quote out of context
“The family should be left to resolve it on their own,” Biondolillo said. “Or private enterprise – private companies can contact the family and say, ‘We heard you were hitting your kids. Can you stop that?’”
The Proposition Song | for Californians
via the sac rag
“They’re coming for you, Barbara!”*
*Night of the Living Dead allusion.
A complete exploitation film all in one shot. Me and Grandpa Ryan visiting Grandma’s grave.
Check out Death Bed: The Bed That Eats
A gallery of exploitation film favorites.
from the comments
I think Texas wins when it comes to female killers. That is, killers who are female. I think they’re all named Lisa Smith.
Filmwasters Podcast: Terrorkitten Was Born
Carole asked, “BTW, has there been a discussion here about Phil’s love of the abandoned?”
I’m not sure, but Phil does speak of his attraction to the traces humans leave behind in the second part of the Filmwasters podcast featuring him and Matt Wells.
Note: Much more of Phil in this episode than in the one posted previously.
In Bugger Hollow
This is an “abandoned” photo, taken in Tennessee. The area is called Bugger Hollow. I am not making that up, a road sign announces it, Bugger Hollow Road. You drive along twisty country roads to find this cabin in the midst of acres of fields, grass, trees, flowers and the occasional house. The hollow (holler in the old vernacular) has the most hypnotic smell — clean, pure, green. It is the smell of the meadow, the life force unrestrained.
Weekly Picture 194
Thiebaud Patrón, 2010
When Your Logo Design Speaks Well of You
Impact Logos of Australia are asshats. Also, they are experts in gerbilling. Contact them if you are interested in that.
Buttons in the Ground
My friends are making a short film, it’s going to be amazing.
As of this writing, they’re at 23,203 dollars and only 55 hours to go to reach their goal of 30,000! If you’re able and of a mind, check them out and see if the project is something you can support.
Nice, and We Would Rightly Look Like Fleas
Noise from wind turbine blades, inadvertent bat and bird kills and even the way wind turbines look have made installing them anything but a breeze. New York design firm Atelier DNA has an alternative concept that ditches blades in favor of stalks. Resembling thin cattails, the Windstalks generate electricity when the wind sets them waving. The designers came up with the idea for the planned city Masdar, a 2.3-square-mile, automobile-free area being built outside of Abu Dhabi.
See Alyssa Danigelis’s article here.
The Unicorn in the Garden
This James Thurber cartoon is incredibly subversive by 1953 standards, I suspect.
headline of the day, 2
Missouri Man Survives Mile-Long Ride Through Poop Chute
Caulksville Bowl. Highway 23, Caulksville, AR 72951
Taken close to the town of Caulksville, AR. Located on Arkansas Highway 23 also known as
the Pig Trail Scenic Byway. It apparently owes its name to the wild pigs who carved paths
through thick forest growth, creating trails that settlers later adopted. Here’s a street view.
I don’t need your f***ing phonebooks, no no
This is exactly how I felt last week when I found a new phonebook on my porch.
It’s 2010, I don’t even have a phone, why are you sending me a giant awkward book of outdated information that doesn’t even cover the whole city, let alone anywhere else?
headline of the day
Newsweek investigates why rebel groups always seem to be driving Toyota pickups
2011 Ford Transit SportVan
I’ve never lusted after a transit van before.
The New Not North Korea
“Hail, hail, Freedonia, land of the brave and free!”
Freedonia is not North Korea.
the evolution, and collapse, of societies — how societies rise and fall
As Austronesian settlers moved from island to island, their language bifurcated again and again, taking unique local forms that in many cases persist to this day. By comparing the languages, other researchers had been able to reconstruct a chronological narrative of the islands’ settlement.
Over 84 societies in this tree, Currie and Mace overlaid what’s known from archaeological records of their social structure, which underwent “spectacular political differentiation to give rise to examples of the entire range of political organization,” wrote Collapse author Jared Diamond in an accompanying commentary.
When they compared the resulting tree to trees generated by computational models of different anthropological narratives — linear and stepwise, varied and lurching — the researchers found a close match to the linear. Political complexity indeed grew slowly, bit by bit, with no sudden jumps from bands to chiefdoms or tribes to states.
“Political evolution, like biological evolution, tends to proceed through small steps rather than through major jumps in ‘design space,’” wrote Mace and Currie.
However, purely forward-marching models didn’t fit the data. There was evidence of societies marching backwards as well, and this didn’t follow the same step-by-step path. Societies could collapse.
from the moderated comments
If you are not down with the clown or crown for that matter… Yall can lick my aqueduct, you red-neck fucks.
WHOOP WHOOP
MMFWCL
from the comments
Here’s the note I once left for Daryl:
I ate the plums that were in the refrigerator.
They were fucking good.
Gliese 581g, perhaps
Steven Vogt, co-discoverer of the disputed extrasolar planet Gliese 581g, continues to defend the discovery.
“I stand by our data and analysis,” Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in an e-mail interview with SPACE.com. “I feel confident that we have accurately and honestly reported our uncertainties and done a thorough and responsible job extracting what information this data set has to offer. I feel confident that anyone independently analyzing this data set will come to the same conclusions.”
“In 15 years of exoplanet hunting, with over hundreds of planets detected by our team, we have yet to publish a single false claim, retraction or erratum,” Vogt said. “We are doing our level best to keep it that way.”
Just one more take on miracles
Here’s how I think of it: Those events are the ones that happened. One can easily imagine a different series of events. Indeed, we are alive at this moment, me writing, you reading, because of a series of unlikely events reaching back to the dawn of life. The odds against any of us being here at this moment are staggering. Imagine that a refrigerator falls out of a window and misses us by 10 feet, sparing our life. Now imagine that refrigerator as any cause of death, and realize that it missed every single one of our ancestors back to the beginning, including the time the refrigerator looked like a carnivorous reptile and we looked like a tasty sloth.
From Roger Ebert’s Journal.
And Giovanni was there
