Woman with Eyes Closed
OFFICIALS SEEKING STOLEN ART FIND PAINT IN ASHES
BY ALISON MUTLER AND JILL LAWLESS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A Romanian museum official said Wednesday that ash from the oven of a woman whose son is charged with stealing seven multimillion-dollar paintings – including a Matisse, a Picasso and a Monet – contains paint, canvas and nails.
Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, director of Romania’s National History Museum, told The Associated Press that museum forensic specialists had found “small fragments of painting primer, the remains of canvas, the remains of paint” and copper and steel nails, some of which pre-dated the 20th century.
“We discovered a series of substances which are specific to paintings and pictures,” he said, including lead, zinc and azurite.
Romanian prosecutors say Olga Dogaru – whose son is the alleged heist ringleader – claims she buried the art in an abandoned house and then in a cemetery in the village of Caracliu. She said she later dug the paintings up and burned them in February after police began searching the village for the stolen works.
“Olga Dogaru describes how she made the fire, put wood on it and burned the paintings, like she was burning a pair of slippers,” he said. “She’s either a repressed writer or she is describing exactly what she did.”
Birth of The Mitt
The Invention of the Baseball Mitt
To round out our series on the the design of baseball equipment, let’s take a brief look at the baseball glove. Unlike the baseball bat or the baseball itself, the glove was not initially a part of the game. Players just used the mitts they were born with. Lest you think that all men were walking around with swollen and broken fingers, it’s important to remember that this was a very different game than the today. There were a lot of differences in the game, not least of which is the fact that much of the throwing was underhand. In the beginning, there wasn’t much need for hand protection, but even as the game evolved and balls were thrown harder and faster, there was some reluctance to use any protection or padding. These were the days when the measure of a man was the number of calluses on his fingers and of broken bones in his hand. Wearing a glove just wasn’t manly.
The earliest gloves were simple leather work gloves, often with its finger removed to ensure that ball handling isn’t inhabited in any way. It’s hard to say exactly who wore the first glove, but some reports claim that catchers were wearing work gloves as early as 1860. A pitcher for the by the name of A.G. Spalding claims that it was New Haven first baseman Charles C. Waite who, in an 1875 game against Boston, first had the audacity (i.e. common sense) to take the field with a glove.
Superhero
Md. Man Swims 5 Hours To Save His Family After Their Boat Capsized
DEAL ISLAND, Md. (AP) — John Franklin Riggs swam for hours to reach help for his family, including two children, after their boat capsized in a storm.
Riggs climbed rocks along the shoreline in the dark and knocked on the door of the first house he saw early Wednesday.
“He came to the right house,” said Angela Byrd, whose dog’s barking awakened her. She found 46-year-old Riggs outside, soaking wet and barefoot.
“He said, `I’ve been swimming since sundown; I need help,’ ” she told the Daily Times.
Last of The Indian Telegrams Gone
163-year-old telegram service to close forever at 9pm today
NEW DELHI: The 163-year old telegram service in the country – the harbinger of good and bad news for generations of Indians – is dead.
Once the fastest means of communication for millions of people, the humble telegram was today buried without any requiem but for the promise of preserving the last telegram as a museum piece.
Nudged out by technology – SMS, emails, mobile phones – the iconic service gradually faded into oblivion with less and less people taking recourse to it.
Started in 1850 on an experimental basis between Koklata and Diamond Harbour, it was opened for use by the British East India Company the following year. In 1854, the service was made available to the public.
It was such an important mode of communication in those days that revolutionaries fighting for the country’s independence used to cut the telegram lines to stop the British from communicating.
Old timers recall that receiving a telegram would be an event itself and the messages were normally opened with a sense of trepidation as people feared for the welfare of their near and dear ones.
Pablo Swift
Who Said It: Pablo Neruda Or Taylor Swift?
It’s Pablo Neruda’s 109th birthday today! Let’s see how the love poet of yore stacks up against our beloved songstress of modern romance.
by Matt Ortile
Inventor of TWISTER Gone
Inventor of iconic party game Twister dies
By PATRICK CONDON
Associated Press
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) – Twister called itself “the game that ties you up in knots.” Its detractors called it “sex in a box.”
