Sunday, August 19, 2012
Come Join Our Prayer Group - Slash - Cheese Tasting - Slash - Orgy
Every Saturday, we get together at St. Bart’s community center for group prayer. We pour some wine and sample a variety of cheeses. Then we make sex like Roman gladiators heading off to battle against a stronger foe, during which most of us will die excruciating deaths and this is our last night of engaging in unconventional positions with multiple genders who happen to also enjoy prayer and cheese. Don’t forget it’s BYOC—that’s bring your own condoms for you first timers. Hah! We’re just kidding. You don’t have to wear condoms with us. That ‘C’ is for cheese, and we’re looking to sample all sorts of crazy fungi and molds.
Our evenings include it all: The Rosary, Round Robin Prayer, Select Hymnals, Colby jack, gorgonzola, spicy gouda, Doggy Style, the Holy Cheddar Train, woman on woman, man on man, intermittent cheese breaks, Group Spooning—if you can imagine it, we can put it to prayer, stick it on a Ritz or rearrange the furniture, respectively. (Note: Before participating in the Holy Cheddar Train, first-timers must sign a release.)
We begin with 20 minutes of silent benedictions. We then sample some mild cheeses that are easy on the palette. Then once the wine is flowing, we fornicate like Neanderthals who have only recently discovered their genitalia and are eager to catch up for lost time. Like monks who have taken a vow of celibacy and are on their way to a weekend retreat, when their bus collides with a truck carrying a secret government aphrodisiac, and 14 miles of bumper-to-bumper motorists inhale the erotic potion until they’re all lying naked across car hoods and windshields shagging strangers from the traffic jam.
Again, folks, this is a prayer group/cheese tasting/orgy. We are not just a prayer group, not just a cheese tasting, and not just an orgy. Over the years, there have been couples who didn’t really understand this and they were offended by the mandatory praying, or our expectation they sample ALL the cheeses and not just the ones they can pronounce, or all the nakedness being flung about. It’s important you come to terms with the triple essence of our gatherings.
This week my wife Hilda has prepared some gospel songs, along with a garlic-horseradish gruyère she aged herself for seven months in our basement. After her rendition of “Amazing Grace,” we will sample her curdled wares. And then we will romp like savage Vikings adrift at sea for months who had lost hope of ever seeing land again, and then after hope ran dry the food ran dry and we turned to cannibalism to meet our daily caloric intake, eating the smallest and weakest of our Viking crew, only to finally spy land and come ashore to a naughty magnificence of nymphs and whores who had crashed en route to an Australian prison camp and were left man-less and cheese-less until we arrived, so that we Vikings and those harlots turned that sandy beach into a carnal buffet of loins and moldy deliciousness where we fondled and nibbled until we passed out from exhaustion.
As a matter of hygiene, please respect our ban on Velveeta, which we learned the hard way does not double as a lubricant. God Bless and see you Saturday for some wholesome prayer, cheese and organized adultery.
Image: Wikipedia
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Under Our Skins
It starts with the simple questions: Can I afford not to own a cell phone? Would I still be employable if I didn’t own one? Would I still know what is happening and get invited to parties? The next year, it’s owning a smart phone. Or being on Facebook. Or getting an iPad for the children. None of this is about being aspirational. It’s about keeping up, an imperative sharpened by the economic crisis. So we cut expenses, but not when it comes to technology. Perhaps we eat out less, or travel less. But the cell phone — which
by now has become a smartphone — stays. And the thing about smartphones is that in order to be fully functional they need to know where they are — that is to say, where we are. This knowledge defines them. It is what makes them smart.
by Giovanni Tiso, The New Inquiry | Read more:
Tweeting the Beat
The New Inquiry: Who are you?
Sheboygan Scanner: I am a chronically unemployed person living in Sheboygan County.
TNI: What’s the history of Sheboygan Scanner? When did you start listening to the police scanner, and why did you start to tweet what you heard?
