poor Neal Puckett
poor Neal Puckett
go on, back your gmail up *to the cloud*
Good news, everybody! Your favourite open software licence has been updated!
Our Information Is Very Important
sadly, The Vicarage Drive is not a new experimental propulsion system used by the vicar
fo0bar
swimming pool for neale?
https://mobile.twitter.com/johnroderick/status/166696287838810113
http://csr.lanl.gov/tf/tf4.html
iiinteresting.
treadmill eh? *nudgenudgewinkwink*
Now that's a commit message.
totally SFW. 'The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned.'
There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived.This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living. We surpassed seven billion dead way back between 8000BC and AD1.
In "2001: A Space Odyssey", Arthur C Clark makes the assertion: "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." But Ms Baldwin points out he was not wrong. "He was making his statement in 1968. There were maybe 3.5 billion people currently living on earth so if you use our method, that would be one living person to 29 dead."
And will we ever reach a point where there are more alive than dead? This would imply a very high rate of population growth. "Could we imagine a carrying capacity of the Earth of 100-150 billion? I find that quite unimaginable."
They're counting from 50,000 years ago, "behaviorally modern humans", instead of from 200,000 years ago, "anatomically modern humans", which seems iffy to me.
Mirrored from jwz.org.
Widespread Celebrations But No Pardon For Turing
This month the House of Lords declined to grant a posthumous pardon for the crime of gross indecency for which he was convicted in 1952. Not only was he forced to undergo chemical castration, his security clearance was then withdrawn and he was unable to work for continue his work for GCHQ, Britain's intelligence agency. Turing committed suicide two year's later."A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted."
Mirrored from jwz.org.
Pictures of the actual jaw from its manufacturer, Layerwise:
Also an eerily silent and largely Ken Burnsey video of the manufacturing process:
Mirrored from jwz.org.
Gisele Bundchen continues to diss her hubby’s New England Patriots teammates!
http://yoisthisracist.com/post/17171662782/yo-are-black-ghosts-pale-too
The Death and Return of Superman
"I'm not drunk in the video, I only get about three cups in. The original rant was 45 minutes long, so of course we had to cut a bunch of stuff out for time, and because it was just too stupid. Like for instance the part where Pa Kent dies of a heart attack and literally GOES TO HEAVEN. AND SEES SUPERMAN."
This is an entertaining rant, even though I never read "The Death of Superman", having already been squarely in the "who gives a flying fuck" camp at the time, so I didn't realize just how stupid it was. Apparently it was even stupider than I had imagined. And I can imagine quite a bit. I do disagree with his conclusion, though, that this craven stunt "broke" death in comics. It was already broken when they got there. Characters were dying and coming back all the time long before that, and anyone who thought Superman would stay dead was a fucking idiot.
Mirrored from jwz.org.
would require disclosure of chemicals injected <-> but that would desecrate trade-secrecy --> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jan/30/fracking-regulation-ec-report?newsfeed=true <-- "We don't need new regulations until we've fucked things up much more"
8=========================D
sneakums
protip: if *everybody* "gets it wrong", then what has changed is actually the language itself. That's how this works.
DJ Spooky (author of The Book of Ice) along with Musicsoft Arts, has developed DJ Spooky, a free and recently updated DJing app for use on the iPhone and iPad. DJ Spooky will be speaking at the PSFK Conference NYC on March 30, 2012, headlining the 2012 Plutopia FutureMusic Summit in May 2012 and participating in several other upcoming events.
via PSFK
That's a copyright-suit defense that honestly had never occurred to me.
Earlier I ran some speed/accuracy tests of Beautiful Soup driven by various parsers. Python's built-in HTMLParser scored very poorly, parsing only 52% (Python 2.7.1) or 57% (3.2.2) of my test pages without raising an exception. Well, Ezio Melotti, the maintainer of HTMLParser, has been working for a while on improving HTMLParser's handling of bad HTML. Most of this code is in Python 3.2.2, so I should have been getting the benefit, but it wasn't working for me because of a semi-related bug in HTMLParser, which is fixed in the as-yet-unreleased 3.2.3.
After talking with Ezio today, I was able to monkeypatch BS4 to avoid the bug in 3.2.2. This means on Python 3, BS4 with no external parser installed will give reliability comparable to BS4+lxml (98% versus 99%). It's still about 50% slower, though, parsing about 1300 kb of HTML per second, versus 2100 kb/second for BS4+lxml.
http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c144/pacey78/nickleback.jpg
man, stay fucking classy, republicans
Vienna-based art collective Monochrom has released the short film Earthmoving, a prequel to their forthcoming Sierra Zulu feature film (previous post). Earthmoving was filmed on location at the UN headquarters in Vienna, Austria.
Another day at the United Nations Offices in Vienna. The Austrian Foreign Affairs Ministry invited members of the European Protocol Service, the UN Strategic Command Center for Central Europe, the United States Air Forces and a regional politician from Lower Austria to talk about the future of Soviet Unter-WHAT?!
Dan The Automator fans should get goosebumps while watching this preview for his new Pillowfight project with singer Emily Wells. The upcoming album, due later this year, also features scratches by Kid Koala (who’s worked with Dan past project such at Lovage and Deltron 3030) and well as visuals by David Choe.
Wells has been previewing some Pillowfight songs during some recent shows with Kid Koala (see video below). I’m digging the mix of soulful vocals with Dan’s catchy beats. It’s somewhat reminiscent of his Handsome Boy Modelling School track with Chan Marshall of Cat Power.
Fast food chain Jack in the Box is now serving the Bacon Shake, a limited edition bacon-flavored milkshake made with “real vanilla ice cream, bacon flavored syrup, whipped topping and a maraschino cherry”. It’s part of a bigger campaign called Marry Bacon which asks, “If you like bacon so much, why don’t you marry it?”. The campaign includes a bacon-centric Tumblr feed, a purchasable bacon tuxedo t-shirt and more.
via Eater
simulated neale pickett
Bryan of Chicago-based Coudal Partners created Red Blooded, a love story for Tracie, his wife of 14 years told using Coudal’s new hand-letterpressed product, a red Field Notes memo book.
Danyelle of [dandee] designed her delightful Love Bug Valentines as a way to send her first-grade son to school with unique non-candy Valentine’s Day cards. She has included a template and full instructions on how to make these cards at home.
via Craft
holy shit wtf
I suppose with the space shuttle no longer available, you've got to go with what you've got
Adventures in Plymptoons! by Alexia Anastasio is a documentary about animator Bill Plympton (trailer). The film will be screened on February 17 at the Boulder International Film Festival, February 20 at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana, and March 8 at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, New York.
This is a collaborative “portrait“ piece on Bill Plympton: The King of Indie Animation. It evolved into a uniquely molded peek into Bill’s creative vision and the inspiration for his hand drawn, animation art. The film crew interviewed and followed Bill on his travels to film festivals, animation master classes and personal appearances in New York City, Woodstock, LA and Portland, Oregon where Bill originally hails from and back to his studio in New York City where his animation magic happens.
via Drawn
Five accordion-playing students from the Kum Song School in North Korea have taken on a cover of 1984 hit, Take on Me, originally performed by the Norwegian pop band, a-ha.
a-ha’s eternal pop evergreen performed by young accordeon players from KUM SONG School, filmed in Pyongyang, North Korea december 2011. Part of multi-genre project THE PROMISED LAND by director and artist MORTEN TRAAVIK, opening at the international arts and culture festival Barents Spektakel in Kirkenes, Norway February 8-12, 2012 (Juche 101). For more info please go to www.traavik.info and www.barentsspektakel.no
via Joey deVilla
ok, yeah, that is racist as all get-out
07.02.12 | Santa Ana | Constellation Room
Tickets & Info
08.02.12 | West Hollywood | Troubadour
Tickets & Info
09.02.12 | San Diego | Casbah
Tickets & Info
Band site | tra-la-la-band.com
These radiation safety posters were produced at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1947.
via Retronaut
images via Oak Ridge Associated Universities
Phineas X. Jones of Octophant has created Squid in Morning Dress, an illustration of a squid looking rather dapper. The art’s screenprints were created in collaboration with Nevermind Gallery who have made two versions available to purchase. Last year, we posted an earlier version of this illustration.
“Dapper, you say? Sir, you insult me. I can respect your plainly keen eye for the finest bespoke haberdashery and your appreciation of the same. But to imply that my manner of dress is self-consciously beyond that of any proper gentleman is pure effrontery! Do you take me for a preening dandy, Sir? A foppish twit? I am simply attired in a style suitable and fitting to a squid of my social station and I certainly do not have time for your knavery. Good day to you!”
“I said ‘good day,’ sir!”
Jake Reilly took a 90 day vacation from email, the Internet, cell phones, and other aspects of modern communication and documented his experience in a short video: “The Amish Project.”
Today, online literary journal The New Inquiry published their first eMagazine. The issue is entitled “Precarity,” and includes musings on eFame by My Drunk Kitchen’s Hannah Hart and PostSecret’s Frank Warren.
