No cue cards, no teleprompters, and no second takes--legendary funnyman Sid Caesar pioneered live television sketch comedy with his 1950s sitcoms Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour. This classic sketch is "Argument to Beethoven's 5th," Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray play a married couple in a argument with pantomimed action and the dialogue is classic music.
Below is a list of interesting sites and places people have found using Google's new Street View feature. If you have found something interesting using Google Maps Street View, drop me an email and I'll post it.
This has been a great labour of love and truly one of the most fun articles I've ever had the pleasure of putting up on retroCRUSH. It's easy to talk about scary movies, but we wanted to highlight the individual scary scenes that really stick out. Some films aren't scary by design, but happen to have creepy and shocking moments that deserve special recognition. So enjoy this list and have fun discovering a bunch of new movies to see!
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Spc. David Williams, 22, of Boston, Mass., had two note cards in his pocket Wednesday afternoon as he waited for Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Williams serves in the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., the first of the five "surge" brigades to arrive in Iraq, and he was chosen to join the Independent from Connecticut for lunch at a U.S. field base in Baghdad.
The night before, 30 other soldiers crowded around him with questions for the senator.
He wrote them all down. At the top of his note card was the question he got from nearly every one of his fellow soldiers:
"When are we going to get out of here?"
The rest was a laundry list. When would they have upgraded Humvees that could withstand the armor-penetrating weapons that U.S. officials claim are from Iran? When could they have body armor that was better in hot weather?
Williams missed six months of his girlfriend's pregnancy when he was given six days' notice to return to Iraq for his second tour. He also missed his baby boy's birth. Three weeks ago, he went home and saw his first child.
"He looks just like me," he said. "I didn't want to come back. . . . We're waiting to get blown up."
Then Joe appears:
Then Lieberman walked in, wearing a pair of sunglasses newly purchased from an Iraqi market that the military had taken him to in southeast Baghdad. He'd been equipped with a helmet and flak vest when he toured the market, which he described as bustling.
Doesn't it defeat the purpose of a photo-op that's supposed to show how positive things are in a marketplace when you're in body armor surrounded by bodyguards?
I assumed that it would be illegal to actually provide people with fake doctor notes, but here's a site that's doing exactly that: myexcusedabsence.com. The site claims that, for only $24.95, it will provide you with a fake excuse saying that you've been at a doctor or a dentist's appointment, been to the emergency room, had jury duty, or been at a funeral. (I wonder who the note comes from in the case of a funeral? From the funeral director?) It looks like what you get for this money is a Word template formatted to look like an official note. For that amount of money, I think it would be a lot easier simply to create your own fake note in Word.
And don't think that people haven't tried using these notes. This lady from Newark tried using one to get out of traffic court.
NEWARK, N.J. - Nina Weems' first mistake was speeding.
Her second mistake was blowing off traffic court.
Her biggest mistake was thinking the Internet could solve her first two problems.
Earlier this month Weems, who lives in Newark, began a campaign apparently designed to persuade Hanover Township Municipal Court she was too disabled to show up for court, or for that matter, get behind the wheel again anytime soon. Could the court drop the whole matter, she asked.
Weems sent the court a doctor's note to support her case, a township official said. The problem was, the note was not written by the chiropractor whose name was on the letterhead. It was instead courtesy of myexcusedabsence.com, an Internet site advertising "absence notes for every occasion."
Weems paid $24.95 for the note, court officials said, and joined the ranks of scofflaw techies using the information highway to augment the age-old practice of forging excuses.
The purpose of these galleries is to educate the public as to the many varieties of dwarfism as well as to reflect the huge spirits of the beautiful individuals who have so kindly agreed to be photographed for this project.
I finally got around to scanning some more of that incredibly popular Fallout Shelter Handbook from 1962 I posted about several weeks ago. I figured that it probably wouldn't hurt to scan more -- it offered me the chance to really check out some of the photos. Interesting stuff going on. The nature of some of the following scans require a closer look; if you click on each image you will be taken to its prospective Flickr page. Once there, select "All sizes," to view larger. (The same goes for the earlier post.)
Colour by Numbers was a 72 meter high light installation at Telefonplan in Stockholm, Sweden, inaugurated on October 23, 2006, and switched off on April 1, 2007. Anyone could control the colours in the tower with their mobile phone.
The reception of the light installation has been very positive and we are thankful for the response on the project in the media and from the residents in the area. The City of Stockholm wants to see the installation made permanent, but the property owner has other plans for the tower at the moment.
Fargo, North Dakota, 1950 - the middle of town in the middle of the midwest in the middle of the century. Almost everything you see here still stands. And almost everything you see is gone.
Take a look at this picture, and tell yourself that things are better today. Cities today: Big white malls, clean black parking lots with a superstore rising like a cheap brick glacier, fast-food franchises, landscapes indistinguishable from any other city. Bah. I don't want to short-shrift convenience or harangue the auto culture, but they're thin comforts, and they have no weight. You throw out your anchor and it clatters at your feet. This picture shows a town usually used as shorthand for America's arctic gulag, the end of the earth, a distant outpost of igloos and teepees. But tell me this doesn't look like a small civil corner of a long-gone golden time.
We are told that the universe was designed and created, and that it is absurd to suppose that matter has existed from eternity, but that it is perfectly self-evident that a god has.
I'm not sure what's more surprising. That there is a Bat Boy play or that it's been around since 2001 and this is the first I've heard of it.