Charles “Chuck” Foley, the father of nine who invented the game that became a naughty sensation in living rooms across America in the 1960s and 1970s because of the way it put men and women in compromising positions, has died. He was 82.
“Dad wanted to make a game that could light up a party,” Mark Foley said. “They originally called it ‘Pretzel.’ But they sold it to Milton Bradley, which came up with the ‘Twister’ name.”
The game became a sensation after Johnny Carson and Eva Gabor played it on “The Tonight Show” in 1966.
To be sure, the game got plenty of innocent play, too, becoming popular in grade schools and at children’s parties. But its popularity among teens and young adults was owed to an undeniable sex appeal.
Players would become tangled up, and various body parts – male and female – would inevitably come into close and embarrassing proximity. Players would often lose their balance and fall on top of each other in a heap.
Concrete Griddle No Mas
Stop Frying Eggs on Roadside, Death Valley Officials Say
Attention aspiring Mythbusters: The ‘leave no trace’ park policy still applies, even for eggs
STEVE MARCUS / REUTER
While Death Valley National Park celebrates the 100th anniversary of the hottest day ever recorded in the world–134 degrees–park officials are hoping their visitors aren’t carrying out a cliché statement about the temperature.
Death Valley park officials wrote on their Facebook page recently that maintenance crews have been “busy cleaning up eggs cracked directly on the sidewalk, including egg cartons and shells strewn across the parking lot. This is your national park, please put trash in the garbage or recycle bins provided and don’t crack eggs on the sidewalks, or the Salt Playa at Badwater.”
Ironically, Park officials are actually the ones who sparked the trending activity: A video, which has already generated over 161,000 views since being uploaded on June 29th, shows a Death Valley employee proving that an egg, served sunnyside up, is able to cook in the 127.6-degree heat. At one point, the egg-cracker “highly recommends” using a skillet, because a frying attempt with just the ground “makes a mess and it doesn’t work.”
Hotel Lambert On Fire
Fire damages landmark Paris mansion
By Marion Thibaut, AFP
The Hotel Lambert mansion in central Paris, a 17th-century architectural jewel with a rich history, was damaged in a major fire on Wednesday amid controversial renovations following its purchase by the Qatari royal family.
Dozens of firefighters fought the blaze for about six hours after it broke out around 2330 GMT on Tuesday (0930 AEST Wednesday) at the Lambert, a private townhouse, on Ile Saint-Louis overlooking the Seine.
Firefighters said the blaze started on the roof of the building, which was bought by Qatar’s royal family from the Rothschild banking dynasty for some 60 million euros ($A93.16 million) in 2007.
The fire “spread pretty fast because the building is empty and in the midst of renovation”, fire service Lieutenant-Colonel Pascal Le Testu told AFP. “The operation was complicated because the structure is fragile.”
Heritage experts had arrived at the mansion on Wednesday morning to check its contents but were unable to go inside due to safety concerns.
But Le Testu said the damage appeared to be extensive.
“The roof was completely devastated and the structure is weakened because a staircase and pediment over the central portion have partially collapsed,” he said.
He said the building’s famed frescoes by Charles Le Brun in the `Gallery of Hercules’ were also “severely damaged by smoke and water”.
Twin Peaks Poisoned Meatballs
San Francisco Police Still Looking For Person Who Poisoned Meatballs
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS / AP) — San Francisco police are asking for the public’s help in tracking down whomever left hundreds of meatballs laced with rat poison in areas where dogs could find them.
The meatballs were found scattered in the city’s Twin Peaks and Diamond Heights neighborhoods last week and at least one dog was sickened.
Most of the meatballs were collected and disposed of by residents.
‘He respectfully requests six Cleveland Browns pall bearers so the Browns can let him down one last time.’
Man wants Browns pallbearers so team ‘can let him down one last time’
By Will Brinson | NFL Writer
Browns fans are a pretty crazy bunch. (USATSI)
People always throw out weird stuff surrounding their death (“When I die I want blah blah blah”) but you rarely see people follow through on it. Not Scott E. Entsminger, a Browns fan who died at the age of 55 on July 4.
Entsminger “was an accomplished musician, loved playing the guitar and was a member of the Old Fogies Band.” He was also, per his obituary in the Columbus Dispatch, a “lifelong Cleveland Browns fan and season ticket holder.”
