When The Cats Met In The Met Elevator
YouViolent
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.”
Farley Mowat Gone
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.
One Erection
One Direction management upset over ‘One erection’ condoms
by JESSICA GUZMAN / NEW YORK POST
BRITISH boyband One Direction’s management team is upset that an American condom brand is for riffing off the band’s name with their “One Erection” line.
“Stay ‘UP ALL NIGHT’ with these FDA approved ONE ERECTION condoms. There is only one direction to go with these babies and that is UP! Great ice breaker at parties and bars,” reads the promotional blurb reported by the Daily Star.
The packaging is a rip-off the band’s first album cover, Up All Night, by using the same font and placement, as well as five cartoon drawings of condoms to represent each band member.
When the fellas heard about the hilarious gimmick they laughed.
“They even joked about buying a few packets for a laugh,” an insider told the Daily Star.
But the band’s management team wasn’t amused. “They are considering bringing in lawyers to stop them shamefully exploiting the band to sell condoms,” the insider also claims.
HIGH on Dream Cars (May 21-September 7, 2014)
Livin’ For The Atari
The Dark Side Of The Rainbow
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.)
Grotesqus Goronicus
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
With 14 deaths, brutal rape scenes, mutilation and cannibalism, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus has never been one for the fainthearted.
But the gruesome scenes at the Globe Theatre’s latest revival have proved too much for even the most daring of theatre-goers.
Members of the audience have been fainting during the play’s most violent scenes, with others reporting feeling sick and warning of sleepless nights.
The play, a revival of Lucy Bailey’s 2006 production, is publicised with a warning that it is “grotesquely violent and daringly experimental”, with a “terrible cycle of mutilation, rape and murder”.
The play’s most famous scene sees Titus murder the sons of his rival Tamora, Queen of the Goths, later feeding their remains to her in a pie.
We Jammin’ Outside Of The Law
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.
Mommy, will the whale explode all over us?
Rotting dead whale washes up in Canadian town – video
A dead blue whale washed into the Trout river in Newfoundland, Canada, is expanding and causing a stench as it slowly rots. Locals are concerned the 25-metre mammal may explode, as can happen when their carcasses are left to decay.
Mommy, will the whale fall on top of us?
Museumgoers Wonder: Why Doesn’t the Whale Fall?
By STUART MILLER
From right, Roman Pacheco and his cousins visiting from Ecuador, Nancy and Marco Pacheco, look up at the massive blue whale suspended from the ceiling of the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
It is one of the biggest attractions — literally — at one of New York City’s most famous destinations: the 94-foot-long blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History. Untold numbers gaze in awe every day at the 21,000-pound creature poised majestically in midair above the Hall of Ocean Life.
They point and take photos. But how many visitors have pondered a basic question: What keeps the hulking whale “afloat”?
“I hadn’t even considered it,” said Ian Mark, 40, visiting recently from Scotland with his daughter, Sarah, 7.
“I didn’t think about it,” said Chris Witkowski, 30, from Jacksonville, Fla. “It is so massive, so that’s a good question.”
Gianina Arana, 27, visiting from Colombia, said the room’s immersive atmosphere played a role. The false skylights are backlit with blue bulbs and have projectors and mirrors behind them to give the impression, when you look up past the whale, that you are looking out of the ocean at the sky. “You feel like you’re part of the ocean, and so of course the whale is there,” she said. “That’s the magic of it.”
No Mo’ Hackify
Spotify Shoots Down Band’s Silent Album Fundraising Hack
Vulfpeck would’ve used ‘Sleepify’ royalties to fund a free tour
WRITTEN BY John Surico
Vulfpeck wanted to go on tour this fall, but didn’t want to charge their fans admission. So the funk group released Sleepify, a Spotify exclusive comprising 10 tracks filled with absolutely no sound (alternately, as band leader Jack Stratton describes it above: “the most silent album ever recorded”). The March LP was an ingenious back door into the streaming service’s royalty system, designed to gather all of those precious half-cents into a pot large enough to send the Ann Arbor, Michigan crew on the road. But that won’t be happening now. According to Hypebot, Spotify has removed Sleepify from its registry.
