We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Well, it's a nothing sort of Monday. Tuesday's a holiday, and everyone had Friday off, too. By the time the 4th rolls around, everybody's going to be too sunburned and hung over to blow their fingers off with off-brand fireworks properly. We're working in shifts here at Maggie's Farm, though. Bird Dog is still having his blood swapped out at the Peter Thiel/Keith Richards clinic, but the rest of us soldier on. We're not as interesting as Bird Dog, but we always tell the truth as we see it. We all wear really thick intellectual glasses, however. It makes us see things funny.
For instance, I'm not even sure that Donald Trump is Hitler. I know, the science is settled on that one, and I try and I try, but I can't see it. I squint and hold him at arm's length, and lift my lids real high, then rub my eyes, but I just can't picture it. He doesn't even look like Ernst Roehm to me. There's not even a hint of Admiral Raeder about him. I can't even gin up a resemblance to Roderick Spode, the amateur dictator. As far as I can tell, the body politic got tired of having Billy Ray Valentine as president, so we elected Thornton Melon. Meh. On to the links!
The family welcomed John to their home on April 30, 2015 and were even more surprised when they found they would be expecting their third biological child. Seven months later, the DHS contacted the family and asked them if they wanted to foster John's sister Paizley who was born while in jail. He said: 'We literally picked her up in the hospital the next day when she was a day old and brought her straight home.'
The White House usually picks a photo of the day. On June 28, the image they chose showed two girls from Nigeria who were abducted in 2014 by Boko Haram but managed to escape: Joy Bishara and Lydia Pogu. They're flanked by President Donald Trump and his daughter, Ivanka Trump. The photo had been taken the day before. (via The Instapundit)
It is actually rare for a marine mammal to "drown," as they won't inhale underwater; but they do suffocate from a lack of air. Being born underwater can cause problems for newborn whale and dolphin calves. It is the touch of air on the skin which triggers that first, crucial breath. And necropsies sometimes show that an animal never gets to the surface to take its first breath of air.
There has been one arrest following April's disastrous Fyre Festival event, as the Southern District of New York US Attorney's office announced the arrest of Fyre Media founder William McFarland. He's charged with wire fraud for allegedly lying to investors about how much money the company was making from artist bookings. According to Assistant Director-in-Charge William F. Sweeney Jr., "McFarland truly put on a show, misrepresenting the financial status of his businesses in order to rake in lucrative investment deals."
Slowly but surely, it's bound to start dawning on Millennials that the internet is not a magical place where regular old laws don't apply.
Everything about the painting — from the subject matter (a Caucasian man between the age of 30 and 40) to his clothes (black, wide-brimmed hat, black shirt and white collar), facial hair (small mustache and goatee) and even the way his face is positioned (facing right) — was distilled from Rembrandt's body of work.
If Rembrandt was a clapboard, this is vinyl siding.
Her appointment was a victory for the women on the Hill. Though women were integral to the success of the Manhattan Project—scientists like Leona Woods and Mary Lucy Miller played central roles in the creation of the bomb—none occupied leadership positions. In this respect, Serber stood alone. As the head of the scientific library, she became the Manhattan Project’s de facto keeper of secrets, a position that soon saw her targeted for an FBI probe—and almost ended in her being fired from the project.
The quest to portray secretaries as more important than their bosses rolls on. Because girlz.
The new controlled folder feature is designed to protect against viruses and ransomware from locking machines out of certain folders. Ransomware has hit the headlines recently as WannaCry and Petya wreak havoc on older Windows machines worldwide. Microsoft is also including exploit protection into its Windows Defender software in Windows 10, which should help prevent viruses and malware from exploiting vulnerabilities in the first place.
As is usual, the article is refreshingly information-free. It sounds similar to always running Windows as a user, and reserving the administrator role for nothing but recovering an earlier image of your computer if things go south on you.
“Although it hasn’t been tested in a kangaroo-specific environment, there was an instance where black swans were interfering, and so they had to build into the car the ability to recognise animals,” Amy Kaa said. Volvo plans to release its first autonomous cars by 2020 and has pledged zero fatalities or serious injuries from all its cars by that time.
I'm confused by the term "kangaroo-specific environment." What about vaguely kangaroo-ish environments, like bars at closing time?
For the entire video, the camera captures him slowly pedaling by numerous tents under the Hairball, as people congregate near their belongings in the narrow bike path. Shopping carts, recycling bins and more sit in the path. The number of people living in tents is near constant through the video. Waddling described it as “impressively depressing,” when he sent it to the San Francisco Examiner.
As usual, the answer is, "Something must be done." Since this is San Francisco, that means something must be done by someone else, at great expense, to assuage your guilt as you pedal past the poors. The policeman in Oklahoma in the first link shows you what "something" really means, virtue signallers. Get busy.
”Since our work is theoretical and computational it must be still verified experimentally, before it can become a standard model of light in a transparent medium. Measuring the total momentum of a light pulse is not enough but one also has to measure the transferred atomic mass. This should be feasible using present interferometric and microscopic techniques and common photonic materials”, researcher Mikko Partanen says.
I'm not exactly sure, but wouldn't that mean that Tired Light is in, and the Red Shift is out? So Einstein was confused, and the universe probably isn't expanding? Other than that, this isn't big news. I wouldn't worry about it. The scientist is obviously a loon. Look at that quote:
"Since our work is theoretical and computational it must be still
verified experimentally, before it can become a standard model of light
in a transparent medium."
Theoretical, computational work needs to be verified experimentally? Hold on there, Poindexter. That kind of approach doesn't fly in climate science, so I don't think we should pay attention to it in physics, either. Hey, Mikko, just say that because of Republican obstruction, light will keep getting slower and slower until you can catch it with fielder's glove. You'll get a big grant, and the science will be settled.
Well, we're in Day Two of: Gee I miss Bird Dog, and who is this feckless replacement serving up links in his absence? I admit I can't hold a candle to Bird Dog's link output. He reads the whole internet every day, just looking for links for you. Interestingly, he prints the entire internet out on a tractor-feed printer before he reads it. He likes his stories to alternate between white and light green, I guess. I don't know how he does it. I can't manage to read the whole internet every day. My lips get real tired.
For all the Maggie's Farm faithful, I offer that snapshot of Bird Dog relaxing at the day spa while he's away on sabbatical. I hope it tides you over until he returns. I don't want you to get the wrong idea about his reading material, however. He assured me that he was just checking the spelling and grammar for a friend. He's wearing his NSA-proof reading faceguard, of course. He doesn't want the boys at Foggy Bottom, the FBI, the NSA, or Mika Brzkini, er, Brzerker, er, Bazouki, or what ever her name is, knowing what he's thinking while he's reading. Speaking of Mika, I hear she has a tight face and a foggy bottom, too. Normally, Bird Dog wears a tin-foil homburg when he reads instead of the faceguard. Unfortunately, he used the tin foil for cooking during the pig roast, and had to go with his backup.
Anyway, here are the links that Bird Dog would have offered, if he was on duty, and slightly deranged:
The protest, dubbed a 3 p.m. “collective coffee break” by the Guild, began with workers exiting the Times’ Renzo Piano-designed headquarters on Eighth Avenue through a door on 40th Street. The protesters then walked to Eighth Avenue, up to 41st Street and finished the walkout by entering through doors on 41st Street.
But over the last decade a radically different picture of Viking life in Greenland has started to emerge from the remains of the old settlements, and it has received scant coverage outside of academia. “It’s a good thing they can’t make you give your PhD back once you’ve got it,” McGovern jokes. He and the small community of scholars who study the Norse experience in Greenland no longer believe that the Vikings were ever so numerous, or heedlessly despoiled their new home, or failed to adapt when confronted with challenges that threatened them with annihilation.
Conjecture and evidence of Norsemen in the Americas and the North Atlantic keeps piling up, but there's one constant: Jared Diamond is an idiot.
A Viking sword from the 9th or 10th century was discovered in pagan boat grave at Dysnes in Eyjafjörður, North Iceland. It had metal hilts and some organic material such as leather, which has broken down. Boat grave is a burial in which a boat is used either as a container for the dead and the grave goods, or as a part of the grave goods itself. This was common among Vikings but didn’t seem to catch on in Iceland, only around 10 graves of this kind have been found here.
Has anyone asked Jared Diamond to be wrong about this discovery yet?
Less than 24 hours after collecting $300 million in its initial public offering, Blue Apron Holdings Inc. faces the reality of needing more cash -- and soon. The unprofitable meal kit-delivery company, which touted its growth prospects to potential investors on its IPO roadshow, has leaned on its marketing strategy to build a customer base. That outreach eats up a fifth of the company’s total spending.
This tells you all you need to know about the moronic state of IPOs in the "Tech Sector." It's laughable to call a grocery delivery business a tech company just because they have a website, but hey, I don't make the rules. Anyway, "In its IPO prospectus, the company warned that it may never be profitable, adding that it anticipates that “operating expenses and capital expenditures will increase substantially in the foreseeable future.” Got that? In print, it tells you they're not even trying to be a real company. It's free beer tomorrow, forever. Mr. Ponzi to the white phone!
He began his career at Paramount Pictures, serving as production manager on five Hitchcock films: “Rear Window” (1954), “To Catch a Thief” (1955), “The Trouble with Harry” (1955), “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956), and “Vertigo” (1958).
An astonishing body of basically anonymous work. There are much worse epitaphs than that in that town. Ask Lupe Velez.
Back in the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space, some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. It was a weapons test, but one that created a man-made light show that has never been equaled — and hopefully never will.
Good thing that H-Bomb didn't wreck the Earth's Van Allen belt and suspenders.
Despite the embarrassment of rich, beautiful storytelling on TV, many of
us indulge in exactly this sort of time-wasting habit: hate-watching
has reached new heights. Fed by almost endless options for shows to
watch, bolstered by the snark contest that social media has become,
viewers now regularly revel in finding plot holes and analysing
awfulness just as much as they delight in quality programming.
For forty years, I've been listening to people, male and female, highbrow and lowbrow, explaining that they don't really like the soap operas they watch religiously. The author would be happier if she admitted she was shallow and not too bright.
The whole premise of the Internet is the connecting of disparate networks. It started out by only connecting computer networks. But today it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, power networks, communication networks, social networks. It truly is “Inter” now. As we rush towards putting more and more things “in the cloud,” as we rush towards an Internet of Things with no governance beyond profit motive and anarchy, what we’re effectively doing is creating a massive single point of failure for every system we put in it.
My experience with computing and the internet is very extensive. I feel as though I have seen enough to form an overall opinion: It was all a big mistake. The entire tech sector should be rolled back to Microsoft Office and land lines. We'd all be happier, and any important stuff would still get done. Of course, a company that occasionally delivers cardboard boxes filled with wilted arugula couldn't IPO for a third of a billion without the internet, but no plan is perfect.
Well, Bird Dog is worn out. He's weary of finding fascinating links every day. He's gone off to get his groove back. He's going to get his covfefe sharpened. Er, I mean, he's getting his covefefe trimmed. That is to say, his covfefe needed a world class overhaul. Bigly. He's left me in charge of finding a Yuge set of morning links for the Maggie's Farm morning roundup. I'm Haile Salassie to help out.
