San Francisco plans to retroactively apply California's new marijuana legalization laws to thousands of pre-existing pot related convictions, the SF district attorney's office announced Wednesday. Thousands of misdemeanors and felonies dating to 1975 will either be expunged or reduced, and the lives of people convicted of those crimes will be changed for the better.
Alex Balk: The Awl, 2009-2018.
The surprise shouldn’t be that The Awl didn’t last, it should be that it lasted as long as it did. And now it’s dead. The archives will remain up, but I hope they degrade in the way everything on the Internet does and that eventually they sink into the vast sea of undiscoverable content so that a decade from now one of you can look at a young person who is ignoring you while she stares at her phone and say, “You can’t find it anymore, but the most amazing thing on the Internet was The Awl. It’s impossible to believe something that incredible existed.” And since everything will have disappeared no one will be able to dispute it. If we wait around long enough our legacy will be legend. We’ll secretly know the truth, but it won’t make any difference then, will it?
Thank you, in advance, for lying about how amazing we were. And thank you, right now, for your attention. You will never know how much it meant.
Now that we all know that the internet dissolves everything, not just bad things, perhaps it never deserved The Awl in the first place. The Awl implies a web that was never really lost because it never existed or could exist, a (wonderfully) conservative vision of the medium's potential to not be what it is. Yet for nearly ten years they proved that things implicit, things never really lost, things hoped for, the unrepressed sublime, can still be.
I’m a Reality TV producer. I make the stuff. Oh, go ahead, scripted television snob, snark away, I’ve heard it all before. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll confess: we have created a Monster. But why are rational Americans surprised by Trump? Twenty years after The Truman Show sent up a cautionary flare about our obsessive self-regard, we are now living in a reality TV show -- a nation of over-sharers and approval whores, each of us our own pathetic little brand. We’re all producers shooting our own docu-series now.
So Reality TV has given us the worst president in living memory. There’s that. Still and all, I will defend Reality TV as a viable and ground-breaking storytelling vehicle right up until the day Trump drops the big one on North Korea and I’m out of a job. As a longtime producer on The Bachelor and its numerous spin-offs, I’m here to point out that it’s time to stop dissing the genre and acknowledge it as a powerful narrative delivery system that can hold its own with anything else in the streaming cosmos - I’m looking at you, Transparent.
Just as Balzac and Zola’s novels savaged the petit bourgeois of 19th century France, with its inflated self-regard, it’s frivolous customs and status-hunger, so Reality TV shows like The Real Housewives franchise do much the same. Reality TV is the new Comedie Humaine, television as 19th century French Social Realist novel.
This is not a popular position to take in Hollywood (first, you have to find someone who’s read Balzac). As a Reality TV dude, I am the recipient of condescension both subtle and overt. And let’s not get started on my financier father, who is still trying to wrap his head around what I do and wonders why he doesn’t see more books coming from me (follow the money, Dad.)
It’s time to debunk the theory that us Reality TV folk opted for the genre when our scripts didn’t sell. Some of us have Masters degrees from Ivy League schools. We not only read books, we write them. In other words, great storytelling for us is King beyond any shenanigans that might pull in ratings. Many of us aspired to tell nonfiction stories and have documentary filmmaking and journalism backgrounds. There is no shortage of smart, talented people working in Reality TV who are very aware of how and how not to unpack a Romantic narrative. And they really, really, enjoy the work.
Reality TV wasn’t my calling, but then again, had it existed as a college major in the late 80’s, I might have opted in. I was contentedly zooming along as a print journalist when the Great Internet Upheaval siphoned off my dead tree media work, making me feel like a Smart Car at a Monster Truck Rally. My job as a freelance journalist in jeapordy, I made the decision to embed myself to a growth industry that valued what I did best - telling stories about real people and their problems.
Hence, my current career.
At first I was as guilty of denigrating reality TV as the next Pynchon worshipper, and I’ll admit it felt like a step backwards. But it didn’t take long to realize that Reality TV had things to teach me about landing a joke, or setting up and paying off conflict.
Admitting to my writing colleagues that I had cast my lot with the TV format that gave us Sex Sent Me To The ER was another matter. While they were sweating out their novels, I was writing wrap scripts for Bachelor host Chris Harrison. They scoffed, but I knew my words would be heard by more people than would ever read their books. And doesn’t a writer ultimately want his words to resonate, even if it's for Bachelor viewing parties?
And the Internet - the very thing that cratered my journalism career - has now become my BFF. Social media has leveled the cultural playing field, even in this Golden Era of scripted TV; The Bachelor generates as much Twitter traffic as The Walking Dead I’m producing shows for an audience that really cares about whether Vanessa and Nick will actually get married (shame on you if you don’t get that reference!) Whether its detractors like it or not, The Bachelor is a huge driver of the Zeitgeist.
Why? Reality TV’s narrative is appealingly indeterminate. Our audience doesn’t want dialogue, actors or directors - they want their drama unmediated and messy. Not messy as in unstructured - more on that in a minute - but as in unpredictable. It’s kind of like watching a great sporting event. Contingency creates the frisson of not knowing, and that’s gold.
To call Reality TV the opiate of the fly-by states is to severely misjudge it. That attitude is reductive and ignorant; it’s Trumpian thinking (The Bachelor’s number one market is New York, by the way.) The format is already 25 years old, and like all maturing art forms, it has sprouted specific subgenres: Harridans in Revolt (The Real Housewives of wherever); Artisanal Smackdown ( Top Chef, Project Runway), Schadenfreude (The Biggest Loser, Teen Mom ) and so on. With an established reality TV show like The Bachelor, certain leitmotifs materialize over time. It’s akin to working in genre fiction. There are things viewers expect to see; the rose ceremony, the fantasy suite, and the 2 on 1 date are as essential to Bachelor fans as the zanni and innamorati are to Commedia dell'arte. The challenge lies in keeping things lively within the format. It’s not easy; you don't just point cameras at train wrecks with Adderall issues. Because it’s unscripted, Reality TV is an act of improvisation – the Ornette Coleman kind. For those who think the inverse is true, and that it’s pre-meditated and ‘soft scripted’, I would say: you’re giving us far too much credit.
As to the ontological debate about what constitutes “reality” on Reality TV, I will say that it’s all too real. Of course cast members know they are being filmed, but it’s astonishing how unfettered on-camera behavior can be when real feelings are at stake. After all, The MOST SHOCKING MOMENT IN BACHELOR HISTORY occurred in 2008 when Bachelor Jason Mesnick, after asking erstwhile Dallas Cowboys cheerleader Melissa Rycroft to marry him, pulled a fast one after the season had been shot and wound up rejecting Melissa for Molly Malaney on the post-show After The Final Rose special in front of millions of delightedly confused viewers. (It was our version of the LaLa Land-Moonlight Oscars mix up.) We were blindsided by it, but it turned out to be a highwater mark for the show, and it was real, folks: no one without a SAG card has acting chops that sharp.
The truth is, Reality TV was a tremendous uptick for me - it continues to be the best and steadiest money I’ve ever made. It’s also the most fun I’ve ever had with a paycheck attached. Trump might only have a few more years left, but Reality TV is an irrefutable fact of life and it’s not going away. And one other thing: I know you’re a closet Bachelor fan. Don’t worry, you’re secret is safe with me.
Baffling. Boggling. Florida.
This story has everything from a hitman named 'the Rabbi' to a child pornographer asking his mom to arrange a murder.
Via People:
A Florida man who had pleaded guilty to child pornography now faces additional charges in a suspected murder-for-hire plot to kill the presiding judge in his case, PEOPLE confirms.
To arrange the hit, Robert Anthony O’Hare allegedly used codes while talking to his mother on recorded jailhouse phone calls in Lake County, Florida, according to court documents obtained by PEOPLE.
On Jan. 7, O’Hare allegedly gave his mom a message that said “Kill Briggs.” Investigators believe this was a reference to Judge Don F. Briggs.
Authorities claim that O’Hare asked his mother to write the message down and give it to a friend called “the rabbi.” In the call, O’Hare allegedly told his mother that the rabbi would know what to do.
“As far as the weird scale goes, it’s off the charts, totally,” Lt. John Herrell with the Lake County Sheriff’s Office told local TV station WKMG.
On a subsequent call, O’Hare’s mother allegedly said that she had spoken to the rabbi. “He knows what you want, but he can’t do it.” she said, the court records claim. “He’s just a ‘rabbi.’ ”
Kevin J Davis is the leader of the Council for the London Borough of Kingston-Upon-Thames; his son Cameron Davis's Linkedin profile shows that he is now a Trainee Development Manager at CNM Estates, a major contractor to the Borough of Kensington. (more…)
"A recent study conducted by Hasbro revealed that nearly half of game players attempt to cheat during Monopoly games, so in 2018, we decided it was time to give fans what they've been craving all along - a Monopoly game that actually encourages cheating," Jonathan Berkowitz, senior vice president of Hasbro gaming told Insider.
The object of the game is still to be the player with the most money at the game's end, but it may be a little tougher to accomplish. The Cheater's Edition will ask players to get away with cheating as many times as they can during game play. That means players can skip spaces, try to avoid paying rent, and slip a few extra bills from the bank when no one's looking.
Yes, it comes with handcuffs too.
A decade ago, J.K. Rowling famously told the world that Dumbledore was gay. Just don't expect it to be shown any time soon.
“Not explicitly,” Yates replied when asked if the film makes it clear that Dumbledore is gay. “But I think all the fans are aware of that. He had a very intense relationship with Grindelwald when they were young men. They fell in love with each other’s ideas, and ideology and each other.”
Yates then added a bit more about what Dumbledore is like in the new film: “He’s a maverick and a rebel and he’s an inspiring teacher at Hogwarts. He’s witty and has a bit of edge. He’s not this elder statesman. He’s a really kinetic guy. And opposite Johnny Depp as Grindelwald, they make an incredible pairing.”
Most opinions are of the kind that this is cowardly, homophobic and sad. One opinion that might matter more than yours is that of China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television. But the supposedly growing influence of foreign censors on Hollywood wouldn't explain the oleaginous smarminess of "all the fans are aware."
https://twitter.com/Hello_Tailor/status/958758021584293890
https://twitter.com/heidiheilig/status/958762633884327937
Plenty of folks have bemoaned the disappearance of the audio jack from phones. Among other problems, it'll create "DRM for audio", since any sound that reaches your need-to-charge-them-all-the-time earbuds will now be served up by software-defined bluetooth -- so phone- and app-makers will be able to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks on your music-listening, halting any signals they don't like or don't approve of.
All well-discussed problems! But here, Charlie Hoey writes something deeper -- a lovely ode to the audio jack as a vestige of sheerly analog engineering.
As he notes, the audio jack speaks in the language of voltage. This grounds it in the world of pure physics, and makes it hackable for all sorts of weird and unexpected purposes, like the way Stripe uses it to read the magstripes on bank-cards:
The series of voltages a headphone jack creates is immediately understandable and usable with the most basic tools. If you coil up some copper, and put a magnet in the middle, and then hook each side of the coil up to your phone’s headphone jack, it would make sounds. They would not be pleasant or loud, but they would be tangible and human-scale and understandable. It’s a part of your phone that can read and produce electrical vibrations. [snip]Entrepreneurs and engineers will lose access to a nearly universal, license-free I/O port. Independent headphone manufacturers will be forced into a dongle-bound second-class citizenry. Companies like Square — which made brilliant use of the headphone/microphone jack to produce credit card readers that are cheap enough to just give away for free — will be hit with extra licensing fees.
Because a voltage is just a voltage. Beyond an input range, nobody can define what you do with it. In the case of the Square magstripe reader, it is powered by the energy generally used to drive speakers (harvesting the energy of a sine wave being played over the headphones), and it transmits data to the microphone input. [snip]
I don’t know exactly how losing direct access to our signals will harm us, but doesn’t it feel like it’s going to somehow? Like we may get so far removed from how our devices work, by licenses and DRM, dongles and adapters that we no longer even want to understand them? There’s beauty in the transformation of sound waves to electricity through a microphone, and then from electricity back to sound again through a speaker coil. It is pleasant to understand. Compare that to understanding, say, the latest BlueTooth API. One’s an arbitrary and fleeting manmade abstraction, the other a mysterious and dazzlingly convenient property of the natural world.
(CC-licensed image via William Hook)
What’s old is new again in this week’s tabloids, which plunder the past for today’s headlines.
Child pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in 1996, but the National Enquirer claims that its "investigation finally solves” the slaying. The magazine, which has in the past alternately blamed JonBenet’s mother, father, brother, and various strangers for the slaying, insists it has now “cracked the cold case after 21 years,” under the headline: “This Evil Monster Murdered JonBenet.”
The killer? A now-dead neighbor who was thoroughly scrutinized by police during their investigation, and dismissed as a suspect. Why is Glenn Meyer now fingered as the murderer? Because his ex-wife, Charlotte Hey, claims: “When I asked him if he murdered her, he would just smile at me. He wouldn’t deny it.” Sounds like a confession to me.
“Queen Survives Assassin’s Bullet!” screams the Globe cover, failing to mention that the incident – alleged by a former New Zealand police officer – occurred 36 years ago, in 1981. British police are reportedly stepping up security, which seems appropriate 36 years after the event.
Equally ancient is the National Examiner cover story claiming to finally solve the Natalie Wood “murder.” The actress drowned in 1981, and the tabloids have spent decades trying – and failing – to pin the blame on her husband, actor Robert Wagner. The Examiner claims that “new testimony could put Wagner away!” But we’ve seen this supposedly new evidence before. Marilyn Wayne, who allegedly heard a woman’s voice shouting: “Help me, I’m drowning!” on the night of Wood’s death, is not a “secret witness” as the Examiner claims. Her claims were widely reported in 2011, and the Examiner adds nothing new. Trees died for this?
Then there are the stories we’ve seen before: Prince Charles has filed for divorce from wife Camilla, reports the Globe (another story supposedly missed by the entire British Royal press pack); Will Smith has split from wife Jada Pinkett-Smith claims the Enquirer (a story they repeat almost every six months presumably in the belief that one day they’ll be right), while the Globe yet again reports on “Michael Douglas’ marriage crisis,” claiming that wife Catherine Zeta-Jones is planning to divorce because Douglas has been hit with sex harassment allegations dating back three decades, long before she ever met him. Right.
Meghan Markle’s coming May wedding to Prince Harry captures the covers of both Us and People magazines, with equally unenlightening results. Us rehashes old interview clippings to intuit Markle’s fitness and diet regime, while People employs old quotes and unnamed insiders for its feature on the growing friendship between Markle and Kate Middleton. Says one source: “I can imagine Kate will find a great friend in her.” And isn’t imagining the future what good journalism is all about?
Fortunately we have the crack investigative team at Us to tell us that Carmen Electra wore it best (doesn’t she always?), that snowboarder Shaun White sits “way too close to the TV,” that actress Anna Farris carries Kind bars, a crystal, and dry shampoo (because “I’m lazy, and I don’t always shower”) in her Fjallraven Kanken backpack, and that the stars are just like us: they walk their dogs, tote luggage, and drink coffee. Revelatory, as ever.
What do Mick Jagger, Olivia Newton-John, Jackie Gleason, David Bowie, John F Kennedy, Russell Crowe and Shirley MacLaine have in common? They have all “claimed close encounters” with aliens or UFOs, according to the Examiner. Kennedy allegedly wrote to the CIA chief demanding to see confidential files about UFOs just days before his assassination. Coincidence...?
Onwards and downwards . . .
Microfluidic systems that move and mix tiny amounts of liquids are used in laboratories for biotechnology, chemistry, and even the development of inkjet technology. Frequently, microfluidic devices are integrated into a single "lab on a chip" but fabricating such systems can be costly and time-consuming. Now, MIT researchers are using customized LEGO bricks to make a modular microfluidics platform. Their prototype system "could be used to manipulate biological fluids and perform tasks such as sorting cells, filtering fluids, and encapsulating molecules in individual droplets." From MIT:
To demonstrate modularity, (mechanical engineering grad student Crystal) Owens built a prototype onto a standard LEGO baseplate consisting of several bricks, each designed to perform a different operation as fluid is pumped through. In addition to making the fluid mixer and droplet generator, she also outfitted a LEGO brick with a light sensor, precisely positioning the sensor to measure light as fluid passed through a channel at the same location.
Owens says the hardest part of the project was figuring out how to connect the bricks together, without fluid leaking out. While LEGO bricks are designed to snap securely in place, there is nevertheless a small gap between bricks, measuring between 100 and 500 microns. To seal this gap, Owens fabricated a small O-ring around each inlet and outlet in a brick.
“The O-ring fits into a small circle milled into the brick surface. It’s designed to stick out a certain amount, so when another brick is placed beside it, it compresses and creates a reliable fluid seal between the bricks. This works simply by placing one brick next to another,” Owens says. “My goal was to make it straightforward to use.”
A mass shooting is defined as four or more people shot in one location, but Seattle ad agency Cole & Weber believes that mass shootings happen every single day in America, just not all in one place.
This week marks the 1000th gun death in this country since 2018 began. Tired of the status-quo and lack of action, the agency took a break from regular client work in an attempt to keep this issue top of mind -- not just once, but every single day.
A team worked together to develop technology that uses constantly-updating gun data to automatically create a video every morning that shows the number of people who were killed by guns the day prior, and a first-person street view where the shooting took place. Each death is ticked off with the gut-wrenching sound of a gunshot, one after the next, creating a sobering message that this violence is happening all around us, all the time. The video creation is fully automated, and targeted at influencers, politicians, their aids, and the media via Twitter account: @DailyGunDeaths.
Yesterday, 27 people were killed by guns, including an especially tragic shooting in #Melcroft outside of #Pittsburgh. We need to get our politicians working together to #EndGunViolence. #NRA #Gunsense @AP @WPXI @CNN @CBSPittsburgh pic.twitter.com/9330YH9R8J
— Daily Gun Deaths (@DailyGunDeaths) January 29, 2018
The project was started after an employee found out their friend was shot during October’s Vegas shooting. While the friend survived, it motivated the agency to start looking into ways to address the issue.
Knowing that this is a complex problem, the message was to keep people talking about how to enact effective change. To not let the conversation just fade away. In the message accompanying the video, people are asked to share concerns with politicians, local and national, letting them know that they need to start working to find a solution.
While the account’s current following leans towards gun-control advocates, the agency says they want gun rights supporters as well. “It’s all about getting people to stop circulating their go-to talking points, and start having a real dialogue to address this issue.” If you’d like to check out or support the project, you can follow it on Twitter @DailyGunDeaths.
United Airlines barred Dexter, an emotional support peacock, from boarding a flight at Newark International Airport on Saturday. From the Washington Post:
United Airlines confirmed that the exotic animal was barred from the plane Saturday because it “did not meet guidelines for a number of reasons, including its weight and size.”
“We explained this to the customer on three separate occasions before they arrived at the airport,” an airline spokeswoman said in a statement Tuesday to The Washington Post...
The peacock’s owner, who was identified by the Associated Press as Ventiko, a photographer and performance artist in New York, told the news agency that she bought the bird its own ticket.
An Amtrak train carrying GOP lawmakers and their staff to a retreat has collided with a garbage truck, killing at least one person. This is a developing story.
So, geophysicists have been studying the earth's magnetic field, and they think it's getting ready to "flip" -- with the north and south poles changing places.
This has happened a few hundred times in the planet's history, most recently 780,000 years ago. The poles tried to swap places much more recently, 40,000 years ago, but snapped back into place.
The magnetic field is understood to be created by the flows of liquid metal in our planet's core. After studying satellite data, geophysicists now believe that "swirling clusters of molten iron and nickel" are an early sign of an impending pole-flip.
If it happens, when would it take place? No-one knows.
But it'll be a nightmare! As science journalist Alanna Mitchell explains in this Undark excerpt from her book The Spinning Magnet ...
The Earth’s magnetic field protects our planet from dangerous solar and cosmic rays, like a giant shield. As the poles switch places (or try to), that shield is weakened; scientists estimate that it could waste away to as little as a tenth of its usual force. The shield could be compromised for centuries while the poles move, allowing malevolent radiation closer to the surface of the planet for that whole time. Already, changes within the Earth have weakened the field over the South Atlantic so much that satellites exposed to the resulting radiation have experienced memory failure.That radiation isn’t hitting the surface yet. But at some point, when the magnetic field has dwindled enough, it could be a different story. Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, one of the world’s experts on how cosmic radiation affects the Earth, fears that parts of the planet will become uninhabitable during a reversal. The dangers: devastating streams of particles from the sun, galactic cosmic rays, and enhanced ultraviolet B rays from a radiation-damaged ozone layer, to name just a few of the invisible forces that could harm or kill living creatures.
You may now commence a) ambient, low-level panic, and b) jokes about that craptastic sci-fi flick, The Core.
Earlier this month, a game called HAPPY WORLD by Jimi Masuraki was released on itch.io. When I first downloaded it, I honestly thought I might play it for 15 minutes during my free-block at school, at then uninstall it and be done. But after five or ten minutes of completing simple quests and making the digital people happy, I realized that this wasn’t another free lackluster game.
Not only did the adorably simplistic art style and funny nonchalant conversations between the player and the entities in the game cause me (and a few of my classmates) to laugh out loud, but once I got home and got further into the story, I found that there was intentional – and dark – lore in the game that was left for the player to discover on their own. I immediately knew that I was going to have to finish the game to unravel all the secrets — and in just less than an hour I did — but it wasn’t the ending that I was looking for. I restarted the game and started my attempt to figure out how to trigger the game’s true ending, and I was not at all disappointed.
I do not plan to spoil anything here, but if you are looking for a quick, free, and overall fantastic game to play, I recommend HAPPY WORLD. It’s an incredible mix of a happy-go-lucky simple world, and a darker, more depressing one hidden underneath. I truly doubt you’ll be disappointed. You can download it for free here.
Also, you can go to Jimi Masuraki’s Patreon page here, because he makes pretty great, fun games that you really can’t find anywhere else. 
Oil of wintergreen makes for lovely glowsticks, but the secret ingredient is the solvent used to create chemiluminescence. (more…)
FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.
IF you like Tom the Dancing Bug, be part of the team that makes it happen: INNER HIVE! Join for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, commentary, and much more.
GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”Filled with wild twists and funny dialogue” -Publishers Weekly) Book One here. Book Two here.
More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)
Some of these near-misses would probably have been catastrophic and unavoidable without predictive autopilot. (more…)
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders fancied herself an expert on etiquette this morning during an interview on CNN. While discussing Trump's State of the Union Speech, CNN's Chris Cuomo said that the room was "grossly divided," and that he'd never seen House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's face like that before, referring to Pelosi's look of frustration.
"I think Nancy Pelosi looks like that all the time," Sanders responded. “I think she should smile a lot more often. I think the country would be better for it. She seems to kind of embody the bitterness that belongs in the Democrat Party right now.”
Interesting that she thinks Pelosi should smile when Pelosi doesn't feel like smiling, but doesn't point to Bernie Sanders (not known for his smiles) or any of the other unsmiling people in the room last night, shown in the video below:
https://youtu.be/9zsBmgSWMBsVia Think Progress
Brenda Fitzgerald was Donald Trump's Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, charged with reducing smoking among Americans and doing work that directly affected the financial fortunes of tobacco companies when she bought a stake in Japan Tobacco. (more…)
Artist Jenny Odell created the Bureau of Suspended Objects to photographically archive and researched the manufacturing origins of 200 objects found at a San Francisco city dump; last August, she prepared a special report for Oakland's Museum of Capitalism about the bizarre world of shitty "free" watches sold through Instagram influences and heavily promoted through bottom-feeding remnant ad-buys, uncovering a twilight zone of copypasted imagery and promotional materials livened with fake stories about mysterious founders and branded tales. (more…)
Nerf has unveiled six new blasters that will ship in fall of 2018, with some pretty amazing features, as detailed in Josie Colt's Wired roundup: the N-Strike Elite Infinius has a funnel you pour ammo into and it automagically slots them into a 30-dart magazine; the Modulus Ghost Ops Evader has a how-it-works-style transparent housing that lights up; the Zombie Strike Survival System Scravenger has twin dart-clips and a breakaway secondary blaster with two holdout shots; while the Nitro Doubleclutch Inferno fires little foam rolling cars around a tracked obstacle course. (more…)
The FCC's order killing Net Neutrality in December 2016 also includes a prohibition on states making their own telcoms rules that restore it (this is a mixed bag -- if states' rights don't permit them to overrule the FCC, then a future FCC that reinstates a Net Neutrality order could stop states whose governments are captured by telcoms lobbyists from subverting it), and states have fought back though a loophole: the governors of Montana and New York have issued executive orders banning non-Neutral ISPs from doing business with the government; but in California, the State Senate just went further. (more…)
Comics writer G. Willow Wilson, who previously lived in Egypt and wrote for the opposition weekly Cairo Magazine, writes movingly and hauntingly on Twitter about the experience of a living in a state that is transitioning into dictatorship, which does not feel "intrinsically different on a day-to-day basis than a democracy does," but rather is marked by "the steady disappearance of dissent from the public sphere. Anti-regime bloggers disappear. Dissident political parties are declared 'illegal.' Certain books vanish from the libraries." (more…)
Make No Law is a just-launched podcast hosted by Ken "Popehat" White (previously), a former Federal prosecutor who writes some of the best, most incisive legal commentary on the web; the first episode deals with the oft-cited, badly misunderstood "fighting words" doctrine and its weird history in the religious prosecution of Jehovah's Witnesses (my sole complaint is that he didn't work in E. Gary Gygax). (more…)
Before being hired to serve as CEO of Wag, a dogwalking startup that just received a $300,000,000 investment from Softbank, Hilary Schneider presided over Lifelock, a company whose fraudulent anti-fraud products cost it over $100,000,000 in fines, before Schneider convinced Symantec to buy it for an absurd $2.6 billion. (more…)
Australian science fiction author Sean Williams (previously) is an Australian Antarctic Division Arts Fellow, who got to live in the Antarctic while researching an alternate War of the Worlds retelling. (more…)
Australian national broadcaster ABC has gotten hold of a massive trove of state secrets that were inadvertently sold off in a pair of cheap, locked filing cabinets purchased from a Canberra junk-shop that specialises in government surplus furniture. (more…)
France is in turmoil. Heavy discounts of Nutella have resulted in "scenes of violence" at supermarkets as shoppers vie to obtain as much of the chocolate and hazelnut spread as possible.
"They are like animals. A woman had her hair pulled, an elderly lady took a box on her head, another had a bloody hand," one customer told French media. A member of staff at one Intermarché shop in central France told the regional newspaper Le Progrès: "We were trying to get in between the customers but they were pushing us."
Ferrero, manufacturers of the delicious spread, said it had no part in the supermarket's decision to discount Nutella and that it "regretted Thursday's violence."
https://twitter.com/kennyLebon/status/956481551621066753
Love it or hate it, Toto's 1982 soft rock mega-hit "Africa" is here to stay. But how did a band from Los Angeles get famous for a song about Africa?