The quartet was supposedly on track to raise $20,000 via the quiet release. Very early on,Rolling Stone reported that 120,000 streams had already been recorded — presumably many fans heeded Stratton’s advice of putting the album on repeat while they slept at night. Back then, Spotify seemed fine with it, and even hit back with a playful dash of criticism. “This is a clever stunt, but we prefer Vulfpeck’s earlier albums. Sleepify seems derivative of John Cage’s work,” a spokesperson had told Digiday, referencing the revered experimental composer behind the music-less song “4’33.”
Space Rock Onslaught
Asteroids cause dozens of nuclear-scale blasts in Earth’s atmosphere
Many explosions stronger than Hiroshima bomb but most occur too high above ground to cause serious damage
Link to video: Planet Earth comes under fire from asteroids
Asteroids caused 26 nuclear-scale explosions in the Earth’s atmosphere between 2000 and 2013, a new report reveals.
Some were more powerful – in one case, dozens of times stronger – than the atom bomb blast that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 with an energy yield equivalent to 16 kilotons of TNT.
Most occurred too high in the atmosphere to cause any serious damage on the ground. But the evidence was a sobering reminder of how vulnerable the Earth was to the threat from space, scientists said.
The impacts were recorded by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation, which operates a global network of sensors set up to detect nuclear weapon detonations. None of the asteroids were picked up or tracked in advance by any space- or Earth-based observatory.
The former astronaut Ed Lu, speaking about the data at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, said: “While most large asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire country or continent have been detected, less than 10,000 of the more than a million dangerous asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire major metropolitan area have been found by all existing space or terrestrially operated observatories.”
Deathcoasters
Taller! Faster! Scarier! Best new extreme attractions
If you’re afraid of heights, you may want to stay indoors this summer. This is the year attractions are pushing and elbowing for the titles of world’s tallest, fastest, steepest, wettest … you name it. Check out our 10 “most extreme” new attractions for 2014, and start planning a trip to get your adrenaline flowing.
Zumanjaro: Drop of Doom, Six Flags Great Adventure, Jackson, N.J.
New Jersey’s Six Flags Great Adventure already has the world’s tallest roller coaster — Kingda Ka topping 456 feet. So their engineers decided to strap another ride to the coaster’s superstructure. Billed as the world’s tallest drop tower that’s part of a coaster, Zumanjaro: Drop of Doom takes riders to heights of 415 feet before dropping them back down at 90 mph. Scheduled to open this spring.
Falcon’s Fury, Busch Gardens, Tampa.
Opening this spring, the tallest, free-standing drop tower in North America is Falcon’s Fury — 335 feet tall and dropping riders at 60 mph. At the pinnacle of the tower, seats pivot 90° to point guests toward the ground face-down, just like the attack dive of its namesake bird of prey. USA TODAY Travel will have an exclusive look — including a video from the ride — April 25, so come back to this space!
Flying Robot Rockstars
Forging Rothko
Indictment Details How to Forge a Masterpiece
One of the Seagram murals by Mark Rothko. Federal prosecutors say Pei-Shen Qian copied him.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times
The painting caught Pei-Shen Qian’s eye, but it was the price that affected him deeply.
Mr. Qian, browsing in a booth at a Manhattan art show a decade ago, had stumbled across his own work: a forgery of a modern masterpiece that he had recently completed. He had sold it for just a few hundred dollars, to a man prosecutors now say was Mr. Qian’s co-conspirator in a long-running, $33 million art swindle, whose success stemmed in large measure from Mr. Qian’s skill.
The painter’s surprise encounter with his own handiwork, offered for sale at a price “far in excess” of what he had earned, prompted Mr. Qian to raise the price he charged for his forgeries, from several hundred to several thousand dollars, according to a federal fraud and money laundering indictment unsealed on Monday. But Mr. Qian, who produced the counterfeit masterworks in the garage of his home in Woodhaven, Queens, still received only a tiny fraction of the money his three co-conspirators netted in the scheme.
The case, which first came to light last year, upended the art world, where many dealers, collectors and experts were duped by Mr. Qian’s deft forgeries of Abstract Expressionist masters — painters like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell — and by the actions of two largely unknown art dealers.
REPOST: Because it’s the best flippin’ music video ever made.
Live H8te
Quentin Tarantino Stages Reading of Hateful Eight, Which is Apparently Not Dead
Remember that Quentin Tarantino script that was leaked, and then spread everywhere by Gawker, resulting in lawsuits and counter-suits and a general ethical and legal melee and Tarantino pulling the plug on the whole thing out of spite and/or rage?