Yes, it's Bat Boy: The Musical, the cult hit based on tabloid stories in the Weekly World News about a child with needle teeth and Spock ears who supposedly was discovered in an Appalachian cave in 1992. In the stage version, the demonic-looking half-breed is taken in by a friendly family that tries to teach him to live in civilized society, only to discover that West Virginia isn't quite as civilized as they hoped.
The story is filled with salacious shocks that might make even Jerry Springer blush, but it also has a serious, even mythic side. It uses the trashy tropes of the tabloids to make a universal statement about prejudice and acceptance.
"It's My Fair Lady meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show," said Damon Dering of Nearly Naked Theatre, who has been frothing at the mouth to direct Bat Boy for years. This week Dering gets his wish, closing his company's season with an Arizona-premiere production.
Bat Boy, after winning the Outer Critics Circle Award for best Off Broadway musical in 2001, has become a popular choice at theaters around the country. There's even a movie in the works, with John Landis in the director's chair, so it's a good bet the play will be a hit in Phoenix as well.
NORWALK, Calif. -- Early this month, 18-year-old Allison Stokke walked into her high school track coach's office and asked if he knew any reliable media consultants. Stokke had tired of constant phone calls, of relentless Internet attention, of interview requests from Boston to Brazil.
In her high school track and field career, Stokke had won a 2004 California state pole vaulting title, broken five national records and earned a scholarship to the University of California, yet only track devotees had noticed. Then, in early May, she received e-mails from friends who warned that a year-old picture of Stokke idly adjusting her hair at a track meet in New York had been plastered across the Internet. She had more than 1,000 new messages on her MySpace page. A three-minute video of Stokke standing against a wall and analyzing her performance at another meet had been posted on YouTube and viewed 150,000 times.
"I just want to find some way to get this all under control," Stokke told her coach.
Three weeks later, Stokke has decided that control is essentially beyond her grasp. Instead, she said, she has learned a distressing lesson in the unruly momentum of the Internet. A fan on a Cal football message board posted a picture of the attractive, athletic pole vaulter. A popular sports blogger in New York found the picture and posted it on his site. Dozens of other bloggers picked up the same image and spread it. Within days, hundreds of thousands of Internet users had searched for Stokke's picture and leered.
Richard Dawkins is Oxford University's "Professor for the Public Understanding of Science." Author of the landmark 1976 book, The Selfish ... all » Gene, he's a brilliant (and trenchant) evangelist for Darwin's ideas. In this talk, titled, "Queerer Than We Suppose: The strangeness of science," he suggests that the true nature of the universe eludes us, because the human mind evolved only to understand the "middle-sized" world we can observe. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 22:42)
I'm Bill Wadman, a New York-based photographer who after completing my first 365 Project, and then a weekly 52 Project, have taken it upon myself to shoot and post one portrait every day of 2007. The photo will have been taken that day, and each day will be a different person. Some will be in the studio, some will be in the wild. Hopefully they will all be interesting.
1. Your full name and contact information, including a verifiable email address.
2. The Gmail address of the individual who passed away.
3a. The full header from an email message that you have received at your verifiable email address, from the Gmail account in question. (To obtain the header from a message in Gmail, open the message, click 'More options,' then click 'Show original.' Copy everything from 'Delivered- To:' through the 'References:' line. To obtain headers from other webmail or email providers, please refer to http://www.spamcop.com/help_with_headers/)
3b. The entire contents of the message.
4. A copy of the death certificate of the deceased.
5. A copy of the document that gives you Power of Attorney over the Gmail account.
6. If you are the parent of the individual, please send us a copy of the Birth Certificate if the Gmail account owner was under the age of 18. In this case, Power of Attorney is not required.
And the blog title of the day award goes to Retrospectacle:
Most of you read the title and thought I was kidding, right? I mean, who in their right mind would give a huge dose of a psychotropic substance to an elephant, just to see what happened? Well, the year was 1962, and someone did just that. And, as icing on the cake, they got a Science paper out of it.
The subject was a 14-year-old male Indian elephant named Tusko being housed at the Lincoln Park Zoo. As previous research had suggested that high doses to LSD were needed to get perceivable effects in "lower animals," they decided to start with a 0.1 mg/kg dose of LSD for Tusko. That came to about 297 milligrams (in 5 mL of water, injected intramuscularly) of LSD for 7000 pound Tusko. The injection was delivered via a pressurized CO2 dart gun. For comparison, the threshold dosage for an effect in people is around 20-30 micrograms and a recreational 3+ hour dose would be around 100-200 micrograms.
After injection:
"Tusko began trumpeting and rushing around the pen, a reaction not unlike the one he had shown the day before (during the placebo shot). However, this time his restlessness appeared to increase for 3 minutes after the injection; then he stopped running and showed signs of marked incoordination. He began to sway, his hindquarters buckled, and it became increasingly difficult for him to maintain himself upright. Five minutes after the injection he trumpeted, collapsed, fell heavily on his right side, defecated, and went into status epilepticus."
A Vancouver police officer stands in a virtual recruitment hall typing on an invisible keyboard.
The cyber cop is busy learning to walk and move inside her new world. While she's at it, she's practising her PowerPoint and presentation skills.
The VPD has been prepping to become the first real police force to join the more than 6.7 million inhabitants who live, work, play and learn inside their computers -- an initiative aimed at finding real-life people with computer know-how to join the force.