Our debut issue brings together a diversity of voices and perspectives
on the issue of precarity, complete with original design and
illustration by Imp Kerr. The contents include a dialogue between
Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen and Frank Warren of PostSecret
discussing the unprecedented experience and inherent instability of
sudden, unlooked-for interent fame; essays on the plight of temps, the
exploitation of interns and the tenuous use of so-called ‘erotic
capital’ in the workplace; criticism about the precarious-economy
underpinnings for shows like Breaking Bad and Dexter and an advice
column for living in the end times with Michael Seidenberg.
Portlandia, the television comedy series from IFC, has really outdone themselves with the hilarious song created for season 2, episode 5: Dream of the 1890s. This song plays off the original song that promoted Portlandia titled Dream of the 90s, but this time they compare today’s Portland with 1890s Portland. Also take a look at the behind the scenes video where the show’s creative team discuss the inspiration behind this new version of the song.
Photographer Bobby Neel Adams combines two photos of his portraits subjects—one as a youth and one as an adult—into composite portraits he calls “AgeMaps.” The portraits are composited without the aid of computers.
via PetaPixel & Visual News
Congressman John Fleming (R, LA) recently posted an article on his Facebook page showing disgust for Planned Parenthood’s “abortion by the wholesale.” The article titled Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex was created by The Onion in May 2011 as satire. Fleming posted the article thinking that it was real.
Someone commented under the post:
The Onion is satire, how exactly did you get elected?
via The Daily What and Literally Unbelievable
image via Literally Unbelievable
In the wonderful short film “The Man Who Lived On His Bike,” Montreal-based director Guillaume Blanchet imagines what it would be like to live on a bike.
via Doobybrain.com
Back in 2006, Improv Everywhere sent comedian and black person Colton Dunn to the overwhelmingly white ski resort town of Aspen, Colorado so the inhabitants could meet a black person. Improv Everywhere is remastering and rereleasing some choice videos from its archives to commemorate its 10th anniversary.
Breast cancer survivor, Linda, created What Breast Cancer Is, and is Not, a powerful video that frankly describes her personal experience with cancer. She also shares harsh words for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the controversial breast cancer organization that has recently been in the news.
Breast cancer is fear, it’s being scared. It’s the unknown. It’s trauma. It’s everything plus more.
…And one more thing. One thing cancer is: it makes you frank. It makes you say what you feel, it makes you no longer scared. When your surviving, you’re ready to fight the world and I wanna tell you something right now, the foundation, you showed your ass, now you can kiss mine. Thank you.
via Lori Dorn and Crooks and Liars
Super Bowl watchers in North Platte, Nebraska got the first look at the latest Old Milwaukee beer commercial starring actor and comedian Will Ferrell. The ad, which only aired in Nebraska, shows Ferrell slowly walking through amber waves of grain until the end where he stops and opens up a can of Old Milwaukee. Our recent post, Will Ferrell Creates Unscripted Old Milwaukee Beer Ads For Free in Various Midwest Cities, described his curious involvement with the brand and rounded up all the local commercials he made that we could find.
via AdWeek
Sir, you have my vote.
no! bad bot!
Hostile snow owls are swarming into the United States.
The Drive-In is Thrivin’
America’s newest major industry was regarded as a newfangled novelty a decade or so ago. Now it’s become strictly big business.
By I. B. Neer
WITHOUT leaving the wheel of your car you can spend the most amazing vacation of your life this summer. For the drive-in is really thrivin’!
Without sliding from behind the steering wheel, you’ll be able, to deposit money in a bank, do all your shopping in supermarkets, buy a bouquet of flowers, mail a letter, go to church, pay your gas and electric bills, have prescriptions filled, get your laundry and dry cleaning done, take out insurance, check into a hotel, visit a zoo, have your shoes repaired and buy a bottle of Scotch for the long cool nights.
The drive-in as a big business may appear to have burst suddenly on the American scene, but actually the trend was being developed for more than 20 years. A few roadside restaurants made their first inquiring venture into the feed-’em-on-the-run field in the mid-20s and found it paid off handsomely.Then businessmen in the cities, searching for a solution to the parking problem, took a cue from their country cousins. They started to convert their facilities so that motorists would be spared the wearisome hunt for an open spot on the traffic-choked streets. Again car owners hailed the innovation and before long Yankee ingenuity had developed a new industry.
Look what happened at Jackson Hole Wildlife Park near Moran, Wyo. On hand was the nation’s largest assortment of native big-game animals—buffalo, deer, elk, moose and antelope, last remnants of the vanishing American herds. The officials thought long and hard and finally leaped on the drive-in bandwagon as the best way to give tourists a real close-up of the animals in their native habitat.
Accordingly, they veined the large wooded area with a network of roads and strung almost invisible fences through the fields which keep the animals constantly in sight of motorists driving past. The herds cannot escape the enclosure because of a tricky device at the entrances. Timbers, criss-crossed along the first few yards of roads, are easy for a car to traverse but impossible for an animal.
Four years ago the Rev. Norman L. Hammer of North Hollywood, Calif., decided to do something about the 40 per cent slump in summer attendance at his Sunday services. Making a sort of one-man Gallup survey, he’ found that his parishioners were tempted by picnic grounds, beaches and golf courses come Sundays. Dressing for church, then rushing home to get into play garb, took too much time. So the pastor met his flock halfway.
He fitted up a pulpit in a parking lot behind his church and spread the word that parishioners could drop in on their way to play. First outdoor service was held on July 6, 1947, and soon swank convertibles and wheezing jalopies were pulling in side by side for Sunday morning worship.
Says the pastor with a twinkle in his eye: “The outdoors gets them on Sundays, but we get them first.”
Perhaps the most surprising development in the spectacular growth of the drive-in industry is the fact that such conservative institutions as banks have joined the parade. Eyebrows flew upward in financial circles back in 1936 when the City National Bank of South Bend, Ind., set up a teller’s window facing an alley and announced it was open for curb-service banking. But the idea took root and, according to the American Banking Association, has now spread to more than 500 institutions in 18 states.
The country’s largest and most elaborate drive-in bank is the Exchange National Auto Bank of Chicago, 111., where an average of 600 cars purr past the tellers daily, making 40 per cent of the total deposits. It is constructed in the shape of a huge U surrounded by driveways with ten tellers’ cages in the center. Attendants funnel the cars to the windows and tellers push out metal drawers into which customers drop money, bankbooks and necessary papers. Tellers and depositors communicate through a loudspeaker and microphone arrangement. If the services of a bank officer are needed, the tellers shoot him the papers via pneumatic tubes.
Drive-in theaters have come a long way since the first was opened strictly as a novelty outside Camden, N. J., in 1933. Hit by an almost disastrous slump during the war, they bounced back to the point where in Denver 7,000 persons waited two hours to see a movie, the first world premiere ever to be shown in a drive-in.
Some drive-ins which know all about baby sitting and home-chore problems, cheerfully tell patrons not to stay home on those accounts. They supply nurses and bottle-warming equipment and even do the family laundry while the show is on. The patron deposits a bundle of wash when he enters and gets it back clean when he leaves.
Rainy, windy or foggy nights used to strike deep gloom into the ranks of drive-in owners, but they don’t any more as the battle against the elements is being won. Scientists have now developed a glycerine compound which is sprayed on car windshields to drain off the downpour in transparent sheets instead of driblets. Steel reinforcements keep the huge 50 by 60-foot screens from swaying or toppling in high winds. DDT has banished the mosquito plague and fog-filters have been perfected so that projectionists can sharpen the picture when the mists descend.
The drive-in-and-dine spots come in two models—those in which cute car hops clamp food-laden trays to the car doors, and fully automatic ones which do away with waitresses, tipping and leg work. Perhaps the world’s biggest and swankiest drive-in beanery is the $750,000 edifice near downtown San Francisco, which sprawls over one and one-eighth acres and employs nearly 200 persons, including four traffic cops who flag customers into spots along the 250-car parking area. It serves more than 7,000 meals a day from two huge kitchens, filling each order in an average of six minutes. Otto E. Straub, the builder, spent eight years in an intensive study of food drive-ins before launching his enterprise.
The Motormat in Los Angeles, the first fully automatic drive-in restaurant, served 10,500 meals in its first nine days of operation a few years ago. A motorist parks in one of 20 stalls which fan out from a central, glass-enclosed kitchen. As he slips into place, a bin shaped like an old-fashioned breadbox shoots out from the kitchen on a runner and stops at the car door.
Inside the bin are glasses of water, a menu, a pad and pencil. The customer writes his order, pushes a button and the bin scoots back into the kitchen. In less than a minute, back comes the bin with the bill which must be paid before the meal is served. On its third trip the bin brings the order plus change.
With skyrocketing demand, there appears to be no limit to the types of business flocking to cash in on the curbside gold rush. The National Institute of Cleaning and Dyeing reports that roadside dry-cleaning places are opening by the dozen each week. Laundry field experts say that ten per cent of the nation’s laundry business is now transacted at windows which open on a driveway.
