Lullaby’s Revenge
Austria investigating whether dead famed composers’ teeth were stolen
VIENNA — Have the teeth of two famed 19th-century composers been stolen from their graves? Austrian prosecutors are trying to find out.
Thomas Vecsey of the Vienna state prosecutor’s office says authorities are considering filing charges against a man suspected of breaking into the graves of Austrian waltz king Johann Strauss Jr. and German Romantic composer Johannes Brahms and taking their teeth. Both are buried in Vienna.
Special Sauce
Marijuana deals, the pain of Happy Meals and how to get a free Big Mac: McDonald’s worker reveals secrets of fast-food giant (and warns against ordering grilled chicken)
By DANIEL BATES
A McDonald’s worker has lifted the lid on what it is really like to work at one of the restaurants in the chain in a candid and hilarious Internet conversation.
The unnamed man claims that some staff at his branch deal marijuana from the parking lot and that if somebody comes in high they will ‘practically give you free food’.
Burgers and chicken are left to stew for ‘hours on end’ whilst staff moan about having to make Happy Meals as they are time-consuming.
The worker said that the worst thing he ever saw was his colleague selling marijuana to another employee just outside the restaurant.
But he added: ‘If you came to our Mcdonald’s high, we would practically give you free food.
‘Everyone makes mistakes, so yeah it might of been embarrassing to screw up your change, but there is no way in hell anyone would turn you in.
‘Our Mcdonalds parking lot is a notorious spot for Ents (people who smoke marijuana) to hang out, because if you just sit in your car and blaze, it simply (at night, at least) looks like kids just eating food they just got in the drive thru. The perfect alibi.’
The worker claims that ‘nobody’ at his restaurant messes with the food as it would be ‘the biggest d*** move ever’.
“No longer a lost, joss-stick-scented tradition.”
Ultimate pop art – Why gig posters are a sound investment
Posters have always been sentimental souvenirs of a concert. But now they are being seen as art, and an investment.
by NICK HASTED
The beautiful psychedelic gig posters that helped define the 1960s San Francisco rock scene are no longer a lost, joss-stick-scented tradition. Musicians from Arcade Fire and PJ Harvey to Bob Dylan and Liza Minnelli are using limited-edition posters to accompany shows, as an often strikingly original counterpoint to their music. Just as in the old days, the artists silk-screen print by hand in batches of a few hundred.
The revival began with the artists who rose alongside the late 1980s US indie boom, culminating with Nirvana. Each subsequent generation has become bigger, with refugees from the skateboard, graffiti, hot-rod, tattoo and comics art scenes referencing pop culture.
Depraved Penguins
Shooter Sandwich w/Bacon and Swiss
Heres what you are going to need
I used a loaf of hard crusted Italian bread, 3 ribeye steaks 1 lb mushrooms, an onion and some bacon.
Hollow out bread
Cook that shit
Try to leave the steaks a little rare as they will carry over cook a little more in the sandwich.
Shove one of the steaks in the bread
Sauce the steak
[ click to learn why you’re going to need 140lbs. of pressure for the finish ]
The History Of Art By Movement
Write Like The Wind G.R.R. Martin!
Rainbow Oreo
Royal, Remington, Underwood, Smith-Corona, Olivetti, Corona, Adler, Oliver
Time for a typewriter renaissance?
Hipsters and newbies alike rediscover those beautiful machines that go clickety-clack
(Credit: toadberry via Shutterstock)
It was 4 p.m. on a Thursday, two hours until the end of Jesse Banuelos’ workday. He was standing behind the front counter of Berkeley Typewriter, his trademark green apron tied around his waist. A dozen broken typewriters — some electric, but most of them manual – were stacked in a corner on the brown linoleum floor.
