They planned tours of two North Dakota wineries and a winter extravaganza with a sleigh ride, tobogganing and hot toddies around a fireplace inside a chalet
The company that makes Hot Tamales candy offered its sales team an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii if it met its annual goals, and a trip to the nation’s arctic tundra if it didn’t.
It is better to look good than to feel good . . . and you look like you have influenza
The Russian Army’s snazzy new uniforms, designed by Moscow fashion designer Valentin Yudashkin, have been blamed for an outbreak of flu and pneumonia.
Mr Yudashkin, who is famous in Russia for dressing Kremlin wives, won a multi-million pound tender to give the Red Army’s successor a fashion makeover in 2007 after soldiers complained that their old uniforms made them look like they were serving in a poor developing country’s army.
But parents said that the uniforms, which were debuted at a grand Red Square military parade in 2008, had put fashion before practicality.
“On the street they (our boys) literally felt naked,” a relative of one of the soldiers told the government daily newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
“They gave our lads army boots made from fake leather with cardboard inner soles, socks, and light clothing clearly not suitable for winter.”
Also:
Concerns have previously been raised about the fact that many Russian officers and soldiers are too fat to comfortably fit into the new uniforms.
What will life be like in 2011?
Henry Ford:
To make an eighty-year forecast may be an interesting exercise, first of the imagination and then of our sense of humility, but its principal interest will probably be for the people eighty years on, who will measure our estimates against the accomplished fact. No doubt the seeds of 1931 were planted and possibly germinating in 1851, but did anyone forecast the harvest? And likewise the seeds of 2011 are with us now, but who discerns them?
Eighty years ago, The New York Times asked a few men of the era what life would be like in 2011. 2091, anyone?
Quote of the Day (from Sheila’s Email)
My very first memories are of the public library in Mason City [Iowa], of eating bark with the Girls Next Door, Debbie and Angie (I bet they make guys eat bark to this day, those damn girls) and cramming M&Ms into the front pseudo-exhaust pipe ports on the side of a shiny new Buick.
an alternate method of creating amino acids in space
Scientists found amino acids on a meteorite where they were surprised they had been able to survive.
“This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided,” said Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway.”
Besties!
Gabe Leidman and Jenny Slate are BESTIES!!!
headline of the day
‘New-car smell’ cited in Edwards hit-and-run case
Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Since 1870
Greta Garbo in the Club St. Germain, Georges Dudognon (ca. 1950s)
From a series of photos on exhibit at SFMOMA that chronicles the history of photographic intrusion.
quote out of context
We’ll set the scene: Man and baby jointly drive car, on what appears to be a public street in Poland, in traffic. Woman records grainy video, family later uploads results to YouTube.
Mirror Cells — creating and studying alien life
Dmitar Sasselov is working to create mirror cells — cells that replicate using an inversion of the normal pattern of left-handed amino acids and right-handed nucleic acids — as a way to produce, and study, a synthetic form of alien life.
A manufacturing ribosome would be great, but a fully domesticated mirror cell—able to synthesize more-complicated stuff—would change everything. “All production will be biological,” he says. In that science fiction future, vats of virus-proof mirror cells could pump out biofuel, lay down nano-size organic circuitry, and even extrude organic cement foundations for skyscrapers.
Of course, mirror life could also kill us all.
The Insane Clown Posse Business Model
Lessons in customer loyalty from ICP:
Over the past decade, Bruce and Utsler have quietly built a massive pop-culture sleeper cell of fans, who call themselves the Juggalos (so named for a 1992 ICP song, “The Juggla”). While most of us happily ignored ICP, the Juggalos embraced the band’s outsider status, helping albums like 2009’s Bang! Pow! Boom! debut at number four on the Billboard charts. Over the years, in fact, ICP has sold a respectable 7 million albums. And that’s just the beginning. Juggalos also flock to ICP’s long-running online store, which sells everything from action figures to baby gear to an energy drink, Spazmatic. There are ICP movies, radio shows, and an annual music-festival-slash-brand-enhancer, the Gathering of the Juggalos. A recent Nightline segment estimated that Psychopathic has revenue of $10 million a year, and while Bruce disputes the figure, he owns four homes in Detroit and has already saved up enough to pay the college tabs for his two kids, ages 3 and 5.
from the comments
Why just sex it up with a gang of dirty hippies, when you can also steal their wallets and/or bear false witness against them?
headline of the day
Are the New Jersey Nets becoming the ‘Brooklyn New Yorkers?’
Nice colors
77 Sunset Strip
from the spam
world, stark naked; am I to go back, in a blink, in the same stark nakedness? It is not fair though: why should I have made such a trip for nothing!
What is, elementary my dear Watson?
The game show “Jeopardy!” will pit man versus machine this winter in a competition that will show how successful scientists are in creating a computer that can mimic human intelligence.
Two of the venerable game show’s most successful champions — Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — will play two games against “Watson,” a computer program developed by IBM’s artificial intelligence team. The matches will be spread over three days that will air Feb. 14-16, the game show said on Tuesday.
Alternate title: Your mother is a whore, Trebek.
A moment of silence, please, for the Alamo Plaza
North Oak Cliff will bid farewell to its own version of the Alamo this afternoon, when a 1940s-era motel undergoes demolition.
The Alamo Plaza Hotel Courts – complete with a poor man’s replica of the mission’s famous façade – doesn’t have quite the cultural heft of its San Antonio cousin. But when the wrecking crew begins work at 4 p.m. today, it will nonetheless mark the end of an era on Fort Worth Avenue.
As my Dallas friend Steve wrote me, “There goes the neighborhood.”
Drive My Car – The Hot Rats
Speaking of retro-tunes, this is a not shitty cover of The Beatles’ song.
(via)
Beatnik Wanton
This book pretty much sums up my life sans the sin orgies and reefer brawls.
Tame Impala – Solitude is Bliss
FUJIFILM FinePix X100 micro-site
Fuji has created a micro-site to promote its upcoming retro-digital FUJIFILM FinePix X100.
After the game, Favre talked about the numbness in his hand
Brett Favre’s streak of 297 consecutive games came to an end last night.
from the comments
They used to do this thing where if you recited a poem from memory, you’d get half off on pints of beer. I would recite Milosz since it was a Polish place. The first time I recited a Milosz poem to the owner he gave me a pint for free. That’s probably not a great business plan, but it made me happy.
Rising Sun
In posting this, I was disappointed to find that Clusterflock currently has no “Japan” category, which is surprising considering some of the other categories.
