Las Reinas Chulas: “Que Suave Patria”
Please don’t turn aside take a look even if no hablas español (not even dumbass texan spanish).
¡Las Reinas Chulas reglan!
Dozens of plastic foam heads rain onto the stage. Four drug traffickers in fringed jackets and sparkly pink cowboy hats bat them into the audience with toy AK-47s. All the while, the cast croons, “Let them slit our throats, let them pack us up . . . let them not ask any questions, let them not investigate.”
This is cabaret, Mexico style. Las Reinas Chulas, or the Beautiful Queens, parody drug violence in a show the women first produced in 2005 and that still fills nightclubs around Mexico, including a performance in the tourist town of Taxco this weekend.
“Oh, go fuck yourself”
That such brutal language as “You cock-sucking son of a bitch!” “You prick-eating bastard!” “You cunt-lapping dog!” “Kiss my ass, you son of a bitch!” “A dog must have fucked your mother when she made you!” “I fucked your mother, you sister, your wife!” “I’ll make you suck my ass!” “You cock-sucker!” and many other revolting terms are used by a limited number of players to intimidate umpires and opposing players, and are promiscuously used upon the ball field, is vouched for by the almost unanimous assertion of those invited to speak, and who are competent to speak from personal knowledge. Whether it be the language quoted above, or some other indecent and infamous invention of depravity, the League is pledged to remove it from the ball field, whether it necessitates the removal of the offender for a day or for all time. Any indecent or obscene word, sentence, or expression, unfit for print or the human ear, whether mentioned in these instructions or not, is contemplated under the law and within its intent and meaning, and will be dealt with without fear or favor when the fact is established by conclusive proof.
This may or may not be an actual memo sent to Major League Baseball players in 1898 as part of a campaign to eradicate foul language from the game, but who gives a fuck, you worthless ball licker?
(via the browser)
“I think my heart is more open to all interactions with other people,” one volunteer reported
Researchers at John Hopkins University School of Medicine have been studying the effects of psilocybin, a chemical found in some psychedelic mushrooms, that’s credited with inducing transcendental states. Now, they say, they’ve zeroed in on the perfect dosage level to produce transformative mystical and spiritual experiences that offer long-lasting life-changing benefits, while carrying little risk of negative reactions.
Looks like this may finally be gaining traction.
headline of the day, IV
David Simon Agrees to Make Sixth Season of ‘The Wire’ If U.S. Agrees to End War on Drugs
What if the U.S.D.A subsidized gardens?
Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine-based nonprofit, has put together this nifty graphic that shows the planting layout of the White House vegetable garden – which is more an ideal than a typical garden, but not uncommon in its choice of plants – and then re-imagines how it would look if it were to reflect the crops that the federal government supports. The change is pretty stark. The data is culled from the Environmental Working Group’s fantastic farm subsidy database.
This hits straight to the heart of the heartland.
Can(nes) of Worms
Lars von Trier made a monkey of himself this past week and no lie. Yeah yeah sure sure, he was indulging in low-key Scandihoovian humor. It just wasn’t funny. “Where’s my rubber chicken?”
But for the Cannes festival’s board of directors to issue the equivalent of a restraining order? C’mon, people. You just opened a can of wriggly worms.
Animated Fowl and (or in) Trousers
“You’ll notice you never saw an animated duck wearing pants.”
Nope. Never. Same for animated parrots.
But take a look at the animated rooster, Panchito Pistoles, in this clip from Disney’s The Three Caballeros (1944).
“Get that cock into a pair of britches, fer crissake!”
in defense of flogging
An amusingly obnoxious essay — in defense of flogging as a counter-argument for America’s ineffective prison system — that actually does a pretty good job of framing the larger problem:
America now has more prisoners, 2.3 million, than any other country in the world. Ever. Our rate of incarceration is roughly seven times that of Canada or any Western European country. Stalin, at the height of the Soviet gulag, had fewer prisoners than America does now (although admittedly the chances of living through American incarceration are quite a bit higher). We deem it necessary to incarcerate more of our people—in rate as well as absolute numbers—than the world’s most draconian authoritarian regimes. Think about that. Despite our “land of the free” motto, we have more prisoners than China, and they have a billion more people than we do.
(via the browser)
quote out of context
We are all the massive beneficiaries of millennia of accumulated human scientific knowledge and cultural output, and not one of us did anything do deserve a jot of it. We’re all just extremely lucky not to have been born cavemen. The greatest creative genius alive would be hard pressed to create a smiley faced smeared in dung on a tree trunk without that huge and completely undeserved inheritance.
Mid-Century Preservation — or Not — in Chicago
Talk about your perfect storm for losing a piece of architecture! This building on S. State Street has it all: it’s in a busy area, it’s a retail facade, and it’s Midcentury in origin.
It’s slated to be remodeled into something forgettable. Blair Kamin wrote a an excellent summation of the who, what, why, and why-it-shouldn’t.
(From a chicago sojourn.)
