Words Are Not The Issue
An Apology for the Oxford English Dictionary’s Ill-Timed Word of the Day
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has apologized for what it called “a coincidence of the worst kind” after the dictionary’s Web site named “bloodbath” as its word of the day on Tuesday, after last week’s deadly shootings in Newtown, Conn.
The Guardian reported that a word-of-the-day entry that ran on the OED.com site, defining bloodbath as “a battle or fight at which much blood is spilt; a wholesale slaughter, a massacre,” drew rapid criticism from readers on Twitter, who called it “tasteless and gross” and said it was “in very, very poor taste in light of recent events.”
The post at OED.com said that “we apologize for any distress and upset caused by what might seem to be a highly insensitive choice” and explained that the word of the day is “selected months in advance by an editorial committee, and is distributed automatically each day.”
James Frey Premier Drama
The Premier League’s drama problem
Posted by Roger Bennett
David Price/Getty ImagesArsenal’s struggles — and our collective schadenfreude — have defined this season more than any memorable or good play.
Writer James Frey, a long-suffering Arsenal fan, recognizes the power of English football’s narratives. “The Premier League is like reality television with a ball,” he said. “If you watch any of the ‘Real Housewives’ shows you can glimpse exactly the same storylines: Crap people wishing others misery and hoping they will succeed while those around them fail as the rich get richer and the poor get crushed.” The bestselling author continued: “English soccer is 21st-century entertainment. Everything is about the story in our society, be it sports, politics or entertainment.”
Frey highlighted the recent North London derby as a case in point. “Tottenham dominated the game early until Emmanuel Adebayor’s tackle — the dumbest play ever — earned him a red card,” he remembered. “Adebayor’s behavior dominated the postgame conversation. The human dimension of his actions overshadowed any of the goals that were scored.”
John Terry and his Instagram account are another prime example for Frey. “How many column inches are dedicated to Terry’s behavior relative to the number that analyze his actual play?” he asked. “These rivalries, heroes and villains always existed in English football but now with the 24-hour news cycles and social media we need to know everything about everybody all the time so we can make a big deal out of it.”
Frey refers to the phenomenon as the “WWE-ification” of the Premier League. “WWE figured out that sports is all about stories,” he said. “We all want to see who wins the game, but whereas that used to be the entire story, today it is just a detail.”
“The Premier League is all narrative now,” Frey concluded. “What you used to get in a book you can get everywhere. Why read when you can get it watching soccer?”
“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.
The Woes of an American Drone Operator
A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people. But then, one day, he realizes that he can’t do it anymore.
For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn’t be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.
The container is filled with the humming of computers. It’s the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren’t flying through the air. They’re just sitting at the controls.
Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.
“These moments are like in slow motion,” he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.
With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.
Second zero was the moment in which Bryant’s digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.
“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.
“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.
Cannabis Cannons Cool
Cannabis Cannon Litters Field Near Yuma with Kilo-Sized Projectiles
BY CHRIS McDANIEL – SUN STAFF WRITER
An attempt by drug smugglers to propel cans of marijuana into the United States with a pneumatic cannon was thwarted by Border Patrol agents over the weekend.
The incident happened some time after sunset Friday in a field near County 22nd and the Colorado River, just northwest of San Luis, Ariz.
The drug smugglers crossed the Colorado River with the pneumatic cannon and entered an area of U.S. territory outside of the border fence. They then used a carbon dioxide canister to propel the pot over the salinity canal and the border fence into a field abut 500 feet away. The marijuana was tucked inside what appeared to be soup cans inside of larger cans and sealed on the ends.
“By actually shooting it over the fence, they don’t have to worry about mules or smugglers actually backpacking it across,” said Kyle Estes, Yuma Sector Border Patrol public affairs officer, adding someone was most likely waiting to pick up the marijuana on the U.S. side.
Understanding Earth 2012
The 10 Books You Absolutely Must Read to Understand the History of Earth
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life began oozing across its boiling, methane-saturated surface about a billion years after our planet was born.
But how did that happen?