In many communities you can roll into a supermarket and make all your purchases without leaving the car. A California market sports a huge sign at the entrance: “If you don’t see what you want, just keep on driving until you do.”
Even the U.S. Government has become aware of the trend and stepped into line. In many cities, the post office has installed curb-side mailboxes with large gooseneck openings into which drivers can deposit mail without dismounting.
There’s really no end to the variations. The Detroit Edison Co. has opened an office where motorists can drive in, pay bills, leave appliances for repair, arrange for service and drive out. A number of insurance firms have set up offices in driveways and a drive-in night club is doing thriving business in Los Angeles.
In Beverly Hills, Calif., a drive-in liquor store has one rigorous rule. When a customer drives up, the salesman steps out, takes a good look and a big sniff. If he detects any tipsiness whatsoever, he sends the driver on his way. The store won’t sell liquor to drunks.
So, if you’re planning to hit the road this summer, don’t worry about missing the comforts and luxuries of home life. You can get ‘em in drive-ins. All you need is the car, the endurance—and the money. •
Understanding LAWS of SCIENCE
—is easiest when an experiment shuts out all extraneous effects and lets one principle alone shine through. Try these six simple demonstrations to see how strikingly clear their principles become To demonstrate why exposed airplane parts are streamlined or given a tear-drop shape, place a piece of cardboard, bent into such a shape, in front of a candle as shown. Now blow at the rounded end of the model. The air from your breath follows the form and blows the candle flame straight from you, almost as if the obstacle were not there.
Blow at a flat piece of cardboard held in front of the candle, however, and the flame blows toward you! Instead of flowing smoothly around the flat card, the air flows turbulently past it, creating a pocket of low-pressure air behind the card. If permitted in airplane design, unstreamlined parts would create similar pockets behind them, interfering seriously with plane movement.Why do you need more power to start your car than to keep it going at moderate speed? You can get an idea by pulling a weighted toy truck with a rubber band. If you pull gently the band will stretch considerably before the truck starts at all. In the photo the car has not yet started to move.
But once the car starts moving, the band contracts, proving that less force is needed. The reason for this effect is that inertia and static friction unite to resist motion when the truck, or your car, is standing still. When the truck is moving at a constant speed, the only resistance encountered is that of rolling and sliding friction, which is much less than the original static friction.
By suspending two metal plates at opposite sides in a glass of water and connecting them in series with a small electric light bulb and several dry cells, you can readily divide all water-soluble substances into electrolytes and non-electrolytes —substances that form solutions that conduct electricity and those that do not. Add sugar to the water, for instance, and the light does not glow, indicating that sugar is a non-electrolyte.
Add salt to the water, however, and the bulb glows brightly, proving that a salt solution is an electrolyte. You can test other substances similarly. Substances which form electrolytes break up into ions when dissolved in water. It is these ions that carry the electric current.
Because of surface tension, liquid bodies freed of all distorting forces tend to become spherical—a sphere having the smallest surface for a given volume. You can demonstrate this by floating drops of cooking oil in an alcohol-water mixture. Using a flat-sided bottle, fill it two-thirds full of rubbing alcohol and into this put a few drops of the oil. Slowly add water until the drops descend part way into the mixture. To prove the drops will remain spherical regardless of size, enlarge some by injecting more oil into them with a medicine dropper.
Can you fill this modernized version of the Cup of Tantalus? Legend has it that this cup suddenly emptied itself just before reaching the parched lips of the king for whom it was named. Bend a glass or plastic tube in the shape of a question mark, as shown. Then slip a short piece of rubber tubing on the bottom end and press the rubber into the stem of the funnel. The funnel will now hold water until it rises to the top of the bent tube. At this point, siphon action starts and the water drains out. Consequently, if you pour slowly enough, the funnel will never fill up.
You can easily demonstrate the curious fact that heat waves from the Sun, from electric light bulbs, and from other bodies at extremely high temperatures can pass readily through glass, while waves from less highly heated bodies, such as radiators and electric irons, can do so only with difficulty. Set up two sheets of glass as illustrated. Facing one sheet, place an electric iron; facing the other, an electric light bulb. If you now put your hand between the sheets, you can instantly note the difference. The side of your hand facing the light bulb will feel much warmer than the side facing the iron, although the latter is actually giving off a great deal more heat.
Vest-Pocket Life Preserver
DURING many an over-ocean, wartime flight as service inspector of B-24s in the China-Burma-India theater, Engineer Bill Baker’s thoughts of home kept reverting to a time when he. and his sister were lake sailing and their boat capsized, pinning the girl under the sail. Both escaped—but from then on his sister’s love for sail-boating was spoiled by her fear of the water.
Now, high above the Indian Ocean, Brother Bill glanced down at his Mae West life jacket and got an idea. Why not make a tiny life preserver, quickly inflated with carbon dioxide, for water sportsmen who often need life jackets but seldom carry them because of their bulkiness? After the war he finally perfected the Res-Q-Pak, which he (and we) hope will help reduce America’s annual drowning death toll of 7000 and bring confidence to those who aren’t too sure of their swimming ability.
ELECTRIC PENCIL SHARPENER
Get a point on your pencils the easy way—-by motorizing your sharpener.
WHY not add an electric motor to your hand driven pencil sharpener in your home or office and make the chore of putting a point on your pencils a real pleasure? The arrangement outlined in this article does not call for mutilating or altering your present sharpener; merely remove the handle and proceed to mount the unit in the manner shown below. In converting your sharpener, choosing the correct motor is very important. Your motor should be quite powerful, of at least one-sixteenth horse power and oper- ate in the neighborhood of 1150 r.p.m.
For transmitting the power a worm gear unit, having a ratio of approximately twelve to one, is used. These gears can be purchased from any gear company at the cost of only a fraction of a dollar. Mount the 1 in. diameter worm wheel to the sharpener shaft by first turning an adapter, one end of which is pressed into the wheel and the other screwed directly on the sharpener shaft. A cotter pin through the worm wheel hub and a set screw through tapped end of the adapter will insure the gear from slipping when the sharpener is in operation.
Next obtain a wooden base of the general dimensions shown and mount the sharpener in place. Block motor so worm meshes with wheel.
SURE – Pro Wrestling is Honest!
It’s as honest as any other legitimate show on Broadway— and what’s more, doesn’t claim to be anything else! But it’s still killing the reputation of amateur wrestling.
By Clive Howard
A GROUP of prominent amateur wrestlers was trying to place wrestling on the sports program of New York City high schools. Arrangements were made for the members to be heard by a special committee of educators and the prospects looked good.
But when the final meeting came about and the topic was broached, the head of the school committee threw up his hands in horror. “Wrestling? Never!” he exclaimed. “We’ve seen that on television!”
Amateur wrestlers, a unique brand of sportsmen who claim that pure wrestling is as scientific as chess and as grueling as football, are very bitter about the professionals who are responsible for wrestling’s poor reputation today. They say that what goes out over the television cameras isn’t wrestling at all but an exhibition of tumbling, acting and a few holds that could be learned out of any ten-cent book on the art of self-defense.What the amateurs really object to is that what goes on in the pro ring is called. wrestling at all. They claim it has damaged what is most certainly the “purest amateur sport on earth.”
In part, at least, the promoters of professional wrestling deny little of this. One of them is Joe (Toots) Mondt who never calls the bouts contests, matches or even exhibitions. He calls his product a show—and he plans hundreds of shows for 18 important arenas from New York to Florida.
“Anytime we put on a show,” Mondt explains, ‘”we want all the emphasis to be on offensive moves. We want wrestlers to belt each other around good. That’s what people pay to see happen. We don’t want any defensive wrestling in the professional arena.”
This is the root of the whole question of wrestling’s honesty. It has box office integrity, to be sure. But the mere thought of a wrestler refusing to use defensive tactics merely because they are dull, appalls the amateur. “Why,” one amateur wrestler said, “that would be like an outfielder standing aside to let a fly ball fall into the stands just because people like to see home runs.”
But just how phony can a professional wrestling match get? One answer lies in the ruling by the New York State Athletic Commission. Neither the promoter, the television announcer nor anybody else connected with a pro match can advertise it as a contest. The Commission recently issued an ultimatum to promoters to stop implying that what goes on in the professional ring is a contest—it’s an exhibition and it can be called by that name only.
Are the pro matches rigged in advance? Dan Parker, the sports columnist who has battled into oblivion every attempt by professional wrestling to reinstate itself as a competitive sport, once proved an important point in print. Every Monday morning for several months, Parker announced the scheduled winners of matches to take place the rest of the week. He was hardly ever wrong.
Wrestlers who take part in preliminary matches ordinarily get the same amount of money whether they win or lose. This is usually between $75 and $100. Probably, they are also instructed as to how and when they should win or lose. The big-timers don’t appear to be so thoroughly held in reign. Take the case of Primo Camera who lost to Antonino Rocca at the height of his wrestling career. Since that time, Camera’s earnings have dropped and Rocca’s risen—winners demand the big money in exhibitions. The question is, knowing what the wrestling business is like, would Camera have obeyed orders to lose?