Well, the plug is no longer totally pulled The director staged a reading last night at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles that featured Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Kurt Russell, James Parks, Amber Tamblyn, Michael Madsen, Denis Menochet, James Remar, Walton Goggins and Bruce Dern. The performance of the five-act western epic took 3.5 hours, and Tarantino told the crowd that re-writes are coming as the project moves forward…possibly all the way to the big screen.
SpaceX Lands!
Great footage of the SpaceX reusable rocket
This footage released by SpaceX shows the first test flight of the Falcon 9 reusable (F9R) rocket prototype. The video was recorded using a drone and shows the rocket taking off from its launch pad, rising to 820 feet, hovering, and landing safely back at its test facility in Texas.
‘Hurricane’ Carter Gone
Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter dies at 76; boxer wrongly imprisoned 19 years
Carter gained the support of Nelson Mandela and Bob Dylan, and his story was told in the 1999 Denzel Washington film ‘The Hurricane.’
By Steve Chawkins
Former boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter holds up the writ of habeas corpus that freed him from prison, during a news conference held in Sacramento, Calif., in 2004. Carter, who spent almost 20 years in jail after twice being convicted of a triple murder he denied committing, has died at his home in Toronto at 76. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press / January 29, 2004)
When Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was at his best as a boxer, it would have been impossible to foresee Nelson Mandela or Bob Dylan doing him any favors.
With his fearsome, drop-dead glare, precisely cut goatee and glistening, shaved head, Carter was violent and swaggering, a white racist’s caricature of a dangerous black man.
Talking to sportswriter Milton Gross for a 1964 story in the Saturday Evening Post, Carter made a widely publicized joking remark about killing cops in Harlem. At a weigh-in before a December 1963 fight against Emile Griffith, he chided his opponent by declaring: “You talk like a champ but you fight like a woman who deep down wants to be raped!”
PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2014
The fight was stopped two minutes and 13 seconds into the first round, with Griffith collapsing in pain as Carter pummeled him, yelling: “You gotta pay the Hurricane!'”
William With A Gun On His Front Porch
Watch: William S. Burroughs Has a Gun
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) was not inclined to share the frame. He made exceptions for things he adored, including cigarettes, cats, guns, and pretty much anything that connoted or denoted danger. Artist Kate Simon photographed the Beat writer over two decades, from 1975 to 1995, and an exhibition of her portraits is on view through May 9 at the London shop of Nick Knight‘s Showstudio.
Rolling Stone’s Initial Pan of ZEPPELIN I
Led Zeppelin I
By John Mendelsohn / March 15, 1969
The popular formula in England in this, the aftermath era of such successful British bluesmen as Cream and John Mayall, seems to be: add, to an excellent guitarist who, since leaving the Yardbirds and/or Mayall, has become a minor musical deity, a competent rhythm section and pretty soul-belter who can do a good spade imitation. The latest of the British blues groups so conceived offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn’t say as well or better three months ago, and the excesses of the Beck group’s Truth album (most notably its self-indulgence and restrictedness), are fully in evidence on Led Zeppelin’s debut album.
Jimmy Page, around whom the Zeppelin revolves, is, admittedly, an extraordinarily proficient blues guitarist and explorer of his instrument’s electronic capabilities. Unfortunately, he is also a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs, and the Zeppelin album suffers from his having both produced it and written most of it (alone or in combination with his accomplices in the group).
Kentucky Fried Corsage
KFC CHICKEN CORSAGE BEING SOLD JUST IN TIME FOR PROM SEASON
LOUISVILLE, Ky., April 14 (UPI) — As part of a partnership between KFC and Nanz and Kraft Florists, prom-goers who want to bring their date something special now have the chance to surprise them with a chicken corsage.According to Nanz and Kraft, the corsage will “will make your date’s eyes light up and her mouth water.”Only 100 chicken corsages are available and the store has already sold 15 of them, according to the New York Daily News. “Just like the last piece of chicken in the bucket, when they’re gone, they’re gone.”
