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This Is Where I Got My Awesome Dark Souls Hoodie
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 01:19 PM PST
| This Is Where I Got My Awesome Dark Souls Hoodie Posted: 23 Dec 2012 12:00 PM PST When I introduced myself yesterday, a number of you expressed interest in my admittedly stylish Dark Souls hoodie. With the sigil and color scheme of the lovable character Solaire emblazoned on it, it's one of my most prized possessions. More »     | | Someone Made A Homemade Version Of The Man Of Steel Trailer Posted: 23 Dec 2012 11:30 AM PST | | What The Hell Is Up With The New Black Isle? Posted: 23 Dec 2012 11:00 AM PST | | This Is The Alternate BioShock Infinite Cover Art You Voted For Posted: 23 Dec 2012 10:30 AM PST A little under two weeks ago, Irrational Games asked you to vote on a design for the alternate side of BioShock Infinite's reversible cover. Today, Irrational revealed the results, and this is the image that came out on top, with 38 percent of the vote. More »     | | Have You Been Keeping Up With Steam's Holiday Sale? Posted: 23 Dec 2012 10:00 AM PST | | How The Zealot Stole Christmas: It's A StarCraft Holiday Special Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:30 AM PST | | Halo 5 On The Xbox 720 Is Shockingly Life-Like (And Totally Fake) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:00 AM PST | | Scattered Across The Globe, The Developers of Rise Of The Triad Have To Rely on Virtual Collaboration Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:30 AM PST | | Here's What The Developers Of Dark Souls II Can Do To Make It Better Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:00 AM PST | | Well That Was Quick: The New Neo Geo Has Been Hacked Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:30 AM PST | | Sunday Comics: The Blame Game Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:00 AM PST | | If You're Giving A Wii U This Christmas, Nintendo Wants You To Open And Update It Yourself First Posted: 22 Dec 2012 09:00 PM PST | | Kotaku 'Shop Contest: Sons of Throttle: The Winners Posted: 22 Dec 2012 04:00 PM PST Last week's Shop Contest asked for a mashup of Sons of Anarchy, the badass motorcycle gang TV show, with Full Throttle, the badass motorcycle gang video game. You folks must not be fans of one or the other or both, because all we got was seven 'Shops out of it. Here they are. AirCairo is overall finalist No. 1 for a second consecutive week. More »     | | Minecraft: The Story of Mojang is on The Pirate Bay (On Purpose) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 03:30 PM PST | | Lying, Stealing And Masturbation: Gamers Confess Secrets Before 'The End Of The World' Posted: 22 Dec 2012 03:22 PM PST Obviously, the world didn't end last night. Still, the possibility spawned the |
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This Week: Senators Hope For 'Miracle on Pennsylvania Avenue'
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 01:14 PM PST
| This Week: Senators Hope For 'Miracle on Pennsylvania Avenue' Posted: 23 Dec 2012 01:00 PM PST  Click here to view this media Ah, Republicans in disarray. It's a sight to see, and Senator Isakson says what we all know: If John Boehner had been able to keep his caucus united around a "deal", a deal would have been done. And because he wasn't, not only won't a deal be done, but the best anyone can do at this point is to pass the Senate bill extending tax cuts for the middle class. Isakson admits what the House seems to be in a constant state of denial over: The only legislation that will pass now or after January 1st are the middle class tax cut extensions. As a practical matter, there's no reason not to extend those before the end of the year. Well, there's one reason: John Boehner won't accept reality and put the Senate bill up for a vote because it would pass because a majority of Democrats support it and God forbid they should do anything with the other side. As for "miracles on Pennsylvania Avenue," let's just say I expect to see a snowball in hell before any miracles in Washington, DC. Full transcript below the fold. STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Isakson, he says that every Republican, every Democrat in Washington says everyone earning under $250,000 should not get a tax hike. So he wants to put that on the floor along with an extension of unemployment benefits and some relief from this sequester that's supposed to hit January 1. Any chance you could support that, Senator Isakson? ISAKSON: Well, I felt like the House should have gone ahead and passed Speaker Boehner's bill because it addressed the subject and we'd still be in negotiation. And the president's statement is right, no one wants taxes to go up on the middle class. I don't want them to go up on anybody, but I'm not in the majority in the United States Senate and he's the president of the United States. If we get down to the end of this year and the only choice we have is to save taxes going up on the middle class, then I would support that, but I wish we would have a comprehensive bill that dealt with spending, dealt with entitlements and dealt with taxes altogether. That's really what we ought to do. STEPHANOPOULOS: But is that still realistic with time so short right now? ISAKSON: It's not realistic, but it was realistic December 1 when we had a lot of time. Unfortunately we killed a lot of time politically while the clock was ticking. It's time for us to get down to work and do the people's business. STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, Senator Klobuchar, you just heard Senator Isakson say he would support a bill like that if it came to the floor even though it's not his first preference. Is that what you expect your leader, Senator Reid, to bring to the floor? KLOBUCHAR: Well, we have already passed that in the senate, as you know, George, for keeping the tax cuts in place for the middle class, people making under $250,000 a year. And as you know, if we go back to the Clinton levels for people making over $250,000 we literally save a trillion dollars in ten years. But I will say, Johnny Isakson is a guy I like a lot. And you can see his willingness to talk about things in the middle is what we need in Washington. And the main thing that needs to happen here is that Speaker Boehner and the House of Representatives have to come back to Washington. The Senate is coming back on December 27th. I think, you know, most members are used to spending that Christmas to New Year's at home in their home states. It is time to get back to the table. And I hope if anyone sees these representatives from the House in line shopping or getting their Christmas turkey they wish them a Merry Christmas, they're civil, and then say go back to the table, not your own table, the table in Washington, because middle class people shouldn't have their taxes go up an average of $2000 a year and we also should start making some meaningful reform on the debt. And I would love to see a bigger deal. I'd like nothing more and there's always miracles. It's Christmas, "Miracle on 34th Street." STEPHANOPOULOS: It might take a miracle to get that... KLOBUCHAR: ...miracle on Pennsylvania Avenue. STEPHANOPOULOS: That might take a miracle. But Senator Isakson, you've been pretty confident all year long this fiscal cliff would not -- we wouldn't go off the cliff, that taxes would not go up on everyone, the sequester would not kick in. Do you still have that confidence? Do you think it's a greater possibility right now? ISAKSON: I sold houses for 33 years, George, I'm an eternal optimist. But time is running out. And the truth of the matter is if we do fall off the cliff after the president is inaugurated he'll come back propose just what he proposed yesterday in leaving Washington and we'll end up adopting it, but why should we put the markets in such turmoil and the people in such misunderstanding or lack of confidence. Why not go ahead and act now? STEPHANOPOULOS: OK, that sounds like both senators want some action there.
 | | Fox Pretends Benghazi Is ‘Greatest Cover-up’ Evah! Posted: 23 Dec 2012 12:00 PM PST  Click here to view this media Last night, Sen. James Inhofe did Fox News the favor of telling host Jeanine Pirro that Benghazi is "probably the greatest cover-up in my memory." The predictable result was that the comment was re-played on Fox & Friends this morning (as it probably will be elsewhere on Fox) thus giving a boost to himself, Pirro's not-very-prominent Saturday night show and, most of all, the Benghazi conspiracy theory that Fox clings to despite any and all facts disproving it. The discussion started with a clip of Inhofe saying: I have made a study of different cover-ups – the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and Iran-Contra. I've never seen anything like it. I think this is probably the greatest cover-up in my memory, anyway.
Of course, that's ridiculous. Not even the Foxy Friends argued that was likely - though they studiously avoided saying one way or the other. As Karoli posted a few weeks ago, Rachel Maddow has demolished the whole cover-up conspiracy theory. So has The New York Times. And Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tom Ricks tried to tell Fox News but their widdle feewings were so hurt by his accusation that they were politicizing the tragedy that they booted him off the set before they could debunk it. But even if you believe that there are still some unanswered questions out there, the entire "conspiracy" boils down to Who Changed The Talking Points About Benghazi and was the danger of Al Qaeda downplayed to help President Obama win re-election? Well, now that President Obama has been re-elected – despite Fox News' best efforts – the "fair and balanced" network is turning its sights on Hillary Clinton, a likely nominee in 2016. I guess you need to allege a giant cover-up if you're going to allege Clinton faked her concussion to avoid testifying about Benghazi. Even though there's no question that she will testify later, as even host Clayton Morris acknowledged. Morris pretended that questions about Benghazi are questions about the death of Americans: "At the heart of all of this, of course, is the four individuals who died during that tragedy. And the answers are still not being found, as our own Catherine Herridge reporting yesterday on our show." But rather than focus on what happened to those Americans, Morris immediately turned his attention to Clinton and kept it there. He said: (M)ore questions emerging about who knew what when at the State Department and when these cables, these sort of desperate cables for security and security issues – a series of them – how far up the chain of command did they go? Did they go to Hillary Clinton's office on the 7th floor? …At least one cable, according to Catherine Herridge's reporting may have made its way to (Clinton's) office. Did she look at it? Was there any actionable information on that? Why didn't they ask for more security at the time? And Hillary Clinton, of course, still suffering from a concussion, or recovering from a concussion, so hasn't been able to answer that but she will at testimony coming up.
