The Greatest Sport Ever
Degas On The Bus
Stolen £700,000 Degas painting found on a bus near Paris
Edgar Degas was a leading Impressionist. CREDIT: HERVE LEWANDOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
French customs officers making a random check on a bus at a motorway layby found a painting by 19th century Impressionist master Edgar Degas that was stolen nine years ago from a museum in Marseille.
The 1877 painting Les Choristes, or The Chorus Singers and sometimes called The Extras, was found in a suitcase in the vehicle’s luggage compartment during a stopover in Marne-la-Vallée to the east of Paris.
Its value is estimated at €800,000 (£700,000).
But when the officers asked passengers who the case belonged to, they were met with a stony silence, the culture ministry said in a statement.
“Its disappearance represented a heavy loss to the French impressionist heritage,” said Culture Minister Françoise Nyssen, who issued a statement saying she was delighted at “the happy rediscovery of a precious work.”
“Wait till you start running into motherfuckers with three or four dicks! Bug-eyed motherfuckers!”
The Last Word: George Clinton on Alien Encounters, Trump’s Lack of Funk
The Parliament-Funkadelic legend also discusses the perils of LSD, the death of doo-wop and how to find great musicians
By Brian Hiatt
Parliament-Funkadelic leader George Clinton talks to Rolling Stone about the essence of funk, his alien encounter, the dangers of LSD and more. Mark Summers for Rolling Stone
Parliament-Funkadelic founder George Clinton is an irreplaceable walking museum of American musical history, with a career that began in Fifties doo-wop (the Parliaments were originally a Newark, N.J., singing group), and continues all the way to Kendrick-era hip-hop and beyond. Clinton put out an excellent, memorably titled memoir, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?, in 2014, and he suggests he’s already done enough additional living for another book – though he’s more focused on an upcoming documentary and a new album. He called in for a characteristically amusing and enlightening Last Word interview while on the road for his latest tour, which is set to run through April.
Who are the funkiest people who ever lived?
When I’m just tryna funk, it’s gonna be the Staple Singers, man – Pop Staples. And Ray Charles. Ray could take “Eleanor Rigby” and make that funky. He ends up doing that to anything – to me, that’s raw funk. And then [Motown session bassist] James Jamerson – that is a musician.
And who is the least funky person alive?
Oh, my God! [Laughs] Probably Trump. Can’t be no funk in the Trump! [Pauses] He ain’t gonna like that.
Roman Boxing Gloves
Roman boxing gloves unearthed by Vindolanda dig
Image copyrightVINDOLANDA TRUST
Image captionThe gloves were “skilfully made” about 2,000 years ago
Roman boxing gloves unearthed during an excavation near Hadrian’s Wall have gone on public display.
Experts at Vindolanda, near Hexham, in Northumberland, believe they are “probably the only known surviving examples from the Roman period”.
Dr Andrew Birley, Vindolanda Trust director of excavations, described the leather bands as an “astonishing” find.
The gloves were discovered last summer along with a hoard of writing tablets, swords, shoes and bath clogs.
Made of leather, they were designed to fit snugly over the knuckles and have the appearance of a protective guard.
Super Cow
Cow escapes on way to slaughterhouse, smashes through metal fence, breaks arm of man trying to catch her then swims to safety on island in lake
Local politician reportedly agrees to let animal live after its ordeal captures public attention
Wczoraj zamieściłem wpis o krowie-bohaterce, która zwiała z transportu do rzeźni i od trzech tygodni przemieszcza się w okolicach Jeziora Nyskiego. Uciekała bohatersko i wpław przedostała się na wyspę na środku jeziora, gdzie pozostaje do dziś. Nie uległa strażakom, którzy chcieli ja przetransportować łodzią i wciąż trwa na polu walki. Nadmienię, ze Pan Łukasz- właściciel krowy- od trzech tygodnie codziennie dostarcza na wyspę żywność dla zwierzęcia. Nie jestem wegetarianine…
A cow has been living alone on an island, attacking anyone who comes near, after staging a miraculous escape on its way to a slaughterhouse.
The animal made its bid for safety last month after it refused to get into a lorry taking it to be killed for meat. Instead it rammed a metal fence before making a dash for the nearby Lake Nysa, south Poland.
After the cow’s owner, known only as Mr Lukasz, attempted to get it back to the farm, the cow broke one of his worker’s arms, according to Polish news show Wiadomosci.