The deceased wasn’t just your average Browns fan: He apparently wrote a song each year about the Browns, which he sent to the team along with advice about how to run the organization.
And he was such a big Browns fan that the family encouraged everyone attending his funeral wear clothes supporting the team. But here’s the real kicker — he wanted his pallbearers to be Browns as well.
Why? Well …
“He respectfully requests six Cleveland Browns pall bearers so the Browns can let him down one last time.”
Rule, Britannia!
Murray’s Wimbledon Win ‘Makes Britain Proud’
David Cameron was in the Royal Box to watch Murray’s straight sets 6-4, 7-5, 6-4 victory over world number one Novak Djokovic.
The Scot became the first Briton in 77 years to win the men’s singles final.
After the victory, Mr Cameron tweeted: “It was a privilege to watch @andy_murray making history at #Wimbledon, and making Britain proud.”
Murray was congratulated privately by the Queen following his historic win.
A Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said: “I can confirm that the Queen has sent a private message to Andy Murray following his Wimbledon victory.”
Balls of Fried Corn Starch
Report: Long John Silver’s ‘Big Catch’ Is The Worst Meal in America
Long John Silver’s “Big Catch” is nothing but heart-wrenching trouble, according to a watchdog group
If you think eating fish–with its purported brain-boosting benefits–is healthy regardless of how it’s made, think again! Long John Silver’s “Big Catch” has been deemed the most unhealthy meal in America, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a consumer advocacy organization. The meal, which consists of fried “wild-caught whitefish” and a choice of two side-dishes, costs only $4.99–but the cost to your health could make it not worth the savings.
Researchers at CSPI found that the assortment of fried fish paired with fried onion rings and hushpuppies (balls of fried corn starch) adds up to 19 grams of saturated fat, almost 37 grams of sodium, and a whopping 33 grams of trans fat – which is an ingredient considered so harmful to heart health that New York City banned it in 2006. In comparison, approximately the same amount of raw whitefish has less than a gram of saturated fat, less than a gram of sodium, and no trans fat.
Free The Fire Station
Station Had Listeners, Just Not a License
By VIVIAN YEE
“People are driving and all of a sudden they run into a Caribbean station,” said Jason Finkelberg, the station’s general manager, describing the listener complaint that constantly bedevils K104.7.
It is not some quirk of the dial, or a blip in the airwaves. The Caribbean music that bleeds into the Top 40 sounds came from the Bronx and Brooklyn version of 104.7, the FM frequency on which a pirate radio station, 104.7 the Fire Station, has squatted for at least the past decade. It has colorful DJs, live special guests, commercials and devoted listeners. What it does not have is a Federal Communications Commission license for its frequency.
But dislodging pirate radio operators from the airwaves may be no more useful an exercise than playing Whac-A-Mole: dozens, if not hundreds, of underground radio operators crowd the FM dial in New York, mainly in neighborhoods like Flatbush, Brooklyn, where immigrant communities clamor to hear dance hall and soca Caribbean music and news from home.
Some flicker on and off, beholden to no set schedule and no one frequency; others are more established operations, with Web sites, revenue from commercials and fan bases. The Fire Station had regular shows and ran around the clock on weekends, playing in the afternoons and evenings during weekdays.
If this is not quite the stuff of outlaw fantasy, as depicted in the movie “Pirate Radio,” the operators often claim that they are giving underserved communities a voice that they cannot find elsewhere. It is the kind of programming that cannot be heard on mainstream radio stations in the city.
“The message that we’re trying to bring across is we are people who have great ideas, who are independent, and there’s a lot more to offer than the big-time radio stations have to offer,” said Timo Flex, a manager at VYBZ Radio, a reggae and soul station. He said the station broadcasts only online, but it and its frequency, 107.1, have been mentioned as being run by pirates on local Web sites and radio message boards.
“There are things going on in the community we wish to share in the world,” he said. “It’s not just local vibe. It’s local vibe community radio.”
Happy Independence Day
Genius
‘All My Children’ and ‘One Life to Live’ to Premiere on OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network With Three-Episode Marathons
Written By Amanda Kondolojy
Los Angeles – OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network is kicking off the network’s previously announced summer fling for soap fans with a marathon of back-to-back original half-hour episodes of The OnLine Network’s reprisal of “All My Children” and “One Life To Live” on Monday, July 15.