Yet somehow with all those questions, nobody thought to point out, as Karoli did, that it was Secretary Clinton who ordered the review and the review was done. Furthermore, as the New York Times reported, "Mrs. Clinton accepted all of the panel's 29 recommendations and has already begun to make changes." | | Look, Honey, it's Glenn's Kids' Pictures with Santa and their New AK-47s Posted: 23 Dec 2012 11:00 AM PST Unfortunately your browser does not support IFrames. This is the second year that Arizona's Scottsdale Gun Club has hosted a "pictures with Santa" event during the holiday season. And, as ABC's Nightline explains, "Nothing says Christmas like a family photo with Santa and an AK-47." "For the Rea family's photo with Santa, Mom and Dad proudly held machine guns. It was tough to say who was more excited for the photo -- the Rea kids, or their parents. "It's a fact of life, there are guns everywhere, especially in Arizona," Glenn Rae said. "We thought it was a really neat thing to do, and fun."'
Guns are holiday fun in Arizona? These parents sound a lot like children themselves, 'Gee, everyone is doing it so, why not?' "Our kids have never touched guns," he continued. "The little ones have never touched guns. Not until they are 5 years old and they can actually go through a gun safety class."
[Emphasis mine.] Way to be the mature adult there, make the wee ones wait until after they turn five before they handle the assault weapons. Is anyone else thinking that the future of mankind is in serious peril? "Santa's elves, who wore their own sidearms, made sure to give everyone a quick gun safety check before they took their Christmas photo: don't point a gun at anyone and keep your finger off the trigger. "Let's talk about finger discipline and muzzle discipline," one elf said. "Remember which side you are on with Santa."'
What else would machine gun Santa's elves do, but gun safety checks? "One important thing to note is while the guns were real, the weapons were not loaded and the firing pins were removed." "These are decommissioned firearms and they have been cleared and safety checked," Kennedy said. "We are just trying to make a fun holiday-themed event for those who want to express their holiday spirit and their love for the shooting sports or the hobby of firearms."
I think they've made their point clear: they're just trying to have fun with their guns in Arizona. Arizona State Representative Steve Farley said it best, "Heck of a way to celebrate the birth of our savior. To me, it is common sense that you don't joke around with guns." | | Romney Advisor Got $1200 An Hour To Testify For Countrywide Posted: 23 Dec 2012 10:00 AM PST You may remember Columbia University 's business school Dean Glenn Hubbard from Charles Ferguson's fantastic documentary "Inside Job." He was said to be Mitt Romney's choice for Treasury. Oh, how the mighty have fallen! You really have to read the whole thing to appreciate what a weasel he is: Hidden among the reams of material recently filed in connection with the lawsuit of monoline insurer MBIA against Bank of America and Countrywide is a deposition of none other than Columbia University's Glenn Hubbard. And boy, is it a wild deposition. It's like Inside Job, only Hubbard has to answer the questions he doesn't want to answer. Reading it is like watching a man try to avoid breathing in a gas chamber. At issue here is the fact that Hubbard testified on behalf of Countrywide in the MBIA suit. He conducted an "analysis" that essentially concluded that Countrywide's loans weren't any worse than the loans produced by other mortgage originators, and that therefore the monstrous losses that investors in those loans suffered were due to other factors related to the economic crisis – and not caused by the serial misrepresentations and fraud in Countrywide's underwriting. In other words, the Dean of the Columbia University business school testified that the fact that Countrywide claimed to have conducted thorough due diligence when in fact it was pressuring underwriters to approve 60 to 70 mortgage applications a day and failing to verify any income levels or other key information (to say nothing of the outright falsification of such data, which also went on on a mass scale) – he testified that these issues were irrelevant. Investors in Countrywide loans, he reported, in specifically rebutting MBIA's claims of fraud, were probably victims of macroeconomic factors, among other things the expansion of lending guidelines by "the government-sponsored entities," i.e. Fannie and Freddie. You know, that old saw. So how much does it cost to get the Dean of Columbia Business School to say that Countrywide customers weren't injured by fraud? Well, MBIA's lawyer, David Freeburg, asked Hubbard that very question: Q. How are you being compensated?A. I'm being compensated at an hourly rate for my work.Q. Do you know your hourly rate? A. Yes, it's $1200 an hour.
For comparison's sake, $1200 an hour is about what Natalia, the woman New York Magazine called "America's #1 escort" in a famous profile many years ago, made early on in her career working for Jason Itzler, the self-described "King of All Pimps." It's not the top-end rate for the kind of Mercedes-class prostitute you'd romp with from an outfit like the Emperors Club, but according to the L.A. Times, it's still more than you'd have to pay for the usual "vanilla sex" or "Republican sex." Twelve hundred dollars an hour in America buys high-end companionship that can run a little bit kinky, if that's where your needs lay. And that's exactly what MBIA got with Hubbard's research. So how did Hubbard manage to analyze Countrywide and conclude that mass fraud in its underwriting procedures wasn't problematic? Easy: He didn't look at the underwriting! All Hubbard did was take a group of Countrywide loans and compare them to a group of other loans from the same time period. When that comparison revealed that Countrywide's loans failed at about the same rate as the non-Countrywide loans, he smartly concluded that fraud wasn't the problem and that macroeconomic factors must have been the cause. Except for one thing: He left out the fact that about half of the loans in the "non-Countrywide" pool he selected for his analysis were originated by companies that were also being sued for underwriting fraud and other irregularities. What Hubbard did is compare a bunch of bad loans to a bunch of bad loans. What's fascinating in the deposition is the way Hubbard repeatedly tries to avoid answering the question about what kind of research he did, or didn't do, in his Countrywide analysis. His sneering annoyance shines through as brightly as it did in Inside Job, but this time he couldn't just say, "You've got three more minutes." Here, for instance, he actually tries to play dumb when asked if he looked into Countrywide's origination practices: Q. Did you make any inquiry into how Countrywide actually originated its loans? A. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that.
Awesome. Hubbard here is just being intentionally obtuse: he's trying to see how much of an appetite MBIA's lawyers have for fighting through his dickishness. They press on: Q. You understand there was a process by which Countrywide originated the loans that it included in the securitizations? A. Yes. Q. And there was also a process by which Countrywide examined the loans that it purchased from other originators inclusion in securitizations? A. Correct. Q. Did you make any factual inquiry into the nature of either the process of origination or the process of due diligence by Countrywide? A. I'm not an underwriter in this proceeding, so neither of the assignments that I told you would require such.
He knows it's a yes or no question, but he's letting them know they're going to have to beat it out of him: Q. And it's fair to say that you gave your opinions without any inquiry into how Countrywide actually originated its loans or how Countrywide examined the characteristics of the loans that it purchased from other originators, correct? A. I'm not an underwriter. As an economist, what I can do is look at the implications of the claims made by MBIA and its experts. Q. So is that a yes in response to my question? A. You have to tell me the question again.
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | | NRA Head LaPierre: 'There is No Gun Show Loophole' Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:00 AM PST  Click here to view this media This interview with Wayne LaPierre on this Sunday's Meet the Press ended up going pretty well the way I expected it would, which is with David Gregory hitting LaPierre with some difficult questions, but doing what he usually does and going easy on him with any follow up. Why NBC felt the need to give this guy a national platform to repeat the same talking points he made during his bizarre press conference the other day is beyond me. After allowing LaPierre to blame our problems with gun violence in the United States on everything from a lack of armed guards in our schools, to our mental health system and on anything and everything other than guns, LaPierre said this about the gun show loophole. LAPIERRE: Now, I know where you're going with this. They come up with this whole... the gun show loophole. There's not a gun show loophole. It's illegal for felons to do anything like that, to buy guns. What the anti-Second Amendment wants to do is put every gun sale in the country under the thumb of the federal government. Congress debated this at length. They said if you're a hobbyist or collector, if someone in West Virginia, a hunter wants to sell a gun to another hunter, they ought to be able to do it without being under the thumb of the federal government.
So he basically defended the loophole while claiming it doesn't exist. And David Gregory continued by trying to reason with someone who is not a rational or reasonable person. GREGORY: What I hear you saying is, well, you can't do anything about high capacity ammunition magazines, because it simply won't work, yet you're proposing things that you don't know will completely work, but you're into the art of the possible, because your standard is, anything that has a chance of working we ought to try, except when it has to do with guns or ammunition. Don't you see that people see that as a complete dodge?
I don't know why David Gregory ever thought he was going to get an honest answer to that question. The man is paid to represent the gun manufacturers and their interests. That's it. About all I can say after watching the entire interview with LaPierre is that it's too bad Lawrence O'Donnell wasn't allowed to sneak into the studio and ask him questions. | | Too Sexy For Work? You Could Get Fired for That...Legally Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:00 AM PST Damn, it looks like there are several of us that should expect pink slips from Amato.... The Iowa Supreme Court ruled on Friday that employers in the state can legally fire workers they find too attractive. In a unanimous decision, the court held that a dentist did not violate the state's civil rights act when he terminated a female dental assistant whom his wife considered a threat to their marriage. The dental assistant, Melissa Nelson, who worked for dentist James Knight for more than 10 years and had never flirted with him, according to the testimony of both parties, sued, saying she would not have been fired if she were a man.