Are the matches rehearsed? Well, come with me down a short flight of steps into a basement gym just off Times Square in New York.
The afternoon I wandered into this gym, two wrestlers were working out together on the mat. Both weighed around 240 pounds and both had cauliflower ears. They looked alike except that one had a black beard.
Beard and No-Beard took positions about a foot apart, facing the same direction. No-Beard, standing in front of Beard, reached back and got his arms locked around the back of Beard’s neck. He hefted him onto his own back in about the same way an iceman picks up a huge cake of ice. He bent his knees a little, pushed against Beard’s middle with his own back and yanked down with his arms. Beard sailed out through the air into a half-somersault. He landed on his rear. It sounded like a sack of grain dropped from a third-floor window.
An older man, also dressed in wrestling trunks, got up from a bench along the wall. “No loud enough,” he said in a thick accent.
“Here, I show you.” He took Beard’s place and No-Beard began to yank him up and forward. The man stopped the action at this point to show Beard how to get more height by springing upward as No-Beard yanked. He went sailing through the air and his hands, feet and back all hit flat, at the same instant. This time it sounded like a sack of grain dropped out of an airplane.
Beard and No-Beard rehearsed this version of the Flying Mare until the man with the accent was satisfied it was loud enough. They went through a whole series of holds ending always in loud and spectacular falls.
The match between Beard and No-Beard came off that evening in a small arena in New Jersey. Except for a few standard holds ad libbed as they went along, the whole thing went as rehearsed. Beard, of course, was the Villain. In moments of great anguish he could approximate the piercing squeals of a small pig caught in a concrete mixer.
He lost. For the last several minutes, he allowed himself to be picked up in the Flying Mare and tossed all around the ring. He gave a pretty convincing performance of a man taking a bad beating. The audience loved it.
But this match didn’t go out over television and its promoter was a shoestring operator. The bigtime promoters insist televised matches aren’t rehearsed. After all, they point out, the average professional wrestler goes into the ring as often as five times a week. There wouldn’t be time both to rehearse and wrestle that often.
Back in the days when wrestlers really wrestled, the sport could get horribly dull. Our promoter, Toots Mondt, recalls some matches around 1905 which lasted four or five hours. “All that time,” he explains, “one wrestler would be on the defensive, just countering his opponent’s move and waiting for an opening. The opening would come only after the man on offense got tired out. Then the other fellow would go on the offense. There would be maybe five minutes of action in five hours of wrestling.”
Mondt insists that any wrestler going into one of his shows must have two abilities. “He’s got to be able to wrestle,” Mondt says, “and he has to have showmanship.” Neither, in Mondt’s book, is any good without the other.
Once in a while, Mondt hears of a man who is supposed to be a better wrestler than anybody else in the business. Always in the hope of turning up another Gorgeous George, he scouts every one of them. “They seldom turn out to be any good,” he says. “No color.”
On one lucky ocasion, however, Mondt did turn up a real sensation. In South America while on a tour with Primo Camera he kept hearing about an Argentine wrestler named Rocca. Mondt went to see Rocca wrestle one night and what he saw sent him running for an interpreter. Rocca had developed a tremendous leap and with it a kicking attack that is pure murder. Mondt brought Rocca back to this country and ever since, the Argentinian has been kicking opponents into the audience and dollars into the cash register. In fact, last December an all-time record gate at Madison Square Garden was set by Rocca when he beat Gene (Mr. America) Stanlee—17,854 fans paid out $50,639.28.
Mondt casts his shows carefully. “Say a wrestler is big and slow and maybe not too colorful,” he explains. “We match him with a fast, rough-and-tumble guy with plenty of color. The idea is to get two men into the ring with opposite appeals.”
The acts fall into a set pattern. A clean-looking wrestler almost has to be a hero; he can add crowd appeal by assuming a definite character—the inspiration for which usually comes out of the comic strips. Or, lacking pretty features he can become a villain or figure out something really eccentric.
Look over the list—there’s Gorgeous George with long platinum locks and an English butler who sprays his corner with an atomizer before every match. Then there’s The Bat who dresses like one of the blood-sucking creatures and makes like a vampire throughout his act. He probably got the idea from one of the all-time wrestling showmen—Count Dracula. Dracula always lost—but in the most spectacular way possible. He’d take out a bottle of chloroform and pretend to empty it into his handkerchief and then cover his opponent’s face with it. As the act went, the opponent would fall to the floor, the referee would disqualify Dracula and proclaim the now-conscious opponent the winner.
Because he once caused a near-riot in La Grange, Ga., the town council barred Dracula from appearing there. Did that stop him? It just meant that whenever he played that town he had to change his character. He’d wear a mask and perform as the Masked Marvel!
Some wrestlers have demonstrated fantastic imaginations. Possibly the most vivid belonged to Leo (Lion Man) Savage, a huge bearded man who made the rounds of arenas in the Southwest for several years. Leo’s press agents swore he was discovered in the mountains where, they claimed, he wrestled bears and pulled trees up by the roots. Naturally, his specialty was a bear hug.
Leo did a good job of living up to his advance notice. He’d enter the arena carrying a lighted lantern and leading a coon dog. His cape was a tattered blanket full of moth holes. He claimed he had always wrestled in the mountains by the light of a lantern so he always tried to get the referee to douse the house lights.
Once the match was under way, Leo would try to work his opponent over to his corner, where the coon dog was tied. The dog would sink his teeth into whatever part of the opponent showed up first.
Once, another hillbilly wrestler worked a reed coon into his act and challenged Leo to a match. It wound up with Leo, his opponent, the coon dog and the coon all in one pile in the middle of the ring.
There’s a rumor—no doubt spread by some promoters—that an occupational hazard of professional wrestling is glaucoma, an eye disease nearly always resulting in permanent blindness. It comes, according to the story, from eye gouging.
Well, in the middle ’20′s, there were a few cases of glaucoma. The disease came, not from eye gouging, but from the filth in sweat-and-dirt saturated wrestling mats in arenas and gyms around the country.
Just how much punishment do wrestlers actually take in the ring? Those terrific body falls don’t mean much because the average wrestler is an expert tumbler and knows how to make it look good without hurting himself. Most of the gruesome-looking holds you see are really very mild and gentle if you examine them closely. And, if by some accident, a wrestler is actually hurting his opponent, there’s always the high sign, recognized in every arena. Two quick squeezes on the forgetful wrestler’s arm or leg, a showmanly groan and the hold is relaxed immediately.
If you want to find out what real wrestling is like, drop in at the West Side Y.M.C.A. in New York City. For the last 15 years this “Y” has turned out some of the best amateur wrestling teams in the country. Henry Wittenberg, present Olympic heavyweight champion, is coach of the team. Walter Steinhilber. a top advertising illustrator, is assistant coach. Most of the members are doctors, dentists, lawyers, bank executives—men who wrestled in college and learned to love the sport.
Steinhilber, who weighs 200 pounds, called out a 125-pound amateur to demonstrate to me why some of the standard pro wrestling holds aren’t necessarily good wrestling. They took the starting position of the Flying Mare —the stunt that Beard and No-Beard had so carefully planned before their match.
Steinhilber got his arms around the little fellow’s neck and pulled. Nothing happened. He pulled again and still nothing happened. It soon became evident that nobody could have pulled the slight, 125-pounder into a forward somersault unless he cooperated a little. When the youngster jumped as Steinhilber pulled, the trick worked fine.
Next, Steinhilber demonstrated the stranglehold. Applied by “Strangler” Lewis, this hold could be murderous. But there isn’t anybody in the ring today who can, like Lewis, depress the steel spring supporting a railroad coach in the crook of his arm. Moreover, the hold is applied in a different way.
When Steinhilber tried it on one of the youngsters, he was dumped hard on the mat. There were several ways to break this hold and all were quick and simple.
One by one, using members of the “Y” as demonstrators, Steinhilber ran through the other standard holds used in the pro ring. Against an amateur they resulted in fast falls for the pros Steinhilber showed me that it’s nearly impossible to deliver a forearm or shoulder punch—two favorite pro punches— without leaning forward so far as to go off balance. In amateur wrestling, a man even slightly off balance is headed for trouble.
Gene Tunney, a guy who ought to know, has his own ideas on those murderous-looking blows to the jaw. He says the blow loses most of its force on the shoulder, where the forearm strikes first.
If any further proof is needed of exactly where the pros stand on the question of the sporting aspects of wrestling Henry Wittenberg, the Olympic heavyweight champion, has a story that’ll end all doubts.
He was introduced to a professional heavyweight wrestler whose name would be known to anybody who ever sat for long before a television screen. Naturally, they had a long conversation about wrestling and in parting Wittenberg said: “Stop by the gym sometime and we’ll work out together.”
“Work out together,” said the professional. “What do you mean by that?”
“We’ll wrestle, of course,” said Wittenberg.
“Wrestle?” exclaimed the pro in the tone of a man invited to swim in the Arctic Ocean on New Year’s Eve. “Are you nuts?”