SS: I got my first scanner for Christmas in 2004. I took it out of the box, put in batteries, turned it on, and heard a plane crash! I didn’t listen to it too much, but I noticed that a lot of interesting things never showed up in our local paper, which is woefully inadequate. In February 2009, I heard a call about an old woman who was found dead outside an assisted-living facility, possibly due to exposure. There was nothing about it in any local news sources. Nada. I started on Twitter soon after that. I added an RSS feed to Facebook a year or so ago, though I kind of regret that because I have to spend an inordinate amount of time refereeing the poo-flingers that show up.
TNI: You’re very prolific—since you started you’ve posted over 45,000 tweets. How do you manage to keep up with the scanner?
SS: It’s not that difficult. I keep the scanner on while I’m doing everyday activities, and I almost always have a computer nearby. Two at once during the day, actually. So I usually have it on all day unless I’m out of the county or running errands.
TNI: What have you learned about Sheboygan through the scanner?
SS: People here drink too much and aren’t fazed by drunk driving penalties. It’s part of the culture. Because what else are you going to do when it’s 10 below and the Packers just lost?
TNI: With reports like “dog wants to go to school,” your feed often takes on a surreal quality. Is Sheboygan weirder than other cities?
SS: Not at all. I haven’t heard scanners in other places, but I’ve lived in five major metropolitan areas across the country, and I don’t think there’s anything too unique about Sheboygan.
TNI: What’s the strangest thing you’ve heard come in over the scanner?
SS: Probably the man who created a disturbance because he was angry about an Italian restaurant serving Italian food. It also came out that he tends to sit and watch the seagulls, but he does not like seagulls.
by Adrian Chen, The New Inquiry | Read more:
You Are Listening To...
[ed. Speaking of scanners here's a repost of a really cool site: police scanners and ambient music - in real time: http://youarelistening.to/losangeles]
How YouTube Put an End to the MTV Generation
The majority of American teenagers now prefer to listen to music via YouTube over iTunes, radio and CDs. Nearly two-thirds of 18-year-olds and younger US teens say that they prefer the Google-owned video platform ahead of all other music mediums.
The report, Music 360, compiled by the research company Nielsen, is hardly ground-breaking – YouTube has been a very popular music platform for some time – but it confirms that the MTV generation is no more.
The report, Music 360, compiled by the research company Nielsen, is hardly ground-breaking – YouTube has been a very popular music platform for some time – but it confirms that the MTV generation is no more.
Gone are the days when most of the discovery and enjoyment of music happened via TV stations, radio programmes and buying CDs.
The study also underlines that teenagers do not see why they need to own music, or even pay for a digital music service such as Spotify. (...)
Mark Mulligan, an independent music analyst, believes that the music experience on YouTube is “too good” – and its functionality (such as the recent addition of a playlist function) needs to be scaled back if the record labels are ever to see young people return to buying music.
“YouTube has transformed what the music buyer’s expectations are of what the digital music experience is. In a way it’s too good,” he says.
“In the UK since 2008, five million buyers have disappeared from the music market. This is because more people have stopped buying CDs than the number who have started buying digital tracks.
“It is totally understandable that people don’t want to pay for MP3s when the experience is poorer than what they get via YouTube.”
Mulligan goes a step further, advising record labels to “up their game” and create a new “next generation music format” which has all of the audio visual, interactive and social elements of YouTube – in other words, make a product worth paying for.
by Emma Barnett, The Telegraph | Read more:
The study also underlines that teenagers do not see why they need to own music, or even pay for a digital music service such as Spotify. (...)
Mark Mulligan, an independent music analyst, believes that the music experience on YouTube is “too good” – and its functionality (such as the recent addition of a playlist function) needs to be scaled back if the record labels are ever to see young people return to buying music.
“YouTube has transformed what the music buyer’s expectations are of what the digital music experience is. In a way it’s too good,” he says.
“In the UK since 2008, five million buyers have disappeared from the music market. This is because more people have stopped buying CDs than the number who have started buying digital tracks.
“It is totally understandable that people don’t want to pay for MP3s when the experience is poorer than what they get via YouTube.”