I found it amusing that everyone in the reglar media pretended that they didn't know that covfefe was simply a typo of the word coverage. In context, it couldn't mean anything else. They like to cast Trump as a vicious bumpkin, so it had to be gibberish, not fat thumbs. And unlike all the misspelled words I see on the internet, covfefe really was just a typo. Everyone claims that they made a typo when they misspell a word, or more usually, use one word when they mean another. Mis-keyed words you're trying to spell correctly are typos. Misspelled words, because you don't know how to spell, aren't.
Back when I was in school, and Galileo used to cheat off me, the teachers instructed us that if you can't spell a word, then you don't know what it means, and you shouldn't use it. I can spell covfefe. I know what it means. It means you're an idiot if you think a sentence fragment typed with your thumbs delivered via mass email is an actionable piece of information. Covfefe away, you Twits!
Using data from dozens of different sources and techniques from a wide range of technologies and disciplines including computer vision, natural language processing, statistics, machine learning, network science, topology, architecture and urbanism, we constructed a new partitioning of the city that resonates with our contemporary moment — 5 boroughs for the 21st century.
Bird Dog claims to like New York City. Me? I think it's a trailer park with a subway. The yokels there marry their own relatives (Hi Woody!), are all tattooed and drug-addicted (Xanax is a drug), and mostly piss outdoors. They can reassemble their five deck chair burrows, er, boroughs, any way they like. It's their covfefe.
The European Union has decided to fine Google an unprecedented $2.7 billion after a years-long investigation into the company’s comparison-shopping product found that it unfairly favored itself over competitors.
The persons in charge of all large internet companies are idiots. They have no idea how they ended up with all that cash. Not one of them can get a repeat success no matter how hard they try, because they ascribe to genius what was dumb luck. They build up huge cash hoards overseas, occasionally fritter them away on pointless boondoggles, refuse to pay taxes so they can distribute them to shareholders, and then childishly think that socialist governments will let them keep it.
Sleeping on the job is one of those workplace taboos — like leaving your desk for lunch or taking an afternoon walk — that we’re taught to look down on. If someone naps at 2 p.m. while the rest of us furiously write memos and respond to emails, surely it must mean they’re slacking off. Or so the assumption goes.
Yes, by all means, take productivity and career advice from the New York Times. I'm fairly certain that the monthly federal unemployment numbers is no longer issued in percentage form, and consists solely of a list of the names of people laid off from the New York Times, and the occasional FBI director.
Awareness and education are key tactics to protect the public as well as the animals. Research from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and the National Parks Service about the biology and behavior of these sharks has helped inform seashore staff and beachgoers about best practices to stay safe.
Awareness and education? Look fellas, let's be reasonable, huh? This is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a fish. And I am not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock.
So, movies are important. We talked a little about one movie yesterday, and it elicited a discussion of many. What do movies mean?
Movies are stories. Some people think movies and other forms of visual entertainment like TV shows are inferior to reading books. I think that's sort of true. If your mind is forced to picture something that has been transmitted to you by the written word, the gray-matter horsepower it takes to make the picture in your head improves its effect somehow. Even a story spoken to you is like that a little. Having all the visual work done for you dulls the effect. It attenuates other effects, though. It's a form of mind control. You'll see my story the way I want it seen, or you won't see it at all.
It's the same for writing. Writing a word with a pencil on paper makes you understand it better than selecting it on a tablet computer. That's one of 6,176,158 reasons why is our children not learning.
Movies aren't more sophisticated than text. I think movies are actually closer to the normal way our pit-scratching, mammoth-pestering ancestors communicated ideas and feelings. The parts that work are a throwback. A pantomime by the firelight. Show, not tell. Or at least, tell, not labor over commas. People are affected by movies and television. Or more to the point, people are influenced by movies and TV.
There's a reason why everyone wears their hair like Laura Petrie one day and talks like Dirty Harry the next. There's a reason why the same people we used to treat like lowlifes -- because they are -- get made into griots and petty Caesars, raised on a pedestal of their residuals. There's a reason why colleges had toga parties in the early sixties, and then again in the eighties when Animal House reminded everyone of reminding everyone about sword and sandal epics like Ben-Hur. Our behavior, mores, speech, and appearance are affected by what we see on the screen. Unfortunately, right now, what we see is pandaemonium.
Wow, there are actual male humans on that list. I thought it would be Audrey Hepburn 10 times. It's a little light on Clint Eastwood, though, isn't it? You had to wear Dirty Harry glasses in the '70s. It was like a law.
Go figure. Kevin Costner's name in the same sentence as "fraud." Must be a day that ends in Y. Of course, he's on the receiving end for a change, instead of the audience. He always sounds like he's reading a phone book with a bite from a peanut butter and Seconal sandwich in his mouth to my ear.
Actually, he was. Two-and-a-half hours of suspense, with Bernard Hermann banging away like a tinknocker, and then the bad guy trips on the stairs and dies like an actor in a kindergarten pageant.
Vincent Van Gogh, Emily Dickinson, Vivian Maier: artists who received the recognition they deserved only after their deaths. With the uproar that echoed across the internet with news of its death, it appears Vine will be joining their ranks.
Oh, brother. That little piece of purple prose is appended to a ranking of the best 6-second video clips on a defunct service cancelled by a soon to be forgotten caterwauling service. That's Remembrance of Things Past to a Millennial.
I've never really understood movie lists. They're always curated under titles like, "The 40 Greatest Zombie Love Stories," or, "Four Dozen Julia Roberts Legal Thrillers You May Have Missed." The ones I really don't get begin with, "The 100 Greatest...
I don't know about you, but I don't think there are 100 movies, total, worth watching twice. A list of 100 Greatest Movies wouldn't need any additional qualifiers. There are maybe a hundred great movies, period. Even a good movie is pretty rare. Office Spaceis a good movie.
It's good because it played small ball. It used offbeat actors and looked at mundane things in a fresh way. Your job sucks and you're lonesome and your boss is just going to have to go ahead and ask you to come in on Saturday. Galaxy Quest came out the same year, and had the same fresh feeling despite the subject matter being pretty well picked over already.
If I had to explain to an alien what the American cultural and business landscape looked like when the clock was about to strike the millennium, I'd show them Office Space. Since they were aliens, I'd have it dubbed in Spanish. The movie is a Swiss army knife of quotes, too. There's one for every occasion. Let's look at the business news today, and see if the little world Mike Judge invented between the lo-pile carpeting and the drop ceiling of Initech still holds up:
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven, I told Bill that if Sandra is going to listen to her headphones while she's filing then I should be able to listen to the radio while I'm collating so I don't see why I should have to turn down the radio because I enjoy listening at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven.
So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life.
I'm thinking I might take that new chick from Logistics. If things go well I might be showing her my O-face. "Oh... Oh... Oh!" You know what I'm talkin' about. "Oh!"
Milt, we're gonna need to go ahead and move you downstairs into storage B. We have some new people coming in, and we need all the space we can get. So if you could just go ahead and pack up your stuff and move it down there, that would be terrific, OK?
I get this weird vibe when I read the newspapers. I'm looking for things to amuse or delight this audience. Nothing seems amusing and delightful to me. Lots of things are funny, but Will Ferrell funny, not Mark Twain funny. Lots of things are delightful. They still publish the obituaries, after all, and there's always people you don't like in there. You have to take your amusements where you find them.
The vibe I'm referring to doesn't really have a coherent theme I can point out. Just the opposite. I'm pointing out the lack of a theme. It reminds me of the interlude just after a trip to Chipotle. You know what's going to happen. You just don't know if that trip to Costco for toilet paper was enough to handle it.
So if you're looking for a theme in today's links, you're bound to be disappointed. It's a burlecue out there, people:
The average person in the United States in unemployable. They are unable to concentrate on anything but a cellphone. You're only hired because they can't get anyone better, and they can't wait to get rid of you. You must become freelancers because there's no other way to force you to pay attention to your work, or starve.
When the nanofibers are embedded within flooring, they’re able to produce electricity that can be harnessed to power lights or charge batteries. And because wood pulp is a cheap, abundant and renewable waste product of several industries, flooring that incorporates the new technology could be as affordable as conventional materials.
Look high. Look low. Go around back. Dig a hole and look at the underpinnings. A number of any kind never appears in that story. I wonder why that is. Wait a minute. No I don't
Google made its money completely by accident. They had a rock in their pocket that kept away tigers in Palo Alto, and they think it will work in the Punjab.
Remember the crack "epidemic" of the 90s? Politicians said prison or midnight basketball would fix it, take your pick. Neither did, but they both took credit. The problem disappeared only after it had utterly destroyed everyone it touched. Cellphones are just like that.
The tech industry is incredibly sanctimonious about imaginary slights to any aggrieved minority. Except anyone older than 35, the hell with them. I have no sympathy. Ten years ago, the aggrieved parties here were snickering in conference rooms about an adult who applied for a job at their startup. Welcome to the wonderful world of freelancing! Now put down the phone, or starve.
Estimated at more than 600,000 people, France has Europe's largest Chinese community. But they have not been in the country as long as more prominent migrant groups, including those from Africa.
There are 600,000 Chinese people in France? Who knew? Say, I was wondering. Are there any French people left in France? I hope they keep at least one around to insult Americans on vacation. It lends a certain charm to the place.
Say, isn't that about the same age as the two people currently applying for George's old job? George retired eight years ago. Ten, if you count when Pelosi took over the country. Is president listed on Old Geek Jobs?
A 28-year-old man leaving the Dancer's Royale strip club on East Colonial Drive fell out of his truck while it was moving, and it ran over his leg, the Florida Highway Patrol said. The incident was reported to FHP at about 2:41 a.m. Tuesday. Authorities said he left his driver’s license behind, and he is known at the strip club.
That's such a wonderful formulation: He is known at the strip club. Are you known at the strip club? Out of the way, peasant! I'm known at the strip club. How do you get known at the strip club? Do you bring quarters instead of dollar bills?
Well, it's Wednesday, people. You might as well swim to the far shore. You're already halfway there.
So, someone knocked on my door yesterday. That's rare. It was a quiet knock, I barely heard it. I spotted a car I didn't recognize in the drive. Also rare. I answered the door. There was a young, soon to be importunate young woman at the door. She was wary and pushy at the same time.
She pushed a garish pamphlet in my hand. She called me by name, which I found very mildly unpleasant. "Have you made up your mind to vote for so-and-so?" I looked at the circular while I wondered about the parsing of the sentence I just heard. It sounded like someone who had rehearsed the wrong line for a play, and delivered a joke during a death scene.
"No," I said. That's all I said.
"Great, I'll put you down as undecided." She produced a small clipboard from behind her back and made a mark. I thought it was fairly rude to record an answer to a question that wasn't put to me as a survey question.
She then asked for my wife by name. I said she was busy. She sort of demanded to see her. I said no. She said, "I'll put her down as undecided, then, too," made another mark on her clipboard, turned abruptly, and hustled off.
I had answered the question put to me truthfully. I had not yet made up my mind to vote for so and so. If he was on fire, I wouldn't piss on him, and if he died, my wife would attend his funeral in a red dress, but no, we had not yet made up our minds to vote for him.
