People Suck Ass
Poachers kill one of the world’s largest elephants in Kenya
Poachers hack the face and tusks off Satao, one of Kenya’s most famous elephants, as conservationists warn elephant poaching “is at least 10 times the official figures”
Satao’s enormous tusks classed him among the largest elephants left alive in the world Photo: RICHARD MOLLER/TSAVO TRUST
By Zoe Flood, Nairobi
One of Africa’s last ‘great tuskers’, elephants with ivory weighing over 100lbs, has been poisoned to death by poachers in Kenya after years of adapting his behaviour to hide himself from humans.
The bull, named Satao and likely born in the late 1960s, succumbed to wounds from poison darts in a remote corner of Tsavo National Park where he had migrated to find fresh water after recent storms.
His carcass yesterday lay with its face and great tusks hacked off, four legs splayed where he fell with his last breath, left only for the vultures and the scavengers.
Conservationists told how he moved from bush to bush always keeping his ivory hidden amongst the foliage.
“I’m convinced he did that to hide his tusks from humans, he had an awareness that they were a danger to him,” said Mark Deeble, a British documentary filmmaker who has spent long periods of time filming Satao.
The elephant’s killing is the latest in a massive surge of poaching of the mammals for their ivory across Africa.
Richard Moller, of The Tsavo Trust, who had been monitoring Satao for several months confirmed that the elephant found dead on May 30 was indeed Satao, whom he called “an icon”.
“There is no doubt that Satao is dead, killed by an ivory poacher’s poisoned arrow to feed the seemingly insatiable demand for ivory in far off countries,” Mr Moller said.
“A great life lost so that someone far away can have a trinket on their mantelpiece.”
Poetry Is The Key – and Not The Money.
Poetry: Who Needs It?
By
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — WE live in the age of grace and the age of futility, the age of speed and the age of dullness. The way we live now is not poetic. We live prose, we breathe prose, and we drink, alas, prose. There is prose that does us no great harm, and that may even, in small doses, prove medicinal, the way snake oil cured everything by curing nothing. But to live continually in the natter of ill-written and ill-spoken prose is to become deaf to what language can do.
The dirty secret of poetry is that it is loved by some, loathed by many, and bought by almost no one. (Is this the silent majority? Well, once the “silent majority” meant the dead.) We now have a poetry month, and a poet laureate — the latest, Charles Wright, announced just last week — and poetry plastered in buses and subway cars like advertising placards. If the subway line won’t run it, the poet can always tweet it, so long as it’s only 20 words or so. We have all these ways of throwing poetry at the crowd, but the crowd is not composed of people who particularly want to read poetry — or who, having read a little poetry, are likely to buy the latest edition of “Paradise Lost.”
This is not a disaster. Most people are also unlikely to attend the ballet, or an evening with a chamber-music quartet, or the latest exhibition of Georges de La Tour. Poetry has long been a major art with a minor audience. Poets have always found it hard to make a living — at poetry, that is. The exceptions who discovered that a few sonnets could be turned into a bankroll might have made just as much money betting on the South Sea Bubble.
There are still those odd sorts, no doubt disturbed, and unsocial, and torturers of cats, who love poetry nevertheless. They come in ones or twos to the difficult monologues of Browning, or the shadowy quatrains of Emily Dickinson, or the awful but cheerful poems of Elizabeth Bishop, finding something there not in the novel or the pop song.
This is not a disaster. Most people are also unlikely to attend the ballet, or an evening with a chamber-music quartet, or the latest exhibition of Georges de La Tour. Poetry has long been a major art with a minor audience. Poets have always found it hard to make a living — at poetry, that is. The exceptions who discovered that a few sonnets could be turned into a bankroll might have made just as much money betting on the South Sea Bubble.
Supermensch
Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon
By Brent Simon
A documentary about its titular talent manager, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, directed by writer-actor Mike Myers, has the potential to be a slice of yawning, self-congratulatory star-fuckery of the highest order. After all, in addition to its famous director, it has plenty of recognizable celebrities who all line up to sing the praises of its subject. And yet, thanks to whip-smart pacing, this warm-hearted and unfussy nonfiction valentine emerges as an engaging portrait of a life less ordinary—a man who embraced and promulgated selflessness, even while, in his early days, indulging in druggy partying and frequently sporting a T-shirt that read, “No head, no backstage pass.”
Gordon looks like your average Florida retiree but sounds rather like the late Sydney Pollack, erudite and measured, except when his laugh—halfway between a chuckle and a goose’s honk—comes bursting forth. What helps further differentiate him is the fact that wild yarns trail him like a speedboat’s wake. A self-described social liberal who graduated from the University of Buffalo but quickly abandoned his dreams of becoming a probation officer, Gordon tells a story of occupational focusing so random and fanciful that it defies belief: a day after arriving in Los Angeles and taking a room at the Landmark Motor Hotel, he took some LSD, and later responded to the screams of a woman he thought was being sexually assaulted. She beat the crap out of him (turns out she was merely in the throes of ecstasy). The next day the duo apologized to one another, and since Gordon had a lot of marijuana, he shared it. The guy she was with suggested he become a manager. It turns out that woman and man were Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, respectively, and within a week Gordon was managing Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd.