The first three episodes of “All My Children” will air from 12:00-1:30 p.m. on July 15, with the third episode repeating at 1:30 p.m. Original episodes will then air daily at 1:00 p.m. beginning Tuesday, July 16.
Skee-Ball Super Bowl
At the Skee-ball Super Bowl
I found earnest rollers playing a uniquely American game, not haughty hipsterdom
This originally appeared on The Classical.
When Joey the Cat rolled a last-frame full circle to nip DaVinskee in the semifinals of The BEEB, he appeared to have his third straight cream jacket fully sewn up. Snakes on a Lane stood in his way however. That’s just how things go down in Cherrytown.
The clash between Joey and Snakes made for a thrilling finals at the fourth annual Brewskee-Ball National Championship—world’s preeminent skee-ball tournament—in Austin, over Memorial Day Weekend. The best roller won thousands of dollars. As both incentive and consolation, all contestants got a bunch of free beers. It’s a winning formula.
A confluence of my wife’s love of live music and some cheap flights brought us to Texas’ capital city, and a dear friend’s ascent in the Brewskee-Ball rankings ensured that we’d spend some time at the BBNC. “It’s The BEEB,” the poster proclaimed, and so let’s call it that. The event had been held in New York City for its first three years and I’d never attended, and never even really considered attending. But a certain wanderlust prompted me to join the 64 rollers at Austin’s Historic Scoot Inn—a bar established in the 19th century and located in what is now the city’s booming scrap metal district, just across the train tracks from chic East 6th Street—for the fourth national tournament organized around a century-old arcade game. It made logistical sense at the time, and makes a different sort of sense in retrospect.
The Divine Weiwei
Ai Weiwei
BY KYLE MULLIN
The grinding heavy metal riffs of Ai Weiwei’s debut single echo an even more unsettling sound—that of brick being crushed to dust.
The infamous Chinese dissident may indeed be delving into a new medium, (his first album, The Divine Comedy, was released on June 22, led by the hard-hitting single “Dumbass”). But it’s far from the first twist in this artistic activist’s narrative. One of the most noticeable turns in that ever-thickening plot occurred in 2011, when authorities demolished his Shanghai studio art gallery. Many supporters saw the razzing as a rebuttal to Ai’s numerous government critiques and human rights pleas in the international press. But his greatest ally and dear friend, Zuoxiao Zuzhou, could relate on a more visceral level, having sung protest songs against those PRC bulldozers for years as they lumbered closer to his family’s village in Jiangsu province—a region deemed ripe for urban development.
Hashassins
Attention word nerds: 13 mysteries of the vernacular, solved
Posted by: Kate Torgovnick
Before a ‘clue’ became a thing that excited a detective, the word referred to a ball of yarn. So how did this shift in meaning occur? Because in Greek mythology, Ariadne threw a ball of yarn to Theseus before he entered the minotaur’s labyrinth. Theseus unrolled the yarn behind him as he traveled into the deadly maze — then used it to find his way out.
And you’ll find lots more of it in the TED-Ed series Mysteries of the Vernacular, from Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel.
- What the word gorgeous has to do with turtlenecks
- How the word window came from a clever metaphor
- The strange derivation of the tuxedo
- How Alfred Nobel invented dynamite
- Why venom once meant ‘something to be desired’
- The riddle of the word earwig
- Why the word inaugurate is for the birds
- How noise, nausea and naval are all related
- The story of the word pants
- Why the origin of the word miniature isn’t so small
- What a hearse was before a vehicle for the dead
- The word assassin’s roots in hash
- And, as previously mentioned, why you could once knit with a clue
New Drone City
Game of Drones: Does NYC Have an ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’ Problem?
Rise of the machines.
In late 2011, a slender Williamsburg resident named Tim Pool roamed downtown Manhattan, seemingly recording every minute of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Mr. Pool, an independent journalist, would use his smartphone to live-stream the demonstrations, sometimes for as long as 19 continuous hours, earning himself the nickname “The Media Messenger of Zuccotti Park” in Time magazine.
As the protests escalated, it became increasingly difficult for Mr. Pool to capture the civil disobedience from eye level. He yearned for an unhindered view—a higher vantage point, like from the sky.
