The first record I ever owned was a greatest hits collection by Stevie Wonder. I wouldn’t be surprised if the second was something by Elvis Costello, one of my all-time favorites. Here’s Costello pushing product in 1980.
You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2013.
Tags: Elvis Costello
I read in passing that the Detroit Pistons have decided to not offer a contract to Jason Collins, the center who came out as gay earlier this year. I’m sure if he’s not signed there will be stories about how he’s been shunned because other players are uncomfortable with a gay man in the locker room. That seems ridiculous. Collins did a great service by coming out, cracking a facade, and removing a stigma for gay kids. But I would think it’s a non-issue in the clubhouse. The NBA is probably just as bisexual as Hollywood or the rap world, especially since there’s so much crossover between those industries and basketball. Sports is show business today, and entertainment has always been more fluid sexually. During the Collins story, we lazily bought this image of the solitary gay athlete in a sea of straight ones. That’s likely very untrue.•
Tags: Jason Collins
From the December 1, 1922 New York Times:
“Paris–Walter Finker, the Viennese biologist, has succeeded in transplanting the heads of insects. Before the Academy of Vienna yesterday he gave an account of his operation and the results, about which the Matin‘s scientific editor says ‘if true it means a real revolution in the science of physiology and biology.’
The Matin adds:
‘This discovery is so astonishing that before discussing it we must make all possible reserves.
‘Finkler took a series of insects–butterflies and caterpillars–and with fine scissors cut their heads off. He then immediately grafted these heads onto which [another] head had originally belonged. After a few weeks the insects operated on began to recover, but to the intense surprise of the professor the newly formed insects began in every case to assume the characteristics of the heads which had been grafted on to them.
‘Bodies lost their original color and took the color of the insect whose head they were wearing. A female insect on to which a male head had been grafted became a male.
‘Not only did the professor succeed in changing the heads of insects and larvae of the same species, but he grafted the heads of one species on to another, an operation hitherto considered quite impossible.”
Tags: Walter Finker
I’m fascinated by what Jeff Bezos may do with the Washington Post, and I’m not the only one. I think he certainly has a big-picture idea of where it’s going, no matter what he says. He’ll work out the details as he goes, but he has a blueprint. From an article by David Streitfeld and Christine Haughney in the New York Times, another traditional newspaper trying to traverse the digital divide:
“‘Jeff may be outwardly goofy, with that trademark laugh, but he’s a very tough guy,’ said James Marcus, who was Amazon employee No. 55. ‘If he goes even halfway through with his much-vaunted reinvention of journalism, there is no way he’s not going to break some eggs.’
Mr. Bezos is the sole founder, the public face, the largest shareholder and the visionary of Amazon. ‘For many of us, creating Earth’s biggest bookstore would have been enough,’ said Kerry Fried, employee No. 251. ‘Jeff’s goal was a touch grander: to conquer the world.’
He has more than his share of detractors — just ask your neighborhood bookseller, if you can find one. But it is increasingly hard to dispute that he is the natural heir of Steve Jobs as the entrepreneur with the most effect on the way people live now.
Amazon, which is as much a reflection of Mr. Bezos’ personality as a corporation worth $125 billion can be, is by far the fastest-growing major retailer, although that simple label long ago ceased to suffice. It is also a movie studio, an art gallery (a 1962 Picasso,’Jacqueline au Chapeau Noir,‘ can be had for $175,000) and a publisher. It is an empire that spans much of the globe and even has its own currency, Amazon Coins. What it does not have much of, and never did, are old-fashioned profits.”
Tags: Christine Haughney, David Streitfeld, James Marcus, Jeff Bezos, Kerry Fried
I think one of the sadder aspects of American culture is ageism. If you haven’t accomplished a certain thing by a certain age it seems like you’red disqualified. Just when you’re actually at a point when you can pretty much handle anything. It makes no sense. It comes as no surprise that age discrimination is particularly acute in Silicon Valley. From Andrew S. Ross at the SFGate:
“In fact, tech executives claim to have tens of thousands of jobs going begging, so much so that they need to bring in educated workers from overseas to fill them.
But if demand is outstripping supply, how come so many skilled IT professionals in the Bay Area are out of work? In a nutshell, job experience in the tech industry matters far less than it once did. In fact, it can work against you.