It then entered the water and swam to one of the islands in the middle of the lake. Mr Lukasz said he even saw it dive underwater on its way.
Bubble Ice
Why Curling Ice is Different Than Other Ice
There is a science to preparing ice for the shuffleboard-like sport. It’s all about the pebbling
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An ice maker pebbles the 2014 Olympic curling rink in Sochi. (Rich Harmer)
Let’s be honest: the fervor around curling in the 2014 Olympic Games has been mostly driven, so far, by the return of Team Norway’s outrageous pants.
When it comes to knowing as much about the sport, plenty of people fall a little short. And if you don’t know the rules, odds are you aren’t thinking much about the actual surface across which athletes push 44-pound stones for a shot at Olympic glory.
It’s just a hockey rink, right?
Well, not quite. Trying to curl on untreated ice “would be like a pro golfer going from putting at Augusta to putting on his back lawn,” says Derek Brown, USA Curling’s director of high performance.
If curling ice was flat, the stone would move barely halfway across the “sheet,” or curling lane. And that’s assuming the curler is hurling it as hard as possible. Friction would halt the rock within seconds. So, to make the ice more amenable to the sport, devoted ice makers employ a technique called “pebbling.” More or less what it sounds like, pebbling involves freezing small droplets of water across the playing surface between each match.
Supervolcano Surging
Yellowstone ERUPTION: Supervolcano under ‘STRAIN’ – experts find magma chamber pressure
YELLOWSTONE is “under strain” according to a group of seismologists who are monitoring the potentially catastrophic volcano, prompting fears an eruption is imminent.
By SEAN MARTIN
GETTY
Yellowstone will erupt again one day.
A process known as deformation, where subsurface rocks subtly change shapes, is occurring beneath the surface of Yellowstone which alerts experts.
Researchers state deformation occurs when there is a change in the amount of pressure in the magma chamber and experts are keeping an eye on the development.
Seismologists from UNAVCO, a nonprofit university-governed consortium, are using “Global Positioning System, borehole tiltmeters, and borehole strainmeters” to measure minute changes in deformation at Yellowstone.
In an article for the Billings Gazette, David Mencin and Glen Mattioli, geodesists with UNAVCO, say “the strain signal is larger than would be expected if the crust under Yellowstone were completely solid”.
Sneak Attack
Why the Asteroid Approaching Earth Was Only Spotted 5 Days Ago
By
Almost exactly five years ago, a truck-size celestial rockunexpectedly exploded in the atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013. As town officials dealt with broken glass and hundreds injured, people worldwide asked why nobody spotted the 51-foot-across (17 meters) object sooner, in time to warn residents.
The same question could be asked of another asteroid that will whiz harmlessly past the Earth today (Feb. 9). NASA said this object, nicknamed 2018 CB, may very well be bigger than one that broke up over Chelyabinsk. The asteroid was only spotted on Sunday (Feb. 4) by the Catalina Sky Survey. Early estimates of 2018 CB’s size range between 50 and 130 feet (15 and 40 m) in diameter. The object will fly by Earth at about 5:30 p.m. EST (2:30 p.m. PST) at less than 20 percent of the distance from the Earth to the moon. That’s about 238,855 miles (384,400 km) from us.
“Asteroids of this size do not often approach this close to our planet — maybe only once or twice a year,” Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement from the agency.
Mr. Ventimiglia
He’s America’s TV dad. Get to know ‘This Is Us’ star Milo Ventimiglia
Actor Milo Ventimiglia, from the NBC hit, “This Is Us,” is photographed at his Los Angeles home with some of his hat collection, including the show’s Big Three Homes. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
It’s just after 1 a.m. and Milo Ventimiglia, finally settling into his Minneapolis hotel room after a climactic Super Bowl night, can at long last sleep with one less secret to keep.
“I’m happy everyone is in the know,” he says by phone.
As flawed-but-nearly-perfect patriarch Jack Pearson on NBC’s megahit “This Is Us,” Ventimiglia has joined the roster of TV’s most beloved dads. So beloved, in fact, that the character’s death, revealed in the show’s debut season, and the mystery surrounding it, kindled the question, “How did Jack die?” It quickly became a pop culture phenomenon rife with conspiracy theories.
On Sunday, the answer came. (This is … where the spoilers start.)
KATERINA UK
New James Frey novel from John Murray
by Katherine Cowdrey
James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces (John Murray), is publishing a new novel with John Murray called Katerina.
