Russian Sledges

A big, bright, beautiful Full Moon will rise at sunset on Sunday.

National Pollinator Week kicked off with a dark twist of irony Monday, when tens of thousands of bumblebees, honeybees, ladybugs and other insects were found dead or dying in a Target parking lot in Oregon. Now, early signs strongly suggest insecticides may be to blame.

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THIS WEEKEND’S WhiskeyFest Northwest is exactly what Portland’s craft distilling industry needs: an opportunity for local distillers to go up against the standard bearers of the industry. As a community, our purveyors can no longer lean on the crutch that they are a fledgling industry, and therefore deserving of slack. Most of our recognizable names have been at it for almost a decade now, and should be turning out a product that can stand on its own merits. As they move from infancy into adolescence, it’s a great time to check their progress.

No less than eight local products—such as Bull Run Distilling’s Temperance Trader Straight bourbon and Eastside Distilling’s Burnside bourbon—will get a chance to stand side-by-side with such stalwarts as Wild Turkey and Buffalo Trace. With over 60 labels duking it out in every major category of whiskey (straight, bourbon, Scotch, Irish, Canadian), it’s a rarely seen spectrum for comparison.

First, a note about provenance. Leaps and bounds have been made locally (and across the country in general) to be more transparent about where these spirits are actually made. The distinction between someone simply buying unbranded bulk distillate from a major distillery, and someone who is distilling from grain at their distillery, has become a contentious issue, and it’s something to note when examining our various young whiskeys.

From the day you pull the first run off your shiny, brand-new still, it is a dead minimum of two years (most bourbons are four-plus years) before you can pull it out of the barrel and sell it as “straight whiskey.” With that in mind, it’s understandable (and financially critical) that start-ups choose to bottle something made and aged by another distillery in the interim. I highly doubt any drinkers have a problem with this, though I do find it distasteful when someone tries to obfuscate the origins of the juice. This brings me to the good and the bad, with my own tasting notes on each.

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THE GOOD.

Bull Run Distilling laid down their whiskey over a year ago, and then went about finding a bourbon that they loved to bottle as a stopgap (read: how they keep the lights on until 2015 when their whiskey is ready). Their Temperance Trader label also has full disclosure that they did not make the base spirit. Flavor-wise, it’s for the Knob Creek drinker who’s looking for something new. High rye content lends some spice to pair with the caramel and sweet toffee notes. Recommended.

Big Bottom Whiskey out of Hillsboro makes no bones about not being a distiller. They market themselves as a “premier independent bottler of whiskeys,” and as such set themselves up much more truthfully. Their value-add is in taking bourbons and whiskeys and “finishing” (aging) them in various types of casks to impart nuance. In general, their whiskeys have a round mouthfeel and just the right amount of heat (all bottled at 91 proof) to deliver the aromas that the individual cask agings impart. Recommended.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

THE BAD.

Snake River Stampede: A Canadian whisky that has a small amount of sherry added. They never acknowledge whether or not they produce the base whisky and it’s almost impossible to tell if they’re even the ones that add the sherry. The result is—ta-dah—a mellow one-note Canadian whisky with added sweetness. Recommended for Crown Royal drinkers only.

Hood River Distillers: Now, no one is going to come along and purport that Hood River Distillers is remotely a craft distillery, but their Pendleton 1910 Canadian whisky is nice, with sweet caramel and Christmas spice flavors. Recommended. The standard Pendleton itself has very little wood flavor under the low rye mash bill, with toasted corn and burnt toffee notes. Not recommended.

Then there are conundrums, such as Ransom Spirits. Ransom for the most part does an extremely good job with their products, like their fantastic Old Tom gin, Small’s gin, and ethereal Gewürztraminer grappa. Then along comes their WhipperSnapper whiskey and all that previous dedication is seemingly thrown out the window, replaced with a slapdash mix of barrels and aging lengths, and then partially mixed with white dog (unaged whiskey) they buy from somewhere in Kentucky. The result is a young, hot spirit with slight sandalwood and brown sugar notes. Not recommended.

