*wildbio* has added a photo to the pool:

1/2 pound chicken livers, well-trimmed 1/2 small onion, thinly sliced 1 small garlic clove, smashed and peeled 1 bay leaf 1/4 teaspoon thyme leaves Kosher salt 1/2 cup water 1 1/2sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature 2 teaspoons Cognac or Scotch whisky Freshly ground pepper Toasted baguette slices, for serving

400 1_ |a X, D M

Prepare yourself for a bigger brain freeze than in days gone by, people: Not only is it 7/11, the day when 7-Eleven doles out free small Slurpees, but the frozen drinks are 42% larger this year. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you my trick for easing brain freeze, if you’re lucky.

Instead of that tiny — yet appropriately sized  7.11-ounce Slurpee that’s been handed over to eager customers for the last decade on the Slurpee’s favorite day, today there will be a 12-ounce slushy beverage shooting into millions of mouths, reports USA Today.

Doing the math makes that new version a whopping 42% bigger, almost doubling the amount of frozen flavor.

A 7-Eleven executive estimates that around 7 million Slurpees will find themselves in the bottoms of customers’ stomachs today, or about $7.6 million worth.

“It helps us reconnect with people who love the Slurpee,” says Laura Gordon, vice president of marketing and brand innovation for the company.

Well, that and that it’s less messy — apparently parents were asking for lids, and the 12-ouncers have them.

It’s not just about giving stuff away, however. For all those millions rushing, ambling or otherwise going through 7-Eleven’s doors for the free Slurpee, many will also lock eyes on a stick of beef jerky, or a bag of chips. Or perhaps the free Slurpee isn’t the right size, notes Gordon.

“For some people, a small Slurpee is not enough,” she adds.

Free Slurpee day runs from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. local time. And once your brain is frozen, simply stick your tongue up against the roof of your mouth, thus warming it ever-so-slightly and, it’s to be hoped, easing your brain freeze. You’re welcome. Unless it doesn’t work for you, in which case, sorry, I’m not a Slurpee scientist.

Free Slurpees get almost twice as big this year [USA Today]

A woman in Ontario, Canada, says she was fired from her job at Walmart earlier this week because she called the police on a customer who had left his dog in a hot car with the windows rolled up — and after she told her boss she’d do it again.

She tells the CBC that she was on her way into work on Tuesday when she saw a customer lock his dog inside the truck and close the windows.

“I said, ‘Is this really happening? I’m going to give him about five or 10 minutes and then I’m going to call the police,’” says the now-former Walmarter. When the man didn’t return, she contacted the police. An officer arrived, took down the license plate number and went into the store to find the vehicle’s owner.

The customer eventually came out, but before he left the Walmart parking lot, he approached the employee who had reported him.

“He pulled up to us and said, ‘Hello, ladies, how are you?’ And I said, ‘You shouldn’t leave your dog in the car,’” recalls the woman. “He told me it was none of my business and I said that that was fine, that if I saw him do it again I would just call the police next time. He said he was no longer going to be shopping at that Walmart, and I said, ‘OK.’”

Later in the day, she says her boss called her into his office, where she claims he told her to bring any dog-in-hot-car related issues to him in the future. She declined.

“I [told him] if I did see something unsafe, that I would just go to the police if I thought it was necessary,” she tells the CBC. “He told me then that I was terminated, he wanted my vest, my badge, and to clean out my locker and that I needed to leave.”

She says that Walmart’s official reason for the firing is that she was rude to a customer, “but I felt because I was not even on the clock, it shouldn’t have been an issue anyways. And I don’t think it should be an issue even if I was on the clock… because it’s on the news and we’re being told not to leave animals and children in cars.”

Walmart Canada declined to comment on the incident to the CBC but did say that it has guidelines in place for handling these sorts of situations, and that it’s reviewing these guidelines with employees.