‘It’s been quite a shock, coming out of my last job, which I had for 11 years,’ said Robert Honma, 49, of Sunnyvale, his resume filled with senior tech positions in multinational companies and small startups. He’s been out of work for 10 months. ‘The Facebooks, the Googles are driven by the young.’
Mark Zuckerberg agrees.
‘I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” Facebook’s CEO (now 28) told a Y Combinator Startup event at Stanford University in 2007.”
Rick Perry having a horrible accident while shaving his pubes.
If I’m gonna be elected President in 2016, I’ll need to be smooth.
Ouch!
Damn, I took out a big chunk.
Well, I ain’t gonna waste it.
Richard Dawkins got into trouble recently for sending out a tweet about the paucity of Nobel Prizes won by Muslims. Part of the defense of his statement was sort of ridiculous–that facts can’t be bigoted. But, of course, they can.
They certainly are when white supremacists (even the ones in academia) try to prove that African-Americans students are inferior because they’ve score lower overall on standardized testing, without mentioning the racial bias embedded in the exams or that preparation for such tests among different groups of students is heavily influenced by history, economics, etc. Facts can be prejudiced when they’re delivered free of such important context. From David Edmonds at Practical Ethics:
“Here is the sequence of events. 1. Richard Dawkins tweets that all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College Cambridge. 2. Cue a twitter onslaught – accusing Professor Dawkins of racism. 3. Richard Dawkins writes that a fact can’t be racist.
It seems to me pretty silly to call Dawkins a racist, for some of the reasons he spells out here.
But I want to focus on his claim that a fact can’t be racist. That seems to me a bit silly too.”
“She is the most tiniest and the sexiest girl I know.”
I’m in love with my cousin (Staten Island Mall)
I think I’m in love with my cousin. She is the most wonderful-est person I know. She is the most tiniest and the sexiest girl I know. She’s been thru a lot. A lot of guy problems, etc. I wish I can just take all the aches and pains away from her and give her the love that she needs and deserves. I wish I can just say all these things and a lot more to her face to face but I can’t…cuz she’s my cousin. I know what you all must be thinking that this is weird and I can’t and shouldn’t have these feelings for her. But if you saw what I saw in her, you would know. I wasn’t meant to be her cousin. I love her too much.
Back before everyone, tan or teen, was willing to stick it in the camera, it was rare to see adult-movie actors in the mainstream. In this 1979 clip, Tom Snyder welcomes porn star Marilyn Chambers to promote the release of her new work, Insatiable. Of course, she had crossed over somewhat into non-blue films with her performance two years earlier in David Cronenberg’s Rabid. Part of the discussion involves Linda Lovelace, who had come out strongly against the porn industry. Producer Chuck Traynor, Lovelace’s former husband and the-then spouse of Chambers, joins in during the interview’s last segment, making it a three-way.
The only things I know about Chambers: She did ads for Ivory Snow before becoming famous for hardcore exploits, she had sex with comedian Robert Klein (who joked about her crassness, which was sort of crass of him) and she died young (56), which probably is not unusual for that business.
Tags: Marilyn Chambers, Robert Klein, Tom Snyder
“Then he began his career as an itinerant long-haired prophet.”
Louis Hauesser was a wealthy German who saw his fortune sink during World War I, before reinventing himself as a “messiah” with a bevy of young followers, many of them attractive females. In that sense, he presaged Krishna Venta, Charles Manson and Mel Lyman, among others. He was in constant conflict with authority figures, and spent a fair amount of time as a defendant. A court appearance for a trifling matter in the early ’20s was the basis of an article in the December 23, 1921 New York Times. The story:
“Berlin–The Moabit Police Court witnessed a strange scene when an ‘Apostle of Charity,’ one Louis Hauesser, self-styled ‘Prophet of the Latter-Day Christ, World Benefactor, Initiator of the New Era and Proclaimer of the New Healing,’ was called to the bar on a charge of having failed to pay $6.29 to a Berlin paper for an advertisement, the insertion of which is said to have been obtained under false pretenses. Prophet Hauesser, six feet of splendid manhood, had bare legs, sandals, a hair shirt, prophet whiskers and the longest inflowing locks seen in court in many a moon. He was accompanied by a similarly garbed and locked flock of faithful, more than a score of freakish men and women.
For months the German Messiahs have been peripatetically and profitably prophesying all over Germany, making many converts, particularly among women. The South German police, taking cognizance of the prophet’s increasing bare-footed and hair-shirted female following, put him into the psychiatric ward of Tuebingen University for observation, whence he was released owing to lack of a charge, but the professor’s expert findings are of remarkable human interest.