The Vancouver Police Department is poised to become the first real-life police force living in the virtual world. They plan to hold a Second Life recruiting session as a way to lure more tech-savvy recruits.
The Vancouver Police Department is poised to become the first real-life police force living in the virtual world. They plan to hold a Second Life recruiting session as a way to lure more tech-savvy recruits.
On Thursday, the department will go public with a recruitment seminar inside Second Life -- the most popular online metaverse or alternative universe on the web -- aimed at attracting the next generation of police candidates from around the globe.
The Vancouver police officers involved in the recruitment on Second Life have their own avatars, or Second Life persona, dressed in a specially designed VPD uniform, badge, belt and radio. They're also trained in the other-world customs and commands of the virtual society.
The rationale for the sci-fi approach to recruitment is simple, says Insp. Kevin McQuiggin, head of the department's tech crimes division: If people are on Second Life, they're likely to be web-savvy, a quality the police department is looking for in new recruits.
Internet and technology-related crimes, from fraud to harassment, are common, McQuiggin says. In fact, he says, almost every major crime involves technology in some way, shape or form.
"It's important for us, as an organization, to keep abreast of modern technology -- both from an educational standpoint and an outreach standpoint, and from an investigative standpoint," McQuiggin says.
"Any new media that comes out, any new form of communication, crime is going to migrate there."
You think I could forget the story of Billy Tipton? Yes, she lived as a man from age 21 till the day she died at age 74. Yes, her three sons (all adopted) never suspected a thing. But that's not the bizarre part. She lived with five women in succession, all of them attractive, a couple of them knockouts. She had intercourse with at least two of them and, who knows, maybe all five. But of the three we know about in detail, none tumbled to the fact that her husband was a woman (one figured it out later). At first you might think: man, I thought my spouse was oblivious. But the more charitable view is that they were taken in by one of the great performances of all time.
So can the direction a person's eyes reveal whether or not they are making a truthful statement? Short answer: sort of. But, it isn't as simple as some recent television shows or movies make it seem. In these shows a detective will deduce a person is being untruthful simply because they looked to the left or right while making a statement.
In reality, it would be foolish to make such a snap judgment without further investigation... but the technique does have some merit. So, here it is... read, ponder and test it on your friends and family to see how reliable it is for yourself.
WASHINGTON - The new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad will be the world's largest and most expensive foreign mission, though it may not be large enough or secure enough to cope with the chaos in Iraq.
The Bush administration designed the 104-acre compound — set to open in September in what today is a war zone — to be an ultra-secure enclave. Yet it also hoped that downtown Baghdad would cease being a battleground when diplomats moved in.
Over the long term, depending on which way the seesaw of sectarian division and grinding warfare teeters, the massive city-within-a-city could prove too enormous for the job of managing diminished U.S. interests in Iraq.
The $592 million embassy occupies a chunk of prime real estate two-thirds the size of Washington's National Mall, with desk space for about 1,000 people behind high, blast-resistant walls. The compound is a symbol both of how much the United States has invested in Iraq and how the circumstances of its involvement are changing.
As a child diagnosed with sensory processing disorder, or SPD, Caleb doesn't experience senses the way other people do. Stimuli from his environment and body are sometimes misinterpreted or ignored altogether. In addition to the obvious physical difficulties manifested with this neurological disorder, it also diminishes the ability to learn, think and even socialize. Behaviors we take for granted, like eye contact and maintaining a polite distance, are often huge challenges for people with SPD.
The month-long Sensory Learning Program in Boulder, Colorado, was designed to recalibrate Caleb's reception of sensory input, reorganizing the neural pathways that process information. Read my mid-treatment report here. Caleb's visual and auditory perception is now within normal ranges and his visual-motor skills have significantly improved. The only area where Caleb still shows appreciable deficits is in proprioceptive awareness -- the sense of one's own body -- so we have turned to occupational therapy to help in this regard.
The Sensory Learning Program focuses on three modalities: vision, hearing and balance. The effectiveness of this "sensory intervention" is measured by a series of tests administered before the treatment, directly after the treatment, and once more at the end of three months.
What is a "That Guy"? A That Guy is a B-list character actor who's just talented enough secure bit parts in a handful of movies every year, but not quite talented enough to become a brand-name star like Chris Kattan. Some specialize in playing villains and others in having freaky-enormous chest tattoos, but combined, these brave, barely handsome men have appeared in every single movie produced in the last decade.
Pop surrealist, graffiti, tattoo, lowbrow, comic and underground artists Shag, Paul Frank, Tim Biskup, Frank Kozik, Marc Ecko, Amanda Visell, Tim Biskup, J. Otto Seibold, Gary Baseman, Joe Ledbetter, Urban Medium and Jeff Soto, among others, show their allegiance to the dark side by customizing Darth Vader helmets in landmark gallery exhibition called The Vader Project, to debut at Star Wars Celebration IV on May 24 to 28 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
The Vader Project is presented by Master Replicas, and curated by Dov Kelemer of DKE Toys, one of the largest designer vinyl and art-toy distributors in the world, exclusively representing over 50 companies, artists, and designers. Kelemer gathered the hottest underground and pop surrealist painters, artists and designers and gave each artist a Master Replicas 1:1 scale prop replica of the Darth Vader helmet used in the Star Wars films. Each helmet served as a blank canvas for each artist to paint, design, mash up and customize in their own unique style.
Millions assert that the philosophy of Christ is perfect -- that he was the wisest that ever uttered speech.