Mulligan goes a step further, advising record labels to “up their game” and create a new “next generation music format” which has all of the audio visual, interactive and social elements of YouTube – in other words, make a product worth paying for.
by Emma Barnett, The Telegraph | Read more:
Cabin Fever: I Want a Tiny Home
I know I'm not alone in finding tiny homes so weirdly compelling. People have lived in very small spaces since the dawn of civilisation, of course, whether out of necessity or monkish self-denial. But it is only very recently – in the last decade, according to Greg Johnson, co-founder of the US-based Small House Society, and a self-described "claustrophile" – that tiny-home appreciation has congealed into a movement. Its hardcore members buy homes from designers such as Jay Shafer, who runs the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, and who will sell you a wooden bungalow with 99 square feet of floor space, easily transportable on a trailer, for £8,900. (If you'd rather build it yourself, he'll sell you the plans for about £60.) The movement's hangers-on, like me, just slaver over a burgeoning number of tiny home blogs, including not just Cabin Porn but also the Tiny House Blog, the Tiny Life and This Tiny House. "I have never met a link promising a teeny tiny home that I was not compelled to click on," a fellow addict, the writer Emily Badger, admitted on the Atlantic Monthly's website the other day.
"People do seem to be really attracted to the idea of the lifestyle," says Johnson, who lived in a 10ft x 7ft house – built by Shafer – for six years from 2003. "We hear a lot from people who you know won't ever make the jump. But they love thinking about it." A piece of fan mail received at Cabin Porn vividly conveys this: "Thank you for this, it is the only site on the internet that I have ever found therapeutic. I am an anxious office worker living in the suburbs. Scrolling through the cabins releases physical tensions in my upper back."
There are several very down-to-earth reasons why a resurgence of interest in very small homes should be happening now. When last month New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, announced a competition for developers to design 300 square feet "micro-units", it was a response to high rents and the rise in one-person households; newly-built British homes are the smallest in Europe, primarily because home-builders make the most cash that way. The rural wing of the tiny homes movement, meanwhile, is motivated primarily by environmental concerns. How much more lightly can you tread on the planet than by having only one room to heat, and no space to accumulate the detritus of the modern consumer economy?
by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Kim Hadley
Tour Bus Confidential: Behind Music's Bumpy Roadshow
"A lot of people think that driving is an easy job," Dotson says. "'Oh, you just sit up there, hold the steering wheel, having a good old time.' But anyone that's driven any amount of time knows that driving is not just physically demanding but mentally demanding. You're driving a $700,000 bus. You're concentrating the whole time. You're carrying people. I can't screw up. It's a lot of responsibility."
Providing a band with a smooth ride, free of sharp turns and unexpected pit stops, isn't just a matter of comfort. Good drivers get work because band members trust that they can go to sleep at night knowing they'll wake up in one piece. Ben Kitterman knows this better than most, having driven for Tom Petty ("Favorite gig ever. Extremely professional."), Motley Crue ("Tough gig. They're a little bit rougher."), Creed ("Fuck every minute of that! Those guys thought they were such a big deal."), and John Legend ("Not a whole lot of interaction. He just likes reading and chilling out and doing his own thing."). He recently made the unusual transition from driver to rider when he became Aaron Lewis' full-time pedal steel player.
"Driving smoothly is really an art form," he says. "I've ridden with a lot of pretty well-known drivers and was surprised at how shitty the ride was. Once, I was rolled out of my bunk and dislocated two ribs. Going into four shows in a row with dislocated ribs is not a pleasant experience." Driving, though, is only a small part of a driver's job. Buses must be cleaned, inside and out, on a regular basis. And as Ron Ward — who's driven for Sean Combs ("He lets me do whatever I want. If I need Ciroc, I can get bottles from the distributor."), the Wu-Tang Clan ("I have to get a new damn lung every time I come off the road with them"), and Chris Brown ("He don't tell me nothing but, 'You want to go partying? Clubbing? Let's go!'") — makes clear, there are certain things he doesn't abide.