So we're blaming the victim again? By all accounts, she did not welcome the attention nor reciprocated it, but her feminine wiles were too much for the weak, weak man... The seven justices, all men, said the basic question presented by the case was "whether an employee who has not engaged in flirtatious conduct may be lawfully terminated simply because the boss views the employee as an irresistible attraction."
The high court ruled that bosses can fire workers they find too attractive and that such actions do not amount to unlawful discrimination.
So ladies, the lesson the Supreme Court wants you to take from this case is don't be attractive in Iowa. Dress down. No styling your hair in aesthetically pleasing ways. Whatever you do, don't wear makeup that highlight your best facial features. That kind of behavior could put you on the unemployment rolls. You've been warned. | | Michelle Malkin: NRA Has Been Demonized by 'Crazed, Anti-Gun, Liberal Media' Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:00 AM PST  Click here to view this media Poor, poor Wayne LaPierre. He's just been treated so unfairly by that evil "liberal media" that they love to demonize over at Fox. I wonder when Michelle Malkin is going to talk to her Uncle Rupert, because it seems there's a problem with some mixed messaging when it comes to whether NRA head LaPierre is being treated unfairly or if we should rightfully believe he's nuts. Maybe someone can ask Malkin to go read these headlines first before she pretends it's just liberals that have a problem with LaPierre and his organization: New York Post, Daily News Blast NRA Speech (PHOTOS). Regardless of what Rupert's publication thinks, here was Malkin on Fox & Friends this Saturday, attacking liberals for rightfully going after LaPierre and his bizarre, tone deaf press conference this week, and right in there with wingnuts like Rick Perry and company that want to arm school teachers. Michelle Malkin Responds to Left-Wing Gun Backlash: 'NRA Has Been Demonized by Crazed, Anti-Gun, Liberal Media': Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin weighed in on Fox and Friends this morning about yesterday's remarks from NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, which have triggered outrage among liberals and gun control advocates. In the group's first news conference since the Sandy Hook massacre last Friday, LaPierre addressed the press, calling for every school in the United States to implement a protection program, saying that guns in the hands of "good guys" is the only means to stop evil among us. [...] Malkin believes the NRA has been demonized by the "crazed, anti-gun, liberal media," adding that the ideas proposed by LaPierre have been embraced by some school districts, specifically in Texas and Oklahoma where teachers legally carry firearms in school. Malkin also called out hypocrisy on the left, especially among celebrities who hire armed guards themselves at times, but then criticize the NRA's position that possessing a firearm is necessary for self-defense. "There's this attitude of 'armed guard for me, but not for thee,'" she said. Malkin went on to address another topic: the fights that have erupted in malls over Air Jordan sneakers in several states, including one incident in Texas where two people were killed.
I guess Malkin doesn't realize that there's a difference between armed security guards who are trained and specialize in providing security for someone, and the NRA's position which is to just put as many guns as possible into the hands of anyone that wants one, no matter how or if they're trained to handle the weapons, if they store those weapons safely, if they're emotionally and mentally competent and regardless of their background. Just arm everyone and anyone with any weapons they want is always the NRA's solution to everything. And it's a hell of a leap to compare celebrities who can afford private security to wanting to force school teachers to do double duty and carry firearms in our schools. We all know Republicans hate those "union thugs" and want their wages slashed and their unions busted. Now they think they should have to provide armed security for their students as well. And as Lawrence O'Donnell reminded us Friday evening, that armed sheriff`s deputy at Columbine High School years ago didn't do those students a bit of good. | | Mike's Blog Round Up Posted: 23 Dec 2012 06:00 AM PST | | Sunday Morning Bobblehead Thread Posted: 23 Dec 2012 05:00 AM PST
Revolution trailer
Between what we've been learning about Nancy Lanza, mother of Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, and this ridiculous place we find ourselves with the NRA, where everything but access to guns is to blame for all society ills, the GOP imploding in the face of the fiscal "cliff" and surviving the Mayan apocalypse, I've had time to contemplate the notion of what life would be like if everything fell apart. Seriously, what if those Doomsday Preppers were right and we were just a few bad world events from the world ending as we know it? Here's the thing: even if they were right about the events, I've really searched my heart on this and I think their outlook is completely wrong. You cannot outgun others. You cannot hoard your way to safety. We simply cannot survive as a species if we believe it's "every man for himself." The only way we can survive is if we develop a community to care for one another. We have to share our resources. What's mine can be yours as well. Because I alone can never save enough food for a lifetime and there will always be someone with a bigger, more powerful gun than mine. We may have a revolution in our future. But we will not survive it unless we work together and cooperate, something that the NRA and these preppers cannot see past their fear to understand. ABC's "This Week" -- Sens. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; former Rep. Asa Hutchinson, who's leading a National Rifle Association program that will develop a model security plan for schools that relies on armed volunteers; Sarah Brady, Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence; Panel: Newark Mayor Cory Booker; Americans for Tax Reform President and NRA board member Grover Norquist; political strategist and ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd; Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan; and WashingtonPost.com columnist and Editor and Publisher of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel. NBC's "Meet the Press" -- Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the NRA; Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Round table: Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), former Democratic congressman Harold Ford, Jr., and NBC's Andrea Mitchell and Chuck Todd. CBS' "Face the Nation" -- David Keene, NRA president; Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Mark Warner, D-Va.; Rep. Tim Scott, R-S.C.; actor Ben Affleck. MSNBC's "UP with Chris Hayes" -- Former Governor James Florio (D-NJ), Adjunct Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Rutgers University; Mayor Kasim Reed (D-Atlanta, GA); Mayor Michael Nutter (D-Philadelpha, PA); Dylan Glenn, Senior Vice President of Guggenheim Advisors and former Special Assistant to President George W. Bush; Heidi Moore, Finance and Economics Editor for The Guardian newspaper; Kevin Alexander Gray, Contributing Editor to Black News and Contributing Writer to CounterPunch and Black Agenda Report; Maya Wiley, Founder and President of the Center for Social Inclusion; Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research; Rebecca Peters, international arms control advocate who led the campaign to reform Australia's gun laws after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. MSNBC's "Melissa Harris-Perry" -- guest list not released. CNN's "State of the Union" -- Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.; Reps. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., and Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio; Hutchinson. Panel: USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page, CNN Senior Political Analyst Ron Brownstein, and Time's Washington Bureau Chief Michael Duffy. CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" -- Economists Glenn Hubbard and Peter Orszag, commentators Zanny Minton Beddoes and Chrystia Freeland. CNN's Reliable Sources -- CNN's Tom Foreman, PBS NewsHour's former media correspondent Terence Smith; Former correspondent for NBC News Fred Francis, Editor-in-chief of Daily-Download.com Lauren Ashburn and George Washington University's Professor of Media and Public Affairs Steve Roberts; CNN's National Security analyst and author of Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad Peter Bergen and New York magazine's film critic David Edelstein. "Fox News Sunday" _ Sens. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and Kent Conrad, D-N.D. Founder and Senior Pastor of Saddleback Church Rick Warren. Panel: Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard/Fox News Contributor; Kirsten Powers, Daily Beast Columnist, Fox News Contributor; Laura Ingraham, The Laura Ingraham Show / Fox News Contributor; Juan Williams, Fox News Contributor.