”

- Are Local Whiskey Distillers Ready for Prime Time? | Lush LIfe | Portland Mercury (via saucieshares)

There's just one week and a half and Google Reader will be history. If you're using the service, it's a good idea to export your data and switch to a different service. You can choose from Feedly, The Old Reader, MultiPLX, NewsBlur, Feedspot, Netvibes. I haven't decided which one I'll use, but Feedly is a strong contender.

Feedly is probably the service that will benefit the most from Google Reader's demise. It grew from 4 million users to 12 million users in only 3 months and that's impressive. The service was just a Google Reader client, an alternate interface for Google Reader that gained a foothold on mobile.

Feedly has recently started to migrate users from Google's backend to its own backend, while preserving most of their data. Feedly Cloud was built in record time and it's now a scalable infrastructure for Feedly that can also be used by other apps that were powered by the unofficial Google Reader API. There are 9 apps that use it, including gReader, Newsify and Sprout Social. If you don't like the mobile apps or the browser extensions, there's now a Feedly web app that's optimized for the desktop and replaces extensions. It's hard to morph from a client to a platforms in a few months.



I'll miss Google Reader, like many other power users. Unfortunately for us, Google is not the right company for niche services. Google wants to create products that are used by hundreds of million of users and Google Reader wasn't one of them. Feedly and other similar services will have to find a business model for something that's no longer cool, no longer supported by many browsers, no longer supported by Twitter (other sites to follow). For many people, social sites offer better value than feed readers and not even Google could change that.

"As a culture we have moved into a realm where the consumption of news is a near-constant process. Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day — replacing the old standard behaviors of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day. (...) Google is looking at pervasive means to surface news across products to address each user's interest with the right information at the right time via the most appropriate means," said Richard Gingras, Senior Director, News & Social Products at Google.

So what will you use instead of Google Reader?

taranamgabata:

did u know, there’s this small rural town in japan called obama.
so there’s this girl in a 2007 drama who moved from the city to obama.
and she hates it at first and blames the town for her misery.
i kid u not. didn’t make this shit up.

After surprising the Doctor Who fandom (and upstaging Dan Harmon) by announcing he would be leaving the show at the end of this year, Matt Smith has released a thank you message for the show’s cast, crew, and fans.

A possibly sleep-deprived Smith (“it’s late and we’ve just finished a night shoot”) filmed the video in Detroit where he is currently working on the Ryan Gosling-directed How To Catch A Monster. Presumably Smith just watched Love Actually, because his video features word cards that give shout-outs to the crew, his castmates (Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill, and Jenna Coleman), showrunner Steven “Moff” Moffatt, and the show’s dedicated fans.

Even without his signature floppy hairstyle, Smith delivers a heartfelt thank you to “Doctor Who land,” explaining, “What makes this job truly spectacular is the fans and the support from the fans. It’s truly unique and it’s ...

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PROS:

• BOOKMARKLET!
• Imports and exports OPML.
• Best solution to the use of wide monitors: a three-pane interface of subscriptions, then item titles, then the full items. All panes are collapsible.
• Extensive keyboard shortcuts, with navigation shortcuts using the GReader/vim-style standard.
• Social first-party sharing with threading comments.
• Comments can be made directly on a sharer’s item, or publicly on any item. Public comments appear everywhere.
• Privacy controls let you limit comments on public shares, or allow only people you approve to see your shared stories at all.
• You can train the reader to “focus” on (promote) shares that match your reading preferences (allegedly; never seen it happen and don’t want/use it).
• Flexible mark-as-read tool lets you mark items older than x days.
• Flexible avatar selection (upload unique to NB or use Gravatar, Twitter, FB).
• Public shares are published to a page with an RSS feed; page can be customzied with colors or custom CSS.
• Interactions list shows social activity at a glance.
• You can view other users’ followers and who they follow. Good for discovery.
• Good community of sharers and commenters.
• Dev is active and listens to feedback.
• Self-supported by paid subscriptions.
• Supports subfolders in feed management.
• In-app email sharing. mailto: links are optionally available as well.

CONS:

• NO SEARCH
• No user-definable tags; the author’s tags come through but are only used for training. You can’t sort or filter by tags.
• Interface is still slower than nearly all other reader webapps. As slow as tOR for me in Chrome and Firefox, sometimes slower.
• Interface uses standard concepts in non-standard ways, and the author is vocal that this is intentional.
  