Until the outbreak of the war the hairy prophet was a well-groomed, fashionably dressed spender and husband of a remarkably beautiful woman living in luxury. He owned a champagne factory and also derived a large income from betting bureaus in Switzerland. But he blew in all his own and his wife’s money and went broke early in the war.
Then he began his career as an itinerant long-haired prophet. ‘His conspicuous virility exercised influenced a strong influence over a large number, even intellectual persons, particularly women,’ according to the Tuebingen professor.
In the police court Hauesser stubbornly refused to sit on the accused bench but graciously gave the Judge permission to go ahead and sentence him, however he pleased. He got the usual installment of three days in jail for contempt of court.”
Tags: Louis Hauesser
This will sound like a provincial and insulting question, but it’s not meant to be: Do people in the American South still eat dirt? I’ve read at various times that devouring soil was a custom, especially among children, in the region. I’m sure the earth has plenty of nutrients, but is it passé at this point? From William E. Schmidt in the February 3, 1984 New York Times:
“CRUGER, Miss. Feb. 9— It’s after a rainfall, when the earth smells so rich and damp and flavorful, that Fannie Glass says she most misses having some dirt to eat.
‘It just always tasted so good to me,’ says Mrs. Glass, who now eschews a practice that she acquired as a small girl from her mother. ‘When it’s good and dug from the right place, dirt has a fine sour taste.’
For generations, the eating of clay-rich dirt has been a curious but persistent custom in some rural areas of Mississippi and other Southern states, practiced over the years by poor whites and blacks.
But while it is not uncommon these days to find people here who eat dirt, scholars and others who have studied the practice say it is clearly on the wane. Like Mrs. Glass, many are giving up dirt because of the social stigma attached to it.
‘In another generation I suspect it will disappear altogether,’ said Dr. Dennis A. Frate, a medical anthropologist from the University of Mississippi who has studied the phenomenon. ‘As the influence of television and the media has drawn these isolated communities closer to the mainstream of American society, dirt eating has increasingly become a social taboo.'”
I’m firmly in the camp that believes Muhammad Ali legitimately beat Sonny Liston twice. The second fight, in 1965, caused so much consternation because Ali scored his knockout on a so-called “phantom punch” (which was actually an anchor punch). Howard Cosell corralled Jack Dempsey, Rocky Marciano, and journalists Jimmy Cannon and W.C. Heinz to discuss the controversy.
Postscript: Marciano “fought” Ali four years later via computer, right before perishing in a plane crash. In 1968, Heinz co-wrote the novel M*A*S*H under the pseudonym “Richard Hooker.”
Tags: Howard Cosell, Jack Dempsey, Jimmy Cannon, Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston, W.C. Heinz
10 search-engine keyphrases sending traffic to Afflictor this week:
- truman show 1996
- lucian truscott iv’s 1972 review of fear and loathing in las vegas
- baby show in old new york
- motopia a planned community in london
- roger holder and cathy kerkow hijacked a plane
- pearl s. buck interviewed by merv griffin
- scott thorson’s relationship with charles manson
- why didn’t mark warner run for president in 2008?
- murray the k profile by tom wolfe
- violence in a barber shop
Afflictor: Thinking that because of a racist Swiss store clerk, Oprah will have to keep using her old purse.
- Old Print Articles: Thomas Edison believes that humans are driven by biological machinery, not souls (1910) + Hatchet-wielding Abolitionist Carrie Nation dies (1911).
- Featured Videos: Woody Allen likes his actors to ad-lib (1965) + Muhammad Ali and Freddie Blassie form a tag team on the Tonight Show (1976) + Henry Miller holds forth, as he was wont to do (1974) Thomas Hoving profiles David Bowie (1980) + Pierre Salinger profiles Debbie Harry (1980) + British TV series Space Patrol had its own Hyperloop (1962).
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: I’m not a senior citizen yet, baby + I might want to give you a blow job + I’m a personal trainer, or maybe just really insulting.
- The Hyperloop is designed to disrupt the planned California bullet train.
- Tad Friend points out three problems with the Hyperloop.
- Hollywood is obsessed with a pencil that went out of production in 1998.
- David L. Ulin writes about the first Charles Manson biography.
- Sun-soaked and outdoorsy though it is, L.A. has long loved technology.
- Moral philosopher Peter Singer explains that not all charity is equal.