Let us see:
Resist not evil. If smitten on one cheek turn the other.
Is there any philosophy, any wisdom in this? Christ takes from goodness, from virtue, from the truth, the right of self-defence. Vice becomes the master of the world, and the good become the victims of the infamous.
No man has the right to protect himself, his property, his wife and children. Government becomes impossible, and the world is at the mercy of criminals. Is there any absurdity beyond this?
–Robert Green Ingersoll, "About the Holy Bible" (1894)
It must have been possible for a Luftwaffe auxiliary to trade a weekend leave for a Wednesday or Thursday off. In any case, one thing is clear: after one long day’s march, I took the tram from Heubude to the Central Station, and from there the train via Langfuhr and Zoppot to Gotenhafen, where Navy recruits were trained to handle submarines. It took all of an hour to reach the goal of my dreams of heroism. I found the recruitment office in a low, Polish-period building where, behind a row of doors with signs, bureaucratic rigmarole was processed, passed on, filed. After signing in, I was told to wait for my name to be called. There were two or three older boys ahead of me. I did not have much to say to them.
The sergeant and the seaman first class I spoke to rejected me out of hand: I was too young; my age group hadn’t come up yet; it would soon enough; no reason for excessive haste.
The Astor Place Riot, one of the bloodiest days in New York's history, had its roots in a banal squabble between two arrogant actors. Actor William Macready, Englishman, and actor Edwin Forrest, Native son, had once been friends. Macready had helped Forrest get his start in London, and Forrest had married an English woman he met through the older actor. But over the years, professional competition and personal egotism had created friction and then outright antipathy. Their rivalry was exacerbated, and then exploited, by a growing nativist movement, then organized as the Order of United Americans, forerunner of the know-nothings and a group with much strength in the organized gangs of the Bowery and other working-class areas. The slights supposedly delivered by an effete, aristocratic Macready to a bold, Democratic Forrest - billed everywhere as "The American Tragedian" - were transformed into insults piercing the very soul of the American character. When the English actor arrived in the United States for an 1849 tour, nativists were incensed.
An attempt by Macready to play Macbeth at the Astor place Opera House on May 7, 1849 proved unsuccessful, as he was driven from the stage by an unruly crowd throwing, as he later cataloged, "eggs of doubtful purity, potatoes, a bottle of pungent and nauseating asafetida, old shoes, and a copper coin."
Convinced by city elders, including Washington Irving and Herman Melville, to try again, he announced a return to the Opera House stage for May 10. This proved to be, to put it mildly, a miscalculation. Nativist elements, fired by the temerity of this fop and organized by local ward leaders, regrouped. One of the principal instigators of the protest was Edward Z.C. Judson, a popular author who use the pen name "Ned Buntline" and who was the man that dubbed William C. Cody "Buffalo Bill." He later served a year in prison for his role in the riot.
Astor Place, from Broadway to Third Avenue, began to fill up early on the evening of the 10th . By curtain time there were thousands of unruly citizens - estimates ran up to 20,000 - in the street, and a packed house inside. It was clear that the situation was uncontrollable.
A Dutch TV station says it will go ahead with a programme in which a terminally ill woman selects one of three patients to receive her kidneys.
Political parties have called for The Big Donor Show to be scrapped, but broadcaster BNN says it will highlight the country's shortage of organ donors.
"It's a crazy idea," said Joop Atsma, of the ruling Christian Democrat Party.
"It can't be possible that, in the Netherlands, people vote about who's getting a kidney," he told the BBC.
The programme, from Big Brother creators Endemol, is due to be screened on Friday night.
A few months ago I was visiting another computer-forensics specialist when I learned about the freezer trick. This fellow gets a few broken disk drives now and then, and, by putting the drives in a freezer overnight, he's frequently able to recover data that would otherwise be "lost." Well, when I got back to Harvard, where I work, I took a few of my "broken" drives down from the shelf and put them in the freezer overnight with a note: "These hard drives are being used for a research project; please don't eat them."
The next day I took two of the drives back to my desk and plugged them into my computer. How about that: two of the drives that had been "broken" were now giving me their data.
This is a big deal for me. For starters, it means that I can now get data off many of those "broken" drives I've been keeping on my shelf. But it also means that many of the drives being sold on eBay as broken can nevertheless be scavenged for data. This is particularly troublesome because it's unlikely that the previous owners of the drives were able to properly clear them before they were sold.
BOSTON, MA — The editors of the American Heritage® dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know.
"The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language."
"The motor driven barrels start winding up to speed at the flick of a switch on the handle. Pulling the trigger unleashes a stream of rubber bands, deluging the target. The fire rate is high enough that at least half a dozen bands are in the air at any one time – the gun appears to fire a single very long chain of them. It’s as much like using a hose pipe as firing a rubber band gun. It also sounds fantastic because each mechanism makes a distinct click as it discharges a rubber band."
I don't think there's a good word for what Mr. Hall did: "researcher" is too dry, "historical investigator" carries hints of melodrama, and "archivist" suggests a dutiful drudge, which Mr. Hall was not. "Amateur historian" probably fits best, though it sounds vaguely derivative and second-tier. Following a career with the Labor Department--he retired in the early 1970s--Mr. Hall turned himself into the world's foremost authority on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Historians, pros and amateurs alike, sought him out for his knowledge and access to his exhaustive files. As one of them put it, James O. Hall knew more about Lincoln's murder than anyone who ever lived, including John Wilkes Booth.