  Biggest, oldest example: mousing over a folder shows an icon with a triangle pointing right, which replaces the folder to the left of the folder name. Mousing over the triangle points it downward. Clicking it DOES NOT collapse/expand the folder: it pops up a drop-down full of options, and none of them are collapse/expand.
  
  So then how do you collapse/expand the folder? A right-justified plus-sign icon that appears on mouseover, which by reflex makes me think it should actually add a feed to that folder.
  
  So then how do you add a feed to a folder? It’s in that drop-down menu under the collapse/expand psychout arrow! DUH!
  
  This sort of wackiness is all over the interface. Let me know when you need help figuring out why stories are (or aren’t) getting marked as read, aka that stupid triangle floating on the left edge of shares, aka why you have to hit j twice to navigate down past the first item in a feed. Or why you can’t mark all as read while viewing the All Shared Stories feed. Or why you can’t add a comment to an item that was shared without comments.
  
  All of the interface problems predate the May 20 redesign, which was mostly shuffling existing elements and colors around but fixed very little in terms of UX.
  
  
• No anti-troll controls on any commenting (block/ban/hide/mute/moderation)
• Site is not mobile friendly; mobile apps required
• Still the only reader that uniquely can’t handle numerous feeds. Paizo feeds constantly fall over. Comic Book Resources shows each post twice.
• Privacy options don’t allow for friend-of-friend GReader-style discovery.
• Even when you crank the privacy options as far as they go, it’s not clear whether others can still see your recent interactions, followers, and who you follow.
• No third-party sharing options (or if there are, they are buried deep in the interface).
• Only third-party read-it-later option is Evernote, and it’s buried like Hoffa (click a tiny drop-down menu icon that only appears on item title mouseover, then click a small icon on the same row as the Email Story option).
• Feed management is clunky—three to five clicks to move a feed to another folder. No drag-and-drop anything. No ability to organize multiple feeds at once.
• Only the first comment on an item (elsewhere known as the “note”) supports line breaks. Replies to that comment don’t. Why? No reason, it’s just how the input field is designed. Totally arbitrary.
• Use the bookmarklet to embed a YouTube video, then open the BlergBlorg. The embed doesn’t show up. Open another RSS feed reader and subscribe to the BlugBlag’s feed. The embed shows up! NewsBlur can’t render embeds generated by its own bookmarklet.

CON, MAINLY TO FIREHOSE:

• Took VC funding via Y Combinator (startup culture influence).
• S is save, Shift-S is share

Screw it. Everyone else is doing it.

Legislation could help those discharged for their sexual orientation access benefits.

ABC News

Facebook Security Bug Exposed Personal Account Information, Emails And ... TechCrunch A Facebook security bug exposed users' personal contact information (email or phone number) to other users who were connected to them; the bug has affected 6 million accounts. “When people upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook, we try ... Facebook admits year-long data breach exposed 6 million usersReuters Facebook bug exposes contact information of 6 million usersFox News Facebook glitch exposes info of 6M usersUSA TODAY Design & Trend -Valley Public Radio -UPI.com all 156 news articles »

I must say. I love Paula Deen's defense. It has the benefit of being both ridiculous and perhaps something her critics could actually agree about. According to the Wall Street Journal, "A representative for Paula Deen says that the 66-year-old celebrity chef used the "N-word" because she has roots in another era." Or as you might translate this, 'Look, she's on the old side and pretty racist.' Which sounds about right and sort of like the criticism rather than the defense.

Another thing it made me think about though is that these days, in 2013, if you're in your 60s, you really didn't grow up in the 'Old South'. More like you grew up in the Civil Rights Era. Paula Deen was born in 1947. So she was 8 or 9 during the Montgomery bus boycott, sixteen for the March on Washington and twenty-one when Martin Luther King was assassinated.

It's worth remembering how ingrained these words were for whites from the South from a certain era, not only for people who were fierce opponents of civil rights but even from some of their greatest advocates. The words signal the mental world of Jim Crow.

I'll always remember this story told by Roger Wilkins, who was a young attorney in the Johnson administration, but also then and later a civil rights leader, historian, journalist and more.