Like most things in the news, I quickly came to the conclusion that everyone in the story and everyone involved in the production of the story was an idiot.
I have a habit now. When I want to find out something about any news story in the United States or elsewhere, I go to the Daily Mail. It's an awful newspaper, but it publishes all the info it can get its hands on. Great pictures. An amazing find.
If you've been under a rock, you might have missed out on the news that the internet sorta crapped out on Friday. You couldn't twit, or twat, or twunt, or twisp, or whatever you call that internet grunting you guys do. You couldn't go to Reddit to visit subreddits that consist of one founder, one reader, and one moderator, adding up to one person. You couldn't binge-watch Game of Cards on Netflix. Or was it Harry of the Rings you like? I forget. Anyway, you couldn't do it.
I didn't notice. You know, if you ask me, the internet is now old enough to be judged on its merits. It kinda sucks. When it doesn't work because your baby monitor and a Cuisinart in the next country don't want it to work, it demonstrates that it was set up and is being run by fools.
Tech oligarchs buy real businesses with borrowed money from fake businesses. You're going to see a lot of people without swim trunks when this tide goes out. I'm not sure this guy is smart enough to buy a real business, so he really better keep a weather eye on the tide chart. At least Bezos has a paper route to fall back on.
The purpose of rigging polls is not discouraging opponents and attracting money from people who want to back the winner. That's gravy. The real purpose is cover for stuffing ballot boxes. James Michael Curley could have told you that.
Do they hand out Nikes and purple blankets? Oh well. No children to pull the plug on you in the hospital when the nurse isn't looking. The nurse will do it when she notices no children come to visit you.
What's it feel like to perform brain surgery? I'd be more interested to know what it feels like to get your brain surgery from someone who can't spell "vise."
Well, it's Monday, and last time I checked, the internet still worked. You're going to have to think of another excuse for not getting anything done this week. Tell them your Samsung Galaxy phone caught on fire, ignited your car's air conditioner, and you got oversampled at Sunday's wine tasting. It's worth a shot.
Almost Saturday Night is a Dave Edmunds song. I know you're going to tell me in the comments that John Fogerty wrote it. I also know that you're going to tell me in the comments that John Fogerty wrote it, but you're going to spell it Fogarty. I know you pretty good, don't I? I know you pretty well, too.
It's a Dave Edmunds song to me because he did it best, or at least made it first to my ear at the appropriate time. He was the first with the most, as they say. That's how the world keeps score. Once you make a recording, it's an artifact. Artifacts don't change. They can be replayed, and judged. The music industry got really big when it began to produce artifacts that could be made on a relative shoestring and then sold on a mass scale. There's a limited amount of performances you can make money from. Records made lots of people rich for the same reason Bill Gates got rich. Once you've made your one thing, you can sell it as many times as you like.
The Beatles are the first musicians I can recall who produced artifacts that were substantially more than captured noises from a performance. That turned the music business into an artifact horserace. In this race, I say Edmunds won. You're going to disagree with me in the comments, I know it. And I also know you're going to spell Edmunds, Edmonds, and Fogerty, Fogarty.
All music is entirely artificial now. Nothing of it has much to do with the performer. They're just nailed to the prow of the artifact ship. There's a navy of men and robots manning the ProTools oars. People won't have it any other way at this point. They prefer the artificial over the real, because that's all they know.
There's a word for people who know real from ersatz, and deliberately choose ersatz. I don't have time to call people names, though. It's almost Saturday night.
People don't buy newspapers to make money. They buy newspapers to wield power. The destruction of the revenue at the New York Times bothers the Pinchy family not one whit. The employees suffer. The people who own the paper get to decide who will get the blame for all the layoffs. Hint: it's not them.
The entirety of the world economy is built on one thing. That is the rock solid belief that the US government will never miss a debt payment and never devalue the dollar to arrest its debt. The entire global economy is built on the asset value of US Treasuries. If there ever comes a time when people begin to doubt the security of that debt, the panic will plunge the world into a new dark age or possible something worse.
I like reading the Z Man, and Zero Hedge, too. Great fun. They're like prophets standing on the corner averring that the world will end yesterday.
Nothing economically productive has happened in the last ten years. Those who ended up in charge can't produce anything of value, and they can't even keep the lights on.
In case you're thinking about chortling at tubby guys with neckbeards and trilbys over a Linux exploit, think again. Linux is the OS on lots and lots of servers. Lots.
Well, Saturdays are slow around the internet, and busy around the farm, so that's all the links you get. Don't despair; it's almost Saturday Night.
Early one morning the sun was shining. I was laying in bed. Must be Saturday.
In my grandparent's lifetime, everyone was expected to work at least half a day on Saturday. Sunday was the only day of rest. My great-grandparents didn't even get that. They had to ask for a whole day off from working far in advance, and their wish might not necessarily be granted.
The peasant working class is reappearing everywhere. Tugging their forelock and saying, "Morning, Guvna" as they hold the door open for their latest Uber cab customer. Hawkers and pedlars don't take the weekends off. That's when they hunt their prey. Er, that didn't sound right. Leisure hours for others are target rich environments. Hmm. That sounded a trifle violent as well. Anyway, they work weekends.
Even the hoity toity don't get Saturday off in the traditional sense anymore. Unless they're smart enough to claim their cellphone ran out of batteries on the weekend. That doesn't work on a steady basis. After all, excuses must be refreshed from time to time. You can only attend your grandmother's funeral like four or five times before the boss catches on.
This is nothing. Wait until someone in the government notices laws do count on the Internet. A lawsuit for money will seem trivial when jail time is in play. Cue Attorney General Pocahontas.
While everyone was busy worrying where a doltish swimmer lost his wallet, the NSA was teaching every bad actor and tinpot dictatorship how to hack even the most secure systems. It's OK, I imagine, because they didn't mean to. Comey means never having to say you're sorry.
Look at the headline. It's magnificent. I love watching Millennials trying to operate punctuation and spelling. Apparently all twelve years of regular schooling now consists of the advice: Take a stab at it. Anyway, we ran a link yesterday that mentioned that internet security warnings often get ignored. This is why ignoring them is usually a good idea.
Half of that list is stupid. The other half would be useless if it were practical, which they won't be. Self-driving cars aren't a problem to be solved, because there's no problem there. Why do Millennials want to sit in a booster seat clutching a ziploc bag of Cheerios and a Gameboy until they're ready for a nursing home? Drive your own damn car. It's not that hard if you're not texting.
Wow, it really is Jimmy Carter's second and third term. BEOG grants are coming back. Can roller disco be far behind? They really did call them BEOG grants back in the day. It's like calling a cash-hole an ATM machine.
This is news? The Pentagon also planned nuclear strikes against the Vatican and Turks and Caicos back in the '60s. That's what they do. If they didn't plan fourteen different ways to move the Soviet Union six inches to the right, the hard way, they should have been fired.
You could have figured this out on your own. Ask yourself, WWTCLTOPED? What Would The Creepiest Little Turd On Planet Earth Do? You can reverse engineer it from there.
I wrote about 500 words of screamingly hilarious text, filled with mordant observations, into the Maggie's Farm website editor. It was like leaving a bucket of corn next to the paddock. It done got et. That means the links for today are late, and they're not funny. Sorta like Game of Thrones. Maggie's makes do with a coal oil powered website, with alcohol lamps on the desks to light our compositing machine, and that's the way we like it.
No text is as funny as the text that gets erased. The fish that got away is always the largest. Writers never can reproduce lost work, even five minutes after they wrote it. Every manuscript is a foreign country as soon as it's written. If the printer accidentally burned Anna Karenina, and you asked Tolstoy to re-write it, he'd probably say something like, "I'm pretty sure it's about Russia, but don't hold me to it."
So if you need a laugh, you'll have to do without my erased observations. Picturing me putting needles in a doll that looks like the webmaster will have to do.
If software warnings from multinational tech companies didn't read like Hop on Pop, maybe people wouldn't ignore them. All the examples I see say things like, "Whoopsie, that shouldn't have happened! Our code monkeys have been dispatched to check into it. Here's a picture of a penguin!"
Another begged question. No cities are liveable. We'll give the article a pass for sticking the mealy-mouthed word "most" in there. Tallest midget in the circus. I like that the first reason a city is "liveable" is healthcare. If your first consideration for where you live is finding a doctor, you'd be happiest in a nursing home, I think.
Not many people know what Cisco does. My impression of the company is that it's 500 times more important than Google, Apple, Facebook, Snapchat, and several hundred other tech companies combined. The Internet is really just a bunch of switches, and Cisco made them all. They're hemorrhaging workers because the CEO decided he (she? I refuse to look it up) wants to be in the Software as a Service business for some reason. After everyone loses their job, and the company tanks, maybe Barnes & Noble will hire him.
I'm confused. I've been assured that it's only trailer parks with confederate flags in the trailer windows where this sort of thing goes on. And we all know that only hillbillies marry their relatives. Woody Allen could tell you that. Is it possible that low-rent behavior isn't about money?
I find Oetzi the Iceman to be the most interesting story of the last 50 years or so. Hmm. Shot in the back with an arrow, and left to die. Dude was a burglar.
If you're unfamiliar with the term, a VPN is a Virtual Private Network. It masks your IP address while you travel the Internet. Well, it sorta does, apparently.
You're right. I don't. Unlike Annabel and Emily from the Daily Mail, I've heard of Photoshop and publicity stunts. Still funny, though. Enjoy!
Say, it's Friday, isn't it? That's like the fifth Monday in a row. I hope our list of links helps you power through until they light the smoking lamp, and the blessed weekend begins. A votre sante, Maggie's readers!
Arthur Hiller has passed away. If the name doesn't ring a bell, he's a movie director. The Hollywood Reporter, charged with identifying him in their headline to a public that left him behind years ago, called him the "director of Love Story." Why they would choose that as his epitaph is telling. About the author, and the industry. Not Arthur Hiller.
Love Story made a lot of money. People in Hollywood find a way to like things that make a lot of money. They prefer working on cranky, obscure things that pay them a lot of money, and don't make anyone else any money, but they sit up straight when a rainmaker like Arthur Hiller walks in the room. Money is power and it's all Hollywood knows.
Arthur Hiller made some fun, interesting movies. You can still watch The In-Laws with Peter Falk and Alan Arkin and get a few laughs from it. He made the pilot for the 60's TV show The Addams Family, which is still very funny to look at. Like its contemporary The Beverly Hillbillies, it was really witty for a short while, before it became like every other dreary thing on TV.
I remember Love Story. It's a bad movie, and must be unwatchable today, even for its devotees. It's not my fault it made money. It got none of mine. It's not Arthur Hiller's fault, really, that it made a lot of money, so don't blame him either. He put his best effort forward for everything he worked at, and people liked him for it. They gave him an award for being generous, once. He remarked, “It’s so embarrassing to receive an award for doing what you should be doing, but I must admit it pleases me greatly.”