Forty years ago, the shop was at the top of its game. But during the ’90s, as computers became more affordable, fewer customers bought typewriters or needed them repaired. Many typewriter stores went out of business. Berkeley Typewriter laid off some staff and managed to remain open by offering services like printer, photocopier and fax repair. Banuelos is the store’s only remaining technician who knows how to fix typewriters. He never learned how to type on a computer and for a time he worried that the typewriter industry would soon disappear.
He was wrong. In the last few years, both typewriter sales and repairs have increased at the store. Berkeley Typewriter experienced an increase in overall sales in 2011, moving about two or three a week. It’s not like the olden days, Banuelos said, but it’s enough.
Most of the typewriters that he sells or takes in are manual machines made between the early 1900s and the 1960s. The dozen or so brands displayed in Banuelos’ front window read like a row of multicolored tombstones: Royal, Remington, Underwood, Smith-Corona, Olivetti, Corona, Adler, Oliver.
Amy Casey Smushes Cleveland
HTTP 451 Forbidden
Call for Ray Bradbury to be honoured with internet error message
A new status code to reflect internet censorship could be named after Ray Bradbury’s most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451
by Alison Flood
Fire wall … author Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 features book-burning censors. Photograph: Charley Gallay/Getty Images
Ray Bradbury‘s fiction looks set to enter the structure of the internet, after a software developer has proposed a new HTTP status code inspired by Fahrenheit 451.
Tim Bray, a fan of Bradbury’s writing, is recommending to the Internet Engineering Task Force, which governs such choices, that when access to a website is denied for legal reasons the user is given the status code 451.
There are already a host of HTTP status codes, from the common 404 Not Found to 504 Gateway Timeout. The 451 idea follows a blogpost from Terence Eden, who found that his ISP had been ordered to censor the Pirate Bay when he was given an HTTP 403 Forbidden message, meaning that “the server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfil it”. In fact, Eden writes on his blog, it was not Pirate Bay that was preventing access but the government, after Britain’s high court issued an order to ISPs to block access to the filesharing site in April, so the response was “factually incorrect”, and a new code is needed to indicate “censorship”.
451, Bray believes, would work nicely, as it would provide a tribute to Bradbury as well as reminding users of the dystopian future predicted by the science fiction author. Bradbury died earlier this month, leaving behind an oeuvre numbering hundreds of short stories as well as the novels Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, which tells of a world where books are banned and burned and fireman don’t put fires out but start them.
Terra Sacra by Sean F. White
Terra Sacra Time Lapses
An around-the-world time lapse journey celebrating our Sacred Earth. Six years in the making… seven continents… 24 countries.
Photographed & Edited by Sean F. White seanwhite.net
Original score by Roy Milner roymilner.com
Full details and locations shot-by-shot:
TERRA-SACRA.com
Versión en español
beyondgravity.whsites.net/ioe/wordpress/?page_id=441
Twitter: twitter.com/seanfwhite
Facebook: facebook.com/pages/Sean-F-White-Photography-Films/291134517608278
Lore: On John’s Lumen
Pittacus Lore Transmission #5 Revealed: On John’s Lumen
We now know that Number Four has developed the Legacy of the Lumen–and that has the potential to mean more than any of us could ever guess.
In this latest transmission from Lorien elder Pittacus Lore, he shares some insight into the power of the Lumen–and how it’s connected to Lorien.
What do you think John’s Legacy will mean for the rest of the Lorien children?
Did you miss our previous transmissions from Pittacus? Find out more about Marina’s healing abilities, Pittacus’s thoughts on Number Nine’s attitude, who Number Four’s true ally is, and secrets about the Loriens and their Guardians.
[ click to read at IAmNumberFourFans.com ]
LeRoy Neiman Gone
Sports world artist LeRoy Neiman dies in NY at 91
By ULA ILNYTZKY / Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) – Painter and sketch artist LeRoy Neiman, best known for evoking the kinetic energy of the world’s biggest sporting and leisure events with bright quick strokes, died Wednesday at age 91.