"I'm not going to pick up stupid shit, like after they ransacked the bus," says Ward. "If there's weed paraphernalia laying around or weapons, I'm not touching that. Don't think I'm going to make up your bed when you've got a machine gun under it." Which, Ward claims, actually happened once. "I came across a big-ass machine gun, like, 'What the hell is this?' And this was a nice rapper, nobody who had to worry about all this. I mean, who you going to shoot with that anyway?"
by David Peisner, Spin | Read more:
Photo by Nathaniel Wood
Friday, August 17, 2012
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
[ed. One of my three favorite authors (and if you've been reading this blog for a while you know who the other two are). I love Ishiguro's spare, elegant style. Also recommend: Never Let Me Go.]
"I was very consciously trying to write for an international audience,"Kazuo Ishiguro says of The Remains of the Day in his Paris Review interview ("The Art of Fiction," No. 196). "One of the ways I thought I could do this was to take a myth of England that was known internationally – in this case, the English butler." (...)
The surface of The Remains of the Day is almost perfectly still. Stevens, a butler well past his prime, is on a week's motoring holiday in the West Country. He tootles around, taking in the sights and encountering a series of green-and-pleasant country folk who seem to have escaped from one of those English films of the 1950s in which the lower orders doff their caps and behave with respect towards a gent with properly creased trousers and flattened vowels. (...)
Nothing much happens. The high point of Mr Stevens's little outing is his visit to Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, the great house to which Stevens is still attached as "part of the package", even though ownership has passed from Lord Darlington to a jovial American named Farraday who has a disconcerting tendency to banter. Stevens hopes to persuade Miss Kenton to return to the hall. His hopes come to nothing. He makes his way home. Tiny events; but why, then, is the ageing manservant to be found, near the end of his holiday, weeping before a complete stranger on the pier at Weymouth? Why, when the stranger tells him that he ought to put his feet up and enjoy the evening of his life, is it so hard for Stevens to accept such sensible, if banal, advice? What has blighted the remains of his day?
Just below the understatement of the novel's surface is a turbulence as immense as it is slow; for The Remains of the Day is in fact a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which it seems at first to descend. Death, change, pain and evil invade the innocent Wodehouse-world. (In Wodehouse, even the Oswald Mosley-like Roderick Spode of the Black Shorts movement, as close to an evil character as that author ever created, is rendered comically pathetic by "swanking about," as Bertie says, "in footer bags.") The time-hallowed bonds between master and servant, and the codes by which both live, are no longer dependable absolutes but rather sources of ruinous self-deceptions; even the happy yokels Stevens meets on his travels turn out to stand for the post-war values of democracy and individual and collective rights which have turned Stevens and his kind into tragicomic anachronisms. "You can't have dignity if you're a slave," the butler is informed in a Devon cottage, but for Stevens, dignity has always meant the subjugation of the self to the job, and of his destiny to his master's. What then is our true relationship to power? Are we its servants or its possessors? It is the rare achievement of Ishiguro's novel to pose big questions – what is Englishness? What is greatness? What is dignity? – with a delicacy and humour that do not obscure the tough-mindedness beneath.
The real story here is that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes, in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son, breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed their love.
In Stevens's view, greatness in a butler "has to do crucially with the butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits". This is linked to Englishness. Continentals and Celts do not make good butlers because of their tendency to "run about screaming" at the slightest provocation. Yet it is Stevens's longing for this kind of "greatness" that has wrecked his one chance of finding romantic love. Hiding within his rôle, he long ago drove Miss Kenton away into the arms of another man. "Why, why, why do you always have to pretend?" she asks him in despair, revealing his greatness to be a mask, a cowardice, a lie.