That's a better epitaph for the man, surely, than the director of Love Story. RIP
Begging the question in the headline again. Tsk. Tsk. The Pieta is Michelangelo's best work. Even seated Moses could give Dave a run for his money. Moses' ankles are fine. Hell, Dave might not be the most enjoyable statue outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Hercules and Cacus is a blast, and it gives you a two-for-one discount on your sculpture-gazing budget. A statue of a guy about to get his brains beat in is more appropriate than David, when it's outside the town hall where you pay your taxes.
This will be misidentified by conservative pundits as an assault on free speech. It isn't. It's more like wanting to leave the poker game early if you have all the chips.
A true expert in valuation buys companies, he doesn't scratch away in a cubicle estimating value. And he would never tell you what he was thinking. Uber could be worth next to nothing overnight, so valuing it at par with General Motors is silly. There's no scrap metal value in Uber if it goes belly up.
This article is interesting to me for the wrong reasons. I'm amazed at the Colorforms-Highlights-infomercial style that younger generations demand for everything they look at.
All the really old persons I've known in good shape never exercised. They did physical labor out in the landscape. No one with a farmer tan ever needs a sports watch.
This will be quoted far and wide. It equates gullibility in the young with virtue, and wisdom in the elderly as stupidity, so I'm sure the Internet will love it.
So why was George Washington great? Let’s start with the word ‘disinterested,’” Dr. Wood said. Although in modern parlance, it’s often used to mean “uninterested,” George Washington was disinterested in the sense that he was impartial and cared a great deal about appearing so. He was a gentleman in the 18th-century sense, concerned about propriety and virtue—meaning reputation—and in doing things as they were meant to be done.
I've been wrong on the Internet more times than I can count. I am only "corrected" when I'm right.
Well, there's the links. Go and have an interesting, disinterested day, all you beautiful people!
Reading news reports from other countries is fun. You have no chips on their intellectual poker table, so you can read about things with an unjaundiced eye. I think George Washington called the attitude disinterestedness. He meant you shouldn't have a dog in any fight that you stand to benefit from. Old Muttonhead was somewhat phlegmatic, so it's hard to know what he might be thinking about any particular topic, but I've gotten the impression by reading about him that if he saw the capital city that bears his name, he'd bust out the fire and sword. Disinterestedly.
Anyway, I went to Europe this AM and poked around, looking for things I could be disinterested in, hoping they'd interest me. I hope they interest you, too.
That's the actual headline from a Swedish news outlet. I am so very disinterested in all that. The 21st Century is making Hieronymus Bosch look like Thomas Kinkade.
From Austria. Yes, Turkey, the problem is that this information is in the newspaper, not that it's accurate. I'd read the Turkish newspaper, but there aren't any.
Snicker. For some reason I have a Cab Calloway song playing in my head. Won't they just have to turn over all the proceeds to Troy? Hi di hi di hi di ho!
I think this comes under the heading of "slow news day" in Germany. Shouldn't you be shopping for a bottle of ouzo and a spray of flowers for some Greek, to go along with your reparations check? Get busy.
Well, there you have it. Europe. And I though the United States was a silly place. Good night, Mr. and Mrs. Europe, from border to border and coast to coast, and all the ships at sea. You were fun while you lasted.
As you can imagine, I adore the Internet. The Internet is like a bad writing contest with 6 billion contestants and no prize. It's the Telephone Game played in semaphore by myopics. It's a vast playground for hunches about grammar, with capitalization carbuncles appearing here and there, garnished with improvisational spelling, in a passive voice reduction. Not to mention the mixed metaphors.
Some wags went on a safari looking for bad writing, and called it the Bulwer-Lytton Contest. We all know its humble beginnings. Poor Georgie B-L was just doing his best to write a novel back in 1830:
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
That ain't Shakespeare, but honestly, it can't compete with the Huffington Post for triteness. It's just the sort of writing that makes you put the book back on the library shelf, and pick up the next one. No. Big. Deal.
But they've made it a contest, so it is a big deal. I hate it. Encouraging people on the Internet to write badly on purpose is a fool's errand. That's what they do. Encouraging them to write well, or even write gooder, would strike me as a worthier task. But then again, the contest is presented by Writer's Digest, whose raison d'etre is encouraging girls who should have flunked out of jo school to write another sparkly vampire bodice-ripper using their specious advice. Yawn.
I want bad writing that turns out that way on accident, to use the parlance of our times. I want bad writing written in dead earnest. Apparently, I wanted the Bad Writing Contest.
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Now that's what I'm talkin' about. I'm slightly confused, though. It says a girl wrote it, but she forgot to put three exclamation points at the end. A minor oversight, but telling.
Now, on to our quotidian dose of bad writing from all over:
Ah, the Internet, where every question is begged. Are computer coders part of the Elite Class? No. They'll revert to the equivalent of journeyman plumbers in the near future. Perfectly respectable, but hardly elite. The author's inability to order concrete without an iPhone app is telling. It's telling about him, not the concrete company. And the word "into" in the headline should be "to."
Along the same lines as Mr. I Retired at 28 and Want a Medal. They always say the answer to any question posed in a headline is invariably, "No." All I needed to see was a long table covered with Apple computers to know nothing productive was going on.
Can a free coding school run by Russian mobsters be the cheap ticket into the Elite Class? More likely than the last two entries. I bet they run Linux.
There's a question in the headline again. It's a fake though. The question is begged, not answered with a "No." Diesel engines have been obsolete for a long time. The reasons they keep making them are weird.
The practice of screwing a bizarre melange of merde to the walls in taverns is a lot older than all the chains mentioned in this interesting article. Every barroom, from the '30s on, put memorabilia from the patrons on the walls to keep them coming back. After they died, it looked randomly chosen to a new crop of drunks.
Boy howdy, the title of that blog, IN ALL CAPS, isn't exaggerating. Do they watch Danish children's television in Belgium? It seems to have broken them in some fundamental way.
Every generation has something that brings a tear of remembrance to the eye. It's a moving target. You'd kill to play Knock Down with your old baseball cards, and people younger than you want to play Donkey Kong Junior on a tabletop.
Some day, everyone will realize that the last ten years has consisted of nothing but skimming. Nothing of value was created. Google stole the Yellow Pages, Facebook stole the dry-erase board hanging on a girl's dorm room door, and Apple gave you a little handheld television to watch while driving.
Well, there's the links for today. When you're done reading, I hope you find a cheap ticket "into" the Elite Class that doesn't require learning javascript. It sucks. Happy Tuesday!
Look, I just thought you should know. I barely know how to break news like this to you. But this is the kind of earth-shaking development that must be disseminated. Send small children out of the room, pour yourself a bracer, sit down, and know this: A swimmer has been inconvenienced!
It's Monday morning, and I know you're relying on Maggie's Farm to cover the globe like Sherwin Williams to get the stories that really matter. I'm trying to take my stint as the Farm's resident hooligan seriously. I felt an obligation to get up to speed on the most important stories on the planet, and report them here to you. I checked in with MSNBSBBclatcheyrudge, and I was shocked, shocked at what I discovered. I was expecting all sorts of bad things. Things like race riots, trouble in the Balkans, plagues of disease-carrying mosquitoes, fixed elections. I didn't see any of that mentioned, so I guess everything's OK on those fronts. But boy howdy, a swimmer has been inconvenienced.
I mean, when a swimmer can be inconvenienced by some ruffian, some footpad, some cad, some bounder, some slavering miscreant -- certainly the end times must be upon us. I forget which horseman of the apocalypse was sent to inconvenience a swimmer, but he's right up there, I bet.
Well, that's it for today's links. Tune in tomorrow, and I promise I'll find out if any swimmers discover there isn't any toilet paper in their stall, or stub their toe on a coffee table, or are made to wait in line over-long at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, or are forced to fly economy.
Roger here. Bird Dog has gone to the spa to take the waters. And by "spa," I mean tavern. And by "waters," I mean single malt. Anyway, he's left me to guard the chicken coop until he can finish his sabbatical, and make bail. I don't know what to talk about. That's because I'm not interesting, the way Bird Dog is.
I'm not interesting, but that's beside the point. What makes me even more useless to the lovely people here at the Farm is that I'm not interested. I don't care about much of anything that makes the front page of the papers, or the nightly news, or Huffpo. At least, I think I'm not interested, because I have no idea what's going on at those venues. It's not a pose like you'd suppose. I think it's all twaddle and avoid looking at it.
I'll try to take the path less traveled, and look for interesting things:
This is called "begging the question," even though it's not a question. It's the smug version of petitio principii. The real question is whether natural photosynthesis is particularly efficient. It isn't. There's just a lot of it going on.
Haven't you heard? Top 10 lists are so 2010. Why, no one that doesn't eat their vegetables by scooping up mashed potatoes with a butter knife and smooshing them in the peas refers to TOP TEN lists any longer. It's just not done by our class of people, dear. We're busy, important people who don't have time to peruse ten entries on any topic. If we wanted a decalogue, we'd hire Moses and a headstone company. We live in a Snapchat society. Keep it under a half a dozen, will ya?
In order to get in the spirit of the exercise, we've come up with a sort of test pattern of TOP FIVE lists. Don't strain yourself reading them all at once. I tried, and my lips got really tired. My advice is to dip into this treasure trove of minutiae over a period of days. When you're all done, you'll have bulked-up reading muscles and can move on to reading the comment sections on the daily crop reports from the USDA. It's bracing stuff.
So without further ado, here's our TOP FIVE LIST OF TOP FIVE LISTS:
This is dedicated to all the people promising to leave the country if Donald Trump wins the election. It also works for all the preppers that are promising to leave the country if Donald Trump loses. It's also handy for Libertarians who promise to leave the country whether Donald Trump wins or loses.
It's against the law in Georgia to use foul language in front of a dead body in a funeral home? People in Georgia must know a different class of people than I do. There's no other reason to attend a wake in my social set.
Hmm. I didn't see clerk at the Quik-E-Mart on there. On the plus side, it's an infographic, which is great for people who think a TOP FIVE list is a workout.
I'm really dull, so I just bought 1,100 Neon Tetras and dumped them into a goldfish bowl. It saves a lot of time, because there's only room for 17 tablespoons of water, making it much easier to clean.
Bucket lists are things you're supposed to do before you die, aren't they? Well, my list only has one item on it. I want to move to Georgia so no one can tell me what they think of me after I croak.
If you're dissatisfied with our selection of TOP FIVE lists, suggest one in the comments. Remember, six or more is right out!
Well, another Monday has rolled around. Time to leave the old rack and earn the spondulac. Exit your cribs to get the dibs. Act the noble savage to get the happy cabbage. Brave the debris to get the dough-re-mi. Feel the balm of the oil of palm. I hope by close of business that you pile the oof up to the roof.
Your humble blogger (I've never encountered of one of those, but stay with me) doesn't get a day off, even though blogging is dead. Oh, you haven't heard? You know; that blogging is dead? It was all over the blogs a year ago.
I have my doubts. I read blogs, including this one. Then again, I'm not like most people, so maybe you should take what I say at a heavy discount. I still bring my lunch to work in a plaid metal lunchbox. You should probably find a more forward-looking guru, like H.G. Wells or something.