“The fact that police would obstruct cameras just sort of put in our minds that we might be in a situation where you can’t get a good shot because there’s a wall or a fence or something,” Mr. Pool, now 27, told The Observer.
Enter the “occucopter”—a modified drone of Mr. Pool’s creation, built from a Parrot AR, one of the first consumer-oriented drones, which hit the marketplace in 2010 and was available for purchase on Amazon for $299.
Drones, also commonly called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), differ from the remote-controlled toy helicopters of childhood in that they operate via onboard computers under the direction of a pilot, who is on the ground. The Parrot AR Drone has onboard technology to follow preprogrammed instructions and automatically stabilize itself against wind.
A lightweight quad-rotor, Mr. Pool’s drone resembled nothing so much as a bike seat and, with its palette of neon colors, it looked like it had been plucked straight from the pages of SkyMall. Unlike the junk found in an in-flight magazine, however, it actually worked—and with the addition of a camera, the occucopter was given further functionality.
Shooting 50 feet into the air and zipping around at speeds of up to 10 miles per hour, the occucopter buzzed above the heads of the protesters. For many, both within and beyond Zuccotti Park, this marked their first-ever encounter with a drone. Even the mainstream media was fascinated, focusing on the device’s nonmilitary capabilities, as Mr. Pool earned press mentions across the globe in outlets like The Guardian and Wired magazine.
Weed Man vs. Beer Man
In Times Square, a Bizarre Clash of Weed Man Versus Beer Man
By VIVIAN YEE
Michael Appleton for The New York Times
This is not an only in New York story.
This is an only in Times Square story, in a place where the Beer Man and the Weed Man in a Box can star as the principals; a different Weed Man can serve as the falsely accused; and Alien and the Predator can stand in as the witnesses to a low-rent attack in a high-rent district.
More than six months ago, the Weed Man in a Box, or Weed Head to some, began wandering around the pedestrian plaza at 46th Street and Seventh Avenue, a cardboard box on his head and a sign over his chest, cajoling cash from tourists with a simple pitch: “I am the weed man. I’m too sexy for you to see me.”
As charming as this tactic may have been to some, his appearance rankled the other creative panhandlers of Times Square, who make their living not by donning Elmo suits or coating themselves with metallic paint, but by simply advertising their need for marijuana, beer or both on handwritten signs.
Busking being serious business in Midtown, long-simmering tensions between the box man and one of his rivals erupted into violence on Friday night, when the box man was said to have stabbed a competing panhandler, Wayne Semancik, five times in the head and chest with a pen.
WCpad
Canis sapiens sapiens
Dog genetics spur scientific spat
Researchers disagree over canine domestication.
Scientists investigating the transformation of wolves into dogs are behaving a bit like the animals they study, as disputes roil among those using genetics to understand dog domestication.
In recent months, three international teams have published papers comparing the genomes of dogs and wolves. On some matters — such as the types of genetic changes that make the two differ — the researchers are more or less in agreement. Yet the teams have all arrived at wildly different conclusions about the timing, location and basis for the reinvention of ferocious wolves as placid pooches. “It’s a sexy field,” says Greger Larson, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Durham, UK. He has won a £950,000 (US$1.5-million) grant to study dog domestication starting in October. “You’ve got a lot of big personalities, a lot of money, and people who want to get their Nature paper first.”
In January, Erik Axelsson and Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, geneticists at Uppsala University in Sweden, and their colleagues reported inNature1 that genes involved in the breaking down of starch seemed to set domestic dogs apart from wild wolves. In the paper and in media interviews, the researchers argued that dog domestication was catalysed by the dawn of agriculture around 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, as wolves began to loiter around human settlements and rubbish heaps (see Naturehttp://doi.org/mv4; 2013).
But Larson, who has worked with Lindblad-Toh on other projects, says that their claim is dubious. He notes that bones that look similar to those of domestic dogs predate the Neolithic revolution by at least several thousand years, so domestication must have occurred before then.
Being Ungoogleable
Internet anonymity is the height of chic
In this age of information overload, internet exhibitionism and NSA snooping, is it possible to make yourself unGoogleable? And does it earn you added credibility, as fashion designer Phoebe Philo and bands such as !!! suggest?