Uncorrupted by graduate degrees, with no thought of professional advancement, Mr. Hall exemplified a tradition in the study of American history, particularly in the Lincoln field, where the most interesting writing and research is often done by hobbyists. It's been this way from the beginning. Until the middle of the last century, all the great Lincoln biographers made their livings outside the university--journalists like Ida Tarbell and free-lance enthusiasts like Benjamin Thomas produced biographies that were beautifully written and filled with news. Even now, dozens of Lincoln or Civil War roundtables flourish, and many of them publish quirky newsletters in which members let drop bits of recondite research or boldly advance new theories. While other areas of academic research have shriveled into hyperspecialization, the amateur tradition has kept the Lincoln field blessedly free of the guild mentality that can make academic history seem the dreary province of pedants and bullies.
From LiveScience comes 10 Creation Myths from different religions and cultures. I've taken Japan's creation myth as an example:
The gods created two divine siblings, brother Izanagi and sister Izanami, who stood upon a floating bridge above the primordial ocean. Using the jeweled spear of the gods, they churned up the first island, Onogoro. Upon the island, Izanagi and Izanami married, and gave forth progeny that were malformed. The gods blamed it upon a breach of protocol. During the marriage ritual, Izanami, the woman, had spoken first. Correctly reprising their marriage ritual, the two coupled and produced the islands of Japan and more deities. However, in birthing Kagutsuchi-no-Kami, the fire god, Izanami died. Traumatized, Izanagi followed her to Yomi, the land of the dead. Izanami, having eaten the food of Yomi, could not return. When Izanagi suddenly saw Izanami's decomposing body, he was terrified and fled. Izanami, enraged, pursued him, accompanied by hideous women. Izanagi hurled personal items at them, which transformed into diversions. Escaping the cavern entrance of Yomi, he blocked it with a boulder, thus permanently separating life from death. (Rather like Persephone in Hades, isn't it?)
The gardens pictured on this page—most of them located in Kyoto and its environs—are given reasonably full coverage on this web site. Clicking on a thumbnail image will take you the introductory page for each garden, from which you can take a tour of the garden, consult a map indicating each point of view, and read a history of that garden.
He never said a word in favor of education. He never even hinted at the existence of any science. He never uttered a word in favor of industry, economy or of any effort to better our condition in this world. He was the enemy of the successful, of the wealthy. Dives was sent to hell, not because he was bad, but because he was rich. Lazarus went to heaven, not because he was good, but because he was poor.
Christ cared nothing for painting, for sculpture, for music -- nothing for any art. He said nothing about the duties of nation to nation, of king to subject; nothing about the rights of man; nothing about intellectual liberty or the freedom of speech. He said nothing about the sacredness of home; not one word for the fireside; not a word in favor of marriage, in honor of maternity.
He never married. He wandered homeless from place to place with a few disciples. None of them seem to have been engaged in any useful business, and they seem to have lived on alms.
All human ties were held in contempt; this world was sacrificed for the next; all human effort was discouraged. God would support and protect.
At last, in the dusk of death, Christ, finding that he was mistaken, cried out: "My God My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?"
We have found that man must depend on himself. He must clear the land; he must build the home; he must plow and plant; he must invent; he must work with hand and brain; he must overcome the difficulties and obstructions; he must conquer and enslave the forces of nature to the end that they may do the work of the world.
–Robert Green Ingersoll, "About the Holy Bible" (1894)
Ladislas Starevich (August 8, 1882 - February 26, 1965), born Władysław Starewicz, was a Polish, Russian and French stop-motion animator who used insects and animals as his protagonists...
...Starewicz had interests in a number of different areas; by 1910 he was director of a museum of natural history in Kaunas. There he made four short live-action documentaries for the museum. For the fifth film, Starewicz wished to record the battle of two stag beetles, but was stymied by the fact that the nocturnal creatures inevitably went to sleep whenever the stage lighting was turned on. Inspired by a viewing of Les allumettes animées [Animated Matches] (1908) by Emile Cohl, Starewicz decided to re-create the fight through stop-motion animation: he removed the legs and mandibles from two beetle carcasses, then re-attached them with wax, creating articulated puppets. The result was the short film Lucanus Cervus (1910), apparently the first animated puppet film with a plot and the natal hour of Russian animation.
Also on YouTube is Starevich's The Portrait (1915)
(YouTube clip via PoeTV)
Update:
Bibi has a ton of Starevich's stop motion animation films on her blog Videos with Bibi.
Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.
Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.
This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.
In joining the Army, my son was following in his father's footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier -- brave and steadfast and irrepressible.
I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.
Welcome to Prison Flicks, the premier web site devoted to reviewing and discussing prison movies.
Prison movies run the gamut from high art to mass-market entertainment to b-movies. Basically anything you can do in a movie can be done in a prison movie. You want a love story? Well, it might not be Hepburn and Tracy, but love sometimes blooms within prison walls (and I'm not even talking about that). Even high-seas adventures are possible with the prison-ship concept. But putting the characters in prison just makes it all so much more entertaining. The guards, the bars, the exercise yard, the smell of human animals packed into cages. So sit back, enjoy, and take a tour of the magical world of prison movies. From women in prison to the Shawshank Redemption, this is the site for you.
When it is mentioned we tend to think of people, almost always black people; degraded, abused and bound in chains, and we tend to think of such images, and the word slavery itself, as belonging to another era.
We do not see slavery as belonging to our world, not as something which is still happening today.
Yet the truth is that if William Wilberforce were alive today and he travelled to different parts of the world - not just in Africa, but also in large parts of Asia, the Middle East, South America and even parts of Europe - he would find children living in conditions and circumstances which Wilberforce would understand and which I am sure he would describe as slavery.
It is believed there are nearly nine million children around the world today who are enslaved.
There are international charters and covenants which try to come to a legal definition of what constitutes slavery.
In essence these documents define slavery in the modern world as a situation where a human being and their labour are owned by others, and where that person does not have the freedom to leave and is forced into a life which is exploitative, humiliating and abusive.
I made this 3 years ago for Embryology class, and I was inspired by the Knitted Digestive System to post it here. The concept is ripped off of Popples, those vaguely mammalian stuffed toys that 20-somethings might remember; they could turn inside-out with a little pouch-thing on their back, so that all you could see is their tail sticking out of a little ball. I thought the gimmic would be a useful way of illustrating the various pouch-within-a-pouch structure of fetal membranes.
Some Christian lawyers — some eminent and stupid judges — have said and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law.
Nothing could be more absurd. Long before these commandments were given there were codes of laws in India and Egypt — laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery and fraud. Such laws are as old as human society; as old as the love of life; as old as industry; as the idea of prosperity; as old as human love.
All of the Ten Commandments that are good were old; all that were new art foolish. If Jehovah had been civilized he would have left out the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, and in its place would have said: “Thou shalt not enslave thy fellow-men.” He would have omitted the one about swearing, and said: “The man shall have but one wife, and the woman but one husband.” He would have left out the one about graven images, and in its stead would have said: “Thou shalt not wage wars of extermination, and thou shalt not unsheathe the sword except in self-defence.”
If Jehovah had been civilized, how much grander the Ten Commandments would have been.
– Robert Green Ingersoll, “About the Holy Bible” (1894)
Across the street from the old Oquirrh School, at 337 South 400 East, stands a bland, derelict, grey stucco two-story building. An example of the worst late 70's remodel and reuse of a residential dwelling as an office building, this narrow, labyrinthine collection of rooms, hallways, stairs and closets will be demolished soon to make space for Utah's first all-green, mixed-use loft-style condominiums. Before this exemplary development begins, the building has been turned over for use as a 20,000 square foot canvas, hosting the largest single collaboration of Salt Lake area contemporary artists ever to be gathered and directed toward a community installation, performance and happening: a high-profile art project entitled 337.
Taking its cue from the previous room, this area describes the idea of different "starting points" in more detail by giving specific examples. Included are discussions of dinosaurs, the formation of the oceans, human ancestry, and more.
As soon as you walk into the Starting Points room, you are greeted by a rather menacing looking dinosaur, standing next to a sign about the evolutionary idea of dinosaur fossils and the creation idea of dinosaur fossils. Instead of the dinosaur dying, slowly rotting away, leaving behind only solid, hard material, and gradually becoming a fossil (if future paleontologists are lucky), the creationist section of the sign attributes the dinosaur's death to the flood, and the development of the fossil is attributed to a rush of sediment (a LARGE rush of sediment) from a surge of flood water.
The obvious difference between the comparisons is the fact that the evolutionary ideas take a longer amount of time than the creationism ideas. That, and the creationism signs all rely on the Bible as a starting point.
On May 25, 2007 Andrew Card faced hundreds of boos and catcalls as he was given an honorary degree during the graduate school commencement at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Before the commencement, over a hundred protesters staged a rally and press conference outside the Mullin Center on the UMass campus. Hundreds more students and faculty who opposed the honorary degree would later protest inside the hall.
The locals come down from the mountains drunk, dancing and ready to fight. The police come to make sure no one dies. And the tourists, reporters, and documentary filmmakers come for the blood.
The outside world has discovered Tinku, an ancient ritual in which indigenous Quechua communities gather each year in a remote corner of the Bolivian Andes to dance, sing and settle old scores in staggering and bloody street fights.
The largest Tinku takes place early each May in Macha, about 210 miles southeast of La Paz, where this year's festival provided a stunning and sometimes uneasy combination of culture, spectacle and violence.
Relatively unknown outside the Andes for centuries, Tinku remains on the fringe of Bolivia's growing tourism industry. But its heavily asterisked listing in the guidebooks (Lonely Planet calls it "a violent and often grisly spectacle") is beginning to draw both backpackers and media curious to witness the peculiar event firsthand.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Hogzilla is being made into a horror movie. But the sequel may be even bigger: Meet Monster Pig. An 11-year-old Alabama boy used a pistol to kill a wild hog his father says weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9-feet-4 from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail. Think hams as big as car tires.
If the claims are accurate, Jamison Stone's trophy boar would be bigger than Hogzilla, the famed wild hog that grew to seemingly mythical proportions after being killed in south Georgia in 2004.
Hogzilla originally was thought to weigh 1,000 pounds and measure 12 feet in length. National Geographic experts who unearthed its remains believe the animal actually weighed about 800 pounds and was 8 feet long.
Regardless of the comparison, Jamison is reveling in the attention over his pig, which has a Web site put up by his father—http://www.monsterpig.com —that is generating Internet buzz.
Bayard Rustin (March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an African-American civil rights activist, important largely behind the scenes in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and earlier and principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He counseled Martin Luther King, Jr. on the techniques of nonviolent resistance. Rustin was openly gay and advocated on behalf of gay and lesbian causes in the latter part of his career.