Let's test out the blogging is dead theory. We'll visit the first blog in the Maggie's blogroll listed under "Mostly Political", Ace of Spades, and take a look at their blogroll. If it's full of going concerns, we'll forget the whole idea of the end of blogging. If tumbleweeds reign supreme, I'll be the first to throw a handful of dirt in my own face:
Alarming News: Just a bunch of links to writing done elsewhere Ambient Irony: Dead American Digest: Very much alive The Anchoress: Dead Anticipatory Retaliation: Dead Antidisestablishmentarianismesque: Abandoned Anwyn: Abandoned Armies of Liberation: Dead Attu Sees All: Contains one post from five years ago Bad State of Gruntledness: Taken over by a porn site Bastard Sword: Nothing since 2006 The Baron: Dead The Bastige: No idea what's going on there, but it's not a blog anymore Beautiful Atrocities: Taken over by a Thai spammer, then abandoned anyway Beleaguered Conservative: Abandoned or hijacked. I'd rather touch Charlie Sheen's pecker than press the redirect button on that page
Well, you see what I mean. I can assure you that the percentage of live blogs to festering pixel corpses doesn't improve as you continue down the blogroll. I guess it's true what Sir Walter Scott said about blogging:
Despite those URLs, PayPal buttons, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust, from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonored, and unlinked.
I'm not picking on Ace, of course. He doesn't have time to read his blog. If he's like most bloggers, he leaves his blogroll as it was eight years ago, as a kind of shrine to his friends, many of whom are his commenters, I'm sure.
So blogs are dead, I guess. Long live ... I dunno: Short-form articles written daily?
"Don’t do stupid shit" was a synonym for "I'm not going to get trapped in a Vietnam". However Rothkopf observed that the most important Red Line in Obama's world could be crossed the other way around. You could get into Vietnam by backing into it. The administration's greatest weakness was failing to realize that inaction was also policy. Not doing something could also be "stupid shit" and passivity was no protection from landing ass backwards in a quagmire.
Obama is barely smart enough to order the most expensive thing on the menu at a Sizzler, and the press corps thinks he's a polymath.
The most organic and eco-friendly way of dealing with weeds is the old-fashioned way: physically removing them. “Physical removal” can mean pulling weeds out completely, but that involves both grasping the weed and doing something with it. A better solution is to just smash it way down into the ground, which is faster, easier, and something a robot can do excellently
If this works better than the current eco-friendly method, which is having illegal aliens crapping on the weeds, then Chipotle and I are all for it.
“Unless you want to go live in a cave away from society,” Nissenbaum notes, you need to be online—often for work or to access government services. Online services claim they’re voluntary, but the cost of being a refusenik grows every day.In this context, obfuscation is a clever judo move. It’s a way for people in a relatively weak position—which is to say all of us, compared with Google or Facebook—to fight back.
Living in a cave is the alternative, huh? You could, you know, shut the goddamned thing off.
Federal and state regulations for burning firewood are increasing yearly. If you’re worried that you might not be able to heat your home using your existing wood stove or wood furnace, changing over to burning wood pellets is a smart move.
I say the old ways are the best ways, so I'm going to stick with burning peat in a brazier in the middle of my great hall, thanks.
Participant A maintained a stable blood glucose level after eating a cookie but responded with elevated glucose levels after eating a banana. Conversely, participant B experienced an increase in blood glucose level after eating a cookie, but not after consuming a banana.
In order to test my personal reaction to ingesting a cookie, a banana, and seven scotch and sodas, you're going to have to give me a banana and a cookie.
Less than three months after his arrival, Luo and 76 other Chinese were arrested. They have been in jail for nearly a year, accused of running an illegal call center and engaging in or intending to commit cybercrime—charges of which they say they are innocent. If convicted, they face up to 15 years in prison.
Help, I'm a Chinese businessman being held in a Kenyan jail, and I'll transfer one million dollars to your account if you'll just pay my bail. Please enter your bank account information...
The “music industry” is a misnomer itself since it lends credence to the thought that there is a singular music industry in which to exist and do business. This is incorrect because there are in fact multiple paradigms that exist within the music universe, all of which operate according to very different rules. Independent music is a whole different world than major label music, and thus the opportunities that lie there do not necessarily mirror the opportunities that lie in the latter.
After reading the article, I realize I have no idea how anything works anymore, but neither does anyone else, so I don't feel bad.
When I speak about the failure of Italian films to translate, I’m not only referring to the work of auteurs beloved by a fairly esoteric circle of scholars and cinephiles. An excellent picture like Gomorra, for example—based on an international best seller and the winner of the Special Jury Prize in Cannes—did poorly at the U.S. box office: it shows the worse of Italy with neither a clear plot nor the possibility of redemption. The protagonists imitate Scarface and the mobsters from Goodfellas, but we hardly understand their names or their motivations, and we witness only the violent squalor of their lives.
Why has Italian cinema lost its appeal? Sophia Loren's bustline finally dipped below the horizon. It's really that simple. And stop calling her abroad.
The first thing our salesman did was to ask for our leads that did not convert. Big portion of these leads were from trade-shows. So he asked for the business cards we collected. I remember asking myself “Why the hell would he need the cards for”. He was looking for phone numbers, it turns out a prospect that did not answer to 30 emails will answer the phone and might even be a pretty easy sell. Yes, phone is intrusive, it’s bold and maybe the other side does not expect it but it works big time.
The author talks in wonderment when the salesman asks about the health of a customer's family members before trying to sell them things. The concept of using good manners, or any manners at all, doesn't even register as "a thing" with the author. Honestly, iPhones have utterly destroyed an entire generation of human beings.
Dutch tissue engineer Mark Post made international news last year when he cooked up a beef burger made from lab-cultured cow muscle tissue. He claims that within a couple of decades, fairly priced cultured meat could satisfy the world’s growing demand for meat while eliminating the ethical and environmental problems of raising animals for food.
I've raised chickens. Chicken breast grown in a petri dish will be 10 percent smarter than any chicken I've ever met.
Well, it's Sunday. That means Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes in the morning, and Sunday-go-to-hell clothes in the afternoon. You know, for puttering around the house.
What's that? You don't putter? That's a shame. It must be hard to putter when you live in a concrete martin house in the city like you all do. You need a jackhammer to hang a picture, and they're a bear to get past the doorman without a lengthy explanation.
Me, I live in the country. I can get dressed up like a scarecrow and have at my house any time I want. I can point to the gutters or point to the lawn or point to the snow-covered driveway with the best of 'em. Then I say yo no entiendo and point at my wife when it's time for the crew to get paid. After that, it's off to the couch to watch America's true pastime: Filling out spreadsheets with football players' names on them, and betting on them.
I must admit I don't keep up with the gridiron game as closely as I used to. Say, did you know the Rams moved out of Cleveland? Well, Los Angeles is a better home for them anyway, and I'm sure they'll stick there indefinitely. I've noticed the cheerleaders don't look like girls in college anymore, either. They look like cocktail waitresses in a lounge on an oil platform. C'est la vie.
I put a picture of The Maid of Orleans I swiped from our friend Vanderleun's page atop Maggie's page this morning. At least I think it's old Joanie. The hairstyle and blank eyes could also indicate that the statue is the rhythm guitar player in Badfinger. I'm not sure about the sword and armor, though. That's more of a heavy metal thing, I think.
A little lower down on his webpage, Vanderleun seems to think Marine Le Pen is a new Joan of Arc, but I'm not feelin' it. Before they gave Joan the hot stake instead of the cold chop, she seemed rather more serious about being Catholic than getting a corner office at the Quai d'Orsay. France doesn't need someone that dislikes Moslems. France needs Moslems who fear Catholics. Jeanne bent her eye on vacancy and with the incorporeal air did hold discourse. And the sword wasn't a prop. Unfortunately, she's not on the ballot.
The Vatican on Saturday ordered five people, including two Italian journalists, to stand trial for leaking and publishing secret documents, in the latest development in a leaks scandal which is rocking the papacy. The trial stems from the publication of two recent books which depict a Vatican plagued by mismanagement, greed and corruption and where Pope Francis faces stiff resistance from the old guard to his reform agenda.The Holy See was embarrassed and angered by the books, which it said used information that should never have been allowed to leave the walls of the city state.
Let's borderline blaspheme and ask, WWJAD? (What would Joan of Arc do?) I'm no expert, and think it presumptuous to speak for her, but I have an inkling whatever she'd do, she'd do it to Frankie, not the reporters, and it would leave a mark.
Surveillance video released by the New Orleans Police Department shows a hooded man dragging a staggering woman around 4:30 a.m. Friday. Moments later, a car stops and another man, identified as Peter Gold, 25, gets out while appearing to make a call on his cellphone."The victim drove up and attempted to assist the woman at which point the suspect pointed a gun at him and demanded money," New Orleans Police said in a statement."The victim explained to the suspect repeatedly that he did not have any cash. The suspect became enraged and shot the victim once in the stomach," the statement said.
Speaking of Orleans, WWJAD? It's not for me to say, but I imagine she would kneel down and tenderly kiss that brave man on his furrowed brow, nurse his wounds, and then go off to see if it was possible to fit the second man into a tuna can.
When he tore open the man's t-shirt, David quickly realized that what he initially thought was a gas explosion at the cafe close to the Bataclan music hall where gunmen killed 89, was actually something far worse."There were wires; one white, one black, one red and one orange. Four different colors," he told Reuters. "I knew then he was a suicide bomber." The man David was trying to resuscitate was Brahim Abdeslam, one of those involved in a series of deadly attacks that killed 130 people at bars, restaurants, a soccer stadium and a music hall. No one other than Abdeslam died at the cafe.
WWJAD? I am a sinner, not a saint, so don't trust me, but I figure she would commend that nurse for showing simple Christian charity to all. Then if the bomber recovered from his wounds, she'd give him a 12" haircut.
As the 10 a.m. service began, the church was filled with strangers who came to say goodbye to a man they never knew. The funeral director says more than 1,000 showed up.“What started out as small internal service for a forgotten individual turned into a public affirmation I think not only of his life, but every life,” said Bruce Buchanan of Flanner and Buchanan Funeral Centers.
WWJAD? This one is easier. She would weep, as did I.
Twenty-two-year-old Leroy Stolzfus finished the 26.2-mile Harrisburg Marathon on Nov. 8 in just over three hours and five minutes, all while wearing his community's traditional clothing, Pennlive.com reported.Stolzfus said he's used to running in slacks and suspenders, and he believes he would have run closer to a three-hour marathon if he hadn't started out so fast."I was feeling good, but I kind of almost crashed at mile 15," Stolzfus said.
WWJAD? She'd run next to him, clanking all the way. Then they'd stop five yards shy of the finish line and pray for the other runners to catch up.
Now aged 48, the naturalized American says he is so worried about the future of his two children, eight and 14, that he's returning to the water to raise awareness of the dire problems in the Pacific, hoping to become the first person to cross the ocean without a flotation device.Lecomte's team includes six crew members on the Rolano, publicists and managers on land, and scientists at several American institutions, including the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, who will collect data, including plankton species and radiation levels.
WWJAD? Mention she needed fewer people to save France.
A man swinging a samurai sword fought an imaginary duel Friday on the glass spiral staircase of the bustling Apple Store on Fifth Avenue as frightened tourists and computer geeks looked on. Video posted to Instagram shows the swordsman walking up the staircase, and then sitting on it while performing pretend lunges and parries for his startled audience at around 3:55 p.m.