This is back during the bleeding, breakthrough years of the Civil Rights Movement, with a President who is pushing through the big epochal legislation that changed the face of the nation but also helped wreck his presidency (in electoral terms) and tear the Democratic party apart for a generation. Notably, for Johnson, he did all of this with his eyes quite wide open.

I've read many things about Johnson in this period and it's really human, almost Shakespearean stuff, because you've got this guy raised in the Jim Crow South, who's gotten religion on the civil rights issue and is pushing the stuff in spite of the politics. And yet at some level he's still an old school guy from Jim Crow Texas and can't make sense of why after he's been part of pushing through this landmark legislation and putting the presidency on the side of right that African-Americans aren't more grateful to him. On thr contrary, the country starting to tear itself apart with riots in the big cities and young African-Americans and many non-young African-Americans not at all satisfied with the post-Civil Rights Act status quo.

In any case, Wilkins - then in his early thirties - saw all of this up close and clearly loved and admired the guy at a deep level and understood and breathed the historical context of all he was accomplishing and yet saw his limitations and how he was actually totally lost in the racial politics of the 60s.

Back to that anecdote, Johnson's there with a bunch of aides in Oval Office, Wilkins included, and in a moment of frustration he slips into using the word 'nigger'. This is from an American Experience documentary. It starts with the historian Robert McCullough talking and then Wilkins comes in ...

McCullough: [voice-over] It was called "the Golden Chalice", the marriage of the President's younger daughter, Luci Baines Johnson. One reporter said, "Nobody was invited except the immediate country." It was August 6, 1966. There was war in Vietnam and riots in the streets, but there was still more Johnson hoped to do. What he wanted was time -- time to build his Great Society. "We can't quit now," he told an aide. "This may be the last chance we have." But time was running out.

Over four long, hot summers, riots had become a brutal fact of American life. Johnson looked helplessly on as more than 150 cities went up in flames. Detroit was the worst -- 43 dead, 7,000 arrested, 1,300 buildings destroyed. Johnson dispatched army paratroopers and prepared to send his own task force to investigate. As part of the task force, Roger Wilkins was there as the President issued his final instructions.

Roger Wilkins, Attorney, Johnson Administration: And he started in a low key. "I don't want any bullets in those guns. You hear me? I don't want any bullets in those guns! You hear me, gentlemen? I don't want any bullets in those guns. I don't want it known that any one of my men shot a pregnant nig -- " and he looked at me and his face got red. I was the only black in the room. "Well, I don't -- I just -- no bullets in those guns." But he was clearly embarrassed, and everybody in the room was embarrassed. So then he told us to go home and pack and get an Air Force plane to go to Detroit.

And as we're leaving, he called me and he said, "Come in here, Roger," and I went into his office with him. And he didn't say anything. I mean, I knew he wanted to say, "I didn't mean to say 'nigger'," but he meant to say 'nigger'. And I knew he wanted to say, "I apologize." He didn't know how to say it.

And so he walked me over to the French doors that went out to the Rose Garden, and it's the area where Eisenhower had his putting green. And he looked out, and he looked at me, and he looked down, looked out, looked down. There were pockmarks on the floor where Eisenhower's golf shoes had hit the floor. And he finally looked at me, and he looked at the floor, and he said, "Look what that son of a bitch did to my floor!" And then he patted me on the back and said, "Have a nice trip." And that was his way of apologizing. It was very human, I thought.

Not to state the obvious, but Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908.

It's not proven from the deposition - but the nature of the plaintiff's deposition combined with Deen's 'defense' in her deposition makes it pretty clear that Deen speaks like this ... today, pretty much all the time. And far more than 'talks' like this, it seems pretty clear that she thinks that way too.

That's why I think it's a good thing when this stuff comes out. Because it shakes us up from the comforting denial that that there aren't a lot of people in the country still living in the Paula Deen world, which it would be nice to think is the world of the 1920s but in fact, for a lot of folks, is the world of 2013.

Russian president rejects billionaire US businessman's claim that he pocketed $25,000 diamond ring in St Petersburg in 2005

If Vladimir Putin ever takes anything from you, worry not: he will replace it with something bigger and better.

Addressing allegations that he stole a ring from billionaire Robert Kraft, awarded after the American football team he owns won the Super Bowl, the Russian president said: "You know, I remember neither Mr Kraft nor the ring."