‘The chicest thing,” said fashion designer Phoebe Philo recently, “is when you don’t exist on Google. God, I would love to be that person!”
Philo, creative director of Céline, is not that person. As the London Evening Standard put it: “Unfortunately for the famously publicity-shy London designer – Paris born, Harrow-on-the-Hill raised – who has reinvented the way modern women dress, privacy may well continue to be a luxury.” Nobody who is oxymoronically described as “famously publicity-shy” will ever be unGoogleable. And if you’re not unGoogleable then, if Philo is right, you can never be truly chic, even if you were born in Paris. And if you’re not truly chic, then you might as well die – at least if you’re in fashion.
If she truly wanted to disappear herself from Google, Philo could start by changing her superb name to something less diverting. Prize-winning novelist AM Homes is an outlier in this respect. Google “am homes” and you’re in a world of blah US real estate rather than cutting-edge literature. But then Homes has thought a lot about privacy, having written a play about the most famously private person in recent history, JD Salinger, and had him threaten to sue her as a result.
And Homes isn’t the only one to make herself difficult to detect online.UnGoogleable bands are 10 a penny. The New York-based band !!! (known verbally as “chick chick chick” or “bang bang bang” – apparently “Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point” proved too verbose for their meagre fanbase) must drive their business manager nuts. As must the band Merchandise, whose name – one might think – is a nominalist satire of commodification by the music industry. Nice work, Brad, Con, John and Rick.
How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus
‘This is a dish that everybody can make, starting with the donkey.’
Is Spaghetti and Meatballs Italian?
Spaghetti and Meatballs. (Photo by Lynda Balslev.)
Meatballs—juicy goodness of meat, onions, breadcrumbs, egg, butter, and Parmigiano-Reggiano, soaked in red sauce over a pile of spaghetti. Nothing says comfort like a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. And, nothing says Italian food like a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs—unless you are Italian.
If you go to Italy, you will not find a dish called spaghetti and meatballs. And if you do, it is probably to satisfy the palate of the American tourist. So if not Italy, where does this dish come from? Meatballs in general have multiple creation stories all across the world from köttbullars in Sweden to the various köftes in Turkey. Yes, Italy has its version of meatballs called polpettes, but they differ from their American counterpart in multiple ways. They are primarily eaten as a meal itself (plain) or in soups and made with any meat from turkey to fish. Often, they are no bigger in size than golf balls; in the region of Abruzzo, they can be no bigger in size than marbles and called polpettines.
Polpettes are more commonly found at the family table than on a restaurant menu and hold a dear place in the heart of Italian home cooking. Pellegrino Artusi was a Florentine silk merchant, who in retirement followed his passion for food, traveling and recording recipes. In 1891, he earned the unofficial title of ‘the father of Italian cuisine‘ when he published the first modern Italian cookbook titled La scienza in cucina e l’Arte di mangiar bene: Manuale practico per le famiglie (The science of cooking and the art of eating well: a practical manual for families.) Artusi was the first to bring together the variety of Italy’s regional cuisines into one book and also importantly, the first to write for the home chef. Of polpettes he writes, “Non crediate che io abbia la pretensione d’insegnarvi a far le polpette. Questo è un piatto che tutti lo sanno fare cominciando dal ciuco,” which translates, “Don’t think I’m pretentious enough to teach you how to make meatballs. This is a dish that everybody can make, starting with the donkey.” Needless to say, meatballs were seen as an incredibly easy dish to make, but a popular one nonetheless.
World’s Most Depressing Video Game
Joy Division Inspire World’s Most Depressing Video Game
Play ‘Will Love Tear Us Apart?’ now, doubt the existence of true love later!
Here’s something no one knew they needed: A video game based on Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Thanks to European developer Mighty Box Games, that need has been satiated. Will Love Tear Us Apart? is a “free-to-play browser-game about relationships on the brink of breaking up,” according to the game’s official website.
Each verse of Joy Division’s signature song represents a different level, and the game as a whole is supposed to encourage players to “reflect on the darker side of love: miscommunication, emotional impasse and the sadness of separation… What guides this game is an ambition to frustrate, upset, and sting the player into remembering the dark days preceding the death of a relationship.” Fun!