WWJAD? Trick question. She's not an Apple person. That was William Tell. Joan wore armor, so I imagine she was more of a Chrome user.
When you spot a glimmering object in your back garden, it rarely ends up being anything more valuable than aluminum-foil. But one farmer in Switzerland has hit the jackpot after discovering a treasure trove of Roman coins thought to be more than 1,700 years old. Further excavation -- with the help of the regional archaeological service -- revealed 4,166 coins buried in Ueken, in the northern canton of Aargau, Switzerland.
WWJAD? She'd probably remind you to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. Then she'd point out that Caesar has been dead for two thousand years, and split the dough with you.
Well, I hope you all have a nice Sunday, and if you think it might be fun or enlightening, you can wonder WWJAD about everything in your life today. I know for a dead cert she wouldn't take the points and bet on the Cleveland Rams. Obvious Saints fan.
It's common for humans to personalize things that don't have anything to do with us in particular. For instance, many people looked at today's news and espied a massacre at the Radisson Hotel in Mali. It was perpetrated by Al Qaeda, or Alcoa, or Al Kaline, or Boko Loko, or Procul Harem, or whatever those pesky Mohammedans are printing on their bowling shirts these days. Some observers immediately wondered what it meant to them.
Be honest. It's possible your first reaction to seeing the mayhem in Mali was, "I've been in worse Radissons than that! That one in Naperville didn't even have USA Todays in the lobby, and I couldn't tell the difference between the continental breakfast and the wet nap." That's hardly commendable, but it's understandable. It's no less sensible than rending your garments over it before changing the channel to The True Game of Downton Boardwalk Thrones. Bad things happen all day, every day. You're not the king of the world, as far as I know.
Tragedy is when I stub my toe; comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die. It's not as heartless as it sounds. Our reactions to the things we encounter in the news must be tempered by proportionality. We are all charged to look after our selves, our family, our friends, our community, our country, and then mankind -- in that order. Making gigantic, pointless, histrionic demonstrations of how much you care about people so far away they might as well be an abstraction isn't of any use to anyone. I've also noticed that people that make a big deal out of loving humanity in general usually leave a 5 percent tip after a four-hour meal, then go home and beat their wives. Or start the Soviet Union. Talk is cheap.
The level of moral preening abroad in the land grows daily. College students are demanding that Woodrow Wilson get airbrushed out of their textbooks to signal they're ready for three minutes hate. That way they can accuse anyone who stops after two minutes of being a kulak reactionary Goldstein fan.
It puts me in mind of King Charles II. After he was restored to the British throne, he dug up the corpse of Oliver Cromwell, the man who had beheaded his father, and had Cromwell's festering corpse drawn, hung, and beheaded. His father must have looked down from heaven, or more likely up from the other place, and thought to himself, "That's swell and all, but it would have been handier nine years ago."
Pope Francis said Thursday in a sermon that Christmas this year will be a “charade” because the “world continues to wage war” and “we do not understand peace." “Today, Jesus weeps as well because we have chosen the way of war, the way of hatred, the way of enmities. We are close to Christmas. There will be lights, there will be parties, bright trees, even Nativity scenes — all decked out — while the world continues to wage war,” he said during Mass at the chapel of the Santa Marta residence in the Vatican.
Christ, bring back the Borgias. What an invertebrate sits on that chair now.
Slower coal and iron ore demand from China – the world’s biggest industrial importer – have battered the dry bulk sector, already in the midst of its worst ever downturns that is expected to extend well into next year.This week the Baltic Exchange’s main sea freight index , which tracks rates for ships carrying dry bulk commodities and seen by investors as a forward-looking indicator of global industrial activity, plunged to an all-time low.
I wouldn't worry too much about that. The Baltic is no big deal. Put all your hotels on Mediterranean.
By the late 1500s, fleets of Manila galleons had helped Spain lock down lucrative trade routes between its Pacific colonies. Latin American silver mines—some of the richest and most productive in the world—provided Spain with wealth, and its Philippine colony of Manila gave ready access to valuable Asian markets. The fleet traded silver and gold for silk, spices, jewelry, and porcelain. By making just one or two trips a year, Spain tightly controlled supply, ensuring that the highly sought-after luxury goods turned a handy profit.
By ignoring everything but precious metals, Spain ended up with runaway inflation. Digging metal out of the ground to increase the money supply is no different than printing greenbacks.
A few days ago, a pastor asked Syrian-born restaurant owner Marie Jarrah to donate food to a welcoming event for recently arrived Syrian refugees. Jarrah, who said she regularly helps people in need, declined. Like many of Allentown's establishment Syrians, she doesn't think it's a good idea to bring refugees to the city. She clung to that view even before last week's terrorist attacks in Paris. "Problems are going to happen," said Jarrah, co-owner of Damascus Restaurant in a heavily Syrian enclave.
Unlike all the little SJW twerps going to Ivy League, I have known lots of real, live Syrians. They're Christian. They came here years ago to get away from the murderous psychos you're inviting over now. But keep on caring deeply about Syrians to earn a sanctimony merit badge on your diploma, kids.
Dr. Ranga-Ram Chary believes he may have found evidence that parallel universes have been bumping up against ours, like bubbles floating in a foam, and that these bumps have caused "bruises" that can be observed, reports New Scientist. Chary looked for signs of these cosmic bumps in the Planck map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a map of the radiation leftover from the first few moments of our forming universe. It's a map that would look the same no matter where you're viewing it from in the universe; a blueprint, if you will, of the structure of the cosmos.
I used to live in a parallel universe where scientists could produce results twice in a row before they'd claim they'd outdone Newton.
An estimated 4,500 Westerners have ditched home for the Islamic State or other Sunni jihadist groups in Syria or Iraq. Researchers at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., collected data on 474 of these cases. They found in news reports an unprecedented number of radicalized women sneaking across borders.“They often appear to be typical teenagers,” said Brigitte Lebans Nacos, a political science professor at Columbia University who studies terrorism. “They ask about hair dryers. They’re looking for romance. They’re fans of ISIS, like others are fans of pop stars.”
I'm often surprised by what surprises people. Chicks dug Rudolph Valentino, too -- until he opened his mouth.
Today, LivingSocial is more unicorpse than unicorn. The company never filed for an initial public offering and consumer fervor for daily deals has cooled. T. Rowe Price has written down its stake in LivingSocial to nearly zero, data from Morningstar shows. The company’s work force has shrunk to around 800 employees from 4,500 at its peak in 2011. (Groupon, which did go public, is trading at more than 85 percent below its I.P.O. price.)
The iPhone economy is 99 percent Ponzi. A half dozen companies make money, everybody else borrows over and over again to cover their losses. LivingSocial lost $1.4 billion in 4 years. They simply convinced investors that the electronic equivalent of a flyer that falls out of the newspaper was General Motors.
Isaza Tuzman spent more than four years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., working in emerging markets arbitrage. In 1998, while still at the bank, he co-founded govWorks.com, a website that promised to link people to local municipalities. In the 2001 documentary “Startup.com,” he could be seen pitching venture capitalists and chatting with Bill Clinton at a summit about the Internet.
It's like the sun rising in the east, isn't it? If a Clinton offers to go halfsies on a gold mine, they'll get the gold, you'll get the shaft.
When Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship was brought to a violent end in the revolution of 1989, demand surged for restitution of the lands that had been collectivised during the years of communism. More than 1.5m Romanian farmers started court cases against their neighbours for land claims in the 1990s. Those who had been using the land during communism thought they had as good a claim to it as the descendants of those who had owned it before. Many of the descendants had moved away and were now in the cities. How did they have more of a right to land than those who had been working it for decades? Corruption and complexity swamped the process. Village land commissions, run by the mayors and deputy mayors, became the means of rewarding friends and punishing rivals.
Phuc Dat Bich, 23, told Facebook followers he finds it “highly irritating” that “nobody seems to believe me when I say that my full legal name is how you see it”. The photo of his old passport clearly displays the name – whose correct pronunciation is approximately “Phoo Da Bic” – and has been shared tens of thousands of times. “I’ve been accused of using a false and misleading name, which I find very offensive,” wrote the Bank of Australia worker.
My aunt, Carlotta Tendant, feels your pain, dude.
Maggie's Farm readers are our friends. We care about our friends. Stay out of the Radisson!
I'm supposed to read the papers and paste some of the more interesting items on this page for you to peruse. We're all supposed to have a few laughs, go tsk, tsk, or on the odd occasion, applaud what we see. Today I was brought up short, as they say. Like a baby midget in the circus. I'm still capable of being shocked, I guess. The papers are full of man's inhumanity to man these last few days, but nothing about a terrorist attack surprises me anymore. Doesn't even move the meter, I'm ashamed to say.
It was more the mundane aspect of the depravity I discovered that got to me. The everyday humdrum attitude that everyone seems to have about it, like it was traffic or inclement weather. I found myself on the KTLA5 webpage while I was looking for something. I gather that KTLA serves the eastern part of Los Angeles, mostly. Here's a list of the headlines I found on one page, all labeled "Local News":
Downey Police Officer Apparently Targeted in Fatal Shooting in Station Parking Lot
Suspected Carjacker Fatally Shot by Deputies After Allegedly Taking Hostages at Downey Restaurant
Firefighter Fatally Shoots Wife, a Sheriff’s Deputy, in Apparent Murder-Suicide: LASD
Man Holding Knife to Hostage’s Neck in Front of Burning El Monte Home Shot by Police
Suspect in Killing of Woman Found Buried in Valinda Yard Is Fugitive Santeria Priest Accused of Rape
2 Found Dead, Others Injured After Shooting Spree in Banning; Man in Custody: Police
Fresno County ‘Murder Suspect’ Arrested in El Monte on Rape Charge: Authorities
Human Remains, Including Skull, Found at Valinda Home During Dig Linked to Missing Person Case
L.A. County Firefighter Suspected in Sexual Assault Case Arrested Near El Monte School: Police
Man Arrested After Allegedly Filming at Least 7 People in Brea Starbucks Bathroom
Teen Charged After Allegedly Raping 72-Year-Old Woman at Senior Living Apartment Complex in Huntington Beach
The Newspaper neglected to mention that the "fugitive Santeria priest" suspected of murder had raped a child. All the news that fits, I guess, and the fact that the rape victim was a child can't compete with everything else the headline has going on.
I can't say I blame the news organization. They have a lot of ground to cover. I didn't even bother listing all the plain old murders I found on that page. There was a kind of monotony to them. The KTLA news page even tried to get me to pay attention to a car wreck. That doesn't even register as bad news to me anymore after reading the rest of the happenings from one little corner of our world.
Well, don't worry, you can count on me to keep bringing you the news, but as soon as I'm done, I'm shaving my head, putting on flowing robes, and fashioning a placard that reads REPENT, THE WORLD WILL END TOMORROW. You'll find me out on the sidewalk, waving at passing cars, and apologizing to everyone for not making the sign 50 years ago when it would have been timely.