"If it's such a valuable thing for Kraft and his team, then I have a proposal," Putin said in response to a question at an annual economic forum in St Petersburg. "I'll ask our firms to put together a really good, big thing, so everyone will see what an expensive thing it is, with good metal and a stone, so it will be passed from generation to generation in the team, whose interests are represented by Mr Kraft."

The owner of the New England Patriots told a US audience this month that Putin had pocketed the $25,000 (£16,000) diamond-encrusted ring during an awkward meeting in St Petersburg in 2005. "I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, 'I can kill someone with this ring,'" Kraft said, the New York Post reported last week. "I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out."

Kraft said the White House had convinced him to cover up the theft by claiming it was a gift. "I really didn't [want to]," he said. "I had an emotional tie to the ring, it has my name on it."

Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has previously denied that Putin pocketed the ring and said he saw Kraft give it to the longtime president as a present. The ring is on display in a Kremlin library devoted to gifts.

The scandal has dominated coverage of Putin for more than a week, with analysts taking it as a sign of the leader's ruthlessness and love of luxury goods.

Continuing his sarcastic tone, Putin said he thought his proposal "would be the smartest solution partners can ever achieve while tackling such a complicated international problem".

Image via Gizmodo

If you'd prefer the pristine view of your terrarium plant sans soil, check out these fascinating hydroponic terrarium vessels from 1012 Terra.  I wonder if the plants would survive for long?

Adactio:

The official line from Twitter is that RSS is “infrequently used today.” That’s the same justification that Google has given for shutting down Google Reader. It reminds of the joke about the shopkeeper responding to a request for something with “Oh, we don’t stock that — there’s no call for it. It’s funny though, you’re the fifth person to ask today.”

“

I AM SINCIRE Iced hibiscus, rosehip, blueberry, schizandra, orange, mango tea 4

I AM SASSY Virgin strawberry margarita 8.5

I AM MAGICAL I AM MAGICAL House made black bean burger with macadamia nut cheddar, tomato, lettuce, red onion and pickles 12

I AM GRATEFUL Our community supported grain bowl. Shredded kale with local brown rice, black beans and tahini-garlic sauce. We created this bowl to allow for those in financial need to have access to organic vegan food.

”

- Cafe Gratitude – Berkeley | SAMPLE MENU

PROS:
- you can add folders by using a button that says “Add Folder” on it
- imports OPML with folders; tOR feeds came over in the same order and with the same folders
- supports subfolders
- can toggle sorting between oldest and newest first
- interface is clean, fast once the app is loaded, very readable
- shows changes in articles between feed retrievals, though this feature is not toggleable
- shows who shared and liked the item
- item rendering is better than tOR’s; more embeds work, styles are nicer
- @firehose works and links to my profile, even in item notes
- activity stream shows when people share, like, comment on my items, or @mention me on other peoples’ items

CONS:
- SERIOUSLY, NO SEARCH
- NO MOBILE INTERFACE. No app, no mobile web, unresponsive design.
- slooooooooowwww to load pages (minimum 3.19s to respond to initial HTTP request when hitting any URL on hivereader.com; compare to 1.85s on tOR, 1.19s on GReader, 1.10 on r2k)
- all shares are public, no privacy options, can’t block users. http://hivereader.com/u/firehose
- despite ^, THERE’S NO RSS FEED ON YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE PAGE, LOL
- collapsing folders in the reader is unintuitive (click the folder ICON)
- hiding feeds with 0 unread items from the list of subscriptions is unintuitive (click the unlabelled right-justified circle on the same line as the top level of Subscriptions. If the circle is full, you’re showing all feeds. If it’s hollow, you’re hiding feeds with 0 unread items.)
- it does that fucking minimalist UI thing where icon text only shows up when you mouse over an item in a feed, but doing so doesn’t actually save any space in the UI, so what the fuck man
- no tooltips on unlabeled UI elements. click them and find out what they do! (for instance, there’s a book icon on every item. I THINK it toggles the read/unread status, but there’s no label and it doesn’t change state when I click on it)
- difference between read and unread stats in list view: only the title of the item, and only about a 40% change in shades of gray
- shows _everyone_ that you shared or liked an item (no privacy options there either)
- there’s a nonsense max-width on the feed column of 780px. This isn’t bad for reading, but it’s terrible for embeds—several YouTube embeds are wider than this, and the interface cuts them off. One line of CSS fixes this using something like Stylish: .story { max-width: 100% !important; } Just change the percentage to any measurement you prefer.
- comments and notes don’t support any formatting. No bold, italics, not eeven line breaks. Even some punctuation marks get scrubbed if they’re too HTML-y.
- no comment view
- no active friendfinding at all. Can’t search by username, real name, email address.
- no comprehensive, on-demand list of keyboard shortcuts. A few show up on the home page.
- “All Unread Stories” doesn’t include unread shared items from friends
- refreshing a feed to get new items doesn’t appear to work; API call goes out and reports back that the feed isn’t updated (and when it was allegedly last updated), but the same feed updates immediately when refreshed in tOR. (Feed updates in general appear to happen more frequently in tOR.)