Katerina, pitched as a sweeping love story that alternates between 1992 Paris and 2017 Los Angeles, will be published in September this year. John Murray acquired UK and Commonwealth rights through Jenny Meyer of Jenny Meyer Literary Agency on behalf of Eric Simonoff at WME.
At the centre of the novel is protagonist Jay, who is 21 when he moves to Paris to live the artist’s life, and falls in love for the first time. Cut to 25 years later: he is a middle-age family man living in California when he receives an anonymous message that draws him back to the life, and possibly the love, he abandoned years before.
North American rights have sold to Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, while the film rights to the book have been pre-emptively acquired by Makeready, the new production outfit launched in 2017 by former New Regency c.e.o Brad Weston. Frey will write the script and be executive producer. Guymon Casady is producing through Entertainment 360, the production arm of Management 360. WME negotiated the sale.
Odessa Young To ‘A Million Little Pieces’
‘Assassination Nation’ Star Odessa Young Joins ‘A Million Little Pieces’ (EXCLUSIVE)
By Justin Kroll
CREDIT: STEPHEN LOVEKIN/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
After a breakout role in the Sundance hit “Assassination Nation,” Odessa Young is boarding Sam Taylor-Johnson’s “A Million Little Pieces.”
Young will be joining the previously announced cast of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Charlie Hunnam, and Giovanni Ribisi.
The story follows a young man who awakens on an airplane to Chicago with no recollection of his injuries or of how he ended up on the plane. He then heads to a rehab and begins his journey to sobriety. Young will play Lilly, a crack and heroin addict who falls in love with the man.
Vigil For Torched Taco Bell
Alabama residents hold candlelight vigil for Taco Bell that burned down
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WJBK) – Residents of Montgomery, Alabama said goodbye to a beloved landmark
They gathered for a vigil to share their memories of a Taco Bell that is no more. The restaurant burned down last week.
Frequent customers took to Facebook saying they were going to have a candlelight vigil to “Stand together in the loss of our beloved Taco Bell.”
Parts of the planet could be rendered uninhabitable
Earth’s magnetic poles could be about to FLIP sparking chaos and mass blackouts
Parts of the planet could be rendered uninhabitable by the reversal, experts have warned
By Brittany Vonow
GETTY IMAGES
THE Earth’s magnetic poles could be about to flip, sparking chaos and making large parts of the planet uninhabitable, it has emerged.
Experts have warned that the change is extremely likely with the magnetic field weakening by 15 per cent over 200 years.
According to an Undark report, the flip could cause “devastating streams of particles from the sun, galactic cosmic rays, and enhanced ultraviolet B rays from a radiation”.
The report warned that satellite timing systems that govern electric grids could fail, causing a ripple effect that would shut off lights, computers and phones. Even flushing the toilet could become impossible, according to the article.
The article shared concerns from Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who warned “that parts of the planet will become uninhabitable during a reversal”.
Fake Computer How-to
How the Fake but Really Cool Computers in Movies Get Made
Whether it’s a DNA database in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ or the heads up display in Iron Man’s suit, real world user interface designers are hard at work making sure characters have a way to operate their fictional tech.
Images courtesy of Cantina Creative
In the Iron Man films and comics, we’ll often see super-genius Tony Stark furiously churning out lines of code to make sure his latest suit upgrade can fly on auto pilot, harness a deadly new source of power, or pair with Bluetooth speakers. What we never see, however, is Tony mulling over font options, window sizes, and all the other variables that go into designing a user interface (UI) that doesn’t suck.
In the real world, tech behemoths like Apple pour billions into UI development, tweaking countless iterations of text bubbles and screen sensitivity to the point of perfection. But for the creators of fictional UIs of the silver screen who are working with mere slivers of a Silicon Valley budget, the path to a believable, elegant UI design is trickier process. At best, the work of these artists goes by unnoticed, seamlessly propelling the story while maintaining the aesthetic of the universe. At worst, it pulls the audience out of the moment, leaving them to wonder why future humans are using papyrus to announce an airlock breach.
We spoke with Alan Torres, a design supervisor at LA-based VFX studio Cantina Creative, to see what sort of process goes into this under appreciated bit of cinematic artistry. While at Cantina, Torres has helped design the God’s Eye device in the latest Fast and the Furious, created a dystopian DNA database in Blade Runner 2049 and, yes, even put the display in Iron Man’s helmet.