Though the latter relationship would only last nine days (Gordon freely admits he had no idea what he was doing), his relationship with shock-rocker Cooper would endure decades. Gordon was less interested in the music than the manipulation of the moment, ginning up controversy wherever they went—trying to get Cooper arrested for wearing see-through clothes, and insisting on wrapping the vinyl records of Cooper’s 1972 album School’s Out in panties. He saw the value in marketed rebellion, but Gordon also had a conscience. Later, working with Teddy Pendergrass and other African-American artists, he sought to break free from the constraints of the so-called “chitlin’ circuit,” in which artists were frequently stiffed performance fees.
Reading Kickbow Starter
Picking Up Indecent Pecans and All Kinds Of Things With Animals
THAD COCHRAN: I GREW UP DOING ‘ALL KINDS OF INDECENT THINGS WITH ANIMALS’
Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) provided his latest head-scratching comment in public, this time joking he engaged in illicit activities with animals as a child.
“[We’d] get back [to the Pine Belt-Hattiesburg area of Mississippi] as often as we could because it was fun—it was an adventure to be out there in the country and see what goes on,” Cochran said of his childhood and how parts of his family lived in the central part of the state. “Picking up pecans, from that to all kind of indecent things with animals.”
The audience laughed at that point, video published by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger shows. Cochran’s facial expressions did not change, nor did his stance or demeanor. “I know some of you know what that is,” he continued. “The whole point of the story is not just coming here to visit cousins and get to know aunts and uncles better, you absorb the culture and you know what’s important to people here. I feel very comfortable here and have an identity with this area of the state that’s different than any other.”
The Shawshank Rainbow
The Shawshank Residuals
How one of Hollywood’s great second acts keeps making money
By RUSSELL ADAMS
Bob Gunton is a character actor with 125 credits to his name, including several seasons of “24” and “Desperate Housewives” and a host of movie roles in films such as the Oscar-winning “Argo.” Vaguely familiar faces like his are common in the Los Angeles area where he lives, and nobody pays much attention. Many of his roles have been forgotten.
But every day, the 68-year-old actor says, he hears the whispers—from cabdrivers, waiters, the new bag boy at his neighborhood supermarket: “That’s the warden in ‘Shawshank.’ ”
He also still gets residual payments—not huge, but steady, close to six figures by the film’s 10th anniversary in 2004. Since then, he has continued to get “a very substantial income” long past the age when residuals usually dry up.
“I suspect my daughter, years from now, will still be getting checks,” he said.
Bob Welch (Reggie Jackson’s Daddy) Gone
Bob Welch, Pitching Ace and Prototype for Today’s Power Arms, Dies at 57
Bob Welch, a flame-throwing right-hander for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Oakland A’s who overcame alcoholism to win 211 games, including 27 in 1990, a single-season total no other pitcher has reached in the past 40 years, died on Monday in Seal Beach, Calif. He was 57.
Welch played 17 seasons in the big leagues, from 1978 to 1994, was named to two All-Star teams, one in each league, and won the American League Cy Young Award in 1990. He was among the hardest throwers of his era, a rangy and athletic prototype of the so-called power arms who now flood the rotations and bullpens of major league teams, challenging opposing lineups with their 95-mile-per-hour fastballs.
His blistering fastball, and his poise, received an early showcase at the end of his rookie season with the Dodgers, when he was called in from the bullpen to protect a one-run lead with one out in the ninth inning of Game 2 of the 1978 World Series against the Yankees.
Two men were on base, and after getting Thurman Munson to fly out he faced Reggie Jackson, the Hall of Fame slugger who the year before had clinched the Series for the Yankees, also against the Dodgers, with three homers in Game 6.
In an at-bat that lasted more than five minutes and became one of baseball’s most famous showdowns, Welch, who was just 21, threw nine pitches, all fastballs, and with a 3-2 count blazed one on — or maybe just off — the inside corner. Jackson swung violently and missed, ending the game.
The Hole’s The Thing
Artist Enacts Origin of the World at Musée d’Orsay—And, Yes, That Means What You Think
On May 29 the Luxembourgian performance artist Deborah de Robertis visited Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, sat down in front of Gustave Courbet’s infamous 1866 painting L’Origine du monde (Origin of the World), and recreated the iconic image in the flesh. In a video of the piece, titled Mirror of Origin, the artist can be seen dressed in a gold sequin dress, exposing her vagina while the museum’s security guards crowding around her and usher cheering visitors out of the gallery. The artist was eventually taken away by police. The museum and two of its guards have filed sexual exhibitionism complaints against the artist.