A Kiwi by Peter Woytuk at the 72nd Street subway station, part of his series of sculptures on Broadway in New York City.
photo by Scott Beale
Freedom Is Blogging in Your Underwear, the latest book by Hugh MacLeod, comes out April 26 (pre-order info).
Think of it a wee love letter to the blog. As everything and everybody gets swallowed up by Facebook, Google+ and other death stars, remember the importance of having one’s own piece of real estate to call one’s own…
Interesting.
No mention of what the Secret might be. :(
"Touching is propper to a crooked line"
"I’ve participated in the love themed 4th edition of js1k. My submission is a static image, a procedurally generated 3d rose. [...] It is made by Monte Carlo sampling of explicit piecewise 3d surfaces."
Randall
A triangular UFO, accompanied by the strange sounds phenomenon, was spotted over Dublin, Ireland!
VIENNA - Sales of wine and schnapps with Adolf Hitler on the label are increasing all over Austria.
I didn't know about this until I was in phoenix last year and did a double take
here's lookin at you, multivariate kid
wombat: here's an easy-to-remember history of what is currently AT&T
that has to be fake.
I once got the data header bumped into the message, when I got half of a concatonated, and hte other half didn't ever show up
Screwtape
Hey, I can save 8 cents per litre!
just a joke. really. don't ask any more.
Keel Moose
http://twitter.com/jephjacques/status/166306713874595841
Screwtape (though it has one historical photo mapped twice, to different modern photos :/
Here’s an extended version of The Avengers Super Bowl commercial. The film hits theaters on May 4, 2012.
Here’s the full-length version of Needing/Getting, the new music video by OK Go that doubles as a Super Bowl ad for Chevy Sonic (we posted the teaser trailer last week). The ad is part of Chevy’s Let’s Do This challenge.
OK Go set up over 1000 instruments over two miles of desert outside Los Angeles. A Chevy Sonic was outfitted with retractable pneumatic arms designed to play the instruments, and the band recorded this version of Needing/Getting, singing as they played the instrument array with the car. The video took 4 months of preparation and 4 days of shooting and recording. There are no ringers or stand-ins; Damian took stunt driving lessons. Each piano had the lowest octaves tuned to the same note so that they’d play the right note no matter where they were struck.
"How do robots see the world? How do they gather meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us? This is an experiment in found machine-vision footage, exploring the aesthetics of the robot eye."
Mirrored from jwz.org.
https://github.com/freqDec/slabText/
if you're curious
this one is slightly differently rendered, fwiw
Screwtape: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/demo/example2.html is a fairly good starting point, though it only mentions many of the features rather than use them
http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
In Port Charlotte, Florida, a kitten with two faces had been born recently at the home of Nash Hand and his wife Amanda Forsythe. They named their new two-faced male kitten Harvey Dent, after the Gotham City villain of the same name. This tiny black kitten is considered a Janus cat, one born with diprosopus, a rare congenital disorder. Sadly, the latest news is that this adorable little guy passed away at just two days old. Check out more of the story at WWSB ABC 7.
Harvey Dent is not the only Janus cat that has been featured here, last year we posted about Frank and Louie, the oldest living Janus cat in the world. In that post, artist and Laughing Squid guest blogger Josh Ellingson had shared a great illustration he made of them.
via BuzzFeed
images via WWSB ABC 7
The new music video for Bad Girls by M.I.A. premiered on the launch of Noisey, the new music channel curated by VICE.
The Bicycling and Walking in the United States: 2012 Benchmarking Report shows that bicycling is getting more popular as a method of transportation; the number of commuters who bicycle to work increased by 57% from 2000 to 2009.
Conservationists working in Central Africa to save the world's rarest gorilla have good news: the Cross River gorilla has more suitable habitat than previously thought, including vital corridors that, if protected, can help the great apes move between sites in search of mates, according to the North Carolina Zoo, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and other groups.
Tim Tebow announced last night that he is running for Senate in his home state of Florida.
Screwtape rather
neale neale neale
my standby
How To Be A Dad takes a look the nighttime challenges presented by various Baby Sleep Positions.
via Tastefully Offensive, Bits & Pieces & EatLiver
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting the Sun-like star HD 10180. One planet, Zamina, is identical to earth.
specifically.
now I'm here, and surprised i still have 3G coverage.
I am, however, here: http://m.google.co.uk/u/m/drAZTf
eythian: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avaSdC0QOUM
http://twitter.com/blainecapatch/status/165182901024079873
Well, that's refreshingly frank
sneakums
someone just linked me to: http://www.amazon.com/I-Am-Not-Cop-Novel/dp/1416570667
*facepalm* Shipping physical media is *always* cheaper than network bandwidth, you fools.
(|)____(\/)
! https://twitter.com/#!/humptyfunk
http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/s720x720/421587_10150515425417076_79070446_n.jpg
Should you wish to virtually transfer a kiss to someone over the internet, Singapore-based research study Lovotics (Love + Robotics) may hold the answer. The Kissenger: Kiss Messenger is a set of googly-eyed robotic pigs (or are they rabbits?) that can long-distance emulate and deliver a kiss. One person kisses the robot animal, where it molds its animal lips around that person’s lips, and then the kiss information is sent to the kiss recipient. The recipient then takes their own robot animal and receives the virtual kiss.
Artificial intelligence researcher Hooman Samani is behind the Lovotics study and has also developed the Mini-Surrogate, “small cute, believable and acceptable surrogates of humans for telecommunication.”
Kissenger enables three modes of interaction:
1. Human to Human tele-kiss through the device: bridges the physical gap between two intimately connected individuals. Kissenger plays the mediating role in the kiss interaction by imitating and recreating the lip movement of both users in real time using two digitally connected artificial lips.
2. Human to Robot kiss: enabling an intimate relationship with a robot, such technology provides a new facility for closer and more realistic interactions between humans and robots. In this scenario, one set of artificial lips is integrated in a humanoid robot.
3. Human to Virtual character physical/virtual kiss: provides a link between the virtual and real worlds. Here, humans can kiss virtual characters while playing games and receive physical kisses from their favorite virtual characters. Further, Kissenger can be integrated into modern communication devices to facilitate the interactive communication between natural and technologically mediated environments and enhance human tele-presence.
via Geekologie and CBCnews
http://ftp-master.debian.org/new/pbs_0.80-1.html
Graphic designer Stephen Wildish has just released the 1950s Film Alphabet, a poster that quizzes us on our 1950s movie knowledge. If you like this, we’ve previously posted all of his film alphabet posters. Film alphabet cards, prints and posters are available for purchase from the artist.
now watching, at babby insistence
You may remember we recently posted about the stark minimalistic “falling man” poster that was created to promote the upcoming fifth season of Mad Men. Well, the street version of that poster has taken on a meme of its own, where it has been humorously altered (either in real life or digitally) to incorporate the “falling man” into a funny scene. He can now be found breakdancing, bouncing on a trampoline and being saved by Superman. Someone even brought beloved Muppet, Cookie Monster of Sesame Street, into the act. Gothamist has been taking submissions of the altered image and has posted two galleries of the best ones [gallery 1, gallery 2]. If you wish to alter your own, here is a clean digital version from AMC, the producers of Mad Men.
via Karen Finlay, Slate and Gothamist
images via Gothamist
what an excellent product
UCB Comedy created a series of Super Bowl Dos and Don’ts PSAs reminding people to “don’t be a dick” on game day.
The faint background lines are just to prove that everything really does line up on the baseline grid; without them, the page looks a good deal better.
I see what you did there.
Up to date with the latest typographic fads of the 1990s!
teferi, SpaceHobo
hilarious
Hey, remember that awesome Hello City Planner video about how the Government is going to have to come and confiscate your ice cream cones? I thought the best thing about it was that it was actually created by the SF Planning Department, but I was wrong. It gets better: it turns out, it's a true story!!
Before Ice Cream Shop Can Open, City's Slow Churn
The Ice Cream Bar opened Jan. 21 in the Cole Valley neighborhood -- an homage to the classic parlors of the 1930s, complete with vintage soda fountain and lunch counter seating. It has become an immediate sensation, packed with both families and the foodie crowd, savoring upscale house-made ice creams and exotic sodas (flavorings include pink peppercorn and tobacco). The shop also employs 14 full- and part-time workers.But getting it opened wasn't easy.
Ms. Pries said it took two years to open the restaurant, due largely to the city's morass of permits, procedures and approvals required to start a small business. While waiting for permission to operate, she still had to pay rent and other costs, going deeper into debt each passing month without knowing for sure if she would ever be allowed to open.
Ms. Pries said she had to endure months of runaround and pay a lawyer to determine whether her location (a former grocery, vacant for years) was eligible to become a restaurant. There were permit fees of $20,000; a demand that she create a detailed map of all existing area businesses (the city didn't have one); and an $11,000 charge just to turn on the water.
The ice cream shop's travails are at odds with the frequent promises made by the mayor and many supervisors that small businesses and job creation are top priorities.
"Someone of lesser fortitude would have left three months into it," Ted Loewenberg, president of the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, said of Ms. Pries. "Through these hard times we've heard all the rhetoric about streamlining the process, about one-stop shopping. It hasn't happened."
