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.
WORDS by Everynone
Wikipornia
Porn still No. 1 on Wikipedia, co-founder Larry Sanger warns
Children using Wikipedia for research can still stumble on the vast repository of pornographic images and videos that are the encyclopedia’s most popular items, warns site co-founder Larry Sanger.
“I think it’s a serious problem and so few people realize it’s there,” Sanger, one of the original founders, told FoxNews.com.
Despite a series of FoxNews.com exposes two years ago that brought the issue to the public’s attention, and a year-old resolution to institute pornography filters, there’s no end in sight to the problem, Sanger said. “I find it disturbing. I wouldn’t be speaking out if I had nothing to do with Wikipedia.”
Finding explicit imagery can be as easy as typing an unrelated search term; results go well beyond line art and diagrams — there are pictures and videos depicting human genitalia and individual acts of masturbation among countless other sexual scenes.
Indeed, nearly all of the most frequently viewed media files on Wikimedia servers are sexually explicit files, Sanger pointed out.
Mister Rogers Auto-tuning In The Garden Of Our Mind
Romantico!
Bob Welch Gone
$4000 Vibrator For Free, Charger Not Included
Bradbury Gone
Sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury dies
By Alan Duke, CNN
Los Angeles (CNN) — Science fiction author Ray Bradbury, whose imagination yielded classic books such as “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” has died at 91, his publisher said Wednesday.
Bradbury was a writer of perils, possibilities and wonder
Bradbury “died peacefully, last night, in Los Angeles, after a lengthy illness,” HarperCollins said in a written statement.
Bradbury’s books and 600 short stories predicted a variety of things, including the emergence of ATMs and live broadcasts of fugitive car chases.
“I would like to shoot them [doo-woppers] all dead.”
West Village residents complain about street doo-wop singers
Singers hit a sour note with locals
By DOUG AUER and ANTONIO ANTENUCCI
Doo-wop’s dead — or at least some folks would like it to be.
West Village residents and business people want cops to permanently tune out the less-than-harmonious doo-wop singers who incessantly serenade tourists on their street corners in the summer.
“I can hear these guys right outside my window, and after 15 years, I would like to shoot them all dead,” griped Rosemary Bella, who lives on Bleecker Street.
With the warmer weather, the a cappella assault reaches a crescendo on Fridays and Saturdays at the corner of Bleecker and Leroy streets, said Bella and several other residents who sounded off on the racket at a recent Sixth Precinct community meeting.
Fed-up resident Dorothy Green compiled the number of hours, days and weekends that groups perform, and she presented the stats to police brass.
“It works out to about 700 hours of doo-wop a year — and it’s not very well sung, either,” sniffed Green, president of the Central Village Block Association.
Venus Transits The Sun Today
T. Boone v. Drake in Best Tweet Takedown Yet
Quickfrey
from Notes From The Underground
Quickfire with James Frey
James Frey is the author of – in my opinion – some of the best books written in the last decade: A Million Little Pieces, My friend Leonard, Bright Shiny Morning and The Final Testament of The Holy Bible. I am privileged to have been able to ask him a few questions.
Where do you start when you’re writing a book – do you have an outline, or just the germ of an idea and an ending, or something else completely?
I know the beginning, the ending, have the entire book, in some abstract way, in head. All I do when I write a book is get it out of my head.
How much do you rewrite?
I don’t rewrite at all. First books were edited, the second were almost exactly what came out of my printer when I printed the first draft.
Do you have a particular place that you like to write?
I write my books on the couch of my house in Amagansett, NY. There’s either music playing, or the TV is on.
What do you do when you’ve finished. When the final proof has gone off and there is no way back?
Let it go.
What are you most proud of?
I’m proud of all the books I’ve written. They were each a different experience, and I’m proud of them for different reasons.
Remote Control Dead Cat
Cats away! Artist turns his dead pet into flying helicopter after it is killed by a car
Many animal lovers find it hard to part with their pets when they die.
So when cat Orville, named after the famous aviator Orville Wright, was run over by a car, his artist owner decided to turn him into a permanent piece of artwork as the ultimate tribute by transforming him into a flying helicopter.
Dutch artist Bart Jansen first stuffed Orville before teaming up with radio control helicopter flyer Arjen Beltman to build a specially-designed flying mechanism to attach to the cat.
Scroll down for video
The end result, named the Orvillecopter, is now on show at the Kunstrai art festival in Amsterdam where visitors can watch Orville flying for themselves.
Jansen said the Orvillecopter is ‘half cat, half machine’, and part of a visual art project to pay tribute to his cat Orville.
Jansen, part of the art cooperative Generaal Pardon, said: ‘After a period of mourning he received his propellers posthumously.’
THE FINAL TESTAMENT OF THE HOLY BIBLE Nabs BMS Best Blurb Nom
BMS shortlists for Best Marketing Campaign
29.05.12 | Benedicte Page
The Book Marketing Society has announced the shortlists for its inaugural Best Marketing Campaign of the Year awards, to take place on 21st June at the British Library. The awards will come in the evening of The Bookseller Creativity Day, to include two half-day Marketing and Design conferences.
Shortlisted in the Best Blurb category are the campaigns for The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey (John Murray); Tiger Motherby Amy Chua (Bloomsbury) and The Wrong Pong by Steven Butler (Puffin).
Porno Cavo
Cave Painting Porn Discovered
The New York Times reports on the publication of an archeological articleoutlining the discovery of 37,000-year-old cave drawings that show our earliest ancestors had a taste for pornography:
The drawings include what appear to be images of the female vulva, illustrated by circles with small slits on one side. “You see this again and again and again,” Dr. White said. There are also very simple images, in profile, of animals, including horses and lionlike big cats, he said.
The work was discovered on a collapsed roof of a rock shelter at the Abri Castanet site in the Vézère River valley in southwest France. Humans at the time lived in such shelters, Dr. White said, and it was a period of cultural naissance.
A Precursor to Playboy: Graphic Images in Rock (New York Times)
Porno Colosseo
Porn video shot on Coliseum grounds
It’s unclear how the filmmaker got access to the taxpayer-owned stadium or permission to use its field lights.
By Paul Pringle and Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum field is the place where the USC Trojans play football, two Summer Olympics were staged, John F. Kennedy accepted the Democratic presidential nomination and Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass.
It was also a location for “The Gangbang Girl #32,” a hard-core pornographic movie that featured 40 minutes of group sex on the gridiron turf, The Times has learned.
The filming at the taxpayer-owned stadium was done at night, with the Coliseum‘s towering lights blazing and its rows of distinctive red and white seats framing many of the scenes. The video also shows the stadium’s signature tunnel, which the Trojan team charges through at the start of games, as well as a sliver of the iconic peristyle, the arched entrance to the Coliseum.
“I was just in awe that we were at the Coliseum,” said a star of the film, who goes by the name Mr. Marcus. “I’ve made movies for about 20 years and I’ve done a lot of things, but that one really stands out.… I mean, who gets to have sex on the Coliseum floor?”