Nothing To See Here
Scientists say rash of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions on ‘Ring of Fire’ not connected
By BILL HUTCHINSON
Volcanic eruptions in Japan, the Philippines and Bali. Massive earthquakes in Alaska and Indonesia.
The rash of natural disasters over the past two days have one common denominator: they all occurred along the so-called Ring of Fire, a sprawling horseshoe-shape geological disaster zone.
At least five different events occurred on the Ring of Fire on Monday and Tuesday, including a magnitude 7.9 earthquake that rattled the town of Kodiak, Alaska, and the eruption of Mount Kusatsu-Shirane near a ski resort northwest of Tokyo.
One More Scroll To Go
from Atlas Obscura
One of the Last Two Dead Sea Scrolls Has Been Decoded
Israeli researchers found an ancient calendar by piecing together fragments of the text.
A larger Hebrew scroll found in the cache in the West Bank caves. PUBLIC DOMAIN
SOMETIME AROUND THE CUSP OF 1947, a teenage shepherd in the West Bank threw a rock, possibly to scare an animal out from a cliffside cave, and triggered one of the most incredible archaeological discoveries of the past century. Instead of a thud, a splash, or even a crash, he heard a shattering noise from within the cave, where the rock had hit a cache of large clay jars. In them were leather and papyrus scrolls. Later discoveries in caves in this area would shore up fragments of some 900 manuscripts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.
These texts, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, have proven a source of fascination to scholars. But their precise origins remain opaque, beyond that they seem to have been written by an ancient Judean sect, the Essenes, and date to at least the 4th century BC. Now, Israeli researchers claim to have “solved” one of the final two scrolls, piecing together 60 of these tiny fragments and, in the process, identifying the name of a festival marking the changes between seasons: tekufah.
Speaking to Haaretz, Dr. Eshbal Ratzon and Professor Jonatan Ben-Dov from the Bible Department at Haifa University explained that by decoding and reconstructing one of the final two scrolls, they were able to uncover a 364-day calendar used by the ascetic sect. Their work was recently published in the Journal of Biblical Literature. This calendar seems to have been a source of struggle between the sect and the Temple, Ratzon said. “But this calendar was disputed, which may be one of the reasons this sect left the Temple and went to the desert. They had many disputes and this was one of them—they couldn’t celebrate holidays together.”
David Dastmalchian To ‘A Million Little Pieces’
David Dastmalchian Joins ‘A Million Little Pieces’ & ‘Die in a Gunfight’
REX/Shutterstock
EXCLUSIVE: Ant-Man And The Wasp actor David Dastmalchian has landed two back-to-back projects. He’s set for A Million Little Pieces, the Sam Taylor-Johnson directed film adaptation of the James Frey book, which is currently in production. The pic stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Carla Juri, Charlie Hunnam, and Giovanni Ribisi.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Sam Taylor-Johnson adapted the book, loosely based on Frey’s life. It follows a young drug-addled writer, who enters a treatment center in Minnesota. Makeready’s Pam Abdy is producing with The Picture Company partners Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman. Makeready is also fully finance the film with eOne distributing Sierra/Affinity is handling international sales.
[ click to continue reading at DEADLINE ]
Gangnam Style
Goodbye, Graydon
GRAYDON CARTER RECALLS HIS FONDEST MEMORIES (AND TRICKS OF THE TRADE) FROM 25 YEARS ATOP VANITY FAIR
The author recounts the key to his longevity, and some of his greatest hits along the way.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
All good things—certainly in my case this month—eventually come to an end. This is my final issue of Vanity Fair. I won’t bore you with the details of my complex emotions right now, but I will say that being the editor of Vanity Fair may well be one of the most extraordinary professional experiences there is. I will have been here for more than a quarter of a century, which, in magazine years, is more than a few eternities. It’s 9,200 days of covering presidential terms (eight of them) and countless terrorist episodes, foreign wars, financial meltdowns, weather disasters, and societal upheavals. What have I left out? Oh yes, Washington scandals, Wall Street scandals, Hollywood scandals, Silicon Valley scandals, Westminster scandals, and Kremlin scandals. Plus Deep Throat and Caitlyn Jenner. I could go on. (On a more personal level, Vanity Fairpaid considerably better than my previous jobs, the result being that I had the wherewithal to afford to have more children, and was blessed with the addition of two daughters to the brood of three sons I had coming into the job.)