Neiman was the official painter of five Olympiads and was a contributing artist at Playboy magazine for many years. His longtime publicist, Gail Parenteau, confirmed his death at a Manhattan hospital on Wednesday but didn’t disclose the cause.
Neiman was a media-savvy artist who knew how to enthrall audiences with his instant renditions of what he observed. In 1972, he sketched the world chess tournament between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik, Iceland, for a live television audience. He also produced live drawings of the Olympics for TV and was the official computer artist of the Super Bowl for CBS.
Neiman’s “reportage of history and the passing scene … revived an almost lost and time-honored art form,” according to a 1972 exhibit catalog of his Olympics sketches at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
“It’s been fun. I’ve had a lucky life,” Neiman said in a June 2008 interview with The Associated Press. “I’ve zeroed in on what you would call action and excellence. … Everybody who does anything to try to succeed has to give the best of themselves, and art has made me pull the best out of myself.”
Neiman’s paintings, many executed in household enamel paints that allowed him his fast-moving strokes, are an explosion in reds, blues, pinks, greens and yellows of pure kinetic energy.
He has been described as an American impressionist, but the St. Paul, Minn., native preferred to think of himself simply as an American artist.
“I don’t know if I’m an impressionist or an expressionist,” he told the AP. “You can call me an American first. … (but) I’ve been labeled doing neimanism, so that’s what it is, I guess.”
Terminator 5 – Creep Of The Crawlers
Venice Beach Bodybuilders Fear Google Is Kicking Sand at Them
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
A painting for sale on the boardwalk in the Venice section of Los Angeles, where Google has set up offices and may lease more space. More Photos »
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and IAN LOVETT
LOS ANGELES — This city’s boardwalk community of Venice has long celebrated its seediness, accepting — embracing, really — the kind of sensory assaults that would faze more conventional places: beachfront bodybuilders, ragamuffin street vendors, tattoo artists, Hare Krishna chanters, skateboarders, drug dealers, gangs, homeless encampments, rowdy tourists, film crews and, more recently, a colony of medical marijuana dispensaries.
But Venice might have met its match in what many see as its most unsettling threat yet: Google.
“As soon as I walked in, they said: ‘You heard about Google? Why don’t you have your staff look into this?’ ” former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who began his professional career as a bodybuilder here 44 years ago, said after he emerged from a throng of worried muscle-bound admirers at Gold’s Gym. “It’s this conspiracy theory: ‘Google is coming! They are going to take over and wipe out our bodybuilding.’ ”
In November, Google moved an army of sales and technology employees into 100,000 square feet in two Venice buildings. It is negotiating leases on another 100,000 square feet, according to real estate agents. That includes the 31,000-square-foot expanse that is Gold’s Gym, the very bodybuilding symbol of Venice, if not the universe, where Mr. Schwarzenegger stopped by the other morning.
Hideous kicks – that’s the true controversy.
‘How would a Jewish person feel if you put a swastika on a shoe?’ Adidas under fire for unveiling new trainer with orange ‘shackles’ like those worn by black slaves
Adidas has come under fire for creating a pair of trainers with ‘shackles’.
Critics have compared the ‘JS Roundhouse Mids’, to be released in August, to the chains worn by black slaves in the 19th century.
The firm unveiled the trainers on its Facebook page. They feature plastic orange ‘shackles’ attached to the ankles by chains in the same colour.
The shoes have sparked an angry debate online. More than 2,000 Facebook users have commented, with many calling the design ‘offensive’ and ‘ignorant’, saying the firm has ‘sunk to new lows’ with its ‘slavewear’ product.
Dear Sister, Oh! I’ve emptied bottles three / And passed out underneath this pleasant tree.
Venus X The New Spooky
The Art World Has a New DJ
And her name’s DJ Venus X. Why not follow her on Twitter? She’s already got a profile inThe New York Times style section. The piece opens with a scene from the after party for Terry Richardson’s exhibition at Half Gallery, “Mom & Dad.” Quoth Richard Phillips: “It was one of the best parties I have ever been to in my life.” Heady praise!