His discovery generates exciting new prospects for how this process could be used to forge new energy sources in a carbon neutral way. Potentially, hydrogen could be transported to other locations and burned as fuel.“In theory, this should be a self-sustaining energy source,” Mendoza-Cortes said. “Perhaps in the future, you could put this material on your roof and it could turn rain water into energy with the help of the sun.”But, unlike many other energy sources, this won’t have a negative effect on the environment. “You won’t generate carbon dioxide or waste,” he said.
I see. He's terrified of producing a beneficial trace gas, or any "waste." He will, however, propose the mining of lots of manganese, a material that causes permanent neurological disorders, tremors, facial muscle spasms, difficulty walking, acute bronchitis, aggressiveness, and hallucinations. But he'll make enough juice to charge his phone, so it's all good.
UnitedHealth Group Inc raised new questions about the viability of Obamacare on Thursday, saying that in 2017 it might stop selling individual plans on the insurance exchanges created under U.S. President Barack Obama's healthcare law.
I don't have any questions about the viability of Obamacare, and never did, but thanks for playing.
Owners of New York City's taxi "medallions" filed a lawsuit (PDF) against city regulators today, saying their business has been devastated by the decision to allow companies like Uber to compete using "E-hail" services. A medallion is required to operate a New York City yellow taxicab, the only type of vehicle allowed to accept passengers who hail cabs on the street. Until recently, those medallions could sell for over $1 million. Companies like White & Blue Group, one of the plaintiffs in the case, managed fleets of licensed taxicabs by leasing out the medallions.
Here's an errand for you, kind reader. Apply for a permit to do anything in New York City. Then tell the person behind the counter you don't need to fill out any forms, or pay any fees, because you wrote 200 lines of javascript, frosted it with a little html, and pasted it into your phone. I promise I'll drag the river to find you.
Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber told the students he agreed with them that Wilson was racist and that the university needs to acknowledge that, according to a video posted to YouTube. But a school spokesman said the president also told students it is important to weigh Wilson's racism, and how bad it was, with the contributions he made to the nation.
Let's make a deal, college kids. I'll help you jackhammer his name off the building if you'll help me erase his signature from the Revenue Act of 1913.
When you’re long, the worst you can do is lose is everything. But when you’re short, everything and a lot more is at stake. He should have known better, no doubt, but you have to feel for this poor guy. This is what apparently happened, as Joe explains in his GoFundMe plea. “I was holding KBIO short overnight for what I thought was a nice $2.00 fade coming,” he wrote. “At the close of the bell I saw the quote montage clear out and figured today there was no action after hours in the stock. So I went to my office for a long meeting. I got out of the meeting and saw a message from one of my buddy’s, he asked if I was ok since I was short KBIO.”
I have no sympathy -- none -- for a college graduate that can't pluralize "buddy."
On Tuesday, the American Medical Association (AMA) called for a ban on direct-to-consumer advertisements for prescription drugs and medical devices. Such ads drive demand and costs for expensive name-brand treatments when those drugs may not be appropriate or when clinically effective, low-cost options are available, the doctors group said. The announcement is part of a larger effort by the association to make prescription drugs more affordable.
I have only one observation. If a man and a woman are in separate bathtubs, no amount of medication will initiate sexual activity between them. That's a cast iron fact.
The implications of a better understanding of mid-Victorian health are profound. It becomes clear that, with the exception of family planning, the vast edifice of post-1948 healthcare has not so much enabled us to live longer but has merely supplied methods of controlling the symptoms of non-communicable degenerative diseases, which have become prevalent due to our failure to maintain mid-Victorian nutritional standards. Dysnutrition is arguably the largest cause of ill-health today.
Sounds great. I'm all for a return to mid-Victorian Napier-style foreign policy, too: "Come here instantly. Come here at once and make your submission, or I will in a week tear you from the midst of your village and hang you."
There are of course some things that one could not have predicted. For example, it now seems that this scandal might be part of a broader “era of cheating software”, including everything from slot machines to voting machines, as well as an EU probe of TV makers into “Volkswagening” their energy efficiency test scores.
I have another theory. The emissions rules to limit CO2 are stupid and unattainable, and Volkswagen workers had to choose between fibbing and mass ritual suicide in the parking lot.
The poll, conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, shows great disparities in quality of life among the city’s five boroughs. The stresses weighing on New Yorkers vary widely, from the Bronx, where residents feel acute concern about access to jobs and educational opportunity, to Staten Island, where one in five report recently experiencing vandalism or theft.
Half say they are barely getting by, and the other half didn't hear the question because their head is in the oven.
This processor that I designed and built is an accumulator-memory machine, that is, a single register is used in programming. I wanted an instruction set similar to those of the 8-bit microprocessors I was used to. However, the Z-80 and 6502 CPUs had complex instruction sets, with variable instruction lengths. I knew from experience that a programmer uses only a subset of these, so I designed an instruction set that was similar to this commonly-used subset. It has 16 instructions in all, with eight arithmetic-logical operations, and eight data movement and jump instructions.
That is a nifty piece of work. After the zombie apocalypse, he'll be an emperor-god because he'll be the only man on Earth able to program an LED register to show the vague outlines of a naked woman.
Well, that should tide you over until tomorrow. Remember, Maggies Farm loves you and wants you to be happy, so if by some twist of fate you accidentally enter the broadcast area for KTLA, roll up the windows, lock the doors, and keep driving.
We used to be rather better at this cloak and dagger stuff.
Perhaps it was because we were all sure we were on the same team back in the day. Kennedy was a bit of a dolt compared to Eisenhower, but he wasn't any kind of friend to the commies. The Bay of Pigs was about as dumb an attempt at exercising American power as you could come up with, but he didn't mess it up on purpose because he was secretly hoping the other side would win. I'm not sure you can count on that brand of My mother, drunk or sober patriotism anymore.
Not too many years earlier, Eisenhower was able to go on national television and admit he was the one that sent Francis Gary Powers to spy on the Soviet Union from the edge of space. He knew that everyone on the other side of the aisle wouldn't impeach him over it. It was, after all, in the United States' best interest. Well, if it worked it was.
While terrorists are raging all over the landscape, our intelligence experts are busy in nondescript buildings in Virginia rifling through Tea Party tax returns. Anyone that understands opportunity cost knows that when some tasks get done to the last jot and tittle, others get the back burner. The Rumford Meteor japed that the massacre in Paris had an effect: France Finally Uses the List of Terrorists They’ve Been Keeping at the Bottom of a Locked Filing Cabinet Stuck in a Disused Lavatory With a Sign on the Door Saying Beware of the Leopard
If that's funny, it's because it's true. France had a list of 168 locations they had identified as possible terrorist hideouts. They used the list to conduct raids the day after the bloodbath. What exactly was a more important use of their time the day before the massacre? Putting someone in the clink for working 36 hours a week?
Even the entertainment about dealing with an implacable enemy used to be better. I'm sick of rogue CIA agents. I long for the good old days of CIA agents who were rogues. Not the same thing, is it?
“When I was five years old my mom told me ‘there’s this thing called OCW,’” says Rungta, who was homeschooled. “I just couldn’t believe how much material was available. From that moment on I spent the next few years taking OCW courses.” When most kids are entering kindergarten, Rungta was studying physics and chemistry through OpenCourseWare. For Rungta’s mother, the biggest challenge to homeschooling her son was staying ahead of him, finding courses and materials to feed his insatiable mind.
C'mon, admit it. Public School is obsolete. It serves only as an academy for depravity at this point.
Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.
Yeah, and the burglars are 100 percent less likely to shoot your dog.
"This showed a linear association between sex and happiness up to a frequency of once a week, but at higher frequencies there is no longer an association," Amy Muise, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga who led the research, said in an email. "Therefore it is not necessary, on average, for couples to aim to engage in sex as frequently as possible."
Once a week? Maybe. I'll reserve judgment until they clarify whether that means at least two people are in the room.
Once the Food and Drug Administration approved Addyi, a failed antidepressant repackaged as a libido pill for women, drug-maker Valeant Pharmaceuticals bought the company selling Addyi for $1 billion. If they were expecting to cash in on a blockbuster drug, early sales aren’t very promising: in the first month, only 227 prescriptions for the drug have been written.
You're not allowed to drink alcohol when taking this drug. No one's getting any action under those circumstances.
In the U.S., senior care is not something many entrepreneurs are thinking creatively about. Not so in Japan: In the past year, 60 gambling-themed senior-daycare centers have opened up, giving some of the nation’s elderly not just basic shelter, but a place to spend time that’s appealing and fun.
You mean Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun aren't nursing homes?
When we first meet Catherine Earnshaw, she is a ghostly hand rapping on a window in a storm—which is to say, she is essentially the storm itself, rattling the glass panes of her former home. At every point thereafter, emotional drama and atmospheric drama are one. If Lear is minded like the weather, Catherine and Heathcliff are bodied like it—together, the most famous storm ever to strike the Yorkshire moors.
There's always plenty of weather in bodice rippers. Otherwise Fabio's pectorals wouldn't glisten with sweat as his hands slowly made their way up inside her chemise, the faint aroma of the sodden garden surrounding them like the perfume of Aphrodite, and all that sh*t.
Philadelphia police said Officer Joseph Marion, 39, was outside of a Dunkin Donuts on Wadworth Avenue on Feb. 14 when an employee lost control of a shopping cart he using was to put down salt.The cart hit Marion's vehicle, spurring Marion to get out and start attacking the employee. Marion also allegedly assaulted a woman who intervened in the initial attack.
When executives at Taco Bell found out that the Downey building that housed their first restaurant was at risk of being demolished, they ordered the store “to go.” The birthplace of the Mexican fast food chain, located on Firestone Boulevard, is up on rails and ready to roll. Founder Glen Bell built the mission style building in 1962 and on Thursday night at 10:30, store “Numero Uno” will begin the 45-mile ride to company headquarters in Irvine.
I'm fairly certain the first and only taco I ate at Taco Bell hasn't moved an inch since I swallowed it.
Rocky Ouprasith, now 23, was the man behind RockDizMusic.com and RockDizFile.com. The latter was the second-largest online file-sharing site specialising in pirated music in the United States in 2013, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Federal law enforcement shut down the sites in October 2014, and Ouprasith pleaded guilty to one count of criminal copyright infringement in August. In addition to a 36-month prison term, he will also get two years of supervised release, forfeit over US$50,000 and pay nearly US$50,000 in restitution.
No one should ever go to jail for copyright infringement, which is a civil violation, or should be. Same goes for tax evasion. If you can't collect the money upfront, willingly, you're not entitled to it. Jailing people for owing money is medieval.
John le Carré, one of England’s greatest novelists, author of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and creator of the character George Smiley, was born David Cornwell in 1931 in Poole, England. He was 2 when his father—who was always either booming or busting, expanding and contracting to the rhythm of his own dodginess—got 15 months for fraud and other charges. “He could put a hand on your shoulder and the other in your pocket and both gestures would be equally sincere,” David’s brother Tony once said.
"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" with Richard Burton and Claire Bloom is the best spy movie ever made. Discuss.
Look, I know you mean well, and some of you look quite fetching in a lab coat, horn rims, and high heels, but I am not interested in your "studies." You do not seem to have studied anything but grievances in school, yet you publish studies by the ream as soon as you escape. I do not care a fig if you think my cell phone is giving cancer to my autism. I am not all that interested in your theories about the correlation of causation with the cessation of sensation in my foot as I drop off to sleep at night.