- Zander Hollander was a sports stats guru in the pre-Internet age.
- Spike Lee, reinterpreting Oldboy, did an Ask Me Anything.
- Isha Datar, cultured-meat researcher, did an Ask Me Anything.
- New Republic Russian correspondent Julia Ioffe did an Ask Me Anything.
- DNA tests have never been foolproof.
- Comedian Tig Notaro wasn’t planning on cancer or being a sensation.
- Advanced defensive shifting has aided the Pirates’ surprising season.
- Baseball slugger Jose Abreu defected from Cuba.
- Google is working in earnest on screenless computing.
- President Obama returned the solar panels to the White House.
- A brief note from 1876 about a meat shower.
- A brief note from 1901 about a baby’s touch.
- A brief note from 1891 about a novel surgery.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
The opening of Christopher Mims’ Quartz post about Google’s push into screenless computing:
“The spread of computing to every corner of our physical world doesn’t just mean a proliferation of screens large and small—it also means we’ll soon come to rely on mobile computers with no screens at all. ‘It’s now so inexpensive to have a powerful computing device in my car or lapel, that if you think about form factors, they won’t all have keyboards or screens,’ says Scott Huffman, head of the Conversation Search group at Google.
Google is already moving rapidly to enable voice commands in all of its products. On mobile phones, Google Now for Android and Google’s search app on the iPhone allow users to search the web via voice, or carry out other basic functions like sending emails. Similarly, Google Glass would be almost unusable without voice interaction. At Google’s conference for developers, it unveiled voice control for its Chrome web browser. And Motorola’s new Moto X phone has a specialized microchip that allows the phone to listen at all times, even when it’s asleep, for the magic word that begins every voice conversation with a Google product: ‘OK…’
There’s nothing new about voice interaction with computers per se. What’s different about Google’s work on the technology is that the company wants to make it as fluid and easy as keyboards and touch screens are now. That’s a challenge big enough that, thus far, it has kept voice-based interfaces from going mainstream in our personal computing devices. And in cases when they are in use, such as interactive voice response systems designed to handle customer service calls, they can be frustrating.”
Tags: Christopher Mims
From the January 21, 1891 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Decatur, Ill.–A surgeon of this city has just completed a novel surgical operation. He removed part of four ribs of a cat and inserted them in the nose of a young lady, forming a perfect bridge for the nose. The bones of the nose had decayed and were removed. This is said to be the first operation of the kind known in the annals of surgery.”
Julia Ioffe, who covers Russia for the New Republic, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
__________________________
Question:
We who are not particularly knowledgeable about Russia still think of it as having a pretty sexist culture. Are women treated more inferior there than in other more ‘Westernized’ countries?
Julia Ioffe:
Yes! Omg, yes, yes, yes. Russia is still extremely sexist. I can write volumes on this, but, good lord. Basically, it’s a matriarchy parading around as a macho patriarchy. That said, the wage gap between men and women is smaller in Russia than in the U.S. And once a year, on International Women’s Day (March 8) Russian women get tons and tons of flowers — I guess to make up for being treated as cooks/strippers with uteruses the rest of the year.
________________________
Question:
Is there something about Russian Culture/Society that makes the country so prone to authoritarian dictatorship-esque regimes (Stalin, USSR, to Putin)?
Julia Ioffe:
I think Stalin set the stage for Putin, and the czars set the stage for Stalin. If the czars taught Russians that they were eternal subjects to the holy emperor and his Church, Stalin drove home the notion by jailing and killing millions and millions of Soviets, of making people afraid not just to speak up and resist, but to trust each other. The scars of what he did are there, but they’re fading in the generation born after the fall of the Soviet Union. I don’t know that it’s a cultural thing as much as it is hard, cruel historical training.
________________________
Question:
Do you think Putin is really this homophobic or is he just making a statement?
Julia Ioffe:
I don’t think Putin is any more homophobic than most Russians, which is pretty homophobic — Russians, like I said, are pretty ignorant about homosexuality and think it’s abnormal). I also don’t think it was his initiative. This law, unlike many, came up to the federal level after being introduced in cities around Russia, and Putin signed into law what the Duma gave him, which obviously signifies his approval: if he hadn’t approved, it would’ve never made it out of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament. That said, the law reflects a tone set by Putin by bringing the Orthodox Church, a very conservative institution, increasingly not just into public life but into the government. It’s all part of a pattern of looking for a more conservative, “Russian” national idea — whatever that means.