Even the planning department itself is calling for reform. "Hello City Planner," an animated cartoon produced by the department and posted on its Web site, depicts a litany of farcical city hassles faced by a woman applying to sell ice cream.
Cases like Ms. Pries's inspired the video, although some believe her runaround was exceptionally absurd. Even after she acceded to all the city's demands, her paperwork sat unprocessed for months. Ms. Pries would not say exactly how much it all cost, including construction, but smiled and nodded when asked if it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And let's not forget:
I started the process of trying to cut a door in the wall between my restaurant and nightclub in February 2011. It is now February 2012, and we still don't have the necessary permits and have not yet begun construction. If we have a door in that wall -- and are allowed to let people walk through it -- before 2013, we will consider ourselves lucky.
Mirrored from jwz.org.
</a>83 year-old woman got 3D printed mandible
The University of Hasselt announced today that Belgian and Dutch scientists have successfully replaced a lower jaw with a 3D printed model for a 83 year-old woman. According to the researchers, It is the first custom-made implant in the world to replace an entire lower jaw.The lower jaw of the elderly woman was badly infected and needed to be removed. Considering the age of the patient, a "classical" microsurgical reconstructive surgery takes too long time and can be risky. Therefore a tailor-made implant is the best choice.
The artificial jaw is slightly heavier than a natural jaw, but the patient can easily get used to it.
Update: Pictures!
Mirrored from jwz.org.
I bought one of those poppers but gave up using it after realizing that completely unbuttered popcorn tastes horrible (except as a cereal)
The previous version of my Corn Containment Dome worked pretty well, but still left a bit of a mess. This one was manufactured with tighter tolerances.
Mirrored from jwz.org.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lytum5RPYi1qj26eao1_500.jpg
Sometimes, I work as a private detective.
Well, that's not quite true. Sometimes I break into the office of a private detective and sit there smoking a cheap cigar and hoping that someone will come in and ask me to do something detectivey.
Usually, they just ask me to get out of their office. But this time, I got a customer.
And usually if it's a customer, I say pithy things and hope that this will somehow be a substitution for professional training and certification. But you could tell this guy was trouble from the minute he walked into the room.
He dropped an envelope on my desk. It was labeled IMPORTANT.
"I got this letter in the mail, and it's labeled IMPORTANT," he said.
"I see that," I replied pithily.
"Inside is just a bunch of crappy credit card offers. Normally I'd toss this in the recycling, but it says on the envelope that it's important. I need to find out what's so important about these particular crappy credit card offers."
"Hmm," I replied pithily, "Mister, I think you've been had."
"Back off, gumshoe!" he replied angrily, "I've been hunting for six years now to try to discern the importance of this particular letter, and I haven't gotten a step closer. I know it's important, because it says right there, but I need to unlock the secret importance of it."
I picked up the letter and frowned at it pithily. "It's important because you've been researching it for six years. It's your Questing Beast, the thing you strive for. It represents the tension between the frustration of an unending journey and the thrill of seeing purpose in the world. The quest is what makes it important; beyond that, it's just some crappy credit card offers."
"Thanks," he said. He gave me three crisp hundred dollar bills, which with the word MYSTERIOUS written in Sharpie in the top right corner.
?wtf... ??WTF... ?What the Fucking Fuck... Invading Fucking Babylon 'cause Maybe It's Got The Bomb, or Maybe Will Get It... Have We ?Not Learned Fuck about ?Fuck... ?What Part of F_U_C_K Lies Beyond the Ken of Our Fearless, Reckless, Mindless, Fuckhead Rulers... and Our Free-to-Lie Press: !Fuck You, too, You Fucking Fucks, Fuck You All
Louis C.K. is one of the most successful standup comics around. But he, like everybody else, got there from somewhere. Here he is a bit earlier in the climb, a 1987 set in Boston. It’s pretty disconcerting to see that smile on a young man.
Here’s Louis in the early 90′s, carrot red topped, still fairly conventional, and still working the dolphin jokes:
Louis talked about how he developed as a comic and George Carlin’s influence at a tribute to Carlin a couple years back. And here’s Louis from 2011 on “Talking Funny” a conversation about comedy with Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais. Here he talks about the first bit he wrote that he thought was really funny:
And here’s an outtake from his recent Beacon Theater show, refreshingly dolphin free:
In the age of YouTube, standup comic secret origins sometimes surface, and it’s fun and educational to see the earliest performances of now well established comedians. I’ve posted before about Seinfeld, Leno, Steven Wright, and Sarah Silverman and the cast of 30 Rock. More to come.
A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that watching the Super Bowl causes male impotence!
South Korean artist Kang Duck-Bong creates wonderful painted PVC pipe sculptures of motion-blurred figures.
via Colossal
photos via Gallery 4walls
“PASS/PORT” is a five book set about different issues surrounding international travel. Each book is designed to resemble a passport. The set was created by Lebanese designer Marwan Kaabour.
PASS/PORT is a set of 5 books in the form of passports that critically investigate the different parts of the travel process. The project attempts to represent the ways the travel document embodies the very essence of restriction rather than allows passage. Our political borders are as closed as ever at a time when our notion of the world is that of a global village or an open city.
via BLDGWLF
“motion feel” by Shinji Inamoto is a frenetic computer animation in which objects undergo wide-ranging transformations. The animation is set to the song “La Combe du Tréboulou” by Thiaz Itch.
via who killed bambi & the MAGNOLIUS machine factory
Filmmaker Marilu O’lyaryz is producing a documentary about cheetah conservation efforts in South Africa, and in particular, the work of the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre. She is raising funds for the project on Kickstarter.
MINNESOTA - Authorities report the first official sighting of Gootans in America. Deer Hunters shot at these aliens.
On January 17, a transatlantic conference call between investigators for the FBI and the UK’s Scotland Yard was compromised and recorded by Anonymous hackers. The subject of the call: the international criminal investigation into Anonymous. For more information, see The Guardian’s article on the hack.
via TPM Idea Lab
no relation to foxy
The NOOKA App for iPhone is a clock app with a nontraditional and very intuitive interface (video). It is based on the NOOKA line of watches.
NOOKA™ presents a new way to look at time. Time is the most ubiquitous thing we experience. NOOKA presents a graphical representation of time that transcends the linguistics and math that make telling time difficult for a child to learn – creating a truly intuitive experience to tell time, set alarms, and visualise world-time/timezones.
via Om Malik
Las Vegas-based fashion designer Malina Sharoni is behind Randy Candy (“tasteful edible lingerie”), a line of strung candy bead bikini tops and bottoms. They are available to purchase at Fab.
Randy Candy is for the lovers among us. These bikinis and bottoms, threaded with colorful, edible candy beads, make for confectionery fashion like we’ve never seen before.
Photographer Kai Wong of DigitalRev, a photography-centered social network, provides a useful and somewhat snarky list of do’s and don’ts for street photographers as he takes photos around Hong Kong. Among Wong’s tips: do use a 50mm or wider lens, and “don’t dress like a paedophile.”
via PetaPixel & ISO 1200 Magazine
Places I Haven’t Been (North America) by Evan Drolet Cook
via Hipmunk, Double Takes, Junk Culture & Eyeteeth
photo by Cameron Wittig
there goes my door-to-door digital breast-exam career
Divers Explore New Depths in 1-Man Sub
DEEP sea explorers are now enabled to fathom the ocean’s secrets to a depth of more than 815 feet, thanks to the invention of a (living suit which has been dubbed the “one-man sub.”
Until recently divers could only descend to a depth of about 200 feet, while submarines could only go a little deeper, about 300 ft. In submarines it was not possible to work around in wrecked ships or examine the ocean floor.
The new diving suit, which amounts to an adjustable case carrying a crew of one man, permits minute exploration of the ocean bottom with complete comfort and the utmost flexibility of movement. The upper part of the suit has four windows of thick compressed glass and contains the signal and light controls, the valves and the instruments for measuring pressure and temperature.
The suit is made of Siemans Martin Steel and Fundit Aluminum and weighs only 1000 lbs. Depths attained are seen in drawing.
FLY-SIZE MOTOR RUNS
So tiny that it rests easily on a finger nail, an electric motor constructed by an Italian youth weighs less than an ounce. The Lilliputian power plant has forty-five Parts and develops about eight-one-thousandths of a horsepower.
New Devices Lighten Work of Housewives
Science has invaded the home, much to the housewife’s benefit. Here are seven new inventions that greatly reduce the labor of household tasks, leaving more time for leisure.
This compact container holds a pint of auto polish in top, polish cloths in bottom.
The steam radiator has now gone electric. Heater element, incased by radiator, is connected to wall outlet and warms up room in few minutes.A very useful article for the modern kitchen is now available in the form of scales that tell the busy housewife the number of cups full of butter, flour, sugar, milk or water there are in a pound. It is only necessary to place a quantity of butter on the scales and weigh it. The result in pounds or fractions of a pound can be read in cups or half cups on the scale, which is provided with a knob, permitting it to be rotated. As each ingredient is weighed, the dial is adjusted so as to start at zero.