In just a few billion years, a hellish ball of melted rock, smashed up by meteorites, became the gorgeous Blue Marble covered in plants, animals, and sparkling ocean waters we know today.
Here’s our list of ten books you must read if you want to understand this transformation, from the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere to the mass deaths of the dinosaurs.
Bennett Madison’s SOMETHINGEST BOOKS OF 2012
Leave Papa’s Pussies Alone
Cat fight pits government against Hemingway museum
By A. Pawlowski, TODAY.com contributor
A popular tourist attraction has lost another round in the legal battle over who is in charge of the slinky creatures with nine lives and six toes roaming its grounds.
The 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Friday ruled that the government does have the power to regulate the dozens of cats that live at the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum in Key West, Fla. — a notion the attraction has fought for years.
When he lived in the house, Hemingway — a famous cat lover — cared for a white polydactyl cat named Snowball that was given to him by a ship’s captain. Snowball’s offspring and other felines have been roaming the grounds ever since without much controversy. Court documents note that the museum has always kept, fed, and provided weekly veterinary care for the Hemingway cats, and spayed or neutered most of them “to prevent population beyond the historical norm of 50–60 cats.”
“They’re very much an important part of the history of the property. We want people to come and see it the way it was when Hemingway was here — to see it the same way he saw it, with the 50 cats running around the property,” said Dave Gonzales, a spokesman for the Hemingway Home & Museum, in a promotional video for the attraction posted on YouTube.
“Every corner you take on this acre of land, you’ll find a couple of cats either snoozing or eating or lapping up some water off the cat fountain.”
yellowscream
“Los Angeles is, of course, fucked.” – GIF Amok
Atoms for Peace Make ‘Amok’ Art Into Real-Life GIF Mural
After a couple of years of minimal output, Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace is suddenly the gift that keeps giving. Last week, we learned the details of their upcoming debut album, Amok, and then discovered that the band had hidden a choice Easter egg inside of the mural-like artwork found on their website. As it now turns out, that image actually does exist as a mural, and it moves just like the one on the web — well, more or less.
Atoms for Peace visual master Stanley Donwood collaborated with UK “GIF-itti” artist INSA to create “Hollywood Doom,” an installation in installments. INSA painted the Amok album art onto XL Recordings’ Los Angeles office, and then repainted the moving bits a handful of times in order to bring the thing to life via time-lapse photography. The end result is a brick-and-mortar mural, which also exists as an awesome GIF. Actually, several.
Check out the images below after reading Donwood’s totally depressing explanation of his inspirations:
“Los Angeles is, of course, fucked. Everything is fucked, all of our cities, all of our towns, our villages, our farms, our entire way of living. and I don’t mean fucked in a good way, oh no; I mean it in a very, very bad way.
Bar Code Birther Gone
Norman Woodland dead: Bar code inventor dies aged 91
Bar code inventor Norman Woodland has died aged 91.
Norman and friend Bernard Silver devised the bar code while studying engineering at university.
It was based on the Morse code that Norman had learned as a Boy Scout.
The pair applied for the world’s first bar code patent in 1949.
But it would be more than two decades before laser technology would advance to the point where it could be applied to the bar code.
The first bar code scan took place on June 26, 1974, in Troy, Ohio, when a cashier scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum for shopper Clyde Dawson.
Today five billion products a day are scanned optically using a bar code.
Cinnamon and Raisin Tamales
Cinnamon and Raisin Tamales
Pool Parties & Hedonism
Catcher In The Rye Still Evil
Catcher in the Rye dropped from US school curriculum
Schools in America are to drop classic books such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye from their curriculum in favour of ‘informational texts’.
Photo: Rex Features
American literature classics are to be replaced by insulation manuals and plant inventories in US classrooms by 2014.
A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an effort to ready pupils for the workplace.
Books such as JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird will be replaced by “informational texts” approved by the Common Core State Standards.
Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Invasive Plant Inventory, by California’s Invasive Plant Council.
The new educational standards have the backing of the influential National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, and are being part-funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Symphonie repris
No More Lunatics From Washington
House Passes Measure Removing Word ‘Lunatic’ From Federal Law
WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – The word “lunatic” will be stricken from federal law under legislation that passed the House by a vote of 398-1 on Wednesday.