A year before his death in 1987, Rustin said: "The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it's the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated."
In May 1946, Slotin, among others, was in a laboratory doing an experiment that involved creation of the beginning of the fission reaction by placing two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around a plutonium core. The experiment was nicknamed "tickling the dragon's tail" after a remark by Richard Feynman that it was "tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon" due to its flirtations with nuclear chain reaction. Slotin grasped the upper beryllium hemisphere with his left hand through a thumb hole at the top while he maintained the separation of the half-spheres by a blade of a screwdriver with his right hand, having removed the shims normally used. Using a screwdriver was not a normal part of the experimental protocol.
Nine months previously on August 21, 1945, the same 6.2 kg plutonium core (later nicknamed the "demon core" because of these accidents) had produced a burst of ionizing radiation that caused lethal radiation poisoning to Harry Daghlian, an experimentor who had made a mistake while working alone doing neutron reflection experiments on it. This core, subject to experiments so shortly after the end of the war, had probably been the intended core for the 3rd nuclear weapon never used on Japan.
On May 21, the screwdriver slipped, the upper beryllium hemisphere fell and caused a "prompt critical" reaction, resulting in a burst of hard radiation. The "blue glow" of air ionization was observed and a "heat wave" was felt by the scientists in the room. Slotin instinctively jerked his left hand upward, lifting the upper beryllium hemisphere and dropping it to the floor. He exposed himself to a lethal dose (around 2100 rems, or 21 Sv) of neutron and gamma radiation, in history's second criticality accident. In addition to the blue glow and heat, Slotin experienced a sour taste in his mouth and an intense burning sensation in his left hand. As soon as Slotin left the building, he vomited, a common reaction from exposure to extremely intense ionizing radiation. The official line was that Slotin, by quickly removing the upper hemisphere, was a hero for ending the critical reaction and protecting seven other observers in the room. The official release from the authorities while Slotin was dying in the hospital after the accident was: "Dr. Slotin's quick reaction at the immediate risk of his own life prevented a more serious development of the experiment which would certainly have resulted in the death of the seven men working with him, as well as serious injury to others in the general vicinity." The designation as a hero is moderated by criticisms (from, for example, Robert B. Brode) that the accident was avoidable and that Slotin was not using proper procedures, endangering the others in the lab along with himself
The kosher Internet has been launched. With a host of blocks against surfing prohibited sites, with a small white list of approved sites, and with an identified e-mail address that will enable identifying rogue ultra-orthodox who do not use the kosher Internet, the ultra-orthodox have launched the war against the greatest enemy technology has presented to them: the Internet.
Behind the “kosher Internet” initiative is “the Rabbinical Council for Communication Affairs,” which is run by the most important ultra-orthodox rabbis: Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, the Hassidic Leader of Gur [Ya’aqov Arye Alter], [SHAS spiritual leader] Ovadya Yosef, hassidic Jewish law adjudicator Shmu’el Halevi Wozner, and Rabbi Tuvya Weiss, the head of the zealots’ stream of the ultra- orthodox sect.
Many ultra-orthodox already use the Internet, whose potential educational and spiritual damage is considered far worse than that of television, not only because of the sex websites, but because of the very exposure it offers to the outside world.
"The Jews, I find are very, very selfish," President Harry S. Truman wrote in a 1947 diary that was recently discovered on the shelves of the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., and released by the National Archives yesterday.
Written sporadically during a turbulent year of Truman's presidency, the diary contains about 5,500 words on topics ranging from the death of his mother to comic banter with a British aristocrat. But the most surprising comments were Truman's remarks on Jews, written on July 21, 1947, after the president had a conversation with Henry Morgenthau, the Jewish former treasury secretary. Morgenthau called to talk about a Jewish ship in Palestine -- possibly the Exodus, the legendary ship carrying 4,500 Jewish refugees who were refused entry into Palestine by the British, then rulers of that land.
Now, I hope this won't turn into a cat vs. dog thing,
because damnit, as much as I love dogs (and basically
feel fairly impartial towards cats), that'd just be
too much of a contrary reaction, you know?
This is Gus (Augusta). She's a Jack Russell Terrorist.
She's a raving mad, mean, lean killing machine. I like
this picture especially, because it sorta symbolizes
what dogs are like -- you know, not cool. Cats are
cool. Dogs are dorks. You can't take pictures of
dorks, because they run around like idiots all the
time.
PETERSBURG, Ky. — The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.
But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.
What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.
For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.
It also serves as a vivid introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus, celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel.
Outside the museum scientists may assert that the universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life’s diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.
A fan made trailer for Lost if it was made into a movie. BTW, I gave up on Lost earlier this season. I've heard that it improved during the second half of season three but I'm still skeptical.
As the cost of sequencing goes down, a lot of once-crazy experiments become feasible. There's a good case in point this week in the preprint section of PNAS. A team of researchers looked at a single patient undergoing treatment with vancomycin for a serious infection. (Just saying "vancomycin" makes the "serious infection" part redundant, since it's often the last resort). They periodically isolated Staphylococcus aureus bacteria from the patient's blood during the course of the treatment to look at how resistance to the antibiotic developed.
Fine, fine - except the way they watched the process was to sequence the whole genome of each bacterial isolate. What they found were a total of 35 mutations, which developed sequentially as the treatment continued (and the levels of resistance rose). Here's natural selection, operating in real time, under the strongest magnifying glass available. And it's in the service of a potentially serious problem, since resistant bacteria are no joke. (Reading between the lines of the PNAS abstract, for example, it appears that the patient involved in this study may well not have survived).
Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a African American woman from Alabama. In 1955, at the age of 15, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, in violation of local law. Her arrest preceded civil rights activist Rosa Parks' (on December 1, 1955) by nine months.
At the time, Colvin was a student at Booker T. Washington High School. Colvin's family didn't own a car, so she relied on the city's gold-and-green buses to get to school. On March 2, 1955, she boarded a public bus and, shortly thereafter, refused to give up her seat to a white man. Colvin was coming home from school that day when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown at the same place Parks boarded another bus months later. Colvin was sitting about two seats from the emergency exit when four whites boarded and the driver ordered her, along with three other black passengers, to get up. She refused and was removed from the bus by two police officers, who took her to jail.
"The bus was getting crowded and I remember him (the bus driver) looking through the rear view mirror asking her to get up out of her seat, which she didn't," said a classmate at the time, Annie Larkins Price. "She didn't say anything. She just continued looking out the window. She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move."
Price testified on Colvin's behalf in the juvenile court case, where Colvin was convicted of violating the segregation law and assault. "There was no assault," Price said.
Colvin had been handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus. She screamed that her constitutional rights were being violated. At the time, Colvin was active in the NAACP's Youth Council, and she was actually being advised by Rosa Parks.
Those in search of eternal life need look no further than the computer industry. Here, last gasps are rarely taken, as aging systems crank away in back rooms across the U.S., not unlike 1970s reruns on Nickelodeon's TV Land. So while it may not be exactly easy for Novell NetWare engineers and OS/2 administrators to find employers who require their services, it's very difficult to declare these skills -- or any computer skill, really -- dead.
In fact, the harder you try to declare a technology dead, it seems, the more you turn up evidence of its continuing existence. Nevertheless, after speaking with several industry stalwarts, we've compiled a list of skills and technologies that, while not dead, can perhaps be said to be in the process of dying.
MyFreeImplants.com is the first website of its kind to harness the global power of the Internet to service the unique needs and desires of its members.
MyFreeImplants is a web-based service in which our clients and members play an active role in its day to day operations. Women come to us because they have the desire to enhance their physical appearance in a variety of ways. Our most common request, and thus our name, is breast implants. However, we do have relationships with a variety of cosmetic surgeons and often provide our female clientele with other cosmetic surgeries at no cost.
Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of “inspiration.” It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge — that is to say, of science. When man becomes great and grand enough to admit that all have equal rights; when thought is untrammeled; when worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellow-men, then, and not until then, will the world be civilized.
– Robert Green Ingersoll, “Reply To The Indianapolis Clergy” The Iconoclast, Indianapolis, Indiana (1882)
AUGUSTA, GA. — Fear is a growth market. And you’re the buyer. Americans, seized by paranoia, will throw money at anything that promises to protect us from harm.
That’s why nobody blinked last week when the Augusta Commission approved a plan to spend $3.2 million over six years to defend the city’s fire hydrants from terrorist attack.
Seriously.
Two new employees will be hired exclusively to retrofit the hydrants with something called the Davidson Anti-Terrorism Valve, designed to keep foreign substances — anthrax, bubonic plague, cyanide, tennis balls — from entering the water supply.
There’s no evidence of such a threat, mind you, but Utilities Director Max Hicks decided the Davidson ATV was a good buy. “They are necessary to protect the system,” he says.
The “stealth” valve was invented in the 1970s by a Sunnyside, Ga., contractor, Tom Davidson, who wanted to keep juvenile delinquents from throwing rocks and bottles into the hydrants. No one wanted it then. He sat on the idea for years, not even bothering to file for a patent.
After 9/11, Davidson had an epiphany: If teenage punks could infiltrate the water supply, a terrorist could poison a city through its fire hydrants.
Once upon a time, years ago, it seemed that the only major fire for atheism burned from the anti-Christian work of Madelyn Murray O'Hair and the American Atheist organization, whose claim to fame was the banning of prayer and Bible reading in public schools in 1963.
Today many more antagonist groups and individuals to theism abound, and they are using every means possible for global proliferation – from local government to the World Wide Web. Such secular progressives include the Institute for Humanist Studies, Secular Coalition of America, American Atheists, American Humanist Association, Internet Infidels, the Atheist Alliance International, Secular Student Alliance, Society for Humanistic Judaism, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, etc. Of course no list of atheistic advocates would be complete without mentioning the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, as well as the anti-God militancy of men like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.
Though the U.S. Constitution outlaws religious discrimination, these organizations and individuals would love nothing more than to help society look with distain upon Christianity and, ultimately, make its components illegal. In fact, right now, they are coalescing and rallying at least 5 million of their troops to mount counter offensives to Christianity.
For that reason I believe theistic patriots need to be wise to atheists' overt and covert schemes, exposing their agenda and fighting to lay waste to their plans.
Though movies and television would like us to believe otherwise, it was very rare when gunfights occurred with the two gunfighters squarely facing each other from a distance in a dusty street. This romanticized image of the Old West gunfight was born in the dime novels of the late 19th century and perpetuated in the film era, to such a point that this fictional version is the what our mind’s eye quickly conjures up when we hear the word “ gunfight.” In actuality, the “real” gunfights of the Old West were rarely that “civilized.”