So what's catching your eye this morning? | | Open Thread Posted: 22 Dec 2012 08:30 PM PST This fanvid of Jonathan Coulton and John Roderick's "2600" has some fun clips from "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians." All the Martians want is an Atari 2600. Open thread below.... | You are subscribed to email updates from Crooks and Liars
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A year ago on Unclutterer
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 01:05 PM PST
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NRA Head LaPierre on Meet the Press: "Call Me Crazy"
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 11:35 AM PST
| NRA Head LaPierre on Meet the Press: "Call Me Crazy" Posted: 23 Dec 2012 10:45 AM PST You're not going to hear any surprises here, as NRA bigwig Wayne LaPierre just continues parroting his "more guns are the only solution" talking points, utterly rejects any and all forms of gun control, and advocates for armed guards in every school classroom. The right wing has been advocating for cutting funds to schools and teachers, and destroying teacher's unions, but they have no trouble spending as much money as possible on MOAR GUNZ. I love how LaPierre pretends to be very concerned about improving mental health care -- and at the same time repeatedly calls mentally ill people "lunatics" and "monsters." But perhaps the most telling moment: when LaPierre says, "If it's crazy to put more guns in schools, then call me crazy." He'll get no argument from me. He's not just crazy, he's batshit insane. If we ever do create a mental health registry, his name should be first on the list.  | | All We Want for Christmas Is...Guns Posted: 23 Dec 2012 10:29 AM PST All We Want for Christmas Is...Guns I'm not here to convince you that we need gun control, because over the next few months there are going to be huge choruses of people calling for that. Instead I'm here to convince you -- meaning you personally -- that you don't need a gun. You won't even really want a gun if you spend some time on the facts. Though you might have various reasons for wanting a firearm, those rationalizations do not measure up against the cold facts or the questions I'm going to pose below if you spend some time to really think about them. As this post points out, if you create another gun scare then you sell more guns. This makes Wayne Lapierre the biggest industry gun pimp in the US, because he's now created another run on AR's. It's basic human psych 101 - you can create demand by falsely amplifying fears while at the same time creating a sense of scarcity or depletion of the item you are selling.  More Guns sold through irrational fears of President ObamaThere are a few questions underneath these sales that everyone with a firearm or who might be considering a firearm purchase really needs to ask themselves that I will get to in bit. First however I've got to be master of the obvious. The US has about 83-87 firearm deaths on average every single day if you look back a decade to present. There are between 8-11,000 homicides with firearms every year, but there are about double that number of people ending their own lives through firearm suicide. Besides the 8-11,000 homicides every year (on average about 31 per day in 2009) Two Thirds of all firearm deaths are suicides (18,735 in 2009, or an average of 51 per day.) People killing themselves with their own firearms or borrowed firearms comprise 6 out of every 10 suicides in this country, or about triple the number for suicide by suffocation (the category that slicing arteries open falls under.) Whether you are a firearm owner, or are a prospective buyer these homicide and suicide death stats are ones you need to think long and hard about. Chances are pretty good that you know someone who is either depressed, mentally unstable, a substance abuser, or who is just going through a very rough time -- even if it's not you that I am describing. If those people end their lives with your rifle or handgun how are you going to feel? If they borrow or steal your assault rifle (and most mass killing are committed with legally obtained weapons or borrowed legal guns,) and end up putting several bullets each into a large group of people or students like the Newton massacre, how's that going to affect you? What are the real chances of you having to use your gun in self defense? What are the chances of really needing an AR because of societal collapse? Both of those chances are much less than you might think, and the chances of homicide, suicide, and accidental deaths from firearms are much greater than the average person realizes. Right now they are tracking almost even with automobile deaths, and we all know someone who has died in a car wreck. If you are older than 20 chances are pretty good that you can name several people who you knew or were acquainted with growing up who are now dead from firearms. Chances are slim that you can name a real person that you know who's driven off a zombie attack, blue helmets, or even a home burglary with a firearm. Please think before you buy, there are better things you could use that money for, and if you own a firearm please do the sane, rational thing and consider removing it from circulation. Don't do it for political reasons, do it because you care, do it because you care about yourself, your family, your friends, and your fellow citizens. I'm really writing this for my friends and family who are still in Alaska - where they lead the pack in firearm deaths per capita. If Black Friday shopping trends are any indication, the gift of cold, hard steel will be more popular than ever this holiday season. According to USA Today, on that day dealers called the FBI with a total of 154,873 background check requests for shoppers seeking to buy firearms. That's 20 percent more than last year's record of 129,166 calls in one day. Sixty-two percent of the Black Friday requests were for long guns like shotguns or rifles, such as the Bushmaster .223 reportedly used by the suspect in today's shooting in Newtown, Connecticut (a state where you don't need a permit to carry a rifle). The FBI doesn't keep track of guns sold--only the background requests it fields--but that number is almost certainly higher than the number of calls received, given that consumers can buy more than one firearm per request. Overall, background requests have jumped 32 percent since 2008 (PDF). As Bloomberg Businessweek pointed out, gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson reported a record number of sales for their last quarter, up nearly 50 percent from the year before. The rise in gun sales doesn't necessarily mean that there are more first-time gun owners, though: A CNN investigation in July showed that fewer people own more and more weapons.
[Link: www.cdc.gov...]
[Link: www.cdc.gov...]
[Link: www.vpc.org...] and:
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full Data from a US mortality follow-back survey were analyzed to determine whether having a firearm in the home increases the risk of a violent death in the home and whether risk varies by storage practice, type of gun, or number of guns in the home. Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4). They were also at greater risk of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person was living with others at the time of death. The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). Persons with guns in the home were also more likely to have died from suicide committed with a firearm than from one committed by using a different method (adjusted odds ratio = 31.1, 95% confidence interval: 19.5, 49.6). Results show that regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.
 | | Your Disturbing Christmas Song of the Day: Sufjan Stevens - I'll Be Home for Christmas Posted: 22 Dec 2012 03:25 PM PST This is my kind of Christmas music: a disturbing rendition of "I'll Be Home for Christmas" by true weirdo Sufjan Stevens, from his massive album featuring practically every Christmas song ever written, Silver and Gold.  | | "Indentured Servant" Dana Loesch Persona Non Grata at CNN? Posted: 22 Dec 2012 01:04 PM PST Tommy Christopher points out that Breitbart.com indentured servant Dana Loesch has become persona non grata (unofficially, of course) at CNN, after her comments applauding US soldiers who urinated on corpses, and her underhanded sabotage of other CNN contributors. (I have a feeling, knowing CNN, that the sabotage was more important than her disgusting comments about peeing on dead people.) Loesch's ascendancy, aided by the rise of the Tea Party and the star power of Andrew Breitbart (as well as her own hard work and penchant for provocation), hit several other stumbling blocks this year. Following pressure from critics over her remarks about U.S. troops who were videotaped urinating on Taliban corpses, Loesch's appearances on CNN dried up, although the network insists there was no connection. In August, at the height of Rep. Todd "Legitimate Rape"Akin's notoriety, Loesch tweeted Akin advising him not to appear on fellow CNNer Piers Morgan's program, then "reached out to the campaign to confirm" Akin had canceled his appearance, and would appear on her radio show instead. Former Mediaite Managing Editor Colby Hall called foul, and Morgan defended Loesch on Twitter, but Loesch hasn't been on CNN since then. Media Matters noted that, in an August CNN online article, Loesch is cited as a "conservative radio host," and not a CNN contributor. The network confirmed, in November, that Dana Loesch is still a CNN contributor, and multiple sources at CNN say there is no organized blackball, that booking decisions are made by the executive producers of each show, but that poaching Akin might not have endeared her to those EPs.
The incident with Piers Morgan and Todd Akin isn't the only case in which Loesch or her husband have attacked and/or sabotaged other CNN personnel; in March, hubbie Chris called CNN host Soledad O'Brien an antisemite, and Breitbart.com published dozens of articles viciously attacking her. Related:
CNN's Dana Loesch Cheers Soldiers Who Urinated on Corpses
CNN's Dana Loesch Spews Insults at Critics of Her Comments Supporting Desecrating Corpses
CNN's Dana Loesch Equates Mandatory Trans-Vaginal Ultrasound to Having Sex
Husband of CNN Contributor Dana Loesch Calls CNN Host Soledad O'Brien 'Anti-Semitic'
Dana and Chris Loesch Defend Akin's 'Legitimate Rape' Comments
In Which CNN Contributor Dana Loesch Falsely Accuses Me of Using a Racial Slur
Dana Loesch Calls for an Investigation Into My Nefarious Scheme to Silence Her
In Which CNN Contributor Dana Loesch Calls Me a 'Stalker'  | You are subscribed to email updates from Little Green Footballs
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Ojo, que Playstation Network ha aumentado sus ofertas para PS3 hasta enero de 2013. Aquí las nuevas incorporaciones
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 11:32 AM PST
| Ojo, que Playstation Network ha aumentado sus ofertas para PS3 hasta enero de 2013. Aquí las nuevas incorporaciones Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:35 AM PST 
El que tuviese como objetivo ahorrar en estas fechas lo lleva crudo. Como venimos diciendo a lo largo de la semana, todos los servicios se han puesto las pilas para que peligre nuestro bolsillo en Navidad.