The congressional action is the most recent effort to eliminate language from the U.S. code that has become outdated or demeaning. Two years ago, Congress removed references in federal law to the term “mental retardation.”
The legislation cites one instance in banking regulation that refers to the authority of a bank to act as “committee of estates of lunatics” on guardianship issues. The word is derived from the Latin word from moon and ancient beliefs that people could become “moonstruck” by lunar movements.
GIF Art Basel Miami
Michael Stipe, Rodarte, RoseLee Goldberg, and More Pick GIFs for Art Basel Miami Beach Show
On Wednesday Tumblr and Paddle8 will open “Moving the Still,” an exhibition of animated GIFsselected by a star-studded committee — James Frey, Michael Stipe, Nicola Formichetti,Richard Phillips, Inez & Vinoodh, Rodarte, RoseLee Goldberg, and Ryan Trecartin — at a 35,000-square-foot warehouse near Wynwood.
The show, which includes moving digital images by Jim Drain, Aarong Young Adam Dugas, Alex Da Corte, threeASFOUR, and more, will be on view December 5-8, coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach and its satellite fairs.
Bret Easton Ouch V Kathryn Hot-elow
Bret Easton Ellis Rips Kathryn Bigelow in Sexist Rant: Zero Dark Thirty Director Overrated Because She’s “Hot”
Joe Kohen/WireImage, Cindy Ord/Getty Images
Bret Easton Ellis has never been one to hold back his opinions on Twitter (see: Paris Hilton, Matt Bomer).
Now, he’s directing his 140-character vitriol at a most unlikely of targets: Zero Dark Thirtyhelmer Kathryn Bigelow.
The motormouthed author took to Twitter Wednesday night to slam the filmmaker—the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director—for her success mainly because of her gender.
Oh, yes: He went there.
Brubeck Gone
from Pioneer Press (photo from The Chicago Tribune)
Dave Brubeck, legendary jazz composer and pianist, dies at 91 (w/ video)
By Richard Scheinin / Mercury News
To see pianist Dave Brubeck in recent years — up on stage, say, at the Monterey Jazz Festival, striding with his band through “Take Five,” his seminal tune — one might have thought he would play forever. That thick shock of white hair. That electric smile. Those sturdy fingers on the keys.
But Brubeck, one of the legends of jazz and American music, generally, died today in Connecticut, one day short of his 92nd birthday. He was on his way to a doctor’s appointment with his son, Darius, also a musician. And so ended the life of this musical voyager, who was born in Concord, California, grew up the son of an East Bay cattle rancher, took piano lessons from his mother, and went on to become the composer of jazz standards, ballet music and oratorios, active until a fine old age. He was a legend, on the cover of Time magazine in 1954, the recipient of many honors, including the National Medal of Arts in 1994.
DiversitYA
Rothko Rocks Both Grapes & Gold
Peanut Cheese
A CHUNKY HISTORY OF PEANUT BUTTER
Posted by Jon Michaud
Shipped off to boarding school in England during the Great Depression, the twelve-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr., was sustained by regular care packages from his father. The biweekly deliveries contained a case of grapefruit and a large jar of peanut butter. In a 1981 essay titled “In the Thrall of an Addiction,” Buckley recalled that his British schoolmates “grabbed instinctively for the grapefruit—but one after another actually spit out the peanut butter.” No wonder, he sneered, “they needed help to win the war.”
Half a century later, when I left Washington, D.C., for school in Northern Ireland, I packed my bags with jars of Skippy. Not much had changed. “Mashed peanuts on bread?” my friends in Belfast asked, incredulously—as if peanuts were synonymous with maggots. The American love of peanut butter is as mystifying to many Britons as the British love of Marmite (yeast extract on toast?) is to me, but, as Jon Krampner writes in “Creamy & Crunchy,” his enjoyable and informative new history of peanut butter, there are plenty of other countries that adore the crushed goober pea. Canadians eat it for breakfast; Haitians call it mamba and buy it, freshly pulverized, from street vendors; it is popular in the Netherlands, where it is known as pindakaas, or peanut cheese. Peanut butter is also increasingly found in the Saudi Arabian diet, thanks, in part, to expatriate oil workers. Nevertheless, it remains, in Krampner’s phrase, an “all-American food.”