CONS, BUT WE’VE LEARNED TO LIVE WITHOUT THEM:
- no share-via-email function, only Twitter and Facebook
- no equivalent to “Note in Reader”, even without a bookmarklet
- no hashtags, no tagging at all
- activity stream is obfuscated (at the bottom of the Home page) and unsortable/unfilterable

CON, ONLY TO FIREHOSE:
- starring is S, sharing is Shift-S

COULD GO EITHER WAY:
- can’t view who follows other users. Makes discovery harder but is slightly more private.
- most links don’t open new tabs by default

putthison:

Shoe Terminology

Yesterday’s post on shoe construction seemed to be popular, so I thought I’d do something similar by going through some more terminology. Pictured above are three of my favorite shoes, with some labeling of their different parts. Click each photo to enlarge them.

Aglet: A small plastic or metal sheath used to protect the end of a shoestring, cord, or drawstring. 

Apron: Some sort of visible stitching or edge that forms a sort of “lake” at the front of the shoe. You typically only see this on derbys or loafers.

Blind Eyelet: See eyelets.

Brogueing: The small perforations and small punches used to decorate a shoe. It’s been said that these were historically done to help country shoes drain out water, but nowadays it’s just for decoration.

Burnishing: A bit of darkening of the leather, usually at the toe or heel. Sometimes it’s called antiquing, especially if it’s done all over the shoe.

Eyelets: The holes through which you stick your shoelaces. Metal rings called grommets are usually used to support these holes. If the grommets are on the exposed side of the leather - the side that you can see - and they’re in a different color than your uppers, then they’re called agatine eyelets. If they match your uppers, they’re called matched agatine, and if they’re on the underside of the leather, they’re called blind eyelets. Generally speaking, blind eyelets are more formal than matched agatine eyelets, which in turn are more formal than agatine. Essentially, the less visible the grommets, the more formal the shoe.

Eyelet tabs: The tabs on a derby that are used to hold eyelets.

Heel cup: A strip of leather on the outside of the heel used to cover the seam joining the quarters.

Heel lifts: Two to four pieces of leather stacked to form a heel. The sides are then usually painted black or brown, depending on the color of the upper.

Insole: The layer of the sole that goes on top of the outsole and midsole. This is what the bottom of your feet touches when you wear your shoes.

Instep: The area of the foot between the toes and the ankle. Much of this is covered by the shoe’s vamp and tongue.

Lining: Most leather shoes have a leather lining that helps the shoe maintain its overall shape. You can see the lining here, and read about unlined shoes here. The lining of the insole section is also called a “sock” and it can be a full length, three-quarters, or just cover the heel section.

Medallion: An ornamental detail at the toe created by punching or perforating the leather.

Outsole: The exposed part of the sole that actually touches the ground.

Pinking: Zig-zag edges on leather, done for decoration. Sometimes this is called gimping because a shoemaker does this with a gimping machine, in which steel tools with various patterns can be fitted to achieve the desired effect.

Quarter: The part of the upper that starts at about the instep and goes back towards the heel. Ever shoe will have two quarters - the parts that cover the inner and outer sides of the foot.

Quarter rubber: A hard, non-slip piece of rubber that’s inserted into the top piece of the heel. Sometimes it’s protected by plastic “heel protectors,” which a cobbler can put in for you.

Scalloping: Like pinking, but instead of a saw-toothed edge, you’ll see a wavy cut.