____________________________
Question:
What are your thoughts on 2014 Olympics? Should gay athletes not attend, attend but protest?
Julia Ioffe:
I think gay athletes should absolutely attend, kick ass, and show Russia and the rest of the largely homophobic world that they are an athletic force to be reckoned with.
__________________________
Question:
How serious of a threat is Islamic radicalization in Russia via both the Caucasus and the quickly growing Muslim population in other regions?
Will Putin’s often times heavy hand lead to instability via this particular demographic?
Julia Ioffe:
It’s a pretty serious threat, and I can’t say that the Russians are doing a good job fighting it. For one thing, they’ve installed a guy named Ramzan Kadyrov to run Chechnya (once torn up by war) and he’s running a pretty Islamist ship. (If you want proof, look at his Instagram account.) And Putin, who is in many ways hostage to him, can’t do much about it.
__________________________
Question:
What is the biggest misconception Americans have about Russian politics?
Julia Ioffe:
That Putin thinks ahead.•
Tags: Julia Ioffe
Rick Perry shooting a clown who handed out condoms.
You’re as bad as an abortionist!
But they were balloons.
“I don’t mean stop eating the foods you LOVE and start eating grass!”
Feeling alone again?
Sick of feeling tired and sluggish? Feel like you weight or size is interfering with your love life? Or worse, you figured out that the reason that you are alone is because of your health? Well I’m here to help you. To help you kill the fucking fat, and GET THE GIRLS! It all starts with your nutrition, no I don’t mean stop eating the foods you LOVE and start eating grass! I mean you need to mix in some GOOD, WORKING supplements into whatever you are doing. STOP WASTING TIME, MONEY, AND ENERGY ON AXE SPRAYS, B.S. CLOTHES, OR STUPID/EXPENSIVE SHOES. The PERMANENT way to get fit, and get the girls, is to make a CHANGE. So commit to the important stuff. If you’re interested in getting more details, just contact me on email. I hope to talk to you soon. Take care.
Tad Friend, the excellent California correspondent for the New Yorker, mercifully liberated from having to profile Ben Stiller’s narcissism, provides his two cents on Elon Musk’s Hyperloop plans. Here’s the glass-half-empty part:
“The bad news is that there’s no conceivable way that the system would cost just six billion dollars, or that one-way tickets would cost twenty dollars. Overpromise disease is endemic to Silicon Valley, but Musk has an aggravated case. When I wrote a profile of him, in 2009, he told me that a third-generation Tesla would be selling for less than thirty thousand dollars in 2014, the same year that he expected SpaceX’s Falcon 9 to begin ferrying tourists around the moon. Well, no and hell no. More worrisomely, he promised that you could start driving the Model S in western California ‘at breakfast and be halfway across the country by dinnertime.’ Musk is a lot better at math than I am, but he eventually acknowledged that by ‘dinnertime’ he really meant ‘the following morning’s breakfast’—if, again, you didn’t stop to go to the bathroom.
Additional bad news is that California’s politicians are skeptical of the Hyperloop, as they’ve already committed to their own relatively slow high-speed rail system, now projected to be finished in 2029. And that no community in San Francisco or Los Angeles would want giant tubes running through it. And that, from the evidence of Musk’s own route map, he hasn’t figured out how to get the Hyperloop across the San Francisco Bay or any closer to downtown Los Angeles than about an hour north of it—which kind of kills the whole point. Also, earthquakes! The suggested route more or less parallels the San Andreas Fault. (Musk says that his flexible tube joints and dampered pylons would enable the system to absorb seismic shocks. But the worst place to be in an earthquake would be ripping along at barely-subsonic speeds twenty feet above the ground—in a system attached to it. Disaster-film auteurs are surely already storyboarding the money shot of Hyperloop pods disgorging onto a teeming freeway at seven hundred miles an hour.)
Finally, of course, no one knows if the thing would actually work.”
Tags: Elon Musk, Tad Friend
We think we can control non-fiction that reads like fiction, but that point has passed. The dial will not turn back. The opening Sharon Weinberger’s new article at Wired:
“MOSCOW — The future of U.S. anti-terrorism technology could lie near the end of a Moscow subway line in a circular dungeon-like room with a single door and no windows. Here, at the Psychotechnology Research Institute, human subjects submit to experiments aimed at manipulating their subconscious minds.