The Greatest Hip-Hop Album Ever
The Making of The Chronic
By Ben Westhoff
Dr. Dre’s seminal 1992 album, The Chronic, turns 20 next month. Though a sensation upon its release, the raw-but-melodic work’s legend has only grown in the ensuing decades, and today seemingly every MC-producer duo fancies itself the next Dre and Snoop Dogg. It has become the most influential rap work ever made, and perhaps even the greatest, as Jeff Weiss argues.
See also: *Top 20 Greatest L.A. Rap Albums
*The Chronic: The Greatest Album In Rap History
But it almost never happened. Despite the success Dre had experienced with N.W.A, he was entangled in contractual problems with his former crewmate Eazy-E’s label. For that reason, as well as Death Row’s dodgy reputation, The Chronic had a hard time finding release. It took the shepherding of renegade upstart Interscope Records, the financing of convicted drug kingpin Michael Harris and the steady hand of Suge Knight, an intimidating former defensive end, to give it life.
Xenon Pictures,Welcome to Death Row: The Rise and Fall of Death Row Records, tells the story of Knight’s infamous imprint, as well as the rise of Snoop and Tupac Shakur. Its producers — Jeff Scheftel, Leigh Savidge and Steve Housden — gained unprecedented access to Harris while he was behind bars. They also spoke with some 100 other figures associated with the label, from publicists and drug dealers to Chronic performers.
Rikki Tikki Dante
Fearless dog saves woman from deadly cottonmouth snake – and almost dies
MICHAEL WALSH
Man’s best friend doubles as a doggone good bodyguard.
Gudrun Mastriano of Kissimmee, Fla., was walking her daughter’s black lab Dante home when a venomous cottonmouth snake, mere inches away, attacked her. The protective canine lunged in front of Mastriano, captured the serpent in his mouth and dragged it away. But during the fight, the snake’s fangs sunk into Dante’s snout and legs. “It could have been me,” said Mastriano. “I would have died.” Dante’s snout swelled up to about 17 inches as the deadly venom settled in his body, according to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “I thought he looked like a little baby hippopotamus,” said Mastriano.
Drive-in Sex Box
Zurich to open drive-in sex boxes
The Swiss city of Zurich is to open drive-in sex boxes in an attempt to rid the town of street prostitution.
By Matthew Day
Zurich council has approved a plan to build the boxes, which will, it hopes, provide a discreet location for prostitutes and their clients to conduct business when they open in August next year.
Located in an industrial area of the city, the row of garage-like boxes will have roofs and walls for privacy, and easy access for cars. The council estimates that around 30 prostitutes will meet clients at the site of the boxes, and use the drive-in slots on a first-come-first-served basis.
The prostitutes who use the sex boxes will also have to take out medical insurance and buy a £26 licence in order to ply their trade. On top of that they will also have to feed five Swiss francs, about £3.30, into a roadside ticket machine each night when they clock on.
Mr Herzig said the attractions of the sex boxes for prostitutes will outweigh their rather dour industrial location, which lies just a stone’s throw from a major rail depot.
But one problem standing in the way of the sex boxes is telling the prostitutes about them and their advantages. Many of the women working the streets of Zurich are foreigners who speak only a little German, and may be unaware of the approaching changes to their working lives.
Prince Richardson Fizz
Terry Richardson Photographs Richard Prince With His AriZona Lemon Fizz Collaboration
BY CEDAR PASORI
In light of his recently announced collaboration with AriZona on a “Lemon Fizz” drink, artist Richard Prince had an impromptu photo shoot with Terry Richardson, where he’s pictured with a case of the product. The Pop Art-inspired 23-oz. can has representations of Prince’s Nurse and Jokes paintings alongside larger black and white shots of him.