‘Animal experiments show that caffeine may reshape the biochemical environment inside our brains in ways that could stave off dementia.’
from The New York Times Magazine
This Is Your Brain on Coffee
This column appears in the June 9 issue of The New York Times Magazine.
For hundreds of years, coffee has been one of the two or three most popular beverages on earth. But it’s only recently that scientists are figuring out that the drink has notable health benefits. In one large-scale epidemiological study from last year, researchers primarily at the National Cancer Institute parsed health information from more than 400,000 volunteers, ages 50 to 71, who were free of major diseases at the study’s start in 1995. By 2008, more than 50,000 of the participants had died. But men who reported drinking two or three cups of coffee a day were 10 percent less likely to have died than those who didn’t drink coffee, while women drinking the same amount had 13 percent less risk of dying during the study. It’s not clear exactly what coffee had to do with their longevity, but the correlation is striking.
Other recent studies have linked moderate coffee drinking — the equivalent of three or four 5-ounce cups of coffee a day or a single venti-size Starbucks — with more specific advantages: a reduction in the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, basal cell carcinoma (the most common skin cancer), prostate cancer, oral cancer and breast cancer recurrence.
Perhaps most consequential, animal experiments show that caffeine may reshape the biochemical environment inside our brains in ways that could stave off dementia. In a 2012 experiment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, mice were briefly starved of oxygen, causing them to lose the ability to form memories. Half of the mice received a dose of caffeine that was the equivalent of several cups of coffee. After they were reoxygenated, the caffeinated mice regained their ability to form new memories 33 percent faster than the uncaffeinated.
Slim Whitman Gone
1923-2013: Country star Slim Whitman of Middleburg has died
By Dan Scanlan
Known as “America’s Favorite Folksinger,” Slim Whitman’s songs were marked with his soaring yodel.
Mr. Whitman, who has lived in Middleburg for years, is dead at 90. He passed away at 1 a.m. Wednesday at Orange Park Medical Center, family friend Sherry Raymer said.
Many remember Mr. Whitman’s yodelling in his 1952 hit “Indian Love Call” as the weapon that killed invading aliens in the 1996 movie “Mars Attacks.”
“I’m the one who killed the blasted Martians,” he joked in a 2008 Times-Union interview.
But back in 1991, Mr. Whitman told The Associated Press he wanted to be remembered as “a nice guy.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever heard anything bad about me, and I’d like to keep it that way,” Mr. Whitman said. “I’d like my son [Byron] to remember me as a good dad. I’d like the people to remember me as having a good voice and a clean suit.”
He was a good man who never sang anything suggestive, said Raymer, who also knew him from the Jacksonville Church of the Brethren they attended. He died from heart failure, according to the AP, a bit more than four years after his wife of 67 years, Alma Crist Whitman, died at 84.
Creepy, indeed.
from M. Husain
‘Hmm, empty room’
Back at the Whitney, Tinkering With Perception
Nancy Crampton
The artist Robert Irwin took over the fourth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1977 with a single work that became a kind of legend, though many visitors at the time failed to see it. “People would step out of the elevator, say, ‘Hmm, empty room,’ and hop back in before the doors shut,” Mr. Irwin recalled recently.
But the room was not quite empty — and in Mr. Irwin’s work, “not quite” can mean the entire world. He has become one of the most important artists of his generation through work that is less about objects and how they might be perceived than about perception itself. The Whitney piece was a radical experiment in dialing art down to almost nothing: simply a white translucent polyester scrim bisecting the open space, extending from the ceiling down to about eye level, with a black painted line on the wall creating the sensation of seeing floating rectangles. Daylight from one of the museum’s trapezoidal windows was the only illumination. The effect, for the receptive observer, was as if the room were separating into its constituent parts.
Mr. Irwin later described the work as the “X at the point where I jumped off,” and told the writer Lawrence Weschler that he considered leaving the art world after the show. “I don’t know what else I would do exactly,” he said, “but I’m not wedded to that world at all anymore.” In the end, he decided to stay. But the Whitney is not staying in its Marcel Breuer building, for which Mr. Irwin created the piece; in 2015 the museum will move to a new home downtown. And as part of the rolling goodbye to the Breuer, Donna De Salvo, the museum’s chief curator, long dreamed of resurrecting Mr. Irwin’s piece, which has not been seen since it came down 36 years ago.