Como imagino que recordaréis, a mediados de diciembre anunciamos una promoción navideña en Playstation Network con un montón de títulos rebajados, casi todos de PS3 (porque había algunos clásicos de PSone), y desde hace unos días hay que sumarle unos pocos más que durarán unos días más. Hasta el 16 de enero de 2013, salvo tres casos concretos que harán lo propio antes, el 9 de enero: ‘Deadstorm Pirates’, ‘Ridge Racer 7 – 3D License Version’ y ‘Tekken Tag Tournament 2’. A su vez, varias de las nuevas incorporaciones se benefician de un descuento adicional si somos usuarios de Playstation Plus. Os lo especificaremos también en la lista a continuación, y de paso enlazamos a su ficha en Sony Entertainment Network aprovechando que ya se pueden comprar desde ahí como anunciamos recientemente. Va mejor que desde Playstation Network. Mucho más. - Backbreaker Vengeance (antes 14,99 euros, ahora 7,49 / Plus 6,74)
- DeadStorm Pirates (antes 14,99 euros, ahora 9,99 / Plus 8,99)
- Deep Black (antes 14,99 euros, ahora 7,49 / Plus 6,74)
- Hydrophobia Prophecy (antes 5,99 euros, ahora 1,19 / Plus 1,07)
- Naughty Bear: Panic in Paradise (antes 14,99 euros, ahora 7,49 / Plus 6,74)
- Pool Shark 2 (antes 2,49 euros, ahora 0,79 / Plus 0,63)
- Ridge Racer 7 – 3D License Version (antes 19,99 euros, ahora 9,99 / Plus 8,99)
- Room Zoom: Race for Impact (antes 2,49 euros, ahora 0,79 / Plus 0,63)
- Rugby World Cup (antes 29,99 euros, ahora 14,99 / Plus 13,49)
- Saints Row 2 (antes 19,99 euros, ahora 9,99 / Plus 8,99)
- Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (antes 49,99 euros, ahora 39,99 / Plus 31,99)
- World Snooker Championship 2005 (antes 2,49 euros, ahora 0,79)
- Worms (antes 9,99 euros, ahora 4,49)
- Worms Ultimate Mayhem (antes 12,99 euros, ahora 5,19 / Plus 2,60)
- Worms Revolution (antes 13,99 euros, ahora 5,49)
- Wrecked Revenge Revisited (antes 11,99 euros, ahora 5,99 / Plus 5,39)
Vía | Playstation.Blog    | | Sexto día de ofertas en Xbox Live. Ahora el grueso de Xbox Live Summer of Arcade 2012 con 'Deadlight' y 'Dust: An Elysian Tail' Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:01 AM PST 
Estos días no hay servicio que se resista a brindarnos más y más ofertas. A las anunciadas recientemente de DotEmu y Steam hay que continuar con las ofertas diarias de Xbox Live. Tras el penoso día de ayer, con una única oferta que no mereció ser reseñada (el no muy avenido ‘Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD’), hoy sí que merece más la pena, y todo porque se completa con el grueso de títulos de la promoción Xbox Live Summer of Arcade 2012, con ‘Deadlight’ y ‘Dust: An Elysian Tail’, aparte del no muy competente ‘Hybrid’. Salvo este último, con un descuento del 67%, los otros dos rebajados a la mitad. Y solamente durante el día de hoy, porque mañana habrá otras ofertas. Os dejamos con sus enlaces directos al bazar de Xbox Live, por si os animáis a probarlos. Nuestra recomendación es clara: aunque estéticamente ‘Deadlight’ nos pareció una gozada, no cumplió con nuestras expectativas, siendo un producto a todas luces escaso en cuanto a duración y rejugabilidad, mientras que ‘Dust: An Elysian Tail’ fue toda una agradable sorpresa ideal para los fans del estilo metroidvania, y con unos guiños muy especiales a varios míticos de Xbox Live Arcade. Una joya. Nota: 600 MS (7,5 euros) y 400 MS (5 euros) Vía | MajorNelson    | | 'Minecraft: The Story of Mojang', el documental sobre 'Minecraft' y lo sorprendente que puede llegar a ser esta industria Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:01 AM PST 
‘Minecraft: The Story of Mojang’, el documental de 2 Player Productions sobre el éxito de ‘Minecraft’ y su desarrolladora, Mojang, ya está disponible en versión digital y física, pero además sus creadores han liberado una versión torrent para aquellos que no puedan permitirse la compra o prefieran echarle un vistazo antes de dar el paso. Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, la película documental sobre el éxito de Minecraft ‘Minecraft: The Story of Mojang’ nace como muchos de los proyectos independientes que hemos visto durante los últimos meses, valiéndose de la financiación en masa de Kickstarter para conseguir los 150.000 dólares que la productora 2 Player Productions necesitaba para mantener vivo el proyecto. El documental de 104 minutos de duración muestra el primer año de Mojang, el estudio creado por el programador sueco Markus “Notch” Persson, mientras profundiza en la dificultad de crear un videojuego. Sin embargo, si ‘Indie Game: The Movie’ se centraba en ese proceso de creación, ‘Minecraft: The Story of Mojang’ versa más sobre su posterior éxito. Resulta bastante interesante ver las caras de Notch y compañía al convertirse en el centro de atención de la industria, encontrarse con los fans y ver cómo esas cifras que iban sumando en sus cuentas corrientes contaban con un gran soporte y admiración por parte del público detrás. Se muestra en vídeos de YouTube como el de ese lince que quemó su casa encendiendo una hoguera, los relojes, los interruptores, las creaciones mecánicas inmensas, la sensación al encontrar tu primera mina de diamantes… una serie de momentos que encantarán a los fans del juego e invitarán a aquellos que aún no lo han probado a darle una oportunidad. 
Un “persigue tus sueños“ para creadores de videojuegos Las buenas ideas tienen eso, la capacidad de, por ejemplo, pasarle la mano por la cara al profesor de Notch que le dijo “definitivamente eso no va a pasar“ cuando el desarrollador le comentó que quería dedicarse a hacer videojuegos, y sobre ello hablan varios integrantes de la industria, desde los siempre recomendables Tim Schafer y Peter Molyneux (que una vez más demuestra que podría vendernos una caja completamente vacía con sus palabras), hasta periodistas del sector como Stephen Totilo. ‘Minecraft: The Story of Mojang’ estuvo a punto de no realizarse pese a haberse convertido en cierto momento en el tercer proyecto más apoyado en la historia de Kickstarter, con varios cientos de personas retirando su dinero antes de que finalizase el plazo, pero afortunadamente las últimas horas recibieron un incremento de mecenas que hicieron que la productora del documental se hiciese con 210.297 dólares de los 150.000 que necesitaban. En realidad puede que todo se reduzca a lo básico, a buscar la lágrima fácil acompañada de una sonrisa al ver que no todo en esta industria son cifras y estudios de mercado, pero cuenta con momentos realmente inspiradores, de aquellos del “tú puedes“ sin importar lo que diga el resto, un aplauso y una palmada en la espalda para un sector indie en el que, sin embargo, pocos consiguen levantar cabeza para ser reconocidos entre la multitud. Sea como sea, es inevitable acabar su visionado y no valorar positivamente lo que te acaba de entrar por los ojos a nivel de dirección, fotografía y ritmo. 
Minecraft: The Story of Mojang en digital, en formato físico y en torrent La película se estrenó ayer en Xbox Live para aquellos usuarios con cuenta Gold, pero lamentablemente nuestro país no se encontraba entre los elegidos para dicha distribución. Algo entendible si se hubiese limitado su visionado a los clásicos Estados Unidos, Reino Unido, Francia y Alemania, pero sí habían varios países entre los que se encontraban Irlanda o Portugal. No sé con certeza a qué directivo de nuestro país habría que enviarle un tirón de orejas, pero si en algún momento lee este texto puede darse por aludido. Superada esa pataleta, continuamos. ‘Minecraft: The Story of Mojang’ puede conseguirse vía descarga digital, con opciones HD y SD, soporte para todo tipo de plataformas, sin códigos de restricción, subtítulos en inglés y la opción de audio censurado, para los que decidan verlo acompañados por niños, por 8 dólares. Unos 6 euros al cambio actual. También se ha puesto a la venta una versión física en DVD que cuenta con todo lo anteriormente mencionado en el primer disco y un segundo DVD con escenas eliminadas, entrevistas extendidas y making of. ¿El precio? 20 dólares más 10,18 dólares de envío a nuestro país, algo menos de 23 euros al cambio actual. 
Lo sorprendente, sin embargo, es que la productora ha decidido colgar la película en The Pirate Bay, la conocida página de descarga de torrents, reconociendo que eran conscientes que la película acabaría ahí tarde o temprano y querían ser los primeros en subirla para explicar a aquellos que intenten acceder a dicha versión de su documental su visión del asunto. A continuación tenéis un extracto de lo comentado por los integrantes de 2 Player Productions. Queríamos venir aquí primero porque sabíamos que la película acabaría aquí tarde o temprano, así que creemos que lo mejor era abrir un dialogo. Los torrent y la piratería son un modo de vida y probablemente no desaparezca. Hay mucha gente que quiere castigaros por eso, pero tenemos un punto de vista más realista. Hemos estado ahí. Todos necesitamos hacerlo en algún momento. Puede que no tengas el dinero. Puede que quieras probarlo antes de comprarlo. Tal vez estés enfadado por colgar la película en Xbox Live primero. Todas son buenas razones. Pero si crees que la piratería es, en palabras de Gabe Newell “un problema de servicio”, ten en cuenta que vendemos copias digitales libres de protección para que puedas verlas como quieras. Sólo somos tres tipos intentando vivir de lo que amamos. Amamos el mundo de los videojuegos y nos encanta convertirlo en realidad. Si compras la película nos ayudarás en nuestros esfuerzos. La razón para financiar vía Kickstarter esta película es que no teníamos suficiente dinero para hacerla, y pese a ello posteriormente pusimos gran parte de nuestro dinero en ella. Por no mencionar casi dos años de trabajo. Escoged la opción que más rabia os dé, pero hacedlo sabiendo que lo que tendréis en vuestras manos es una de esas piezas de historia muy recomendables para conocer hacia qué dirección podría encaminarse esta industria. No soy muy dado a escribir palabras malsonantes por aquí pero, joder, adoro este sector, sus posibilidades y su, a veces complicado, entramado de compañías y usuarios, y ‘Minecraft: The Story of Mojang’ me ha recordado en no pocas ocasiones ese sentimiento. Página oficial | Minecraft: The Story of Mojang    | | 'Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3' nos enseña el combate entre Asuma y Choji Posted: 23 Dec 2012 06:20 AM PST 
Posiblemente es una de las mejores adaptaciones del anime a los videojuegos. El buen hacer de CyberConnect2 al frente de la franquicia de Naruto está arrojando títulos impecables con un acabado visual que deja a todos con la boca abierta. Hoy llega un nuevo vídeo de ‘Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3’. En el vídeo podréis ver un épico combate entre Asuma y Choji y disfrutar una vez más de ese impecable “cel shading” que consigue darle al juego ese aspecto de anime que pocos consiguen. Recordad que ‘Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3’ será lanzado en nuestro país en marzo de 2013 para Xbox 360 y PS3. Contará además con dos ediciones especiales que ya os mostramos hace un tiempo y que os pondrán las cosas difíciles a la hora de elegir. Por cierto, con ellas viene el DLC con el traje de Goku. Vía | Gamingbolt    | | 'Wordament': el primer juego para iOS con logros de Xbox Live Posted: 23 Dec 2012 12:44 AM PST 
Tras la llegada del panel de Xbox Live y el reciente aterrizaje de SmartGlass, Microsoft suma ‘Wordament’ a su catálogo de aplicaciones para iOS. La diferencia en este caso es que los logros conseguidos en el juego se sumarán a los de nuestra cuenta Xbox. Valiéndose del género Boggle, que cuenta con varias adaptaciones tanto para iOS como para Android, el juego nos invita a descubrir palabras en nuestro idioma, ya sean de un tema en concreto o con reglas libres, demostrando un excelente diccionario interno y ofreciendo puntuaciones y logros que podemos comparar después con nuestros amigos. Lástima que la aplicación no esté adaptada para iPad, sin duda la mejor forma de acercarse a este tipo de juegos por el tamaño de su pantalla, pero aún así resulta ser un juego muy entretenido, de los de hilar una partida con otra casi sin percatarte de ello y perder varios minutos sin darte cuenta. Además es gratuito, así que echadle un ojo. Vía | Genbeta
Página oficial | Wordament en iTunes    | | Imagen de la semana: siete curiosidades sobre videojuegos, pero con el ácido toque de 'El jueves' Posted: 22 Dec 2012 10:09 AM PST 
El jueves, la revista que sale los miércoles. Lleva desde 1977 dando caña con un humor de lo más incorregible, sin miedo a las represalias. Una de sus últimas viñetas ha tratado el tema de los videojuegos, ése que tanto aterra a Ana Rosa Quintana, y de un modo gore en algunos casos. La combinación podría ser fatal para los que ven los videojuegos como el mal. Los Nintendos, como decía “ese gran filósofo” Josué Yrion. Por suerte no para nosotros, que conocemos a la perfección el toque satírico de El jueves y no nos asusta, sino todo lo contrario. Otra forma de conocer varias curiosidades sobre los videojuegos, en algunos casos bastante conocidas a estas alturas, pero siempre es de agradecer otro punto de vista con el cachondeo de por medio y, por qué no, un toque macabro. Y si no que se lo digan a Jumpman, el personaje más famoso de este nuestro mundillo. Os dejamos con más extractos de la imagen de la semana. Si queréis ver el resto de viñetas hacedlo desde su espacio oficial, cuyo enlace tenéis al final. Su autoría, a todo esto, es de Julio A. Serrano. 