The “Nifty Sifter,” which prevents lumping of ingredients in mixing dishes. Pressure on handle opens and shuts squeezers.
The capacity of clothes closets is greatly increased with new garment hanger shown above. It is made from attractively finished steel tubing and provided with points that grip into the molding so that no screws or nails are required for installation. The hanger rests on the top of the coat hook rail, and the tube ends hold moth balls or crystals. Insert shows close-up of one end.
Top photo shows the new “Moto-Iron” which handles all types of ironing from flat work to the most exacting hand work, greatly reducing time and effort required of the housewife. Operation is entirely automatic. The ironing pad is vibrated by a small electric motor which pats out the wrinkles in the fabric, leaving a new fluffy finish, even on most delicate cloth. Below—Coffee is measured automatically and unerringly with this container. Tilt it once and it measures coffee for one cup, twice for two cups, etc.
SUBBER
TV Service Instruments for signal circuit analyzing.
When Castle introduced the TV Tuner SUBBER analyzing instrument a couple of years ago it became the first practical way to easily test the VHF tuner, UHF tuner and i.f. amplifier system of any TV receiver. Being lightweight, self contained and battery powered the TV Tuner SUBBER *Mk. IV is the first such instrument which may be carried on service calls and used with ANY color or black and white TV receiver … at $45.95 for the battery powered Mk. IV, or $54.95 for the a.c. plus battery powered Mk. IV-A the instruments have been known to pay for themselves in TIMESAVING in the first two weeks of use!
Now we have introduced the Mk. V Master SUBBER*, an instrument which is absolutely unique . . . there is nothing else like it anywhere! It is completely portable and battery powered, practically foolproof in it’s simplicity of operation when testing ALL the signal stages of any color or black and white TV receiver. The substitution signals available allow tests of the following stages: VHF tuner, UHF tuner, each video i.f. amplifier, video detectors, video amplifiers, 4.5 MHz sound i.f. amplifiers, sound limiter, sound detector and audio amplifier. It includes a signal level meter for testing the antenna signal. Inbuilt telescopic antenna makes the meter adaptable for true field strength measurements. Inbuilt monitor loudspeaker ensures foolproof substitution tests . . . every time!
At $169.95 the Master SUBBER* instrument is the best bargain in an analyzer that has ever been available. It will save oodles of time in the hands of a professional troubleshooter . . . and help advance the novice to professional status.
All SUBBER* instruments come complete with batteries, connecting cables and comprehensive instruction manual. The Master SUBBER* and Mk. IV-A TV Tuner SUBBER* come complete with wall plug-in transformer for 120vac 60 Hz operation.
As an added bonus, all SUBBER* instruments enable use of the high speed age system analyzing procedure invented by Castle . . . the first practical method for analyzing age system defects without confusion.
*A trademark of Castle TV Tuner Service, Inc.
These instruments boast the extra features of all Castle products — advanced technology — modern styling — and they work!
If you need to save some analyzing time . . . you need a SUBBER* instrument!
See your stocking distributor … or write for more details and complete specifications.
CASTLE TV TUNER SERVICE, INC.
5715 N. Western Ave., Chicago, Illinois 60645 Phone: (312) 561-6354
Lobbyist for Hobbyists
“You need a hobby,” warned the doctor. So Dave Elman dug up more than 500,000 pastimes—for other people.
By Fred Horsley
“PICK any noun in the dictionary, and I’ll name you a hobby for that word,” Dave Elman, the originator of radio’s Hobby Lobby, boasted as he leaned back in his office chair in midtown Manhattan.
“All right,” I said and opened up a small dictionary on his desk. “Here’s one for you—auk.”
“That’s easy. I’ve got that hobby right here in the office. Ned Hand of the American Museum of Natural History collects the remains of auks as his hobby. See those bones over in the corner? That’s your auk hobby.”
“Well, here’s a slippery one for you— eel.”
“Know a guy down in Florida who makes a hobby of electric eels. Spends all his spare time trying to find out just how much voltage one of those shocking fish can put out.”“That’s not bad so far, Dave, but who do you know that makes a hobby of eggshells?”
“Believe it or not, there’s a lady out in Milwaukee who makes lovely pictures out of eggshells. She saves all her broken shells, then arranges them on canvas in pretty pictures.”
“I don’t think anybody could do much with an old potato besides putting it in a pot. How about potato?”
Dave pulled his chubby chin a second, then grinned like a cherub.
“‘Got just the man for you. Louis Strakes, a former Manhattan restaurant man. carves faces from potatoes. Does a fine job, too.”
“Well, Dave, this one is going to spoil your perfect score—zero.”
“Zero’s a tough word but even on nothing I can give you something for a hobby. I had an Army officer from Fort Monmouth, N. J., on my show not long ago. His hobby was not merely zero but absolute zero. He was trying to find out whether he could get anything all the way down to zero cold. Theoretically, that’s minus 459.6 degrees Fahrenheit. He hadn’t quite made it yet. but he was having lots of fun trying.”
I was surprised that anyone could make good on such a fantastic boast. Later, when I found that Elman had carefully catalogued more than half a million hobbies in the overflowing files lining his big Madison Avenue offices, it was no longer so amazing that he could name a hobby for any noun you picked out of the dictionary. If Elman used all the hobby material he has stowed about his offices, he could keep running his weekly radio program for more than 400 years without ever repeating a single hobby.
As if he didn’t have enough hobbies already on hand, every week some 4000 hobbyists send him not only letters but samples of their hobbies, which may be anything from soap bubbles to bombs. Being a considerate fellow, he doesn’t want to throw away some item a hobbyist has spent years creating or collecting. Dave’s problem now is not finding hobbies but figuring what to do about all the material that keeps filling up his hobby warehouse and flooding him out of his home and his office.
In Elman’s 49 years on earth he has collected some 550,000 odds and ends from other people’s spare-time activity. Yet he . would gladly give away this entire collection just to have seven worn-out toothbrushes again. For these long-lost molar scrubbers marked his debut in show business.
When he was six, the “doctor” in a medicine show stopping in Fargo, N. D., picked Dave from the sidewalk audience to demonstrate a miraculous tooth-powder that cured everything from rheumatism to fallen arches. Because of Dave’s successful demonstration he was hired to be the model for the show’s seven-day stand. Elman says his payoff was seven battered toothbrushes and “the awfullest gob of penny candy you ever saw in your life.”
After doing a number of small parts in the local theater, he was told to quit the theater or leave school. At sixteen he finally left school for a tent show. He has been a professional entertainer ever since, playing everything from showboats to burlesque before he wound up behind a microphone.
In 1937 Dave’s oldest boy, eight-year-old Jackie, suddenly died of pneumonia. For two weeks he was too upset by his grief to concentrate on anything but the tragedy of his loss. Finally Dave’s doctor told him he would lose his mind if he didn’t pull himself together. The doctor urged him to throw himself into a hobby.
“I went home and got out a book on hobbies,” Dave recalled. “I tried to skim through the first chapters, but I found my mind wandering again. The book was all about stamps, coins and the usual prosaic collecting hobbies. I got so disgusted with the boring stuff, I threw the book against the wall and swore I could dig up more interesting hobbies myself. I used to clip newspaper items that caught my fancy and put them in scrapbooks. I remembered seeing a story about a man whose hobby was angle worms. I started going through the old clippings. Next thing I knew, it was six hours later and I still hadn’t found the angle worm piece. Then I realized that for the first time since my son’s death, I had been absorbed in what I was doing—and that I had found my own hobby in other people’s hobbies.”
The following day Elman began hunting in earnest for newspaper and magazine stories about people with remarkable hobbies. The New York Times and the Herald Tribune gave him permission to search their morgues for more clues to absorbing pastimes. When he had collected some 300 stories on outstanding hobbyists, he got the idea for a radio program.
“I wanted a show that would stimulate the spare-time activities of others so that their lives would be fuller, richer and more meaningful. I wanted to put on that show real, normal people who were enriching their lives with purposeful but fun-producing hobbies—and I wanted to pass on their hobbies to others. That’s how Hobby Lobby started—with each hobbyist lobbying for his own hobby.”
After a tryout on WOR. Hobby Lobby soon changed from an experimental sustaining program to a nationwide commercial feature. Hobby Lobby became the first successful hobby show, although more than 500 had been tried and found wanting.
To make up a show, Elman and his staff screen the most likely letters in his weekly mail and check the office files for seven or eight unusual but varied hobbyists. After he has made a selection, he phones or wires the hobbyists and has them come to New York as his guests, at his expense.
The hobbies for which Dave lobbies on the air range from serious and profitable pastimes to such amusing trivialities as organizing a Union for Abused Husbands, or dreaming up a Rube Goldberg machine for pulling up pants.
But whether the hobby is silly or serious, Dave’s radio audiences seem to have almost as much fun as the hobbyists. His Hooper rating has been as high as 17. That means his listeners were estimated at more than 17,000,-000. His transcribed programs are rebroadcast not only in Canada but even in faraway Africa.