Your eyes are not deceiving you: The Silk Pavillion ? an architectural experiment constructed at MIT, was "3-D printed" using 6,500 live silkworms.

Why do the Pauls have such a problem again and again getting tied up with neo-Confederates and borderline white supremacists? It's not just a prime example of that classic Onion headline "Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My C$#k?" It goes to the heart of what contemporary libertarianism is - or to put it more precisely, how there are very different movements and political agendas operating under that one label.

This whole subject has come up again because of the latest Rand Paul ghostwriter/aide brouhaha. And one-time TPMer Rachel Weiner has a excellent reported piece in the Post getting libertarians' view on the stark division between the 'neo-Confederate' wing of their movement and what they call "cosmotarians." It's a good piece and she talks to various academics and activists within the libertarian movement.

But let me call a polite time out on this whole debate. The idea that there is a ideological divide or set of philosophical questions or priorities that makes some libertarians embrace the Confederacy and secession and despise Abraham Lincoln while others do not is, to put it generously, nonsense. Neo-Conderates, pro-secessionists, whatever else you want to call them are varying hues of white supremacists or to put it even more simply, racists. That's not an accusation. It's simply identifying them as a distinct political strain in American politics.

They may not be violent or actively call for legal discrimination against blacks or other non-whites. It's also not wholly bound up with the racial polarity of whites and blacks. It also feeds off related but not identical nativist traditions in US politics, which adds an additional dose of conspiracy thinking and paranoia about the government being in the hands of sinister alien forces. But let's not kid ourselves. That is what neo-Confederacy and all the rest of it are about, a vision of white supremacy expressed through a retrospective embrace of the Confederacy and the racial mores of the Jim Crow era. No one familiar with this phenomenon can question this.

Now I'm not saying that people who do Civil War reenactments or even people who are just really into Confederate history and nostalgia are like the folks I'm describing. Being a bit too much into Confederate nostalgia may be a sign of some questionable politics. But we're talking here about a very specific neo-Confederate political movement in the United States, with a group of known voices, magazines and institutions, which has somehow managed to get itself listed as 'libertarian'.

Let me also say that I don't think this has anything to do with the people at the Cato Institute or Reason magazine or most of the other people tied to the libertarian movement or Libertarian party going back forty years or so. It's not a movement I agree with on many things. But it's philosophically consistent, isn't basically about race but is a form or what I'd call hyper-individualism. Not my cup of tea but a perfectly legitimate political movement.

Part of the confusion, of course, if we can call it that, is that libertarians and 'neo-Confederates' do meet up on opposition to certain exertions of state power. Libertarians on principle; neo-Confederates because that's been the main vehicle for vindicating the rights of non-whites. More deeply though there's something about how the rhetoric of 'freedom' and 'liberty' appeals to the 'neo-Confederate' mindset which is paradoxical and considerably more toxic and corrosive than the ways many of us think about those terms. Freedom can also mean freedom from any check on my actions. My freedom. My group's freedom. A warlord who totally dominates his followers has a sort of perfect liberty and freedom. Just not quite the sort we think of in a civic context. It's the same authoritarian mindset of Stormfront and the militia crazies, just through this looking glass where it twists into 'freedom' and 'liberty'.

It's not for me to referee the intramural disputes within the libertarian movement. I'm sure they have no desire for me to try. But the neo-Confederates, the Lew Rockwells and that whole crew are fundamentally about white supremacy and nativism. And the Paul clan has been thick as thieves with those folks forever.

Who knows what's in their hearts and frankly who cares? But none of this latest stuff should surprise us. And I don't know why real libertarians waste any time making any sort of common cause with these folks. 'Neo-Confederacy' isn't some outgrowth of or logical deduction from libertarianism. You're a neo-Confederate because you believe in white supremacy. People who just can't figure why good upstanding libertarians keep ending up finding themselves connected up with people who really don't seem to like black people or Hispanics and believe in weird conspiracy theories about black helicopters stealing your lawn furniture really need to reread that Onion article.

Ginsburg likes Scalia because he makes her laugh; Scalia likes Ginsburg because she laughs at his jokes; and the two love to spar over ideas. What unites them, though, is opera. Enter Derrick Wang, a talented musician who has just graduated from the University of Maryland's Carey School of Law. Wang is composing an opera entitled Scalia/Ginsburg, based on the justices' own words and using musical themes and styles of other composers from Verdi to Puccini and Bizet. The University of Maryland plans to premiere excerpts this fall, and it will get a partial airing next spring from the Washington National Opera and its young artists program.

4. The people who lean on the pole. Feels nice and relaxing to lean on that pole, eh? Just treating that pole like your own personal leaning area? Stone cold relaxing, on the crowded train? Hey, guess what, THE POLE IS FOR EVERYONE TO HOLD, so get the fuck off the pole.

Jakob Wagner jakobwagner.eu


Jakob Wagner jakobwagner.eu


Jakob Wagner jakobwagner.eu

Above the clouds

The 48-page “Fashion Music Wonderland,” which takes its theme from Lewis Carroll’s classic ”Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” includes three wordless stories by Jacob Chabot (slated for a signing at the Viz Comic-Con booth Sunday, July 21 at 1:30 p.m.), Victoria Maderna and Ian McGinty. According to Viz, the book will take Hello Kitty on “an adventure that takes her from being a fashion designer to a rock star to an underground explorer, where she discovers a world of wonder with magic potions, tea parties and a queen who loves tarts!” 

Herbert James Draper - The Lament for Icarus (1898)

New research suggests that trees in at least some parts of the world are having to pull less water out of the ground to achieve a given amount of growth.

MrMetlHed writes "A portion of this Reuters article about the Pentagon's inability to manage paying soldiers properly mentions that their payroll program has 'seven million lines of Cobol code that hasn't been updated.' It goes on to mention that the documentation has been lost, and no one really knows how to update it well. In trying to replace the program, the Pentagon spent a billion dollars and wasn't successful."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Insects, we are learning, are nature's Makerbots. First, MIT researchers enlisted 6,500 silkworms to print a silk pavilion. Now Dewars, the venerable whisky brand now owned by Bacardi, has marshaled an army of bees to 3D-print a honeycomb sculpture of a whisky bottle. The sculpture, which is designed to promote Highlander Honey Whisky, was coordinated by New York advertising agency The Ebeling Group. Fast Company takes a look at the challenges involved in so-called "3B printing," starting with the fact that the queen bee had to be sequestered to prevent her from laying eggs in the honeycomb. The project took six weeks to complete, two rounds of bees, and plenty of bee suits to protect the film crew. And while the bees were coerced into...

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For years Utah prisons have been unique in that they required inmates to speak with their visitors using only English, the fear being that anyone speaking in some godless foreign tongue could be dangerously scheming in front of the guards. Ain't that the American way: Instead of teaching the guards foreign languages, or hiring multilingual guards in the first place, let's just ban every language but English.

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Jay-Z can now join Tilda Swinton and The National in the category of performers-turned-performance artists. To promote his new art-themed album Magna Carta Holy Grail, Jay-Z is spending six hours rapping along to his song “Picasso Baby” at the Pace Gallery in New York. The performance art will eventually culminate in a music video for the song, but for now it’s being recorded on Instagram videos and Vines. Jay-Z recently tweeted he will be making “6 pieces of art” as the visuals for his new album. Hopefully the other five pieces will include watching Monty Python And The Holy Grail for six hours, stealing the Magna Carta National Treasure-style, and only communicating via Samsung apps for the next year.  [via Gawker]

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TARDIS console from  An Adventure in Space & Time revealed

Mark Gatiss talks to Blogtor about An Adventure in Space & Time

This unique meteorological phenomenon is called a roll cloud, and it's seen here making its away over the city of Calgary, Alberta. Though it looks like a tornado that has fallen down, it's actually a type of arcus cloud — a dense and horizontal cylindrical structure that often appears ragged and turbulent.

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How do impoverished Haitians end up wearing American T-shirts with crude slogans? It's a complicated story of capitalism, consumption, and "charity."

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To cope with budget troubles, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration has steadily depleted a trust fund for elderly services created with an infusion of federal cash a decade ago. When Jindal took office, the Medicaid Trust Fund for the Elderly contained more than $830 million. Now, the balance has been cut in half to $410 million, according to the treasurer's office. By the end of the current fiscal year, it is projected to sink to $250 million or less. Officials involved with creating the fund expected the state to leave the principal intact and mainly use the interest and investment earnings, so the trust fund would provide a stream of funding for decades to pay for nursing home care and other health care services. Instead, the Jindal administration — with approval from lawmakers through the budget process — keeps dipping into the principal to plug health care budget gaps and finance Medicaid services at nursing homes. At the current rate, the money could run dry by the end of Jindal's current term, leaving his successor with a hefty health care financing gap.

Refresh is an iOS app that uses data from social networks and other online sources to provide users with a quick, 30-second briefing on anyone you’re meeting. The app provides users with information about the other person like jobs, achievements, interests, friends, and trips, giving the user useful conversation points. Refresh is currently in private beta, and prospective users can sign up at the Refresh website using their LinkedIn account.

images via Refresh

Thanks Will Mayo!

Yesterday, Orson Scott Card made an insane plea for tolerance of his intolerance. The reactions are flying hot and heavy:

1. David Gerrold, the author of the Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles," has responded to Card with a Facebook post:

You want me to be tolerant, Scott? First be one of those people who understands. Or to put it bluntly — get your fucking foot off my neck, then we'll talk tolerance.

See, Scott — I don't dislike you. I honestly don't. I think you're a very interesting author and you've turned out some works I admire. But you've made PR Mistake Number One. You've sided with hate-mongers. You've targeted a minority and you've characterized yourself as the righteous warrior. That gives you a short-term gain and a long-term loss. Look up Father Coughlin and Anita Bryant and Kirk Cameron.

Now you've made PR Mistake Number Two — instead of honestly and sincerely apologizing for the hurt you have caused others, you have doubled down. You have played the martyr card, arguing that you are the victim.

2. Joe My God points out that NOM head Brian Brown has sent out an e-mail that doesn't respond to NOM board member Card's calling the battle against gay marriage "moot." Instead, it asks for a lot of money, so that NOM can try to pass an anti-gay-marriage amendment to the Constitution. I wonder how much drama Card's statement caused at NOM HQ yesterday; I wish I could've seen the e-mail thread that must've erupted when they realized Card was fucking with their fundraising efforts.

3. In case you or someone you know on Facebook needs it, Rachel Eddin at Wired published a lovely dismantling of Card's plea for tolerance. It's just the thing to send to contrarians who try to suggest that Card is suddenly the victim in all this.

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When photographer Kirk Crippens came to Portland, he wanted to test the version of the city put forth by the hit comedy Portlandia. He made 45 portraits and expected his work to stand in sharp contrast to the fictions of Brownstein and Armisen. In the end he found significant overlap between their view and his.

Now, the same folks who brought us the Cuppow canning jar drinking lid are pleased to present their latest product, the BNTO ("ben-toh"), a new accessory that further extends the utility of the standard glass jar.

animals-riding-animals:

goat riding tortoise (before choosing another tortoise steed)

scalesofperception:

CONFUSION OF TONGUES: THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE TOWER OF BABEL via Socks Studio

The interpretation of the Genesis 11-1:9 narrative by generations of artists, notably from the Flemish school.

1 And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.

2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

3 And they said one to another: ‘Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

4 And they said: ‘Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’

5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded

6 And the LORD said: ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.

7 Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’

8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.

9 Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

SoP - Scale of Representation