Stevens's greatest defeat is the consequence of his most profound conviction - that his master is working for the good of humanity, and that his own glory lies in serving him. But Lord Darlington is, and is finally disgraced as, a Nazi collaborator and dupe. Stevens, a cut-price St Peter, denies him at least twice, but feels forever tainted by his master's fall. Darlington, like Stevens, is destroyed by a personal code of ethics. His disapproval of the ungentlemanly harshness towards the Germans of the Treaty of Versailles is what propels him towards his collaborationist doom. Ideals, Ishiguro shows us, can corrupt as thoroughly as cynicism.
by Salman Rushdie, The Guardian | Read more:
"I was very consciously trying to write for an international audience,"Kazuo Ishiguro says of The Remains of the Day in his Paris Review interview ("The Art of Fiction," No. 196). "One of the ways I thought I could do this was to take a myth of England that was known internationally – in this case, the English butler." (...)
The surface of The Remains of the Day is almost perfectly still. Stevens, a butler well past his prime, is on a week's motoring holiday in the West Country. He tootles around, taking in the sights and encountering a series of green-and-pleasant country folk who seem to have escaped from one of those English films of the 1950s in which the lower orders doff their caps and behave with respect towards a gent with properly creased trousers and flattened vowels. (...)
Nothing much happens. The high point of Mr Stevens's little outing is his visit to Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, the great house to which Stevens is still attached as "part of the package", even though ownership has passed from Lord Darlington to a jovial American named Farraday who has a disconcerting tendency to banter. Stevens hopes to persuade Miss Kenton to return to the hall. His hopes come to nothing. He makes his way home. Tiny events; but why, then, is the ageing manservant to be found, near the end of his holiday, weeping before a complete stranger on the pier at Weymouth? Why, when the stranger tells him that he ought to put his feet up and enjoy the evening of his life, is it so hard for Stevens to accept such sensible, if banal, advice? What has blighted the remains of his day?Just below the understatement of the novel's surface is a turbulence as immense as it is slow; for The Remains of the Day is in fact a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which it seems at first to descend. Death, change, pain and evil invade the innocent Wodehouse-world. (In Wodehouse, even the Oswald Mosley-like Roderick Spode of the Black Shorts movement, as close to an evil character as that author ever created, is rendered comically pathetic by "swanking about," as Bertie says, "in footer bags.") The time-hallowed bonds between master and servant, and the codes by which both live, are no longer dependable absolutes but rather sources of ruinous self-deceptions; even the happy yokels Stevens meets on his travels turn out to stand for the post-war values of democracy and individual and collective rights which have turned Stevens and his kind into tragicomic anachronisms. "You can't have dignity if you're a slave," the butler is informed in a Devon cottage, but for Stevens, dignity has always meant the subjugation of the self to the job, and of his destiny to his master's. What then is our true relationship to power? Are we its servants or its possessors? It is the rare achievement of Ishiguro's novel to pose big questions – what is Englishness? What is greatness? What is dignity? – with a delicacy and humour that do not obscure the tough-mindedness beneath.
The real story here is that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes, in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son, breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed their love.
In Stevens's view, greatness in a butler "has to do crucially with the butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits". This is linked to Englishness. Continentals and Celts do not make good butlers because of their tendency to "run about screaming" at the slightest provocation. Yet it is Stevens's longing for this kind of "greatness" that has wrecked his one chance of finding romantic love. Hiding within his rôle, he long ago drove Miss Kenton away into the arms of another man. "Why, why, why do you always have to pretend?" she asks him in despair, revealing his greatness to be a mask, a cowardice, a lie.
Stevens's greatest defeat is the consequence of his most profound conviction - that his master is working for the good of humanity, and that his own glory lies in serving him. But Lord Darlington is, and is finally disgraced as, a Nazi collaborator and dupe. Stevens, a cut-price St Peter, denies him at least twice, but feels forever tainted by his master's fall. Darlington, like Stevens, is destroyed by a personal code of ethics. His disapproval of the ungentlemanly harshness towards the Germans of the Treaty of Versailles is what propels him towards his collaborationist doom. Ideals, Ishiguro shows us, can corrupt as thoroughly as cynicism.
by Salman Rushdie, The Guardian | Read more:
Top Ten Differences Between White Terrorists and Others
1. White terrorists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the US? Other terrorists are called, like, “terrorists.”
2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners.
3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a guaranteed promotion.