“If you ignore the context, you could construe this performance as an act of exhibitionism, but what I did was not an impulsive act,” De Robertis told Luxemburger Wort. “There is a gap in art history, the absent point of view of the object of the gaze. In his realist painting, the painter shows the open legs, but the vagina remains closed. He does not reveal the hole, that is to say, the eye. I am not showing my vagina, but I am revealing what we do not see in the painting, the eye of the vagina, the black hole, this concealed eye, this chasm, which, beyond the flesh, refers to infinity, to the origin of the origin.”
Travels With Johnny
John Waters details his cross-country hitchhiking adventure in his new book ‘Carsick’
Cult director began his journey in May 2012 at end of his street to catch a ride to Interstate 70. That began a nine-day, 21-ride odyssey from Baltimore to San Francisco
by MARIANNE GARVEY, BRIAN NIEMIETZ AND OLI COLEMAN WITH MOLLY FRIEDMAN
Famed cult director John Waters was 66 when he decided it would be a great idea to hitchhike across the country and write a book about his experience.
“I make a living thinking up weird things to do,” says Waters, now 68, who directed such camp classics as the original “Hairspray” and “Pink Flamingos.” “That’s what I do every morning.”
His nine-day, 21-ride odyssey from Baltimore to San Francisco (he has homes in both cities) is detailed in a road-trippy new book, “Carsick.”
Not mentioned in the memoir is that Waters made it back to New York in time to accept a Council of Fashion Designers of America award on behalf of absentee Johnny Depp in 2012.
Waters, who had directed Depp in “Cry-Baby,” was such a hit that the CFDA asked him to host the whole glittering shebang Monday at Lincoln Center. It seems the director — famous for his pencil mustache — always had a passion for fashion.
Robots Escape Factory – Fall On Grandma
Dawn of a robot revolution as army of machines escape the factory
Cleaning the Sydney Harbour Bridge used to be a dangerous, dirty and laborious job. As soon as a team of workers, operating a sandblaster, reached one end of the iconic structure they had to start again to keep 485,000 square metres of steel pristine.
Now two robots called Rosie and Sandy, built by SABRE Autonomous Solutions, blast away paint and corrosion all day long without a break. They determine which area needs most attention via a laser scan and move about on rails.
“A sand blaster can slice through flesh. Automating jobs like that is a good thing, it helps improve the quality of human work,” says Roko Tschakarow, head of the Mobile Gripper Systems Division at Schunk, which supplies the lightweight robot arm for the Sydney robots.’
However, first various ethical, legal and societal issues will need to be addressed.
“If a heavy robot falls on your grandma, without a clear legal framework, what’s going to happen?,” asks Mr Champion at Robolution.
I knew there was an invisible whale there! I just knew it, woo-hoo!
Hidden Beached Whale Revealed in 17th-Century Dutch Painting
By by Megan Gannon, News Editor
View of Scheveningen Sands, before and after conservators uncovered a beached whale in the painting. (Fitzwilliam …
When art conservators in the United Kingdom were cleaning a 17th-century Dutch seascape, they found a surprise: an image of a beached whale that had been hidden for at least 150 years.
Until recently, the painting — “View of Scheveningen Sands,” created by Hendrick van Anthonissen around 1641 — simply showed groups of people gathered on a beach in The Hague in the Netherlands.
“It seemed a very unassuming painting depicting a very calm beach scene set in winter,” Shan Kuang, a conservation student at the University of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, said in a new video explaining the strange find. “There were clusters of people gathered. I was unclear why they were there, but it didn’t seem too out of normal.” [Image Gallery: Technology Reveals Hidden Art Treasures]
Kuang was tasked with removing a coat of varnish, which is typically found on oil paintings, but unfortunately yellows over time. When she began cleaning, a figure emerged on the horizon of the ocean next to a shape that looked like a sail. This was “extremely peculiar and unexpected,” Kuang said. But further cleaning with a scalpel and solvent revealed the floating figure was actually standing on top of a whale, and what at first appeared to be a sail was actually the whale’s fin.
At the time the painting was created, there was a surge of public interest in whales, researchers at the museum said, noting that historical records document a number of whale strandings on the coastline of the Netherlands in the beginning of the 17th century.
Sheepskin Pshaw!
Science Confirms: Yup, This Book Really Is Bound in Human Skin
Surely, you’ve seen our recent work on anthropodermic bibliopegy, the early modern practice of binding books in human skin?
No? Well, a quick refresher: some books, since the 16th century but before our own time, were bound in human skin. Why? “The confessions of criminals were occasionally bound in the skin of the convicted,” Harvard librarian Heather Cole explained, “or an individual might request to be memorialized for family or lovers in the form of a book.”