What Rock ‘n Roll Used To Be
Watch KISS Turn ‘The Tonight Show’ Into the 1976 ‘Destroyer’ Tour
WRITTEN BY John Surico
“This is a profound moment for all of us,” Paul Stanley told the crowd at the Barclays Center on Thursday night. After almost 40 years playing together, his band, KISS, had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Nirvana, Hall & Oates, Linda Ronstadt, Cat Stevens, and the E Street Band. But, while Dave Grohl, Joan Jett, and others took the stage as performers, KISS did not. The pop-metal legends did, however, smear on their makeup and strap on their instruments for one high-profile gig this week: On Friday, KISS reunited to appear on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.
After a blaring introduction from Fallon himself, KISS conquered the NBC studio as if it was 1976 all over again. Tongues wagging and guitars shredding, the pyrotechnic-loving foursome played Destroyer cut “King of the Night Time World” for the telecast, and played “Black Diamond,” “Deuce,” and a mashup of “Hotter Than Hell” and “Firehouse” as web-only exclusives. Watch “King of the Night Time World” above and find the other clips below.
Heartbleed Galactica
How ‘Battlestar Galactica’ explains Heartbleed
BY BRIAN FUNG
(SyFy)
Here’s the latest on Heartbleed: The critical Internet vulnerability doesn’t just affect Web services, but also extends to routers and networking hardware. Yes, that means that a hacker who gains access to a vulnerable router might be able to grab information from said router and use it against you — that is, unless your equipment is too old to be affected by the bug.
For anyone who’s watched Battlestar Galactica, this might sound familiar. In the opening hours of the Second Cylon War, the Galactica was among the humans’ few surviving warships after a crippling surprise attack by invading robots. Many of the fleet’s other battlestars were caught in a Pearl Harbor-like situation: disabled in spacedock, then mercilessly destroyed.
The ships were crippled by a devastating electronic attack that took advantage of a flaw in the Command Navigation Program, the operating system on which the fleet relied. The fleet’s networked computers allowed the hack to spread, shutting down systems everywhere. With their vessels offline, the Colonial fleet proved helpless against the onslaught. Their over-dependence on technology led to their defeat. But Galactica, being a much older battlestar, escaped. The CNP was never installed on its computers, nor were its computers ever networked. Galactica’s second-generation fighter craft were similarly behind the times — but in a head-to-head fight with the Cylons, this proved to be an advantage. Electronic warfare techniques didn’t work against them.
Creepy Freaky Weird Emma Watson
Cliffs Notes AutoGen
Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say
Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won’t commit to.
“I give it a few seconds — not even minutes — and then I’m moving again,” says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.
“It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.”
To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.
“I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”
Kilian Martin Cool
DOROTHY MUST DIE – Exclusive Trailer
Exclusive trailer: Preview the book ‘Dorothy Must Die’
Beneath that sweet exterior, Dorothy Gale is a cold, hard witch.
That’s the idea behind a new young-adult book, anyway — and I think it’s one that might prompt teens (and their parents) to take another plunge into the land of Oz.
In her dark new novel, Dorothy Must Die, Danielle Paige re-imagines the fantasy landscape we grew up with. Her world paints the Scarecrow as a character who “conducts inhumane experiments on winged monkeys,” the Tin Man as a trained killer, the Cowardly Lion as a “monster out for blood” and Dorothy as a power-hungry woman who must be stopped.
Today I’m debuting the trailer for the book, which goes on sale next week. Intrigued? A whopping 12 free chapters have been posted on Epic Reads. For $1.99 you also can grab No Place Like Oz, Paige’s prequel e-book.
Yay!
Vandals Flip Over Smart Cars in San Francisco
By Lisa Fernandez, Bryan Carmody and Christie Smith
Someone’s been vandalizing compact Smart cars in San Francisco, flipping the tiny vehicles on their front and rear ends in the city’s streets.
- MORE PHOTOS: Smart Cars Flipped Over in SF
NBC Bay Area found four of the targeted Smart cars between Sunday night and Monday morning. Two were found in the Bernal Heights neighborhood on Anderson Street, and another was found a bit south on Sweeny and Bowdoin streets, closer to the Portola district. They were either sitting on their headlights, rear bumpers high in the air, or vice versa.
A fourth Smart car — a small white one with a faded “Obama-Biden” bumper sticker — was discovered Monday about 9 a.m. at Coso and Prospect avenues between the Mission District and Bernal Heights. Shelley Gallivan was babysitting her friend’s Smart car after it was left to her by her late father, and was shocked to find it flipped on its right side.
“Whoever is doing this just has misdirected anger,” Gallivan said.