4. The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed.
5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.
6. White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.
7. White terrorists are never called “white.” But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.
8. Nobody thinks white terrorists are typical of white people. But other terrorists are considered paragons of their societies.
9. White terrorists are alcoholics, addicts or mentally ill. Other terrorists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.
10. There is nothing you can do about white terrorists. Gun control won’t stop them. No policy you could make, no government program, could possibly have an impact on them. But hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent on police and on the Department of Defense, and on TSA, which must virtually strip search 60 million people a year, to deal with other terrorists.
2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners.
3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a guaranteed promotion.
4. The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed.
5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.
6. White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.
7. White terrorists are never called “white.” But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.
8. Nobody thinks white terrorists are typical of white people. But other terrorists are considered paragons of their societies.
9. White terrorists are alcoholics, addicts or mentally ill. Other terrorists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.
10. There is nothing you can do about white terrorists. Gun control won’t stop them. No policy you could make, no government program, could possibly have an impact on them. But hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent on police and on the Department of Defense, and on TSA, which must virtually strip search 60 million people a year, to deal with other terrorists.
by Juan Cole, Informed Comment | Read more:
Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With ‘Curation’
A few years later, I reluctantly lent my collection of magazines to a (now former) friend. He had just bought a house that he had no idea what to do with. I, on the other hand, had nothing but ideas. O.K., they weren’t strictly mine, in the sense that these ideas were acquired, arranged, styled, photographed, published and distributed by entities bearing no relation to me whatsoever. They were mine because I internalized them. I gradually convinced myself that they were me.
Of course, I didn’t realize any of this until my friend returned my magazines to me with dozens of pages torn out, having either forgotten or ignored my admittedly ridiculous request that he make photocopies instead. I felt gutted, but I was much too ashamed to admit it. How could I, without sounding crazy? It was better, ultimately, to let the friendship slide into estrangement.
The whole embarrassing situation could have been avoided if Pinterest existed then. Pinterest is a social-media Web site on which users compile collections of pictures they find on the Internet or just browse the collections of others. The site’s name combines the words “interest” and “pin,” in reference to “pin boards,” which are also known in various creative professions as inspiration boards or mood boards — basically a large board onto which appropriated images (torn from magazines!) are juxtaposed to evoke in the viewer a certain feeling, atmosphere or mood. Once the exclusive province of advertising art directors, designers and teenage girls in boarding-school dormitories, mood boards and their electronic equivalents have exploded online. Not just on Pinterest, but also in the form of dopamine-boosting street-fashion blogs and cryptically named Tumblr blogs devoted to the wordless and explanation-free juxtaposition of, say, cupcakes and teapots and shoes with shots of starched shirts and J.F.K.
This kind of visual catch-bin blog has become disconcertingly common, for reasons that a cultural theorist like Walter Benjamin would perhaps be hard pressed to explain. Who knew there was such a large, mainstream market for artfully arranged pictures of other people’s stuff? Or that “curation,” that rarefied and highly specialized skill, would all of a sudden go viral? Pinterest went online in 2010, and by the end of that year it had 10,000 unique users. By January 2012, that number had increased to 11.7 million, making it the fastest site in history to break through the 10-million unique-visitor mark, according to TechCrunch. For this, it has been valued at $1.5 billion.
I’m not a big Pinterest user (more of a lurker, really), but the over-the-top monetary valuation doesn’t entirely surprise me. Long before I heard of Pinterest, I was already spending too much time on “curated” (read: reblogged) design/fashion/image/inspiration blogs. For me, it’s sites like Apartment Therapy, Ffffound, Poppytalk, Oh Joy and dozens and dozens of obscure, exquisite, utterly pointless but oddly compelling Tumblrs. (Some, like the addictive street-fashion blog The Sartorialist, are made up of original photos, but this is more the exception than the rule.)
In fact, in the past half-decade, I’ve probably spent more time fighting the urge to satiate my visual addictions — addictions formed in the process of satiating them, no doubt — than I have actually browsing through magazines. Not because I don’t like magazines. In many ways, I like them better. But they’re too grounded in space and time, too organized and linear, too collaborative and professional to deliver the synaptic frisson available from the stream-of-consciousness image blog.
