbersome to manage.
“Many areas with legalized hen-keeping are experiencing more and more of these birds coming in when they’re no longer wanted,” said Paul Shapiro, spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States. “You get some chicks and they’re very cute, but it’s not as though you can throw them out in the yard and not care for them.”
Hens lay eggs for two years but can live for a decade longer than that. They can rack up bills for veterinary care and feed, and they can attract rats and predators such as raccoons and coyotes.
Supporters say the cases of abandonment are rare and that the drawbacks of raising backyard chickens are overshadowed by the benefits of having a sustainable source of local food.
But NBC reports animal shelters are reporting an increasing number of unwanted chickens from so-called locavores. One rescue center in Minneapolis, Chicken Run Rescue, reports a jump in abandoned birds from less than 50 in 2001 to nearly 500 in 2012.
It’s certainly happening in Oregon as well, according to Wayne Geiger, president and founder of Lighthouse Farm Sanctuary southeast of Salem in Scio.
His farm animal shelter has around 80 birds right now, and he gets frequent calls with new requests.
“The majority of them are going to be backyard birds that have been either abandoned or dumped,” he said. “Usually, no one wants roosters, and the hens we get are usually spent hens. People don’t know what to do with their old hens. I’ve picked them up at apartment complexes, parks, or I get calls from the Humane Society or animal control.”
Sometimes people don’t even ask the sanctuary for help. The birds just show up unannounced.
“One day you’ll have one new rooster in the barnyard and two more running around the road,” said Geiger.
The sanctuary already has its fill of roosters, which are sometimes sold by mistake to people wanting hens because it’s hard to tell the sex of young chicks.
In theory, the unwanted backyard birds could be killed for food, Geiger said, but in reality “you can have ordinance problems with butchering in your backyard and what to do with the waste products.”
Geiger said he thinks people need to have more information before they take on the responsibility of raising backyard birds.
“I can certainly appreciate wanting to grow your own food, but the full picture on what to do with these birds just is not being provided,” he said. “If people did have all the information, they might choose to go to the grocery store.”
Marilyn Monroe in 1953 at the Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta, among those other majestic peaks known as the Canadian Rockies. She sprained her ankle filming River of No Return. Photo by John Vachon for Look magazine. View full size.
Some memories just won't die — and some can even be transferred to a whole new brain. Researchers at Tufts University have determined that a small, yellow worm known as a planarian, which has long been studied for its regenerative properties, is able to grow back a lot more than just its body parts: after the worm's small, snake-like head and neck are removed, its body will even regrow a brain that's capable of quickly relearning its lost skills.
A little training makes it all come back
The researchers tested the memory of planarians by measuring how long it took for them to reach food in a controlled setting. The small worms dislike open spaces and bright lights — but they had been trained to ignore it so that they could find their meals. Even after decapitation, worms that had gone through training were able to overcome their fears and start eating much faster than worms that hadn't been trained. However, the memories didn't come back immediately. Each worm still had to be reminded of its earlier knowledge, though it only took a single lesson for it to all come back.
Why this happens is still unclear. Planarians' brains control their behavior, but the researchers suggest that some of their memories might be stored elsewhere in their body. Alternatively, they suggest that the worms' original brain may have modified their nervous systems, and their nervous systems may have then altered how the new brains formed during regrowth.
The researchers' findings appears in The Journal of Experimental Biology. They say that more work needs to be done to nail down the specifics of how planarians recovery their memory, but the hope is that the worms can be used as a way to study how memory and learning work. That may sound complicated for a seemingly basic creature, but existing studies are already using them to research drug addiction and withdrawal.
Editorial Note: In the aftermath of the NSA revelations, I’ve been writing more and more posts on privacy and ways to help secure it. From this post on I will use the tag “Privacy” to mark these.
AT&T, my wireless carrier, has joined other large communication companies in deciding that our data really belongs to them and that they are going to sell it to advertisers. It’s OK, they say, because everyone is doing it. There’s the usual “no personal identification will be given to advertisers; we just want to give you better ads” nonsense. This is basically what Google is doing but this time we’re paying the carriers and they still feel free to appropriate our data and sell it. Really, it’s despicable.
Anyone with a clue already knows that cell phones—especially smart phones—are tracking devices but that doesn’t mean that our carriers should get to sell that information to anyone willing to buy it. Ideally, it would be illegal to collect and store this information (except maybe for engineering purposes and then only with identifying information removed). Of course, the usual 3-letter agencies would run screaming to Congress about the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse so that probably isn’t in our immediate future.
Fortunately, at least for AT&T, you can opt out of this program as this Forbes article explains. I urge everyone to take the time to do this. If we don’t push back—now and hard—it will only get worse.
CSBG's Greg Hatcher bemoans what he finds to be a repetitive predictability in the structures of modern superhero films, citing a specific dependency on homogenized origin stories.