Sole: The entire part of the shoe that’s below the wearer’s foot. These can be single or double leather, or even HAF (double tapering to a single). The upper and sole make up the whole of the shoe.

Throat: The central part of the vamp that dictates the maximum girth of a shoe. The throatline is the seam that joins the rear part of the vamp to the front part of the quarter.

Toe cap: A piece of leather that covers the toe area of a shoe.

Tongue: The piece of leather that comes between your foot and the shoelaces. When I was a kid, we used to pump these to make our shoes inflate, because it was somehow believed that inflatable shoes would increase our athletic performance.

Topline: The opening of the shoe, where you’d stick your foot in. On athletic shoes, this area is typically padded and referred to as the collar. On women’s shoes, you’ll sometimes see the top most part of the topline decorated with a thin, rolled piece of leather (usually in a contrasting color to the upper). That’s called French binding.

Top piece: The part of the heel lift that actually comes in contact with the ground.

Upper: The part of the shoe that you see that’s above the sole. The upper and sole make up the whole of the shoe.

Vamp: If you take a bird’s eye view of your shoe, this is the center front part of the upper.

Waist: The area of the shoe that supports the mid-section of your foot, where your arch is.

Welt: A strip of material that holds the upper, insole, and sole together. Here we see the welt seam, though it’s important to note that just because you see stitching here doesn’t always mean the shoe has been welted. Sometimes stitches are glued here for decorative purposes.

(Shoes pictured: Edward Green Malvern in Chestnut Antique calf, 202 last; Edward Green Dover in Dark Oak antique calf, 606 last; Meermin Linea Maestro plain toe blucher in dark brown Annonay naturacalf, Hiro last)

Retweets, or RTs, are critical for sharing content on Twitter — the equivalent of forwarding an e-mail to a large list. For some reason, lots of Twitter users, especially journalists and think tankers, like to say in their Twitter bios that RTs are not equal, or ≠, to endorsements. They might think this covers their behinds, but often it’s a sign that they are too clever for their own good. I hate to break it to you, folks, but RTs are implied endorsements

In 1904, the British government in India sent an army into Tibet to force the Dalai Lama to open trade relations with British India. This military incursion was also grew out of British fears of the influence of Russia in Central Asia. The army was headed by Francis Younghusband, and was euphemistically known as the 'Younghusband expedition'. One of several British officers on the expedition was Frederick Marshman Bailey, a young lieutenant. Bailey was also a keen photographer, and documented the progress of the expedition from Sikkim into Tibet, all the way to its final destination in Lhasa.

The nitrate negatives of Bailey's photographs are now held at the British Library, where they are currently being digitized by IDP. Several hundreds are already online, and can be found by searching on the IDP website for the pressmark Neg 1083. The subjects of the photographs include landscapes, buildings and people, including many portraits of Tibetans as well as Bailey himself. Bailey liked to photograph animals, including the elephants that were part of the expedition, Tibetan dogs, goats and antelopes -- the latter often after they had become hunting trophies. The photographs of Lhasa show the city as it was in 1904, ranging from panoramic views of the Potala Palace to busy street scenes like the photograph above.

After the Younghusband expedition, Bailey was appointed Trade Agent to Tibet, and was stationed at Gyantse. He also travelled extensively in Central Asia, China and India, and the photographs from these travels will be digitized along with those from Tibet.

lolzpicx:

Baby tries to eat cookies from a magazine

(RNS) Exodus International, a group that bills itself as “the oldest and largest Christian ministry dealing with faith and homosexuality,” announced late Wednesday (June 19) that it’s shutting its doors.

Exodus’s board unanimously agreed to close the ministry and begin a separate one, though details about the new ministry were unavailable at the time of the organization’s press release.

The announcement came just after Exodus president Alan Chambers released a statement apologizing to the gay community for many actions, including the organization’s promotion of efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation.

“I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents,” Chambers said. “I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly ‘on my side’ who called you names like sodomite—or worse.”

The announcement comes at a critical point for gay rights, as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to issue two potentially decisive rulings on gay marriage and public opinion shifts rapidly in favor of gay rights and even gay marriage.