Qué romantico!
Anyway, we know it happened because people refer to it happening in the literature of the time, and also because some books bore inscriptions that literally said that they were bound in skin.
But such tomes are suspect. You can’t just trust anyone who says they’ve bound a book in human skin. For example, one had this inscription, but turned out to be stupid sheepskin:
The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it.
Gravity Killed
Marilyn Beck Gone
Marilyn Beck, longtime syndicated Hollywood columnist, dies at 85
(Ron Galella, WireImage)
Marilyn Beck, a syndicated Hollywood columnist who for decades dished out delectable dollops on celebrities hooking up, splitting up and cracking up, has died at her Oceanside home. She was 85.
At its peak, Beck’s column was featured in some 500 newspapers with a total circulation of 38 million. She also was a familiar presence on television’s syndicated “PM Magazine” and E! Entertainment’s “The Gossip Show.”
As an interviewer, Beck was genial but brash. In a TV appearance, she asked her longtime friend Barbara Walters, then in her 50s, whether she’d had cosmetic surgery. (The answer was no.) She also tried to pin down Bob Hope on the size of his fortune and discovered it was more than $100 million but less than $500 million. (Time magazine got the half-billion-dollar estimate from “some kid backstage,” Hope fumed.)
Run Robot Run
from International Business Times
Korea’s Dinosaur Robot Outruns Usain Bolt
Scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have built a fast-running biped robot that can reach a top speed of 46 km/hour (28.6mph) on a treadmill.
Inspired by the velociraptor – the predatory dinosaur which lived 75 million years ago, and was made infamous by Jurassic Park – the scientists decided to build a sprinting robot with two legs and a mechanism that works as a tail.
While Raptor is not as fast as Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah, the world’s reigning fastest legged robot, which has a top speed of 47 km/hr, the new Korean robot can beat Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt, the fastest human ever whose top speed is estimated to be 43.92 km/hr.
The two robots are also very different in the way they have been built.
Cheetah is a four-legged quadroped robot powered by hydraulic actuators and is heavy, but the Raptor only has two legs, which are made from lightweight composite material, and it weighs just 3kg.
The Raptor also has a ‘tail’ – a spinning rod – that keeps its body stable as it navigates around and over obstacles, according to Jongwon Park, a PhD student at KAIST’s Mechatronics, Systems, and Control Laboratory.
Insomniac: The Life And Times of Pasquale Rotella
Fox 2000, Temple Hill To Bring EDM Mogul Pasquale Rotella’s Life To Screen, Buying James Frey-Penned Memoir
EXCLUSIVE: Based on a book proposal, Fox 2000 has made a preemptive acquisition of Insomniac: The Life And Times of Pasquale Rotella, a memoir that the Electronic Dance Music mogul is writing with A Million Little Pieces author James Frey. The book, which St. Martin’s Press will publish next summer, tells of Rotella’s rags to riches ride as the architect of Insomniac, a company behind the biggest EDM events in the country. Rotella became a promoter at the beginning of the rave scene in the early 1990s, starting with 50 people in warehouses in Venice Beach, to staging events like the Electric Daisy Carnival Flagship Festival, which draws 400,000 to Vegas each June. He reportedly sold half his company to Live Nation for $50 million.
Temple Hill‘s Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen will produce with Haven Entertainment’s Rachel Miller, and Fox 2000′s Elizabeth Gabler and Erin Siminoff will oversee it with Temple Hill’s Isaac Klausner. The studio views it as a way into the immensely popular EDM world, with an edgy 8 Mile/Social Network-type look look at a provocative character scratching for his share of the American dream. Mollie Glick at Foundry and Lev Ginsburg at Ginsburg Daniels brokered the deal. Frey’s repped by WME.
Why Racecar Drivers Are So Damn Cool
GWARbar
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.”
Maya Angelou Gone
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.”
When Boogers Just Won’t Do
Norwegian Performance Artist Eats His Own Hip
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.”
This Is Terrible.
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.”
Memorial Day by artnet
Morgan Freeman On Helium
The Revolutions Will Be Televised
Arby’s Is Airing 13 Straight Hours of Smoked Brisket on Television
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.
ENDGAME: Million Dollar Cover
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
The first novel in James Frey’s Endgame series, The Calling, is set for release in 36 countries on 7 October 2014, and today publishers HarperCollins have revealed its golden cover. But there’s more!
As a surreal real-life tie-in, readers across the globe can solve clues both within the book and in the outside world to be in with a chance of winning the extraordinary prize this cover represents. Very mysterious! The prize, a million dollars in gold, is going to be displayed in a soon-to-be-revealed public location…
No more steering with your knee while texting.
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.
Bulls On Parade
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.
Say It Isn’t So….
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.
Très Cool Kitchen Slide Rule
Buzz Books: Young Adult
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.