Imagen | El jueves    | You are subscribed to email updates from Vidaextra
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NASA offers free e-book for iPad owners
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 11:31 AM PST
| NASA offers free e-book for iPad owners Posted: 22 Dec 2012 05:00 PM PST  What a nice holiday gift from NASA: it's an interactive e-book available in the iBookstore called Hubble Space Telescope: Discoveries, featuring beautiful images, video and animations relating to the space telescope that is giving us striking new views of the universe we live in. "These new e-books from NASA will allow people to discover Hubble and Webb in a whole new way - both the science and the technology behind building them," said Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist on the Webb telescope project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "They collect all of the amazing resources about these two observatories in an excellent product that I think people will really enjoy." The e-books are highly interactive and include image galleries and videos. Tracy Vogel of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., is part of the design team that put them together. "For instance, the readers can watch a galaxy collision simulation video, manipulate a telescope model to see it from all angles, or flip through a gallery of planetary nebulae - all right there on the page," Vogel said. NASA offers free e-book for iPad owners originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 22 Dec 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments | | Targus iNotebook: Pen, paper and iPad Posted: 22 Dec 2012 03:00 PM PST  Despite having the latest in high technology at my fingertips, I like to take notes on good old paper. Yeah, I know -- I should at least snap photos of my scrawls and upload them to Evernote, but being middle-aged, it's hard to get rid of some old habits. Targus has just released an iPad accessory that may work for me (and Dave Caolo, my paper-notebook-addicted cohort here at TUAW) by letting me write on regular paper with a real pen, and capturing my notes in an iPad app. The iNotebook (US$179.99) isn't exactly as inexpensive as a pad of paper and a regular pen or pencil, but it offers a way to capture, annotate, and organize your handwritten notes. Design iNotebook doesn't need to be near your iPad all the time. It's able to capture and store up to 100 pages of notes that can then be synced to the iPad with a touch of a button. That's a good thing, since the iNotebook is about the size of an iPad in a case, meaning you'd have to lug around two devices. Inside the nice case -- there are two varieties, one made of black leather, the other covered with cloth -- you'll find a notepad. You don't need to use this particular notepad, so if you happen to be a fan of Moleskine's Professional Notebook you can drop one of those in. There's a place for the back cover to slide into so that the paper notebook doesn't move too much while you're using it. There's one negative point to using the iNotebook -- both the sensor in the case and the pen need to be charged before use. Both have a mini-USB connector, and there's a handy two-headed charging cable included so you can charge both pieces at once. The pen takes about six hours to charge fully, while the sensor charges in about three and a half hours. On the plus side, once both are charged up and ready to go, they'll happily wait up to 60 days for you to use them in standby mode. Working life when not paired to your iPad is about 15 hours, but only about six hours when you're paired via Bluetooth. While waiting for everything to charge up, I took the time to install the free iNotebook App that provides the repository for your notes. It's of the skeumorphic design school, with a cherry wood bookshelf with all of your virtual notebooks. Those notebooks can be named anything you want, and with a tap and drag, your individual captured note pages can be moved to any notebook. The pen comes with a trio of refills so you can continue to take notes and not throw out the pen. Additional refills can be purchased for $7.99 for a pack of ten. So, how does the sensor know where the pen is on the piece of paper? The sensor is covered with a transparent red plastic and there are what look like IR LEDs behind a transparent part just above the pen tip. It's smart that they're using IR to do this, since the iNotebook itself uses Bluetooth to talk to the iPad and you wouldn't want any battling Bluetooth signals. Functionality Let's start with the charging process. There's a red LED on the pen that shows when it is charging, and a red icon on the sensor that glows during its charging period. Both LEDs go out when charging is complete. Pairing the iPad and iNotebook is easy. While in the Bluetooth settings on the iPad, you press and hold the power button on the iNotebook until a green light flashes, then press the Bluetooth button on the iNotebook until the blue light flashes. Once iNotebook appears in the list of Bluetooth devices on your iPad, you tap the device name to pair it. In the iNotebook app, you tap the New icon on the bookshelf to create a new notebook, then open the notebook with another tap. Another tap on the New icon creates a new page. At this point, you can start writing in the notebook. Whenever a page is filled, you either tap the + icon to add a new page, or press the physical "page" button on the sensor. I like the fact that there's no special paper or notebook required for the iNotebook. Basically, anything that is 5 inches wide by 8 inches tall or smaller can be used. Now, let's get into the actual operation of this device. The first unit I got wouldn't charge up, and fortunately the folks at Targus were good about sending a second test device and taking the first back for troubleshooting. However, I had some issues with the second unit that made me a bit trepidatious about recommending the iNotebook. The first issues came about when I had linked the device to my iPad and was busily writing on the paper pad watching my writing being captured in digital ink on the iPad. Very cool! Then, all of a sudden, I noticed the writing capture turning to an illegible pile of scrawls. I also had a problem where some text was suddenly angled on the page differently from the rest of the text. That was just plain odd. I was able to figure out what caused the first problem to happen -- the notebook was just thick enough that the upper right corner of the page was sticking up and blocking the sensors. There's a small elastic band that can be used to hold down the corner of the page and stop that problem. The angled text seem to occur when I slightly changed the position of my hand of the page while writing. I was able to get the hang of how to hold my hand pretty quickly, so that issue went away. Next, I decided to try writing in the notebook, capturing my pen motions while nowhere near the iPad. I turned on the unit and as I wrote, I saw the flickering green icon that indicated that my writing was being captured. When I was done writing (it was a list of dinners for the week), I went to transfer that to my iPad. The first time I tried, the green light on the iNotebook went solid green, indicating that the sensor memory was full. I doubted that, since I was on page three of my notebook. I kept trying to import the writing from the sensor, and kept getting an error message. Not good. And finally, I found that I could not turn the sensor off. I found a small hole next to the switches, and used my handy iPhone SIM removal tool to reset the unit. After that, I was able to do the import of information from the sensor unit. Although I had written three pages of text, the app imported a full eleven pages. Five of those were blank, three had drawings I had not made, and the other three were the pages I had created. I erased all of the pages that weren't mine, and then used the "clear sensor memory" command in the app to hopefully get rid of the garbage pages. WIth that done, I decided to shut off the iNotebook and turn off the iPad, and try again. I wrote a complete page of handwritten notes, then turned on the iPad and imported that information into my digital notebook in the iNotebook app. The import showed that I had accumulated 42,442 bytes and it slowly brought the information into the iPad. Sure enough, my writing was straight and almost as clear as what I had written into the notebook. Victory at last! With four pages of handwritten notes now in the app, I decided to use the app to try sharing the notes. For individual pages, you can email a page. This saves the page as a PNG file and emails it. Pages can also be saved to the Camera Roll, saved to Dropbox, or printed. For a group of pages in a notebook, you can email, print or save to Dropbox from the Export command. Multiple pages are saved as a PDF before mailing. A couple of thoughts about the software. It's quite easy to create a group of notebooks -- say one for each class you're taking or project you're working on -- to put on your virtual shelf, organize the notes by tabs, and move pages to different tabs. To do the latter, you just slide a page to a particular tab. That's quite intuitive. Finally, there are a number of pens and annotation tools that can be used after the fact when your notes are in the iNotebook app. You can add text boxes, use highlighters, and more. There's also a voice notes feature that could come in handy to provide a verbal backup to your written notes. Conclusion Despite the few issues I ran into, I eventually got everything working properly. I would suggest to anyone who wants to use an iNotebook for classes or work to practice with it for a while to make sure you get the hang of writing, capturing, and transferring notes. Once you're up to speed, then you should be able to use the iNotebook with no problems. However, to me there just seem to be too many manual steps involved in capturing your notes. Open the notebook, turn it on, grab the pen, write, make sure the iNotebook is connected to your iPad, launch the app, import the captured information, send the information to yourself or others via email or Dropbox. It's a workflow that just doesn't make me want to use the device. As much as I wanted to like the iNotebook, there is an alternative available that I feel might be more useful to those who want to use handwriting to take notes. The Evernote Smart Notebooks by Moleskine ($24.95 to $29.95) don't require any batteries, sensors, or special pens. Basically, they're regular Moleskine notebooks with a special page design. You can write on them with any pen or pencil, then take a photo with the Evernote Page Camera app for iOS and they're "cleaned up" and uploaded automatically to Evernote. In addition, the service (which requires an Evernote premium account) also allows users to place special stickers on pages to automatically tag them for searching in various categories. Another way to keep handwritten notes that has a drop-dead simple workflow is to use an app like Penultimate ($0.99) and a stylus to just write the notes right onto the iPad. That way you don't have a notebook and an iPad to keep track of, and your notes can be on a variety of different "paper" types. Photos can be embedded in your notebook pages, and since the app has been purchased by Evernote, it's simple to sync your notebooks with both Dropbox and Evernote. The iNotebook is an interesting device, but make sure that you really have a need for a separate device to capture handwritten notes before you consider purchasing one. And seriously, think about the workflow involved -- if your notes go to Evernote anyway, either the Smart Notebooks or Penultimate might be a much less expensive and "busy" alternative. Honestly, when I want to take notes, I want to just sit down and write 'em, not worry about whether my notebook and pen are charged, whether or not the pen motions are being captured, or whether or not those motions will be transferred to the iPad app. The iNotebook isn't the device for me, but it might work for you. Pros - Good looks, and much less obtrusive in meetings than an iPad since it just looks like a regular notebook