When I arrived at the magazine, Cheers, Murphy Brown, and Seinfeld were among the big television hits. George H. W. Bush was president and Bill Clinton would soon become the president-elect. It was the year that The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson went off the air. Taylor Swift was just out of diapers: she hadn’t even broken up with anyone yet—at least not to my knowledge. No one had heard of e-mail, and the Internet as we know it was still in the future. Back then I looked like one of the male assistants here now—clear eyes, dark hair, and a waist smaller than a yardstick. As I leave, I gaze in the mirror and, save for the absence of a twinset and pearls, I see the Queen Mother.
The crumbling husk that lies before you aside, not a week went by when I didn’t mention to one or more of the staff I saw every day—Chris Garrett, Aimée Bell, Jane Sarkin, Beth Kseniak, Sara Marks—just what goddamn fun this all was. And how could it not have been? After an exhilarating life at Spy and a giddy, shoestring year at The New York Observer, being given the editorship of Vanity Fair was truly like being given the keys to an almost fictional magazine kingdom. Back in the day we didn’t even have budgets. S. I. Newhouse, Jr., our legendary proprietor, just said to spend what you needed. In the late 90s, we were having lunch and I told him that I had some good news and some bad news. He said, “What’s the bad news?” I told him that the Hollywood Issue cover we had just shot might well be the most expensive magazine cover ever. Si thought for a moment, then asked, “Well, what’s the good news?” I said it lookedlike the most expensive magazine cover ever. Only Si would have smiled at such news.
Clear Water Bad
Lake Michigan has become dramatically clearer in last 20 years — but at a steep cost
by Tony Briscoe
In this May 3, 2007 photo, Inland Seas Education Association instructor Conrad Heins holds a cluster of zebra mussels that were taken from Lake Michigan off Suttons Bay, Mich. (John L. Russell / AP)
Decades ago, Lake Michigan teemed with nutrients and green algae, casting a brownish-green hue that resembled the mouth of an inland river rather than a vast, open-water lake.
Back then, the lake’s swampy complexion was less than inviting to swimmers and kayakers, but it supported a robust fishing industry as several commercial companies trawled for perch, and sport fishermen cast their lines for trout. But in the past 20 years, Lake Michigan has undergone a dramatic transformation.
In analyzing satellite images between 1998 and 2012, researchers at the Michigan Tech Research Institute were surprised to find that lakes Michigan and Huron are now clearer than Lake Superior. In a study published late last year, the researchers say limiting the amount of agricultural and sewage runoff in the lake has had an immense impact. However, the emergence of invasive mussels, which number in the trillions and have the ability to filter the entire volume of Lake Michigan in four to six days, has had an even greater effect.
“When you look at the scientific terms, we are approaching some oceanic values,” said Michael Sayers, a research engineer at Michigan Tech and co-author of the study. “We have some ways to go, but we are getting a lot closer to Lake Tahoe. A lot of times, you’ll hear from people that the water is so blue it compares to something in tropical areas.”
Hereditary
Erect Knotweed
Hunting for the ancient lost farms of North America
2,000 years ago, people domesticated these plants. Now they’re wild weeds. What happened?
Adventurers and archaeologists have spent centuries searching for lost cities in the Americas. But over the past decade, they’ve started finding something else: lost farms.
Over 2,000 years ago in North America, indigenous people domesticated plants that are now part of our everyday diets, such as squashes and sunflowers. But they also bred crops that have since returned to the wild. These include erect knotweed (not to be confused with its invasive cousin, Asian knotweed), goosefoot, little barley, marsh elder, and maygrass. We haven’t simply lost a few plant strains: an entire cuisine with its own kinds of flavors and baked goods has simply disappeared.
By studying lost crops, archaeologists learn about everyday life in the ancient Woodland culture of the Americas, including how people ate plants that we call weeds today. But these plants also give us a window on social networks. Scientists can track the spread of cultivated seeds from one tiny settlement to the next in the vast region that would one day be known as the United States. This reveals which groups were connected culturally and how they formed alliances through food and farming.
Juliette Lewis Joins Billy Bob Thornton in ‘A Million Little Pieces’ Cast
Juliette Lewis Takes Over Acne Studios Instagram
The actress was spotted filming other guests, among which Isabelle Huppert, Sara Forestier and Stephen Jones
Juliette Lewis front row at Acne Studios / Stephane Feugere/WWD
Juliette Lewis was busy capturing the scene at the first Acne Studios women’s show to be held during couture week in Paris on Wednesday, before sitting in the front row alongside Sara Forestier, Isabelle Huppert, Stephen Jones and Michel Gaubert.