According to Jackie Harrigan, Global Communications Director at AriZona, “It was important for AriZona to create a beverage that embodied the mystery and intensity of Richard’s art, and Lemon Fizz acts as the perfect beverage to symbolize those feelings.”
Marvin Miller Gone
MLB union legend Marvin Miller dies at 95
Bob Nightengale, USA TODAY Sports
3:39PM EST November 27. 2012 – Marvin Miller, 95, who formed the Major League Baseball Players Association in 1966 and helped transform sports economics, died Tuesday morning, the union announced.
Miller, who turned the union into one of the most powerful in the country, negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in sports history in 1968. Six years later, he successfully challenged the “reserve clause” when Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally played out the option years of their contract. Players were granted free agency after six years of major league service, which was formalized in the next collective bargaining agreement.
The minimum salary was $6,000 when Miller formed the union, and today, the minimum salary is worth $480,000. Miller also bargained for salary arbitration, which has been responsible for salaries to soar for players before entering free agency. The average salary was $3.4 million in 2012. He also helped players negotiate the right to arbitration to resolve grievances.
Twist’d Punk’d
(A truly uncoolly fooly…)
Vagina, Eugenics, Hippocampus, Bastardization
Neuroscience: Under Attack
By ALISSA QUART
THIS fall, science writers have made sport of yet another instance of bad neuroscience. The culprit this time is Naomi Wolf; her new book, “Vagina,” has been roundly drubbed for misrepresenting the brain and neurochemicals like dopamine and oxytocin
Earlier in the year, Chris Mooney raised similar ire with the book “The Republican Brain,” which claims that Republicans are genetically different from — and, many readers deduced, lesser to — Democrats. “If Mooney’s argument sounds familiar to you, it should,” scoffed two science writers. “It’s called ‘eugenics,’ and it was based on the belief that some humans are genetically inferior.”
Sharp words from disapproving science writers are but the tip of the hippocampus: today’s pop neuroscience, coarsened for mass audiences, is under a much larger attack.
Meet the “neuro doubters.” The neuro doubter may like neuroscience but does not like what he or she considers its bastardization by glib, sometimes ill-informed, popularizers.
Capt. Tony Nelson Gone
Dallas Star Larry Hagman Dies in Texas
(LOS ANGELES) — Larry Hagman, whose predatory oil baron J.R. Ewing on television’s long-running nighttime soap opera “Dallas” became a symbol for 1980s greed and coaxed forth a Texas-sized gusher of TV ratings, has died. He was 81.
Hagman, who returned as J.R. in a new edition of “Dallas” this year, passed away Friday afternoon due to complications from his battle with cancer, according to a statement from the family provided to The Associated Press by Warner Bros., producer of “Dallas.”
Hagman was diagnosed in 1992 with cirrhosis of the liver and acknowledged that he had drank heavily for years. In 1995, a malignant tumor was discovered on his liver and he underwent a transplant.
Years before “Dallas,” Hagman had gained TV fame as a nice guy with the fluffy 1965-70 NBC comedy “I Dream of Jeannie,” in which he played Capt. Tony Nelson, an astronaut whose life is disrupted when he finds a comely genie, portrayed by Barbara Eden, and takes her home to live with him.
Macho Camacho Gone (Shot in the face – what a waste\:–(
Hector ‘Macho’ Camacho brain dead
Associated Press
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Famed Puerto Rican boxer Hector “Macho” Camacho is clinically brain dead, doctors said Thursday, but family members disagreed on whether to take him off life support and two of the fighter’s aunts said later that relatives had agreed to wait two more days.
Dr. Ernesto Torres said doctors had no more medical tests to perform on Camacho, who was shot in the face Tuesday night.
“We have done everything we could,” said Torres, director of the Centro Medico trauma center in San Juan. “We have to tell the people of Puerto Rico and the entire world that Macho Camacho has died, he is brain dead.”
One of the fighter’s aunts, Aida Camacho, said Thursday evening that two of Camacho’s sisters had asked to have two more days to spend with him, and other family members had agreed, even though they felt it was time to give in.
“I’m a person of a lot of faith, and I believe in miracles, but science has spoken,” she said.