A recent Gallup Poll showed that 59 percent of Americans now view gay or lesbian relations as “morally acceptable,” a 19-point swing since 2001 and the biggest change seen on any social issue, including divorce, extramarital affairs and other issues.

Chambers disavowed reparative therapy at the annual Gay Christian Network conference in January 2012. “Alan has been moving this way for awhile … but this apology is much more explicit and leaves no room for support for change therapies or demonizing gays.” said Warren Throckmorton, a psychology professor at Grove City College who has long observed the ex-gay movement.

“Exodus has been a lighting rod for Christian discussion about homosexuality over the years and with today’s events will probably continue to be for awhile.”

John Paulk, who was spotted at a gay bar in Washington D.C. in 2000 and left his role as chairman of Exodus, also recently apologized for the reparative therapy he once promoted.

• READ: John Paulk, poster boy for ex-gay movement, recants

Chambers announced the closure of Exodus at the ministry’s 38th annual conference in Irvine, Calif. Local affiliated Exodus ministries, which are autonomous, will continue, but not under the name or umbrella of Exodus.

Exodus began in 1976 by a gay man, Frank Worthen. “Perhaps nothing has brought Exodus into the mainstream of evangelicalism more than its embrace by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family,” wrote Christianity Today in 2007. The ministry has faced some challenges in recent years, including a split with Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago and dissolved partnerships.

In his apology, Chambers acknowledged stories of people who went to Exodus for help only to experience more trauma.

“I have heard stories of shame, sexual misconduct, and false hope,” he said. “In every case that has been brought to my attention, there has been swift action resulting in the removal of these leaders and/or their organizations. But rarely was there an apology or a public acknowledgement by me.”

On Thursday, journalist Lisa Ling’s program “God & Gays,” which features Chambers among others, will air on The Oprah Network. “The organization needs to shut down. Shut down!” a man in the trailer tells Chambers.

 

The post Ex-gay group Exodus International shuts down, president apologizes appeared first on Religion News Service.

Silkworms in a Japanese lab are busy spinning silks with a colorful glow. But these silkworms, unlike others that have been fed rainbow-colored dyes, don't need any dietary intervention to spin in color: They've been genetically engineered to produce fluorescent skeins in shades of red, orange, and green.

Google Reader is set to shut down on July 1, and while several companies have stepped in to fill the void, Feedly has been one of the most successful replacements with more than 12 million users, up from four million before Google announced the end of Google Reader.

Feedly has transitioned from a simple RSS application to an RSS platform with the launch of a new web interface and a cloud platform that supports multiple third-party applications. Feedly Cloud supports one-click migration from Google Reader, which should make it easy for users to switch over without a hassle, and Feedly also provides a standalone web version that can be accessed from any browser.

As of today, feedly cloud is now live, providing a fast and scalable infrastructure that serves as the backbone to feedly, as well as a number of connected applications. Feedly cloud is open today to all users visiting http://feedly.com, providing a simple oneclick migration path from Google Reader.

Feedly cloud also powers a brand new, standalone Web version of feedly (no plugins or extensions needed), making feedly available from any browser, including Opera and Internet Explorer. This was one of the most requested features, and we are thrilled to deliver on this today.

To begin using Feedly, users can visit the website and migrate their Google Reader feeds to Feedly in just a few seconds. Feedly also has a universal app available in the App Store, which can be downloaded for free. [Direct Link]

Vice's Women in Fiction issue is an interesting package. There's a short story by Mary Gaitskill here, an interview with Marilynne Robinson there, and a short story by Joyce Carol Oates over yonder. And then...there's the fashion spread. Featuring models styled and posed as famous female writers who have killed themselves. At their times of death.

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rachel shared this story from Hannanimal.

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Also, Lily Potter would have never wanted an abortion, because she was a financially well-off white woman starting a family in a happy marriage with a secure place at the top of wizarding society.

The question you should be asking is what if Merope Gaunt, an impoverished and uneducated single woman who escaped from a severely abusive family only to become pregnant with the unwanted child of a man who wanted nothing to do with her, had had access to an abortion and not had immense social pressure brainwashing her into carrying to term?

it got better

I'm changing my name in August to Jesus Shuttlesworth Metta World Shuttlesstein Jesus World Peace Shuttles World Something with Jesus Shuttlesworth in it.

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