A lot of queer hobbies give satisfaction to no one but the hobbyist, who doesn’t think his particular avocation strange at all. Take Mrs. J. B. Clopton, an Alabama schoolteacher, who paints on cobwebs. She got the idea from reading about an European family who did that delicate artwork. It took Mrs. Clopton two years and several hundred webs to produce her first picture on a cobweb. She exhibited 17 of them to the studio audience, however, when she appeared on Hobby Lobby. According to Dave, those cobweb landscapes and portraits were really beautiful.
Annette Avers was a nice little girl in Portage, Wis. Like other nice little girls in her home town, she sometimes went to the store on errands for her mother. One day when Annette went to the grocery, however, her appearance nearly caused a riot. For on the end of her leash was not a playful puppy but an all too-serious-looking six-foot rattlesnake.
She was a little surprised at all the excitement because, after all, the big rattler was only her favorite pet, Elmer. He had even helped her learn to swim by letting her hang on to his tail as he wiggled through the water. Her father had given Annette her first snake on her very first birthday—not a rattler then but a harmless fox snake. She had loved snakes ever since. In 1940, when she was seven, she appeared on the Hobby Lobby with both hands full of her pets. Before that show, however, Dave took the precaution of building a stout screen between himself and little Annette with her snakes.
Hobbies often mean money as well as fun, as a lot of people on Dave’s show have demonstrated. That profit angle interests almost everybody—that goes for Dave, and me, too.
Blowing square soap bubbles sounds like one of Major Hoople’s goofier projects. Wallace Block of Buffalo, N. Y., who owns a photographic laboratory, claims such wacky bubbling is a practical commercial business. He blows triangular, cylindrical and square bubbles by using a special wire hoop or frame which he dips in the soap solution.
“These goemetrical soap bubbles, Mr. El-man, serve a very good purpose,” Block told Dave before the mike. “They’re used to test the explosive quality of gases. In laboratories they fill a soap bubble with gas, light it, and it explodes. If they used glass, it would shatter and that would be dangerous. But no one has ever been injured by a bursting soap bubble.”
Sometimes Dave comes across a man whose hobby is his fellowman. Such a hobbyist is Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the noted polar explorer. He appeared on Dave’s program to explain why he, an Admiral of the Navy, made a hobby of promoting world peace.
During his second Antarctic expedition, Byrd was alone for six months at the world’s most southerly outpost. There in the loneliness and darkness of the polar night he was poisoned by the fumes from a faulty stove. Death seemed inevitable as he lay helpless in his tiny shack beneath the snow. He thought of the world and its many troubles. He became convinced that war was the greatest folly of mankind. He solemnly resolved that if he lived through this ordeal he would devote all his energy to the cause of peace.
“When the great masses of the people of the world fully comprehend why another general war would end our civilization,” Admiral Byrd declared on Hobby Lobby, “I believe they will do something about it. . . the people of the world are 200 to 1 against war . . . the force for peace is the greatest force in the world … no nation can for long stand the unified condemnation of the world . . . From a practical standpoint, no nation could afford to be put into Coventry by the world …. And it can be done without bloodshed.”
But even with Dave’s best lobbying for the peace-loving Admiral, he couldn’t put over his hobby. For that program took place more than ten years ago—-on the brink of World War II.
Dave keeps on encouraging hobbyists, though, whether they are idealists like the Admiral or practical gagsters like the inventor of the pants-puller-upper. He even encourages his own personal pastimes whenever he gets a chance—fishing for marlin in the deep sea, or trout in the lakes—or playing around with photography. Last year he helped the neighborhood kids in St. Albans, Long Island, become sharp shutterbugs and junior geniuses in the darkroom. Dave’s real hobby, however, is neither fishing nor photography but playing lobbyist for other people’s hobbies. As the signature on his broadcast puts it: “Hello . .. Who? Hobby Lobby? It’s for you, ladies and gentlemen—it’s for you!”‘
Emilie Autumn
El Rey Theatre
Saturday, February 4th
Tickets & Info
[ENTER TO WIN TICKETS]
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm
SpaceHobo: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f434/index.htm
The Original: Accept No Substitutes <-> Especially not --> http://medicalcannabisgrowers.org/
http://teapartyjesus.tumblr.com/
Simone Baruzzi shot a beautiful photo of colorful Chuck Taylor All-Stars arranged in a flower pattern.
via mikl-em & Gaks Designs
photo by Simone Baruzzi
18-year-old Jyoti Amge, who at 2 feet 6 inches is the world's shortest woman, has moved to the U.S. and is running for Congress.
Furry Friday Special! Bigfoot Bundle only $19.95! Make it a WWN Valentines Day! 
http://evan.status.net/notice/1346419
(Finally. I really need to move my "blog to Congress" script over to ikiwiki.)
Dear Representative Stark:
I am writing to ask you to oppose H.R. 3699, the Research Works Act.
If Rep. Darrell Issa came to you and said, "Let's give our grant recipients permission to steal taxpayer-funded equipment from the lab and resell it on the Internet," you would say he was nuts. But this is exactly what H.R. 3699 would do with those scientists' research results.
The Public Access Policy at the National Institutes of Health has been a success, and makes original papers available to health professionals, patients, and their families. Open access to research also encourages follow-up research in the public and private sectors.
H.R. 3699 would throw away these benefits for no gain. The foreign publishing companies that would benefit from this bill are not publishers in the usual sense. They do not provide the same editing and selection functions that a typical magazine does in-house. Our Federally funded researchers already do the work of reviewing and editing at no charge.
Please do what you can to stop H.R. 3699.
Sincerely,
Donald B. Marti Jr.
Okay. This is cool. Not $12,000 cool (?!), but cool.
Experienced players who are up to the challenge might want to try going to the bathroom in expert mode.
original image source unknown
It's a .905 caliber. A ballistic beast!
Several UFOs were spotted over Los Angeles last night.
http://i.imgur.com/7vX09.jpg
That's a pretty cute JavaScript effect.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adeepbreath/4051934218/
contrails? chemtrails, itym!
pipe organ is BIG. (19" server rack to scale)
Donald McBonald is Nicholas Cage?
The UQ: Not Terrible?
good times
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2wVFG3jKbCs/TyVvGFosW2I/AAAAAAAAJqE/w5gaPNqtv6E/s400/wttd.jpg
man, I bet there will be long lines around the Google Store when the new Privacy Policy is officially released
Unicode Character 'PILE OF POO' (U+1F4A9)
Name: PILE OF POO
Block: Miscellaneous Symbols And Pictographs
Category: Symbol, Other [So]
Index entries: POO, PILE OF
Comments: dog dirt
Version: Unicode 6.0.0 (October 2010)
HTML Entity: 💩
Though on my iMac it looks like this, which is far more festive.
I still say it's crazy that Unicode contains things like 💩 and ☃ and but not 
.
Also I note that www.💩.com is still unregistered.
Mirrored from jwz.org.
Researchers have discovered a series of peptides, found on the internal structures of influenza viruses that could lead to the development of a universal vaccine for influenza, one that gives people immunity against all strains of the disease, including seasonal, avian, and swine flu.
Archie McPhee has just released a line of awesome uniquely-shaped flavored candy suckers. The full line includes: a strawberry-flavored Lobster Claw Lollipop, an orange-flavored freshly-plucked Chicken Sucker, a cherry-flavored T-Bone Steak Sucker, a sour-lemon-flavored Fish Head Sucker, a cinnamon-flavored coiled Snake Lollipop, and a banana-flavored Banana Slug Sucker.
Wellington city-wide costume party! (also knows as the Sevens rugby tournament)
there are over 20,000 terrorists in the US.
http://woozle.org/~neale/tmp/sb.html
whoda guessed?
Made from high-end French terry fabric, the Dress Pant Sweatpants from San Francisco-based clothing firm, Betabrand, were designed to give ‘boardroom style” with “bedroom comfort”.
Whether you’re in the office or on the road, rest assured that these trousers will make any day feel like Casual Friday. But no one will be the wiser.
via Time NewsFeed
5ives
BB-Blog
Brian Danger Hicks
Brian Danger Hicks
Brother Ted
Chris Hastings
Clickolinko!
Cooking for Engineers
CulturePulp
Damn Interesting
Don Marti
Evan Prodromou
Fabulist
Great News Network
Ironic Sans
Jay Pinkerton
Jeffrey Rowland
Laughing Squid
Losanjealous
Martin Pool
Mister Bad
Modern Mechanix
Neil Gaiman
Nick Moffitt
Nick's Mail
Paul Graham
Pigdog Journal
Pink Tentacle
Pop Culture Will Eat Itself
Rands in Repose
Ryan North
Scopitones
Sneakums's Mail
Some Idiot
The Champagne of Blogs
Uncle Pedro
Weekly World News -- Breaking News
Yosemite Sam
Yosemite Sam
Zen's Mail
crummy.com
emad
jwz
mikegrb
sneakums
xkcd blag
Last updated:
February 07, 2012 08:32 AM
All times are UTC. Isn't that just super?
Powered by:
