from SPIN

GWAR Restaurant Will Feature ‘Gourmet Junk Food’

Legendary costumed metal band solicits fan support on Indiegogo

WRITTEN BY Chris Martins

Heavy metal monsters GWAR suffered a major setback in March when frontman Dave Brockie, a.k.a. Oderus Orungus, died unexpectedly at the age of 50. Now they aim to move forward once again, while honoring their fallen leader, with help from their fans. As it turns out, Brockie had a dream to open up his very own restaurant in the band’s hometown of Richmond, Virginia, and his pals are now using Indiegogo to fun the so-called GWARbar.

“We have found the perfect building in Richmond’s historic Jackson Ward, but we need your help to transform it into a fantasy land of food and beverage that we know it can be,” they write. “We need a budget to update almost every surface on the interior and exterior of the building, including bars, floors, walls, ceilings and bathrooms. The money we raise on Indiegogo will also be used to help us renovate the kitchen and purchase all the equipment we will need to bring Derks’ vision of ‘gourmet junk food’ to life. We will be building a smoke house to create our world famous GWAR-B-Q. We need a GWAR sized meat grinder to make creative new takes on hot dogs and freshly ground hamburgers.”

[ click to read complete article at SPIN.com ]

from TIME Magazine

Maya Angelou: A Hymn to Human Endurance

Remembering a life of relentless creativity.

When Maya Angelou was 16 she became not only the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco but the first woman conductor. By the time she was 40 she had also been, in no particular order, a cook, a waitress, a madam, a prostitute, a dancer, an actress, a playwright, an editor at an English-language newspaper in Egypt, and a Calypso singer (her one album is entitled “Miss Calypso.”) It wasn’t until 1970, when she was 41, that she became an author: her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, told the story of her life up to the age of 17. That remarkable life story ended today at the age of 86.

In her last years Angelou’s work became associated with a certain easy, commercial sentimentality—she loaned her name to a line of Hallmark cards, for example—but there was nothing easy about her beginnings. She was born Marguerite Johnson in 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was 3. When she was 7 her mother’s boyfriend raped her. She testified against him in court, but before he could be sentenced he was found beaten to death in an alley. Angelou’s response to the trauma was to become virtually mute – she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak in public for the next 5 years. She often cited this silent period as a time when she became intimately aware of the written word.

Angelou eventually regained her voice, but her life remained chaotic. She became a mother at 17, immediately after graduating high school. She bounced from city to city, job to job and spouse to spouse (she picked up the name Angelou from one of her husbands; “Maya” was her brother’s nickname for her). She spent years living in Egypt and then in Ghana. By the time she was 40 her life story and her distinctive, charismatic way with words had her friends—among them James Baldwin—begging her to write it all down. She finally did.

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Angelou describes herself as “a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil.” Although generations of high school students have been assigned it, the book’s unsparing account of black life in the South during the Depression, and of her sexual abuse, is not easy reading. It is Angelou’s tough, funny, lyrical voice that transforms her story from a litany of isolation and suffering into a hymn of glorious human endurance. That extraordinary voice—dense, idiosyncratic, hilarious, alive—brought novelistic techniques to the task of telling a life story, and its influence on later generations of memoirists, from Maxine Hong Kingston to Elizabeth Gilbert, is incalculable. (Angelou also mixed fact and fiction, unapologetically, long before James Frey.) The themes she expounded in Caged Bird, of suffering and self-reliance, would be braided through the rest of her long life’s work. “All my work, my life, everything is about survival,” Angelou said. “All my work is meant to say, ‘You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.’ In fact, the encountering may be the very experience which creates the vitality and the power to endure.”

[ click to continue reading at TIME.com ]

from artnet.com

Norwegian Performance Artist Eats His Own Hip

Benjamin Sutton

A Norwegian artist named Alexander Selvik Wengshoel has kicked his art career into high gear with a stunt that’s equal parts Chris Burden and Hannibal Lecter: He claims he ate his own hip. Born with a deformed hip that kept him in a wheelchair despite several surgical interventions, Wengshoel finally underwent a successful operation at age 21, which involved replacing his hip. Following the surgery, the performance artist, who is now 25, said he took the detached bone bit home, boiled it, and ate the meat along with a glass of wine and potato gratin, the Independent reports.

“When I got home, I sat in my living room and suddenly I had a whim that I should cook the meat,” Wengshoel told Norway’s The Local. “I resolved to have this nice moment, with me and my hip bone. . . . It’s not every day I will have a piece of human flesh which is mine and which is possible to eat. So I had a little taste and then I thought, ‘That’s really nice.’”

Shocking though this act of self-cannibalism may seem, Wengshoel says his meat actually tasted quite good, even a little exotic. “It had this flavor of wild sheep,” he told The Local, “if you take a sheep that goes in the mountains and eats mushrooms.”

[ click to continue reading at artnet.com ]

from CBS Seattle

Family Finds Out Daughter Died In California Mass Shooting After Activating iPhone Tracking App

A woman places flowers on the lawn of the Alpha Phi sorority house on May 25, 2014 in Isla Vista, Calif. (credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

SEATTLE (CBS Seattle/AP) — A Seattle family found out that their 19-year-old daughter died in the California mass shooting after activating a phone tracking app.

Bob Weiss, father of University of California, Santa Barbara freshman Veronika Weiss, realized their daughter was at the crime scene after activating an iPhone tracking app in an effort to find her after the shooting.

“We got to the border of the crime scene and we turned it on again,” Weiss told KING-TV. “We could actually see the phone moving which we assume was Veronika’s body being moved to the coroner’s truck.”

[ click to continue reading at CBS Seattle ]

from artnet.com

Your Memorial Day Weekend in 12 Artworks

Cait Munro

Leo Villareal, Flag (2010).

[ click to continue viewing at artnet.com ]

from Slate.com

Arby’s Is Airing 13 Straight Hours of Smoked Brisket on Television

By Alison Griswold

Forget the Yule Log. How would you like to see 13-straight hours of meat on film? If that sounds up your alley, then Arby’s has you covered, thanks to a TV ad it will be airing this weekend to promote a new sandwich mounded with brisket cooked for—you guessed it—13 hours. The New York Times reports that the commercial is free of talking and consists of a single take of the brisket cooking away through the glass window of a smoker.

Arby’s has arranged for the commercial to air on a single television station in Duluth, Minnesota. The action starts at 1 p.m. Central time on Saturday and ends at 2 a.m. on Sunday with an Arby’s exec removing the brisket from its smoker and slicing the meat for a sandwich. It will also play in a one-time livestream of the event from 9 a.m. until 10 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday. The takeaway is that if you live in Duluth and come home drunk and hungry on Saturday night, you’ll have a big hunk of meat to stare at.

[ click to read full article at Slate.com ]

from The Guardian

Million dollar cover reveal for James Frey’s new Endgame series

Newsflash: Readers around the world are given the chance to win a million dollars in gold by solving the clues of a super-puzzle!

by Amber Segal

Emblazoned… Endgame: The Calling by James Frey. Photograph: HarperCollins

from TechCrunch

California Will Start Granting Licenses For Driverless Cars In September

by Greg Kumparak (@grg)

You need a license to drive a car. But does a robot?

For now, yes.

Come September, the California Department of Motor Vehicles will begin granting licenses to select driverless cars and their human co-pilots, which will make it a bit less legally iffy as to whether or not they’re actually allowed to be on a public road.

The good news: The license will only cost $150 a pop, and that covers 10 vehicles and up to 20 test drivers.

The bad (but probably actually good) news: You probably can’t get one, so don’t go trying to make your own Googlecar just yet.

The terms of the license are (as you might hope, in these early days) pretty strict.

[ click to continue reading at TechCrunch.com ]

from BBC News

Madrid matadors gored by bulls at festival launch

Matador Antonio Nazare was the second matador to be wounded at the San Isidro festival launch

A major event in Madrid’s bullfighting season had to be cancelled after all three matadors were gored by bulls.

David Mora suffered the worst injuries, as one of the animals rammed its horn into his leg and tossed him into the air at the Las Ventas bullring.

He was said to be in a serious but no longer life-threatening condition.

The organisers of the prestigious San Isidro festival said it was the first time in 35 years that the event had had to be suspended.

About 2,000 bullfights are still held every year in Spain, but the numbers are falling. In 2010, Catalonia became the second Spanish region after the Canary Islands to ban the tradition.

Opponents describe the blood-soaked pageants as barbaric, while fans – including Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy – say the tradition is an ancient art form deeply rooted in national history.

‘Horrific, shocking, chilling’Mr Mora, who opened the programme, fell to the ground after being knocked over by a 532kg (1,172lb) bull.

A shocked crowd watched in horror as he was gored and thrown through the air. Mr Mora sustained a large gash in his thigh and another in his armpit, bullring officials said.

[ click to continue reading at BBC ]

from PASTE Magazine

Plagiarism Controversy Behind Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway” Resurfaces

By Shawn Christ

For 43 years, “Stairway to Heaven” has been the most popular song in the Led Zeppelin catalog, capturing listeners from Jimmy Pages’ first glimmering notes to Robert Plant’s fading vocals.

However, Bloomberg Businessweek reported last week that legal action has been taken to block the release of the band’s Led Zeppelin IV reissue because of a plagiarism conflict with the song’s famous intro, which can be heard at any time by stepping into a Guitar Center of your choice nationwide. Attorney Francis Alexander Molofiy is representing deceased guitarist Randy California, who played with the band Spirit) and claimed before his death in 1997 that the beginning of “Stairway to Heaven” was lifted from his band’s 1968 song “Taurus.”

The similarities in the songs become evident right around the 1:38 mark in the video above.

[ click to continue reading at PasteMagazine.com ]

from {LIFE}BUZZ

Hang This In Your Kitchen. Seriously, This Idea Is Genius.

Credit: sblattindesign

[ click to read more at LIFEBUZZ.com ]

from Publishers Marketplace

BEA In A Book, Featuring The Best of YA!

Available for free download now for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple’s iBookstore, the Google Play Books store, and Kobo.

This inaugural edition of Buzz Books: Young Adult provides substantial pre-publication excerpts from more than 20 forthcoming young adult and middle grade books. You now have access to the newest YA voices the publishing industry is broadcasting for the fall/winter season—for free to read on Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Google Play, Kobo and more.

Excerpts you can read right now include new work from established giants of the field (Ellen Hopkins; Garth Nix; Scott Westerfeld), authors best-known for their adult books (Carl Hiaasen; Michael Perry; Ben Tripp; Meg Wolitzer), and genuine newsmakers—including the first of James Frey’s attention-getting Endgame trilogy, which will include interactive elements developed in association with Google’s Niantic Labs.

[ click to continue reading at Publishers Marketplace ]

from The New York Times

Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm

By JENNIFER MEDINA

A sophomore at the university, Bailey Loverin, and others have formally called for “trigger warnings” on class syllabuses that would flag potentially traumatic subject matter. CreditMonica Almeida/The New York Times

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Should students about to read “The Great Gatsby” be forewarned about “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,” as one Rutgers student proposed? Would any book that addresses racism — like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or “Things Fall Apart” — have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label?

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.

The warnings, which have their ideological roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the student government formally called for them. But there have been similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, George Washington University and other schools.

The debate has left many academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense and that being provocative is part of their mandate. Trigger warnings, they say, suggest a certain fragility of mind that higher learning is meant to challenge, not embrace. The warnings have been widely debated in intellectual circles and largely criticized in opinion magazines, newspaper editorials and academic email lists.

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from The Daily Mail

Are these mystery radio bursts messages from ALIENS? Freak frequency from outside the Milky Way baffles astronomers

By JONATHAN O’CALLAGHAN

In 1967 British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left stunned by mysterious pulsing signals she detected coming from outside the solar system.

For months she suggested the signals could be of an extraterrestrial intelligent origin, but they were later proven to be rapidly spinning stars known as pulsars.

However, a new series of mysterious signals, known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), has again got astronomers scratching their heads and wondering if, maybe, we’re picking up alien messages.

FRBs are radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly, making them not only hard to find, but also hard to study.

The mystery stems from the fact it is not known what could produce such a short and sharp burst.

This has led some to speculate they could be anything from stars colliding to artificially created messages.

[ click to continue reading at The Daily Mail ]

from Shaq.com

Shaq to publish a children’s book series

Courtesy USA Today

Shaquille O’Neal can add a new title to his LinkedIn profile: “Children’s book author.”

The retired basketball player will author a new series of books called Little Shaq for early readers. It will be based on O’Neal’s childhood and feature a series of adventures of a young Shaq and his cousin Barry.

“I am excited to be working with Bloomsbury on this project that will reach young, independent readers,” O’Neal said in a statement. “Education is a cause that is very important to me and I love that this series will combine reading with my love of basketball. It’s a slam dunk for literacy!”

The first book is scheduled to be published in 2015.

[ click to continue reading at Shaq.com ]

from The Washington Post

4 high school senior pranks that went wild

BY VALERIE STRAUSS

You’d think that after more than a dozen years in school, high school seniors would know what will get them into trouble and what won’t, but apparently some don’t.  It’s senior prank season, and while some have been innocuous, others have led to arrests and suspensions, with one school seeing nearly 20 percent of the senior class picked up by police.

Traditional senior pranks are harmless, and include activities such as making prank phony school announcements, putting desks and chairs outside, and putting alarm clocks in the ceiling to go off at different times.

And then there was a senior prank in San Francisco, where somebody posted phony inspection notices in the hallways that said that school district authorities required “mandatory penis inspections on all male students, faculty, and staff at Lowell High School,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. A statement that the newspaper said was issued by the district reported that Lowell adminstrators are “regarding this incident as a senior prank, and the infractions will be addressed according to school and district policies.”

[ read entire article at WaPo.com ]

from GALLEYCAT

Sci-Fi Artist H.R. Giger Has Died

By Dianna Dilworth

Swiss artist H.R. Giger has died. According to reports in the Swiss press, Giger died of injuries after he suffered after sustaining a fall. He was 74 years old.

The surrealist artist was known for his work which explored the fusion between man and machine. He was best known for designing the sets of the film Alien. Giger was both the author and subject of many books. Giger published his first bookNecronomicon in 1977. Taschen published a comprehensive study of the artist’s work in a book in 2007.

Giger built his own museum in Gruyere, Switzerland which featured many of his sculptures and paintings. Here is more about the site from The Morpheus Gallery’s bio page of the artist.

[ click to continue reading at MediaBistro.com/GALLEYCAT ]

from The San Jose Mercury News

Protecting Godzilla: Even giant monsters need lawyers

By Anthony McCartney / Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — He spews radioactive fire, razes cities and pummels creatures from Earth and beyond, but even Godzilla needs a good lawyer sometimes. After all, you don’t survive 60 years in the movie business without taking some fights to court.

For decades, attorneys acting on behalf of Godzilla’s owners, Tokyo-based Toho Co. Ltd., have amassed a string of victories, fighting counterfeiters and business titans such as Comcast and Honda along the way. The opponents have come from all corners of pop culture: TV commercials, video games, rap music and even the liquor industry.

The litigation has kept Godzilla’s brand thriving and helped pave the way for commercial and merchandising tie-ins that will accompany the monster’s return to the big screen on Friday after a 10 year hiatus. Godzilla’s image is for sale, but permission is needed.

Toho’s attorneys use copyright and trademark law as effectively as Godzilla uses his tail and claws to topple buildings and swat opponents. Their court injunctions have permanently whacked music, books and movies from store shelves.

[ click to continue reading at the SJ Merc ]

from HIGH MUSEUM OF ART ATLANTA

Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas

May 21-September 7, 2014

This major exhibition of innovative automotive design will bring together 17 concept cars from across Europe and the U.S., including some of the rarest and most imaginative cars designed by Ferrari, Bugatti, General Motors and Porsche. Dream Cars will feature cars from the early 1930s to the 21st century that pushed the limits of imagination and foreshadowed the future of design. The exhibition will pair conceptual drawings, patents and scale models with realized cars, demonstrating how their experimental designs advanced ideas of progress and changed the automobile from an object of function to a symbol of future possibilities.

Highlights of Dream Cars will include:

• Paul Arzens’ L’Oeuf électrique (1942), an electric bubble car designed by Arzens for his personal use in Paris during the German occupation that has never before traveled to the U.S.
• William Stout’s Scarab (1936), the genesis of the contemporary minivan.
• Marcello Gandini’s Lancia (Bertone) Stratos HF Zero (1970), a wedge-shaped car that is only 33 inches tall.
• Christopher Bangle’s BMW GINA Light Visionary Model (2001), featuring an exterior made of fabric.
• A full-scale (6 x 20 foot) rendering of a concept car by Carl Renner (1951).

Reserve Tickets
Organization & Support
Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

The exhibition is supported by presenting sponsor Porsche Cars North America, Inc.

[ click to read at HIGH.org ]

from The Star Press

Way, way over the rainbow

Farley Mowat – nature lover,

It’s possible that the old Wicked Witch of the West had a point.

Debut novelist Danielle Paige fantastically flips the fantasy script on the wonderful land of Oz and its denizens in “Dorothy Must Die, the first book in a new young-adult series.

Dorothy Gale, the plucky heroine from the L. Frank Baum works and classic 1939 Judy Garland movie, is now the big heavy, and it’s another girl from Kansas who’s tapped to take out the pigtailed menace and her little dog, too.

Amy Gumm, with her pink hair and knock-off clothing, is a teenager who’s willing to do anything to get out of her trailer-park life in Flat Hill. Though armed with tons of gumption, she’s not liked at school or at home, where her single mom leaves Amy to fend for herself in an oncoming tornado.

It’s a doozy, too, and like the one that took Dorothy on a magical journey decades before, this windy disaster transports Amy to Oz.

[ click to continue reading at The Star Press ]

[ click to pick DOROTHY MUST DIE now at Amazon ]

from CBS DC

Psychologist: YouTube Has Become Tutorial For Kids On How To Act Violent

by Regina F. Graham

WASHINGTON (CBSDC) – Researchers and psychologists have long questioned what kind of effects violent television shows, song lyrics and video games have had on audiences throughout the years. Now, those same questions are being applied to videos featuring violent attacks and fights on sites like YouTube.

Clinical social worker and psychotherapist Laura Miller explained that video sharing sites like YouTube and WorldStarHipHop are allowing users to receive unlimited attention.

“I do think there is something about the unlimited attention that the Internet and specifically social media offer youth today that provides an incentive to defy rules and morality in the pursuit of a certain kind of power through broadcasting violent and demeaning behavior towards others,” Miller told CBSDC. “But I don’t think that YouTube and other social media sites can really be blamed for this.”

[ click to continue reading at CBS DC ]

from Quill & Quire

Beloved Canadian author Farley Mowat dead at 92

Photo by Fred Phipps

Farley Mowat – nature lover, gadfly, and author of the Canadian classics Never Cry Wolf and Lost in the Barrens – has died at the age of 92.

The iconic Canadian author of novels, memoirs, non-fiction books, and books for children, was born in Belleville, Ontario, in 1921 (his father claimed he was conceived in a canoe). He enlisted in the army during the Second World War and was sent overseas, where he fought in the bloody and extended Italian campaign that cost many Canadian soldiers their lives. According to Sandra Martin’s obituary in The Globe and Mail, it was in Ortona that Mowat started drafting the manuscripts that would become the canonical children’s tales The Dog That Wouldn’t Be and Owls in the Family.

Beloved for his children’s writing and his passion for environmental causes, Mowat’s career was not without controversy. Particularly damaging to the author’s reputation was a 1996 cover article in Saturday Night magazine that claimed Mowat had exaggerated or outright falsified facts and other information in his first book, People of the Deer, set among the Inuit of the Arctic. The author of the article, John Goddard, also claimed infelicities in The Desperate People, the sequel to People of the Deer, and Mowat’s classic memoir, Never Cry Wolf. Years before James Frey was excoriated on Oprah’s couch, Mowat found himself forced to defend his approach to what is now known as “creative non-fiction,” saying he preferred truth to facts and that he wrote in a grey area between the two.

Perhaps Mowat’s most memorable defence of his practice occurred onstage at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors in 1999. When interviewer Peter Gzowski asked about his fidelity to facts in his writing, Mowat exploded, “FUCK the facts!”

Of his own writing, Mowat was self-effacing. “I’m a simple man,” he told Q&Qin 2008. “I loathe all talk of ‘artistry’ in writing.

[ click to read full obit at Quill & Quire ]

from The Courier Mail

[ click for the High Museum Of Art’s “DREAM CARS” Exhibition ]

from imgur via REDDIT

[ click to view at imgur ]

from The Huffington Post

The Dark Side of the Rainbow: 9 Good Guys Gone Very, Very Bad

by Danielle Page – Author, ‘Dorothy Must Die’

When I told people I had written a book in which Dorothy Gale of Kansas was the villain, almost everyone had the same response: “Uh, what?”

The Dorothy of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books is the Little Miss Perfect of children’s literature. She’s got a sweet, wide-eyed innocence and an ever-optimistic outlook on life. She sees the good in everyone and tries to treat others as she’d like to be treated. Dorothy’s got her values in order too: this is the girl who could have been princess of her own personal fairyland, but decided to go back to Kansas instead–because she missed her family.

In the popular imagination, Dorothy Gale is about as Good as it gets. In my book, Dorothy Must Die (HarperCollins, $17.99), she’s a vain, evil dictator who needs to be taken out before she destroys Oz.

Where do I get off messing with Dorothy like this? Look, just hear me out.

I like Dorothy, I promise! One thing I love about Baum’s character is that, for all her sweetness, she’s no Pollyanna. She has a no-nonsense, Midwestern toughness about her that makes her easy to admire. She’s a nice girl, sure, but she’s not a doormat. Mess with her, and she just might melt you. (By accident, of course.)

[ click to continue reading at The Huffington Post ]

from The Telegraph

Globe audience faints at ‘grotesquely violent’ Titus Andronicus

Five faint after seeing the ‘grotesquely violent’ Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare’s Globe, as theatre-goers warn of feeling sick and sleepless nights

Laura Rees playing Lavinia in the 2006 production of Titus Andronicus Photo: ALASTAIR MUIR

from Fox NY

Driver caught using cell phone jamming device

By LUKE FUNK, Senior Web Producer

MYFOXNY.COM – A Florida man is facing a $48,000 fine for using a “jammer” in his SUV to keep people around him off of the phone while he was driving.

The Federal Communications Commission says that Jason R. Humphreys used a phone jammer in his vehicle during his daily commute on I-4 between Seffner and Tampa for about two years before he was caught.

Metro PCS alerted the Feds of an issue in April of 2013. The company noticed that its cell phone tower sites had been experiencing interference during the morning and evening commutes.

Agents from the FCC used direction finding techniques to find that strong wideband emissions were coming out of a blue Toyota Highlander SUV driven by Humphreys.

The FCC says that Hunphreys admitted to using the jammer to keep people from talking on their phones while driving.

[ click to continue reading at Fox NY ]