I sleep when I'm tired and I eat when I'm hungry and I drink when I'm thirsty and I read when I'm curious and I wonder what you're on about. If you've got evidence, trot it out, but I warn you I'm going to want to inspect your test tubes before I throw away my office chair and sit on a beach ball.
"In our study, we found people who drank three to five cups of coffee per day had about a 15 percent lower [risk of premature] mortality compared to people who didn't drink coffee," says one of the study authors, nutrition researcher Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health. Decaf drinkers also saw benefits.
This article is only sorta-correct. It's true you'll live longer if you don't get in my way when I'm trying to get coffee.
Harvey hadn't snatched the brain for the morbid fascination of keeping a part of history the same way some collectors have done with Annie Oakley's gun or Neil Armstrong's hair. Instead, Harvey was hoping to learn whether or not Einstein's genius could be quantified. Was his brain somehow wired differently than ours? Gutfreund dismisses that line of research. "I don't know," he says. "Your brain is different than my brain. There are no two brains alike."
This is the equivalent of breaking into a bank to steal the deposit slips. Ted Williams frozen head is never going to bat .400, either.
But the truth is there are 2.5 billion people globally who lack access to even the very basic necessities of sanitation, cleanliness and safe water — that's twice the population of the U.S.World Toilet Day is November 19, and aims to raise awareness about the global issue of poor sanitation around the world. We ask: What would your life look like if you had to exist without access to clean water? To a hot shower? To a private, indoor toilet?
Another paid advertisement masquerading as a news article, but I'll play along: America doesn't have "access" to water. We have a population of capable humans who consider an inexpensive supply of potable water for its citizens to be an important, if trivial, undertaking, and then makes it happen. Well, except California.
I’ve consistently experienced connectivity issues between the cup and the app on my iPhone. Sometimes the app wouldn’t recognize the cup, so I’d have to physically reset the cup in order for it to work. I had to do that at least 10 times over the last couple of weeks. It was pretty frustrating, so I ended up not using Pryme for about a week until last night. I, once again, reset the cup and then connected it via Bluetooth to my phone. It worked fine until I woke up this morning and tilted the cup to look at my Pryme level. According to the cup, I was at my Pryme, even though I hadn’t had any water for the previous several hours. Sigh.
Yet another fake ad, but I'll play along. This woman believes she needs a handheld supercomputer wirelessly attached to an electronic cup in order to get herself a drink of water. She's the target audience for the last fake article, I imagine.
There is an unnamed epidemic slowly traveling through the middle of the U.S. This epidemic goes by many names, but our venture fund refers to it as “early exit disease.” This disease spreads when founders realize sub-$20 million exits. Many of these exits could have grown much larger. Instead, early exits have been quietly devastating the Midwest region’s startup maturation, cutting off the very process that first created Silicon Valley — and which could create more tech capitals in the middle of the country.
The article says startup owners are cashing out before they've sufficiently bilked investors out of enough money to fund still more startups. Welcome to the fabulous new iAmway economy!
The first, built in 1887, was Sioux City’s corn palace, which spanned more than 18,000 square feet, rose 100 feet high and cost $25,000–hundreds of thousands in today’s dollars. In the year it was built, a drought had devastated crops across the middle of the country. But for some reason, Sioux City's part of Iowa was spared and even had an excess of corn. The city wanted to signal that life in the Midwest wasn't as dreary and desperate as it might seem, and, as Pamela H. Simpson writes in Corn Palaces and Butter Queens, the idea for the palace came from a town meeting, at which one enterprising man asked “why, if Saint Paul and Toronto could have ice palaces, Sioux City couldn’t have a corn palace.”
The United States has always been an endlessly interesting place, and continues to be so.
What happens when you apply thousands of LED lights to a bicycle? You fit right in with Venice, California locals. Venice Beach, which served as a US hippy hub of the 1960s, is now seeing dozens of locals cruising its boardwalk late at night with brightly glowing rides.
The United States has always been an endlessly interesting place, and continues to be so.
Mr. Jindal unveiled a series of policy proposals, ferociously attacked Donald J. Trump and spent considerable time courting conservatives in Iowa, which begins the presidential nominating process. None of it worked.
If a couple more Republican candidates quit, they're not going to be able to field a baseball team.
A disgruntled crowd member stormed the pitch and hit an assistant referee with his penis during a football match in southern Spain. The incident occurred during a match between Second Division Andaluza Sénior and fellow Andalusian team CD Abes in Granada on Sunday.
I've noticed that gruntled people never attack anyone with their penis.
The analysis of a fossil tooth from Siberia reveals that a mysterious people known as Denisovans, discovered a mere five years ago, persisted for tens of thousands of years alongside modern humans and Neanderthals.The find underscores that our Homo sapiens ancestors shared the Eurasian continent with other human-like populations. For hundreds of thousands of years, modern humans lived alongside Neanderthals, a sister hominid species that died out about 40,000 years ago. Denisovans appear to have shared some of that territory as well.
I know they're scientists, but I doubt I'm related to Julia Roberts.
Well, there you go. If I were you, I'd blow off work, get hopped up on pots of coffee, build a house out of corn shucks, and then ride a bicycle covered with LEDs in circles around it. If you don't, the terrorists have won.
Since the entire world has quickly settled on singing a dreary, infantile ditty written by a wife-beater that extols the state religion of Nazi Germany and the USSR as a response to an existential threat, I guess it's time to move on to new topics. Speaking of existential, didn't those Frenchmen invent existentialism? No, I think that was Kierkegaarde. Maybe it was Nietzsche. Whatever. It was one of those grouchy fellows. I was doodling in my copybook and trying to get a peek down a girl's blouse that day in school, and must have missed it. At any rate, Europe is just a bunch of zebras at the watering hole watching a lion eat their little sister while mumbling, "Wasn't me, don't care." Who am I to bother about it? Let's read the papers:
Ignored in news coverage of the Paris massacre is the single most pertinent piece of background: A 2014 opinion poll found that ISIS had an approval rating in France (at 16%) almost as high as President Francois Holland (at 18%). In the 18-to-24-year-old demographic, ISIS’ support jumped to 27%. Muslims comprise about a tenth of France’s population, so the results imply that ISIS had the support of the overwhelming majority of French Muslims (and especially Muslim youth), as well as the endorsement of a large part of the non-Muslim Left.
Like Obama, Hollande looks at terror attacks through the lens of self-interest. If it affects their personal reputation, they get peevish and start talking like a fop's idea of Audie Murphy. Otherwise, they really don't give a sh*t.
Hacker collective Anonymous posted a video Saturday on YouTube in which it declared a cyber war on ISIS. In the nearly two-and-a-half-minute video, a person wearing the group’s signature Guy Fawkes mask read a statement in French promising that the hacktivist organization would attack ISIS in cyberspace with the ultimate goal of weakening the terrorist organization.
I'm sure a multinational terrorist organization is shaking in their sandals over the prospect of a deluge of fake one-star reviews on Yelp.
Machine made snow is made up of exactly the same stuff as natural snow - frozen water. When the weather provides cold temperatures, but no moisture, our snowmaking team simply adds just the right amount of moisture to the atmosphere to produce excellent snow. It may sound easy, but making great snow requires millions of dollars in specialized equipment and an experienced team of snowmakers.
In my experience, machine snow is half-frozen filthy retaining pond water sprayed all over you if you deign to ski on a weekday.
Society judges people by what they can do for others. Can you save children from a burning house, or remove a tumor, or make a room of strangers laugh? You've got value right there. That's not how we judge ourselves though. We judge ourselves by our thoughts."I'm a good person." "I'm ambitious." "I'm better than this." These idle impulses may comfort us at night, but they're not how the world sees us. They're not even how we see other people.
Silly me. I thought holding up an inexpertly lettered sign with a preachy message and a hashtag was the pinnacle of human achievement.
In a religion where the first woman in history is said to have caused all kinds of problems, the Roman Catholic Church should have perhaps been able to see what was coming with Francesca Chaouqui.Her hiring in 2013 to be part of COSEA, the Pope’s Commission for Reference on the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See, was an eyebrow-raiser for Vatican watchers and Italian tabloids alike.She was, at 30, the youngest member on the influential eight-member panel by more than two decades. She was also the only female.
Bombshell? You guys don't get out much. She reminds me of homely girls who go to Star Wars conventions.
WASHINGTON — In response to the Paris attacks, a top American intelligence official on Monday renewed a debate on government surveillance and privacy, denouncing “hand-wringing” over intrusive spying and saying that leaks of classified information had made it harder to identify terrorists.John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, appeared to be speaking in part about the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications that were disclosed by Edward J. Snowden in 2013. Those disclosures prompted sharp criticism and new restrictions on electronic spying both in the United States and in Europe.
Ever hear of the Fourth Amendment? Cute little thing. It was popular around here 200 years ago. It almost seems like you have a problem using probable cause to determine who to surveil because then you'd have to admit who is probably gonna cause a problem.
A man has been sentenced for knocking out his sister's two front teeth in a row over a Christmas record 40 years ago. Patrick and Anita Ackroyd disagreed over John Lennon's Happy Xmas (War is Over) when they were teenagers in December 1975. A court heard that he punched her in the face and knocked out her teeth in an assault that has left her wearing a dental plate ever since.
Judge: I need to know which one of them liked that dreadful song in order to rule against him or her.
Weapons have been stolen from an Army base following a break-in just 24 hours after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris. The firearms went missing from the armory at the Lincoln Army Reserve Center in Worcester, Massachusetts, on Saturday night after the suspects entered the building through the roof.
Recently, US presidential candidate Ben Carson commented on his theory that the pyramids were actually primarily used for storing grain, much to the consternation of the US media. Why do pyramid mysteries and alternative theories persist even now? And why have we never explored them fully?
Don't worry. ISIS will crack those open like a pinata after their next Mahdi connects the Sudan to Vienna.
The Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi, available on May 20, is a collection of artwork by Julius Csotonyi, an award-winning illustrator whose work lives in museums and in science papers. Csotonyi, who holds a PhD in microbiology, works frequently with paleontologists who need help bringing their fossil finds to life.
"Brutal" prehistoric world? Compared to what? My housecat will kill anything it can catch, and tortures it first, too. Your goldfish would eat you if it could fit you in its mouth.
Be careful out there in the brutal posthistoric world today.
Roger here. Bird Dog has gone to the spa to take the waters. And by "spa," I mean tavern. And by "waters," I mean single malt. Anyway, he's left me to guard the chicken coop until he can finish his sabbatical, and make bail. I don't know what to talk about. That's because I'm not interesting, the way Bird Dog is.
Haven't you heard? Top 10 lists are so 2010. Why, no one that doesn't eat their vegetables by scooping up mashed potatoes with a butter knife and smooshing them in the peas refers to TOP TEN lists any longer. It's just not done by our class of people, dear. We're busy, important people who don't have time to peruse ten entries on any topic. If we wanted a decalogue, we'd hire Moses and a headstone company. We live in a Snapchat society. Keep it under a half a dozen, will ya?