- Ability to use different notebooks, plus standard pen refills
- App provides good organization and annotation tools
Cons - A rather expensive way to take handwritten notes
- No direct way to upload to Evernote
- Workflow is somewhat complex unless you rarely upload your notes to the iPad -- it's just easier to write on the iPad or just take a photo of your handwritten notes
Who is it for? - Those who prefer to take handwritten notes but want a way to capture them electronically
Giveaway Although the iNotebook didn't receive a rave review from TUAW, we're giving one of these away to a TUAW reader for whom it may be the perfect answer to capturing handwritten notes. Here are the rules for the giveaway: - Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older.
- To enter, fill out the form below completely and click or tap the Submit button.
- The entry must be made before December 26, 2012 11:59PM Eastern Standard Time.
- You may enter only once.
- One winner will be selected and will receive a Targus iNotebook valued at $179.99
- Click Here for complete Official Rules.
Loading... Targus iNotebook: Pen, paper and iPad originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 22 Dec 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A Case for Posting a Dozen Tweets a Day as a Business
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 11:26 AM PST
| A Case for Posting a Dozen Tweets a Day as a Business Posted: 22 Dec 2012 08:51 PM PST 
“We have a rule at our dealership – no more than 3 social media posts a day. Yes, Twitter is included.” It’s not a secret. Those who follow me on Twitter know that I post 40-50 times a day. I’m a guy who has been sucked into social media and it works for me. It definitely wouldn’t work for a business. With that said, the infrequent way that the car dealers I monitor handle their Twitter is simply not enough. You need to Tweet more. The notion that people will unfollow you if you post too much is still a reality… on Facebook. Twitter is different. Because of the way that the feed works in a chronological order rather than based on an algorithm the way Facebook and Google+ do it, each individual Tweet only reaches a tiny fraction of your audience at any given time. Some say that, depending on the quality of your following, the best that you can expect is still less than 1% per Tweet. That means that if you have 1000 followers, less than 10 people actually see your Tweet. To Tweet infrequently means that you’re not reaching the audience. To Tweet too much means risking getting unfollowed. The middle ground: a dozen. If you post around a dozen Tweets a day, you’ll find that you can be successful and garner more engagement without making people leave you in droves. The other challenge when looking at this number is the time necessary to make it happen. A dozen sounds like a lot. Done right, it should only take about 10-20 minutes a day. Here are some tips: - Post 3-5 links. They can be to your blog, to a video you released, to industry news, to reviews of your products – the possibilities are limitless.
- Post 1-3 proactive engagement @replies. Send a Tweet towards other local businesses, local influencers, and others in the industry.
- Post pics – no limit here. If you’re a car dealer, you have plenty of things on your lot that can be sent as pictures. The new filter tools on Twitter mobile are excellent. Take advantage of them. Post pictures of cars!
- Respond accordingly. If you’re only getting a couple of interactions and retweets a day, respond to all of them. If you start getting more interactions, respond to the “manual” ones. Anyone who talks to you directly (in other words, not a retweet) should get a reply from you.
- Use your other social networks. Some people tie Facebook directly into their Twitter feed. I’m against this for several reasons that I won’t get into now, but you should definitely tie in Pinterest, Tumblr, and other social networks.
The most important thing to remember is to space out the frequency. You’ll run more risk of people unfollowing you by posting three or more Tweets one right after another (other than responses to others) than by posting a dozen a day spread out. Use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to keep space between your posts. Twitter is a great tool that so few are really using properly. Differentiate yourself from your competitors by having a vibrant Twitter feed. |
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Jerry Seinfeld Explains How He Writes Jokes
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 11:19 AM PST
| Jerry Seinfeld Explains How He Writes Jokes Posted: 22 Dec 2012 03:00 PM PST Jerry Seinfeld talks about comedy writing and how he writes a joke in this video from the New York Times. The Times also has a feature on Seinfeld. In the video, Seinfeld explains how he came up with a joke called "The Pop Tart Joke." Seinfeld says he always writes on yellow pads. He doesn't use the computer because he says he doesn't like that cursor flashing and asking, "So, What have you got?" Seinfeld compares the joke writing process to songwriting, where you are looking for just the right word with the right amount of syllables. He says if you have a long joke, the end is the hardest part because that is where the biggest laugh has to be. Take a look: Permalink | Facebook | Twitter | Recent Headlines | Our News Feeds  |
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Less is more
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 11:17 AM PST
| Less is more Posted: 23 Dec 2012 10:51 AM PST  Maybe you don’t need to add anything to make your product better.
Maybe you need to take something away. Take a look at these utensils. Less waste, better for the environment, and less manufacturing cost because of reduced raw material — which means more profit. What can you punch a hole in? | | Get a free copy of my book Posted: 22 Dec 2012 01:00 PM PST 
This holiday season: Buy the comic book or audio editions and we’ll send you a free, signed paperback copy. From now through December 31st, email a receipt of your comic book or audio edition purchase to edi...@wordofmouth.org and we’ll mail you a signed paperback edition for free. (Sorry, but we can only ship our free paperback copies to U.S.-based addresses.) The comic book edition is the action-packed, condensed, and illustrated version of the Word of Mouth book. It’s all the fantastically useful word of mouth ideas from the full book in a format that’s even easier to read, implement, and share. Buy it here. The audiobook edition is the most convenient and mobile way to learn all of the practical, actionable ways you can get more people talking about you. For your commute, your big road trip, or your morning workout — this is a great way to learn the essential word of mouth skills. Buy it here. |
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Woman Loses Wheel of Fortune Due to Mispronunciation
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 11:08 AM PST
| Woman Loses Wheel of Fortune Due to Mispronunciation Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:00 AM PST A woman recently lost of Wheel of Fortune due to a mispronunciation. The women knew the correct answer and all the words to the puzzle, "Seven Swans A Swimming." When she pronounced it she did not pronounce the "G" in swimming so they didn't give it to her. Some fans are reportedly outraged by the verdict. Take a look: Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest  | | Last Minute Shoppers Hit Malls Posted: 23 Dec 2012 05:00 AM PST Shoppers that have not finished their Christmas shopping are now in a mad dash to wrap it up before Christmas arrives. It is too late to ship presents on time, so last minute shoppers are hitting the malls. Procrastinators should expect to encounter large crowds as there are many people who have not completed their holiday shopping. NBC reports that a Consumer Reports study found 132 million people still haven't finished and 26 million people haven't started yet. Take a look: Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest  | | Trailer for The Incredible Burt Wonderstone Starring Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi and Jim Carrey Posted: 22 Dec 2012 07:33 PM PST  Warner Bros. has released the first trailer for the magician comedy, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi play magicians - Burt Wonderstone and Anton Marvelton - who have a falling out after a long partnership. The two reunite when an outrageous street magician Steve Gray (Jim Carrey) begins drawing fans and hires Wonderstone's former assistane Jane (Olivia Wilde). The film arrives in theaters on March 15, 2013. Take a look: Photo: Warner Bros. Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest  | | San Diego Zoo Panda Cub Plays With a Ball Posted: 22 Dec 2012 06:00 PM PST  The San Diego Zoo's panda cub, Xiao Liwu, was given a plastic ball to play with during his 18th exam. The ball is nearly half the size of little Xiao. He loves the ball and doesn't seem to want to give it up. The panda keepers at the San Diego Zoo say they gave the cub the ball to test his coordination and encourage him to play with new objects. Xiao weighed in at weighed 14.5 pounds during his exam. Take a look: Photo: Ken Bohn, San Diego Zoo Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest  | | NRA Links Violent Films and Video Games to School Shootings Posted: 22 Dec 2012 03:00 PM PST In the wake of the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, the NRA is suggesting a connection between violent video and films and school shooting. In a press release (PDF file), NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre mentions several video games as corrupting Americans, including Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat. He also mentions the films, American Psycho and Natural Born Killers. "And here's another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people. Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse. And here's one: it's called Kindergarten Killers. It's been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn't or didn't want anyone to know you had found it?