When The Times interviewed the DJ, whose real name is Jazmin Venus Soto, “she was gingerly burning an assortment of MP3s onto blank CDs…for a private party in honor of Damien Hirst’s dot paintings to be given by the Gagosian Gallery later that evening.”
Rodney King Gone (Thanks, Rodney – though still we do not listen.)
Rodney King was haunted by memories, daunted by pain
The 1991 beating by LAPD officers and years of drug and alcohol abuse left Rodney King unmoored. But he sought a new beginning.
By Kurt Streeter, Los Angeles Times
Rodney King was working hard to mend personal relationships that had frayed during two decades of instability and trouble. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times / October 3, 2008)
Rodney King spoke candidly of death. I recall a time last March when he and I were walking through his Rialto home. He looked at photos of the LAPD officers who’d beaten him. Without prompting, he opened up. “I’m just glad I survived what he did to me,” he said, speaking of one of the officers, Stacey Koon. He held his two fingers about a quarter-inch apart. “I was this close to death,” he said. “This close.”
He went on to say there were long moments that night in Lake View Terrace in 1991 when it felt as if he had, in fact, died. Moments when it seemed he was outside his body, looking down at a scene of horror below. King explained how, as boots and batons fell, as electricity from Tasers ripped through his body, he thought of what it was like for African slaves to withstanding whippings. The thought of what they went through helped him stay alive.
Make no mistake, that wasn’t the only time Rodney King could have died. He was extremely candid about his addiction to drugs and alcohol; about the damage he’d done to his body and how addiction could have cost him his life on several occasions. He felt lucky to have survived moments like the time in 2003 when he sped down a street in Rialto, high on PCP, and crashed into a tree.
He compared himself to a cat. “They’ve only got nine lives,” he said. “I don’t want to get to nine.”
Anal Žižek
Žižek: Not Into Anal
Who knew, right? The Guardian‘s profileof the cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, who has a new book out called Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, is…not for the faint of heart.
…Because for some horrifying reason, Mr. Žižek opens up about every sordid detail of his sex life, going off on a tangent that feels as random and beside-the-point as some of his more painful writing. Have a look at this exchange:
“I keep thinking I should try to intervene with a question, but he’s off again. “I have strange limits. I am very – OK, another detail, fuck it. I was never able to do – even if a woman wanted it – annal sex.” Annal sex? “Ah, anal sex. You know why not? Because I couldn’t convince myself that she really likes it. I always had this suspicion, what if she only pretends, to make herself more attractive to me? It’s the same thing for fellatio; I was never able to finish into the woman’s mouth, because again, my idea is, this is not exactly the most tasteful fluid. What if she’s only pretending?”
Now you know probably the last thing on Earth that you ever wanted to find out. In all fairness to Mr. Žižek, we always thought Hegel and Lacan were a little too fond of TMIs as well.
Catching Crabs In Rome
Has a New 10-Legged Species Evolved beneath Rome?
By Rob Dunn
People have been keeping an eye on the river crab because like many species of crustaceans and nearly everything else in rivers and streams, its populations have been declining. We do terrible things to rivers and the species living in them. You have seen some of those things, and unfortunately, we do them nearly everywhere. Drop something into a river and it seems to disappear, and so we have dropped, dumped, poured and otherwise contaminated nearly every river in the world. In the Mediterranean we have been doing these things for thousands of years, especially in cities. As a consequence, crabs have gone locally extinct from most of the urban areas where they once lived.
Personally, I like crabs. You could not invent them if you did not know they existed. They are just a little too odd. Insects make do with six legs but crabs seem to need two extra sets. And then there are their eyes, which might as well be legs the way they can look up and around corners. They gather what falls toward them. Those humans interested in rebirth seem to like the idea of being reborn as tigers or eagles but by my accounting, a great many bodies are reborn as crabs.
And Still A Dad.