Threats to Digital Preservation
In an attempt to damp down anti-government protests, the Egyptian government shut down the Internet in their country. One copy of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is hosted at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. As I write it is accessible, but the risk is clear. But, you say, the US government would never do such a thing, so the Internet Archive is quite safe. Think again. Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins are currently pushing a bill, the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010, to give the US government the power to do exactly that whenever it feels like doing so.
via David Rosenthal
Wolverines merit endangered species protection, but must wait
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service announced Monday that the wolverine warrants protection under the Endangered Species Act, but the listing will be delayed because other species take higher priority.
Wolverines, who are members of the weasel family, are only a candidate for listing, and their status will be reviewed annually, the agency said.
This kinda steams me. I like wolverines, and I invite any female wolverine with kits to come to my neck of the woods. We have deep snow that settled early this year, so she can dig a den for her youngsters out behind my house, and I will help her guard them.
Tim Berners-Lee: Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality
The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. The simple setup demonstrated a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere. In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up. Today, at its 20th anniversary, the Web is thoroughly integrated into our daily lives. We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity.
High Society
With the illicit drug trade estimated by the UN at $320 billion (£200bn) a year and new drugs constantly appearing on the streets and the internet, it can seem as if we are in the grip of an unprecedented level of addiction. Yet the use of psychoactive drugs is nothing new, and indeed our most familiar ones – alcohol, coffee and tobacco – have all been illegal in the past.
From ancient Egyptian poppy tinctures to Victorian cocaine eye drops, Native American peyote rites to the salons of the French Romantics, mind-altering drugs have a rich history. ‘High Society’ will explore the paths by which these drugs were first discovered – from apothecaries’ workshops to state-of-the-art laboratories – and how they came to be simultaneously fetishised and demonised in today’s culture.
High Society exhibition. 11 November 2010 – 27 February 2011 at the Wellcome Collection, London.
Ground Control to Major Tom
“Getty Images steals public domain NASA image and will ‘license’ it to you for money,” re-twitters archival colleague Kate Theimer, pointing to this HiLobrow post:
. . . images gathered in the course of NASA missions belong to the American people; they’re born in the public domain, part of our cultural commons. On what basis does Getty claim the image?
tax receipt, 2009
An itemized receipt of what the taxes of a person making $34,140 last year would have paid for:
Update: Jason had this post yesterday.
from the comments
I, too, remember the “Duck and Cover” drills of the cold war days. I remember seeing my father going over plans for the building of a personal bomb shelter–and then not doing that anymore when data about the effect a single five megaton warhead would have on a metropolitan area was released. The lie of civil defense just couldn’t be sustained anymore. This kind of threat, though, seemed huge and general–similar to a great comet streaking toward the Earth that nobody could do anything about. The doom it suggested played into my hedonistic tendencies at the time.
9/11 gave me a sense of a different kind of fragility. It was like a story of a gnat getting into a machine and causing a tiny short that sets off a cascade failure. My sense of the status of apocalyptic fears in play now is that an always present element has become much more powerful: an actual desire for apocalypse–whether it be held by terrorists who think their best shot at long term power would lie in wiping the slate clean, crawling back out, and making a new push for significance, or American religious fundamentalists who see the “next” world as the real one and would be pleased to see god’s great plan expedited (as if his “need” for us to do that is not ironic). I am personally more fearful of the American fundamentalists, since they have become politically viable and this nation has more powers of mass destruction than any other.
The Royal Road
A little bit scary and a little bit fun. Spiky but silly, kinda like me.
America’s First Tribal National Park?
Pending the results of management plan vetting currently under way, the National Park Service is primed to turn the South Unit of Badlands National Park over to the Oglala Sioux Tribe (OST) for management as America’s first tribal national park. In other words, it looks like the Oglala Sioux Tribe is going to get their half of the park back.
the privatization of public schools
It has come to this: Parents are now being asked to send their children to school with their own toilet paper.
quote out of context
So that’s the Republican plan — to fight socialism, we must become communists.
The Edge of the American West
My favourite new (to me) blog:
The Edge of the American West.
Figured some of you would like it. Group blog, like here, and they possess some of that same curiosity shown by y’all. And there’s a heaping helping of smart, too.
Lots more politics than here. They deserve some attention.
via Walt
quote out of context
Mrs. Fernández would sometimes throw a piece of shoulder at a friend across the conveyor and wave good morning.
from someone else’s comments
This approach would make foes apoplectic,
Teabaggers increasingly hectic,
Invective and babble
Of cash to the rabble,
Comprising their whole dialectic.
Maiming’s what I prefer. Psychologically.
In a pre-election missive to Gordon Brown on his Cameron strategy, the (sadly) fictional Malcolm Tucker simultaneously addresses American health care, the $25 meth baby, and the membership of clusterflock:
In the final week we’ve got to promote in the public imagination the role of the odd, the pimply, and the cerebral. The people who are going to take away your child and exchange it for a voucher, give you a slot-operated hospital bed and get you to swipe your credit card as you’re heaved on the air ambulance. And other actually very brilliant ideas.