The actress caught Casey Spooner jumping up on a bench to shake things up. Earlier in the week, he and partner-in-crime Violet Chakchi had joked about wanting to have their own reality TV crew.
“I’m doing the Instagram takeover for Acne Studios,” said Lewis, known for such films as “Cape Fear” and “From Dusk Till Dawn.”
Lewis hinted at further projects with Acne, and then clammed up. In the meantime, she is flying back to Los Angeles to start filming on Monday a screen adaptation of “A Million Little Pieces,” the infamous James Frey book, with Billy Bob Thornton.
Spice World Redux
CREW MEMBERS EXPLAIN WHY SPICE WORLD IS STILL SO WEIRD, 20 YEARS ON
By Rachel Hodin
Turn on Spice World today, and I promise it will confound you. So many things about the movie don’t make sense. So many things defy the basic rules of narrative, with characters left unexplained and subplots unresolved—but that’s what makes it so captivating and fun. How exactly did this poppy, cinematic romp get made? It’s one of the greatest mysteries of pop culture, and one that, on the occasion of the movie’s 20th anniversary, I’m determined to resolve.
As pointed out on the podcast How Did This Get Made?, Spice World got away with ignoring the most basic tenets of moviemaking and screenwriting. Spice World has no real plot, and no end goal—there’s no real story arc at all, for that matter. The girls pinball from place to place, studio to studio, and rehearsal to rehearsal, each one suited up in her respective coat of character armor. Then, with 10 minutes to go in the movie, the band’s “first live show at the Royal Albert Hall”—fleetingly mentioned in one of the film’s first scenes—becomes the movie’s climactic narrative. Will they or won’t they pull off their first live concert? Thing is, the girls have already performed live only a couple scenes prior—not to mention in the first scene—but this is the grand finale, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Apparently.
Then, there’s the Spice Bus—which, while certainly a sight to impress even Austin Powers, tricked-out with fairytale ’90s-era gadgets and toys—is also about 12 times the absolute maximum size that any bus interior could feasibly be. It’s a full-on dreamscape, and one that production designer Grenville Horner remembers fondly. “The Spice Bus was fantastic,” he told me over the phone. “It was just fun. You totally invent it; it’s not like anything you’ve ever come across.”
A MILLION LITTLE PIECES Casts Billy Bob Thornton, Carla Juri, Charlie Hunnam, Giovanni Ribisi
Billy Bob Thornton, Carla Juri & Charlie Hunnam Join Aaron Taylor-Johnson In ‘A Million Little Pieces’
REX/Shutterstock/Nan A. Talese
EXCLUSIVE: A Million Little Pieces, the screen adaptation of the James Frey book, is fast assembling for a January 25 production start. Billy Bob Thornton has joined Aaron Taylor-Johnson and director Sam Taylor-Johnson for the first film to go into production for Brad Weston’s producing/financing company Makeready. Thornton will be joined by Carla Juri, who emerges from Blade Runner 2049 to play the female lead, and Charlie Hunnam. Giovanni Ribisi was already set. Makeready’s Pam Abdy is producing with The Picture Company partners Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman.
Thornton plays the role of Leonard, whom fans of Frey’s book will recall as a mysterious tough guy who became the guardian angel at a rehab facility for the protagonist, who tried to end his addiction problems before they killed him. Frey later wrote Leonard’s life story in a followup book.
Sunset
Where the Real Los Angeles Meets the Dream
On Sunset Boulevard, two Californias — the lived place and the one seen on screen — run parallel for 22 snaking miles.
Photographs by Jake Michaels / Text by Steven Kurutz / Produced by Eve Lyons
Like Broadway in New York and Ocean Drive in Miami, Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles is both a real street and a myth. It’s where you go to gas up at the Arco station (5007 Sunset Boulevard) or grab a meal at In-N-Out Burger (7009 Sunset), and also to chase the dream of fame and eternal sunshine. Remarkably, Sunset lives up to the postcard.
Drive east to west, from where the street begins downtown to where it ends 22 twisting miles later at the Pacific Ocean, and at any point along the route, you will see the images that movies, TV shows and magazines have implanted in your brain.