State officials said they are working to lower the water level at a Coventry pond that has risen to 10 feet above normal. Heavy rains and a beaver dam on a culvert have contributed to the flooding, which has sent water close to homes and Route 114.
DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — In a story July 10 about Ramadan, The Associated Press, relying on a press release issued by the U.N.'s Department of Public Information, News and Media Division, reported erroneously that the World Food Program said it needed $27 million every month to deal with the growing ranks of Syrians made hungry because of the war and refugees crisis abroad. The World Food Program needed $27 million every week. The U.N. has corrected the error.
Our own Lisa Hix has written a terrific article about how Bessie Smith and other blues divas of the 1920s led not-entirely secret double lives as lesbians, occasionally taunting their audiences with revealing lyrics. For example, in the 1928 song "Prove It on Me," Gertrude “Ma” Rainey—known as “The Mother of Blues”—sang, “It’s true I wear a collar and a tie, … Talk to the gals just like any old man." While such lyrics might not seem like a big deal to us today, back then, pursuing same-sex relations could get you thrown in jail.
Whilst the blog has been on the sparse side of things, my first properly full haute couture week in Paris has not. A one-plus day absence makes me itch and now there are blog posts aplenty mounting, all to do with FANCY. As in, how fancy everything is in haute couture. Essentially it's been three and a half days of taking in completely unnecessary, highly indulgent and pure and unadulterated fanciness. There's nothing "easy" about most of the things I've seen and for that I'm grateful. Relevance can be pushed aside for the moment and instead, the goal is to feast the eyes with an excess of craftsmanship, decoration and boundless creativity.
First up a revisit to Dutch fashion visionary Iris Van Herpen, who has always operated in her own haute couture sphere, pushing innovative techniques. She has started to dip her toes into ready-to-wear (modelled by Grimes no less) but it's her off-the-cuff haute couture shows which have earnt her something of a cult following. When I went to her show two years ago, she had just begun to experiment with 3-D printing involving .mgx files and a Belgian company called Materialise. Thanks to EU research funding, what started as a university spin-off has grown to a multinational company. Last time she created cage-like structures from 3-d printing. This time, she has created a real soft garment - a seamless and made-to-measure dress with transparent bone-like structures produced with Materialise's mammoth stereolithography machine aka the "printer" as it were that can produce one large piece layer by layer. What should have been a dress with multiple steps and complicated processes if made tradtionally has now been brought to life through 3-D printing in one swift motion, as one single piece.
Here comes the science...
The design was first created on a computer before being optimised for 3D printing using Materialise software. At this point flaws or obstacles were fixed before work continued and the design was sent to the printer. The design was then brought to life using Mammoth Stereolithography, which creates objects layer by layer. UV lasers scan the design into a liquid resin that hardens wherever the laser hits and the 3D object gradually comes to life.
Van Herpen therefore makes another great leap towards establishing 3-D printing as a clearly possible and maybe even inevitable method for the manufacturing of unique pieces of clothing that can be brought to market quickly. Obviously Van Herpen isn't using the technique for that reason in her haute couture collections but she is subverting the parameters of couture by employing a machine to create a piece that arguably can't be created by the "petite mains" no matter how skilled that person was, just by nature of the materials used. The dress here and the neckpiece paired with a texturised silicone cage dress are the results of Van Herpen's latest foray into 3-D printing by Materialise.
In the rest of the collection Van Herpen continues to carve out her own niche of boundary pushing techniques, which meld with the natural and organic world. Moulded silicone that looks like rubberised fossils, silk frayed into shaking tree branches, intricate laser cutting and metal worked into dresses like spines running all over the body. Van Herpen continues to work with United Nude on the shoe front (the Dutch shoe brand has just debuted a sci-fi-fantasy shoe collaboration with Zaha Hadid so innovation seems to be abound). The most brilliant stroke of an ensemble in the collection definitely belonged to the two-headed bird dress constructed out of cut pailette fronds. Like I said, FANCY. In fact, maybe fancy doesn't quite cut it. Try out-of-this-world fantastical. It was certainly a fleeting sight that should only exist in rarified form, something which Van Herpen excels at.
Last February, Chevalier von Windsor posted a bunch of gorgeous, amazing photos from the UK's phone booth graveyard, near the village of Carlton Miniott (scroll right to the bottom). The contrast between the normally shiny and proud red call-boxes and these dusty, decaying corpses makes the photos work. 
Via press release from Protect Marriage: 
Our own Lisa Hix has written a terrific article about how Bessie Smith and other blues divas of the 1920s led not-entirely secret double lives as lesbians, occasionally taunting their audiences with revealing lyrics. For example, in the 1928 song "Prove It on Me," Gertrude “Ma” Rainey—known as “The Mother of Blues”—sang, “It’s true I wear a collar and a tie, … Talk to the gals just like any old man." While such lyrics might not seem like a big deal to us today, back then, pursuing same-sex relations could get you thrown in jail.