Elena Rusalkina, the silver-haired woman who runs the institute, gestured to the center of the claustrophobic room, where what looked like a dentist’s chair sits in front of a glowing computer monitor. ‘We’ve had volunteers, a lot of them,’ she said, the thick concrete walls muffling the noise from the college campus outside. ‘We worked out a program with (a psychiatric facility) to study criminals. There’s no way to falsify the results. There’s no subjectivism.’
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone to many strange places in its search for ways to identify terrorists before they attack, but perhaps none stranger than this lab on the outskirts of Russia’s capital. The institute has for years served as the center of an obscure field of human behavior study — dubbed psychoecology — that traces it roots back to Soviet-era mind control research.
What’s gotten DHS’ attention is the institute’s work on a system called Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology, or SSRM Tek, a software-based mind reader that supposedly tests a subject’s involuntary response to subliminal messages.”
Tags: Sharon Weinberger
Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS) has a name now, but that wasn’t the case in 1977 when seemingly healthy Laotian refugees in America began dying in their sleep. While it was always suspected that irregular heart rhythms played a part in the mysterious deaths, more inscrutable sources have been suggested. Malign spirits? Nightmares? From Wayne King in the May 10, 1981 New York Times:
“SAN FRANCISCO, May 9— The Federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta is conducting an intensive inquiry into the manner in which 18 apparently healthy Laotian refugees died mysteriously in their sleep in this country within the last four years. One possibility being explored is that they were frightened to death by nightmares.
The 17 men and a woman were members of a preliterate Laotion mountain society called the Hmong. About 35,000 Hmong are now living in the United States. Most of them fled their homeland after it was overrun in 1975 by the Pathet Lao.
The Hmong come from an isolated culture similar to that of the American Indian. Most of those who have been resettled in this country live in concentrated communities in Missoula, Mont.; Santa Ana, Calif.; Providence, R.I.; Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul, where the largest number, 10,000 to 12,000, reside.
Very few speak English. Their own tongue became a written language only a few years ago, and their adaptation to American life has been marginal. Until some relatively recent conversions to Buddhism and Christianity, their religion is animist, governed by spirits and manifestions of the soul.
Terror Induced by Nightmare
The cause of death of the 18 refugees in their own beds in the early morning hours remains a mystery. The deaths have generally been attributed to ‘probable cardiac arrythmia,’ or irregular heartbeat. Although pathologists have been reluctant to advance it publicly, one possibility being explored is an obscure pattern described in medical literature as ‘Oriental nightmare death syndrome,’ in which death results from terror induced by a nightmare.”
I knew that Jimmy Carter had installed solar panels on the White House in the late 1970s, but I never realized that Ronald Reagan had them removed roughly a decade later. Dipshit. President Obama is putting them back as the solar-energy biz enjoys a renaissance. From Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica:
“On Thursday, a White House official confirmed to the Washington Post that President Barack Obama would finally make good on a 2010 promise to install solar panels on the First Family’s residence. The panels are being installed this week.
Once complete, it would make Obama the first president since President Jimmy Carter to go green. Carter’s solar panels were installed in 1979, but President Ronald Reagan had them removed in 1986. It also makes the Obama family part of the rapidly expanding growth in solar energy across the United States.
According to new industry data from GTM Research, solar panels have fallen in price, and their installation and collective energy-generating capacity has consequently skyrocketed. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s existing solar panels have been installed in the last 2.5 years.”
Tags: Barack Obama, Cyrus Farivar, Jimmy Cater, Ronald Reagan
From Peter O’Toole to Andre Dice Clay, Woody Allen has written dialogue for actors to not exactly be ignored but to be reinterpreted. He tells them to get his message across but to not feel hidebound to the screenplay. Louis C.K., one of Allen’s recent actors, would cut off your vagina if you stray from any of his words. Two very different approaches that have both yielded pretty miraculous results. In this 1965 clip, Allen talks about his first original screenplay, What’s New Pussycat.
Just prior to the Allen interview is a commercial for Hollywood Bread, which is usually served with a spread made from semen, cocaine and disappointment.
Tags: Louis C.K., Woody Allen
Ke$ha tweeting with a consumptive.
ke$ha My new jewelry line debuted on Aug. 1 — and my penis necklace has already sold out! ❤❤❤
My lung$ are filled with blood. @kesha My new jewelry line debuted on Aug. 1 — and my penis necklace has already sold out! ❤❤❤