I used to think this obsession was mine alone. But now nearly everyone I know — and by that I mean everyone who spends vast, barren tundras of time at her computer — goes to Web sites like these to escape, destress, perk up, calm down, feel something, not feel something, distract themselves and (they don’t call it “lifestyle pornography” for nothing) modulate pleasure and arousal. A friend of a friend calls his addiction to sites like these “avenues for procrastination,” but I think there’s something else involved. Like other forms of pastiche — the mix tape, the playlist, the mash-up — these sites force you to engage and derive meaning or at least significance or at the very least pleasure from a random grouping of pictures. Why not dive into an alternative world full of beauty and novelty and emotion and the hard-to-put-your-finger-on feeling that there’s something more, somewhere, where you’re not chained to your laptop, half dead from monotony, frustration and boredom? (...)
There’s a German word for it, of course: Sehnsucht, which translates as “addictive yearning.” This is, I think, what these sites evoke: the feeling of being addicted to longing for something; specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing. And that feeling is necessarily ambivalent, combining both positive and negative emotions.
A paper titled “What Is It We Are Longing For?” published in The Journal of Research in Personality, breaks down these “life longings” into essential characteristics. They target aspects of our lives that “are incomplete or imperfect”; involve “overly positive, idealized, utopian imaginations of these missing aspects”; focus on “incompleteness on the one hand and fantasies about ideal, alternative realities on the other hand”; result in a “temporarily complex experience” combining “memories of the past, reflections on the imperfect present and fantasies about an idealized future” (this is called “tritime focus”); and that “make individuals reflect on and evaluate their life, comparing the status quo with ideals or successful others.”
In other words, your average Pinterest board or inspiration Tumblr basically functions as a longing machine.
by Carina Chocano, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration by Tom Gauld
In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government rounded up nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans and placed them in confinement camps as war hysteria gripped the nation and citizens feared another attack.
Amateur photographer Bill Manbo was one of them, and documented both the bleakness and beauty of his surroundings, using Kodachrome film, in an extremely rare collection of color photographs.
Sixty-five of these stunning images have been selected for a new book titled 'Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome photographs of Japanese-American incarceration camps in World War II'.
Daily Mail Reporter | More images here:
First Lady of the Internet
[ed. Still being used today.]
Lenna or Lena is the name given to a 512×512 pixel standard test image which has been in use since 1973, and was originally cropped from the centerfold of November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine. It is a picture of Lena Söderberg, a Swedish model, shot by photographer Dwight Hooker. The image is probably the most widely used test image for all sorts of image processing algorithms (such as compression and denoising) and related scientific publications.
The picture's history was described in the May 2001 newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, in an article by Jamie Hutchinson:
via: Wikipedia | Read more:
Lenna or Lena is the name given to a 512×512 pixel standard test image which has been in use since 1973, and was originally cropped from the centerfold of November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine. It is a picture of Lena Söderberg, a Swedish model, shot by photographer Dwight Hooker. The image is probably the most widely used test image for all sorts of image processing algorithms (such as compression and denoising) and related scientific publications.The picture's history was described in the May 2001 newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, in an article by Jamie Hutchinson:
“Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of 1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague's conference paper. They got tired of their stock of usual test images, dull stuff dating back to television standards work in the early 1960s. They wanted something glossy to ensure good output dynamic range, and they wanted a human face. Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy.
The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner, which they had outfitted with analog-to-digital converters (one each for the red, green, and blue channels) and a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer. The Muirhead had a fixed resolution of 100 lines per inch and the engineers wanted a 512×512 image, so they limited the scan to the top 5.12 inches of the picture, effectively cropping it at the subject's shoulders. ”This scan, nonetheless, became one of the most used images in computer history, so much that the mysterious Lenna came to be dubbed the "First Lady of the Internet".
via: Wikipedia | Read more:
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