Pete Cosey Gone (Dark Magus changed my life)
Pete Cosey, jazz guitarist, dies at 68
Cosey played on some of Miles Davis’ most experimental albums
Pete Cosey, a jazz guitarist who was best known for his work in Miles Davis’ electric band in the 1970s has died aged 68.
His daughter said he died at a Chicago hospital of complications from surgery on 30 May.
During the 1960s Cosey was a member of the studio band for Chess Records, playing for the likes of Etta James, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.
But it was his creative sound that attracted the attention of Davis.
He liberally applied the distortion pedal to his licks, punctuated by wah-wah effects, and appeared on some of Davis’ most experimental albums including Agharta, Pangaea, Get Up With It and Dark Magus.
“Pete’s sound was something quite amazing,” Wendy Oxenhorn, from the Jazz Foundation of America told the Chicago Tribune.
“He took blues, funk, rap and jazz and combined it into a new sound.”
Haiku Haboob
Arizona asks for haikus to promote dust storm safety
The Associated Press
PHOENIX—Arizona transportation officials are getting the message out about dust storm safety—in precisely 17 syllables.
The Arizona Department of Transportation is encouraging Twitter users to tweet haikus around the theme safe driving in haboobs—severe dust storms that hit Phoenix in the summer.
An example, from Phoenix resident Mindy Lee, who goes by the Twitter handle mindyblee: “Haboobs blow through town / In one instant it is dark / Pull over and wait.”
The haiku challenge runs through Friday. Tweeters are asked to include the hashtag (hash)HaboobHaiku.
Honey-Orange Chicken Legs With Roasted Beets
Rosemary’s Pixie – #6 of TIME’s 10 Most Iconic Hairstyles
Mia Farrow’s Pixie Cut
Famed hairdresser Vidal Sassoon worked his magic on American actress Mia Farrow’s hair before she starred in Rosemary’s Baby. Sassoon was a fan of low-maintenance styles, and what could be easier than chopping it all off? The pixie was a marked departure from looks that tethered a woman to hot rollers and piles of bobby pins, and the cut’s emphasis on the face helped usher in a new kind of sexiness.
[ click to continue reading at see all the cuts at TIME.com ]
The Kings Kill The Devils
The Cane For Samantha Lo
Individualist 451
Ray Bradbury: Enemy of the State
Remembering the late science fiction writer
Ray Bradbury won’t “live forever,” as he wished, but he may well live on as the most-read critic of the state in America’s public schools. It was in public school that I first encountered Bradbury’s magnum opus, Fahrenheit 451, which is required reading in the government schools he would have shuttered.
Bradbury, who died this week at the age of 91, was a man of the right, a detail sadly airbrushed out of most obituaries this week. Like the best science fiction writers, he imagined worlds and realms outside the grasp of government, where the focus was always on the people that populated them, not on the gizmos in their pockets.
Libertarians can easily see one of their own in the non-comformist nonagenarian, who, despite moving to Los Angeles in the 1930s, never bothered to learn how to drive. A consummate autodidact, he also never went to college. And good thing too! He hated affirmative action, condemned “all this political correctness that’s rampant on campuses,” and called for an immediate ban of quotas in higher education. “The whole concept of higher education is negated,” he told Playboy in 1996, “unless the sole criterion used to determine if students qualify is the grades they score on standardized tests.”
But Bradbury’s antipathy to formal education went deeper than passing controversies. He knew that educators, like politicians, are the natural enemies of dreamers. “Science fiction acknowledges that we don’t want to be lectured at, just shown enough so we can look it up ourselves,” he continued in thatPlayboy interview. His can-do optimism recalled the small Illinois town his family left, ultimately finding its place in his fiction even if it was set on distant worlds, which he longed to explore and colonize. For Bradbury, it was the politicians who “have no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads” that ultimately kept America earthbound. And Bradbury, who grew up on the romantic fiction of Hugo, had romance and love to share, penning some 27 novels and 600 short stories.