In hip and historically Mexican Echo Park and Silver Lake, you’ll find trendy boutiques beside a 99 Cents Only store (3612 Sunset), and cool kids scarfing down tacos at Guisados (1261 Sunset).
In Hollywood, there are always weird Hollywood people, and tourists hoping to see weird Hollywood people, walking around near where Sunset meets Vine.
Moving west into Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, the street becomes wide and lush and curving. The sidewalks and pedestrians disappear, and the wealthy residents in their mansions hide from the celebrity-home bus tours behind walls of hedgerow — the Sunset of “Sunset Boulevard” and “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles.”
They’re Coming
Earthquake-causing meteor leaves southeast Michigan residents awestruck
By KARMA ALLEN
Residents of southeast Michigan were left a bit shaken Tuesday night after a big bright flash lit up the sky and the ground beneath them shook.
A flying saucer? No. A shooting star? Not quite.
The National Weather Service eventually solved the mystery, tweeting “USGS confirms meteor occurred around 810 pm, causing a magnitude 2.0 earthquake.”
“After reviewing several observational datasets, the NWS can confirm the flash and boom was NOT thunder or lightning, but instead a likely meteor. We continue to monitor feeds from astronomical agencies for official confirmation of a meteor,” read a tweet posted nearly two hours before the NWS confirmed it was a meteor.
Bocuse Gone
‘Nouvelle cuisine’ pioneer Bocuse dies at 91
Reuters Staff
PARIS (Reuters) – Paul Bocuse, one of France’s most celebrated chefs, has died at the age of 91, the interior minister said on Saturday.
Bocuse was an early exponent of “nouvelle cuisine”, which reinterpreted traditional French cooking using less butter and cream and focusing on fresh ingredients and stylish presentation.
Dominance & Submission (Radios Appear)
How the internet controls you
Corporate giants have created an entirely new surveillance capitalism. And we’re too hooked to care
by John Naughton
The “dust of exploded beliefs,” the English aphorist Geoffrey Madan once wrote, “may make a fine sunset.” We’re beginning to see that glow over the internet which, if you count back to the design phase in the autumn of 1973, is now over four decades old.
From the moment the internet first opened for semi-public use in January 1983, it evoked utopian dreams. It was easy to see why. Cyberspace—the term coined by the novelist William Gibson for the virtual space behind the screen—really did seem to be a parallel universe to “meatspace,” the term invented by Grateful-Dead-lyricist-turned-essayist John Perry Barlow for the messy physical world that we all inhabit. Cyberspace in the 1980s was a glorious sandpit for geeks: a world with no corporations, no crime, no spam, no hate speech, relatively civil discourse, no editorial gatekeepers, no regulation and no role for those meatspace masters whom Barlow called the “weary giants of flesh and steel.”
But then, gradually, the internet was commercialised and those two parallel spaces merged to create our networked world, in which the affordances of cyberspace combine with surveillance and corporate control. Of course, the internet has brought huge benefits in terms of access to information and efficiency of communication: try imagining our home or work lives without it. But there are serious worries. The online world is populated by several billion mostly passive addicts of devices, apps and services created by a handful of corporate giants. Prying governments and giant companies have acquired the capacity to surveil our every move, both on the internet and, now that so many devices have built-in GPS, in the real world too. Through their ability to monitor our searches these companies—as well as the governments they co-operate with—are able to see our innermost thoughts and desires. (Yes, even our desires: what people search for on Google is incredibly revealing.)
747 Gone
The 747 Had a Great Run. But Farewell Doesn’t Mean the End.
By Zach Wichter
MARANA, Ariz. — There may be no airliner as recognizable as the Boeing 747, the world’s first jumbo jet, with its iconic hump of an upper deck. For aviation fans, the introduction of the “Queen of the Skies” was a triumph of engineering and grace: unprecedented size and speed with spiral-staircase international glamour.
But the airline business has changed, and the giant plane has become more expensive to operate. A couple of weeks ago, the final 747 flight by any commercial United States airline took to the sky.
Like so many others before it, the plane was heading to the Southwest to retire.
A passer-by at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport might have noticed something unusual as Boeing 747 No. 6314 pushed back from the gate for the last time. Onlookers in the terminal waved farewell as the plane, operated by Delta Air Lines, taxied out to the runway. Undeterred by the chilly weather, even members of the ground crew pulled out their phones to memorialize this flight in photos.