Dave Simpson of The Guardian recently interviewed the song's writer (and vocalist) David Paich and found out:
One of the reasons I was in a rock band was to see the world. As a kid, I’d always been fascinated by Africa. I loved movies about Dr Livingstone and missionaries. I went to an all-boys Catholic school and a lot of the teachers had done missionary work in Africa. They told me how they would bless the villagers, their Bibles, their books, their crops and, when it rained, they’d bless the rain. That’s where the hook line – “I bless the rains down in Africa” – came from.They said loneliness and celibacy were the hardest things about life out there. Some of them never made it into the priesthood because they needed companionship. So I wrote about a person flying in to meet a lonely missionary. It’s a romanticised love story about Africa, based on how I’d always imagined it. The descriptions of its beautiful landscape came from what I’d read in National Geographic.
Paich told Musicradar in 2013:
"Its first inception came when there used to be UNICEF commercials on TV, showing children and families living in poverty. The first time I saw that it affected me deeply…"I sat down and started playing and the chorus just came out like magic. I remember after I'd sung 'I bless the rains down in Africa', I just stopped and went, 'Wait a minute. I might be a little talented, but I'm not that talented - God's using me for an instrument here!'
"I realised I had a song in the making, so I started writing on the Yamaha CS-80, which you hear in the intro - that's the keyboard playing - and then you hear the little kalimba sounds [on the Yamaha GS1] in the chorus. It was a fertile time to make music with new sounds, and that kind of defined that song."
In 2015, Paich shared with Grantland:
“We had finished our record, so when I started writing that, they were like, ‘Dave, why don’t you save this for your solo album?’ It’s kind of the joke — when someone writes a song that doesn’t really fit into the Toto mold, the joke is, everybody says, ‘Save that for your solo album.’ So the band kind of indulged me and let me start working on this track for it. This one barely made it; it just got on the end of the Toto IV album. It’s the one that didn’t get away, you know?”We hadn’t the faintest idea that this was going to be a hit, maybe until the head of Columbia Records called us and said, ‘You know that they’re starting to play this song “Africa”? It’s starting to become a dance hit.’ I go, ‘Are you kidding me? “Africa” is becoming a dance hit?’ ‘Yeah, they’re starting to play it in these discos and dance places in New York City.’
“I think it starts breaking there, and you know how things catch on. It became popular, kind of like a little cult thing, and all of a sudden started climbing the charts. We couldn’t believe it. I mean, we still look at each other, turn to each other with a look of amazement today, at the journey that song’s taken. Normally, things that are kind of deep and musical and kind of off the beaten path don’t make for hit records. I mean not always, for us anyway, so that was a very special record.”
The band has a new greatest hits album titled 40 Trips Around the Sun and will begin touring Europe in February.
This might very well be my new favorite thing. While the "Super Big Wrapped in Warmth Happy Furry Jeans Sleeping Bag" looks like an oversized pair of dungarees, it's really just a giant novelty sleeping bag built for two!
It even comes with two bandana-patterned pillows, which fit adorably in the back pockets... 
It's available at Japan Trend Shop for $696. Grab one for me too and we'll have a sleepover.
It's hard to imagine that contemporary discussions in the White House are even dumber than those between Richard Nixon, John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman.
Nixon: The point that I make is that goddamit, I do not think that you glorify, on public television, homosexuality! You ever see what happened, you know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. Aristotle was a homo, we all know that. So was Socrates.
Ehrlichman: But he never had the influence that television has.
Nixon: The last six Roman emperors were fags.
Amy Shira Teitel of Vintage Space shares lots of cool facts about the golden age of space exploration. Here, she enumerates the engines (and motors) it took Apollo to get to the moon. (more…)
At the Under the Radar Festival in New York City earlier this month, a crowd of soon-to-be singers rehearsed "back ups" for David Bowie's "Heroes." After an hour, they were performing the song with David Byrne as a Choir! Choir! Choir! tribute to Bowie.
According to Consequence of Sound, Byrne gave his thoughts on working with the choir group, in a press release:
"There is a transcendent feeling in being subsumed and surrendering to a group. This applies to sports, military drills, dancing… and group singing. One becomes a part of something larger than oneself, and something in our makeup rewards us when that happens. We cling to our individuality, but we experience true ecstasy when we give it up. So, the reward experience is part of the show.”
Byrne is beginning an ambitious tour in March for his new album, American Utopia. The album is his first solo LP in 14 years.
There's SO much Star Wars merch out there and few galactic items catch my eye anymore.
Well, that is until I came across this robotic vacuum POWERbot duo by Samsung. One looks like the head of a stormtrooper and the other of Darth Vader. Both play some of your "favorite Star Wars sound effects," including the theme song. (Sure! Why not?)
Get that second mortgage because prices for these snazzy limited-edition vacuums start at $599.
Also, related: I wasn't sure if "stormtrooper" was capitalized or not (it's not) and came across this Star Wars style guide while looking for the answer.
Glenn Payette is a TV news reporter for CBC in Newfoundland and Labrador. Over the years, his pronunciation of the name of the province's capital has undergone an amazing transformation.
Previously: Gustavo Almadovar
Multiplying large numbers before calculators led to a number of ingenious inventions to make things easier, like these Genaille-Lucas rulers demonstrated by the fine folks at DONG.
Via manufacturer Creative Crafthouse:
In the days before calculators, methods of simplifying calculations were of much interest. In 1617 Napier also published a book describing a method to multiply, divide and extract square roots using a set of bars or rods. These became known as Napier's Bones. (avail on our website)In the late 1800s, Henri Genaille, a French civil engineer, invented an improvement to Napier's Bones that eliminates the need to handle carries from one digit position to the next. The problem was posed by Edouard Lucas and thus the alternate name of Genaille-Lucas Rulers (or Rods).
There are also sets for division. You can get your own set online or print your own from these free files.
• Genaille-Lucas Rulers (YouTube / DONG)
Whether you aim to work in marketing, fashion, or even game design, one of the tools you'll need to get comfortable with is Adobe Photoshop. This image editing tool has become a staple for producing gripping visual content, and understanding its ins and outs is a whole lot easier with the Ultimate Adobe Photo Editing Bundle, now on sale for $19.
From the absolute essentials to high-end retouching techniques, this eight-course collection is designed to take you from beginner to expert with Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. You'll dabble in a host of these programs' applications, including graphic design and photo editing, and leverage essential tools like the Magic Wand, Lasso Tool, Quick Selection Tool and more to create professional-quality content that can bolster your portfolio.
The Ultimate Adobe Photo Editing Bundle was on sale for $29.99 in the Boing Boing Store, but you can get it today at a new sale price of $19.
Vinyl jukeboxes are making a comeback, and Sound Leisure built this incredible Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band vinyl jukebox to celebrate the album's 50th anniversary. (more…)
Except for some interior stairs and some retrofitted safety and stabilizing additions, the inside of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is smooth marble. This lovely tour goes all the way up to the bells at the top, offering a great view. (more…)
Glenn Thrush, who apologized for his behavior around women colleagues at The New York Times, is returning to work there after his time off.
“The woman involved was upset by my actions and for that I am deeply sorry,” in relation to the June episode. “Over the past several years, I have responded to a succession of personal and health crises by drinking heavily. During that period, I have done things that I am ashamed of, actions that have brought great hurt to my family and friends.”
The New York Times responded by suspending Thrush and launching an investigation into his actions. He underwent counseling. The newspaper last month announced that he would return to work, though he would no longer be covering the White House, a choice beat under the mercurial and mendacious President Trump.
How odd that false accusations supposedly destroy men's careers, yet truthful ones barely touch them.
Bianca Taylor of KQED Arts recently visited the archive and writes:
Aftel tells me that the natural oils in her perfumes are not as pungent and long-lasting as the synthetic oils that you’d find at a makeup counter.The Aftel Archive of Curious Scents was founded as a way to share her love of natural fragrance with the world...
Aftel says perfume is more than just Chanel. Scented materials have been used in spiritual traditions from Buddhism to Catholicism, and Native American rituals. She has created nearly all of the 300 scents in the museum.
“Perfume has a very tangled history,” she explains. “There is no civilization that didn’t revere and want scented materials.”
The New York Times Style Magazine visited in 2017 and reported:
...[It] is not just the first museum in the U.S. dedicated to perfume, but more beguilingly, the first one dedicated to the experience of fragrance. This tiny museum manages to contain the olfactory history of the world: hundreds of natural essences, raw ingredients and antique tinctures gathered from every corner of the globe, and all available for visitors to smell.
The museum is only open on Saturdays from 10 AM to 6 PM, and tickets are $20. That buys you one hour and "3 letter-press scent strips to dip in essences and take home."
image via Aftelier Perfumes
Libyan desert glass is a material of unknown origin scattered across a large swath of the Sahara. Among it, scientists found Hypatia stones, a strange phosphorous-nickel alloy recently determined to be extra-terrestrial. (more…)
A group of exiled Turkish human rights lawyers have published an in-depth history of how Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkish government has described Bylock, an encrypted messenging app, whose 1x1 analytics pixel was used as the basis for accusing tens -- if not hundreds -- of thousands of Turks of treason, with consequences ranging from loss of employment and ostracization to imprisonment, to torture, to suicide. (more…)