Then there's the blood-soaked slasher films like American Psycho and Natural Born Killers that are aired like propaganda loops on 'Splatterdays' and every day, and a thousand music videos that portray life as a joke and murder as a way of life. And then they have the nerve to call it 'entertainment.'" ABC News highlights research on the connection between violent video games and gun violence in this report. Take a look: Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest  | | President and Mrs. Obama Wish Americans a Merry Christmas, Focus on Military Families and Their Sacrifices Posted: 22 Dec 2012 01:00 PM PST President and Mrs. Obama made the weekly presidential address together to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. The Obamas thanked Americans for being so giving and helping their fellow citizens through the year: from Hurricane Sandy to the shooting, Americans stepped up to lend a helping hand to neighbors in need. They also focused on those in the military and asked citizens to help military families, who serve right alongside their loved ones who are deployed, sometimes for very long stretches. The president spoke of his faith in Christ, and how the season is to celebrate his birth. He then mentioned the values that Christianity and other faiths have in common. Take a look: Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest  | | Trailer for The Place Beyond the Pines Starring Ryan Gosling Posted: 22 Dec 2012 11:00 AM PST  The trailer for the crime drama The Place Beyond the Pines has been released. Ryan Gosling plays a motorcycle riding bank robber in the film. The movie also stars Eva Mendes, Bradley Cooper, Rose Byrne and Ray Liotta. The film is directed by Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance. Take a look: Photo: Focus Features Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest  | | Top Ten Santa Pet Peeves Revealed on David Letterman Posted: 22 Dec 2012 10:00 AM PST David Letterman had Santas on his program to reveal the list of the Top Ten Santa Pet Peeves. The Santas say they own their own outfits. The list includes restless beard syndrome and How come no one ever asks what I want for Christmas? Take a look: Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest  | You are subscribed to email updates from ShoppingBlog.com
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This Week In Trailers: You Are Not Alone, 56 Up, Stalled, False Trail, The Package, Stag
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 11:03 AM PST
| This Week In Trailers: You Are Not Alone, 56 Up, Stalled, False Trail, The Package, Stag Posted: 23 Dec 2012 10:00 AM PST 
Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they're seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: What better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising? This week we get trapped in the ladies room, visit a small town in Illinois in order to get murdered, have a mid-life crisis, find a stripper for a bachelor party, get some Stormare power in our corner to catch a killer, and stop in to see what Steve Austin is up to.
You Are Not Alone Trailer Clear your calendar, block some time out, put your phone on mute, if you watch no other trailer this week please make it this one. A film that reminds me of home (northwest suburbs representin’, yo) and shows life in lower Illinois the way I remember it, there is a real weight placed on the location. It’s an odd way to begin a discussion about a trailer, I realize that, but the first thing this trailer sells is its sense of where we’re at. From the idyllic town where the action is about to go down, the breathless way we move through moment to moment in this first person narrative, and the powerfully haunting score that accompanies it, this is an incredible introduction to this world. Now, unlike Doom and the shaky cam that United 93 has forever turned me off of thanks to nausea, I like the use of the perspective here. It’s novel, yes, but in the trailer it works to establish not only the characters but it manages to increase the tension when things go south. On a program like Peep Show it’s able to use that perspective to increase the subtlety on a moment and I just feel like it works in this case. And it’s that moment as we’re riding in the back of a truck with that woman and the fireworks that go off by the house that illuminate the darkness ever so briefly that makes me lose my mind. I want to know so badly what is about to happen to these people that when things go south and it devolves into a real panic situation that I am in 100% love with this trailer. I am emotionally invested with the rage that explodes on the screen and the heaviness, the raw weight that the environment brings to this picture because we are so close to the carpet, the walls. It’s damn near hacky to say it but you do feel like you’re there and it’s a bit electric. I can’t think of a better trailer I saw all week than this one and, God help me, it better be as good as the movie because I can’t imagine how you can package something this low budget, so well, and have it completely fall apart when you let it air out. Regardless, though, I am in love and now want to see some of my fellow midwesterners, oh yah hey dere, cut up like flank steak as soon as possible. Incredible. Stalled Trailer When the zombie apocalypse happens in a women’s restoom I’m more than all ears, I’m all eyes. Director Christian James is bringing a whole new angle to this now tired and busted genre by just getting scatological. There’s something about seeing ladies getting frisky with each other, and me thinking someone just sent me zombie porno, only to hear the satisfying crunch of teeth digging into flesh. There honestly isn’t much more to this trailer other than the literal parade of characters that begin to inhabit this toilet space. I’m at a loss to try and even imagine what this movie could possibly bring that new and fresh but I am won over by its charm and gumption. Using a demented version of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” as a conga line of zombied, costumed characters enter the bathroom is a nice touch as well as the use of zombie Jesus which, in and of itself, is pretty meta. The nutty meter is off the charts with this one and good for James as we’ve been missing a fun zombie film for a little while and I’m feeling there might be a chuckle, a guffaw, or two to be had here. Big ups for the quality kills, as well, as the makeup and blood and viscera on display kept me more than engaged with the insanity unfolding on the screen. There is no way I can’t not watch this now, you realize this, right? For better or worse I need to know how this ends. 56 Up Trailer Michael Apted wins the war of persistence, without question. You see a trailer like this and all you can do is marvel at the sheer amount of focus and dedication you have to possess in order to stick with a story for as long as he has. The trailer doesn’t do anything particularly flashy or novel but it sells the idea of a movie that is part of a larger whole. Seven previous editions are a bit unwieldy to get through but the trailer here just hits the highlights from the other films by having a few stories that have carried over. It’s a trailer that helps carry you through these people’s life arc and explains how we’re here with them right now. In a way it’s melancholy to hear how the subjects themselves saw this project unfolding and the futile thrashing to push it away, you see how they’ve eased on their dreams and accepted what this life is all about for better or worse. Damn near made me depressed but it looks like it could be required viewing if for no other reason than to be educated to hear how people are reflecting on their human experience 56 years into their time on this planet. Stag Trailer Brett Heard, you naughty cad. I think if i had but one sentence to describe this trailer it would be that this is what Workaholics: The Movie would look like if it ever made the small screen. After seeing this all the way through there are some very humorous moments that appear as though an investment of $1 to a Redbox near you isn’t out of the question, but I don’t think it deserves much more than that. Which isn’t to say that it’s bad, mind you, just that what’s on display fits within the acceptable guidelines for what a good comedic trailer should provide. It has a little narrative development, it has some awkward moments that actually work, some crude humor, all big points to consider when thinking about how you want to spend 90 minutes of your time. It earns that right to be at least considered as you ponder your options and, as a Donald Faison fan, he displays that same level of comedic intensity. I realize comedy is subjective, and that this is closer to the objective side of things by saying it appears to be a middling comedy at best, but there’s enough reasons to appreciate what they’re selling. False Trail Trailer Kjell Sundvall might not be known to many of you but for those of us who remember his work on the seminal classic, 1999′s In Bed With Santa, then you know what kind of lumber this man is swinging. All joking aside, this is a trailer that just hits the right way. With as much attention that has been paid to the Scandinavians and their strange-hold on all things crime in the last decade this appears to be yet another in a series of movies that deal with something savage with someone trying to get to the bottom of it all. And, when one of those people is Peter Stormare, you have a perfect storm brewing. And Peter delivers in this trailer. We don’t have any clue what’s happening but what we are let in on is that we have a serial killer, that killer gets away and terrorizes some more, while Peter seems to be the deep, pensive thoughtful detective who is trying to keep his case, and his life, together. I like the beats we hit in how we move from crazy psychopath to Stormare going batty on a pile of paperwork. The juxtaposition is nice as well as moments that show us that he’s genuinely able to play the side of the quiet intellectual and the nutty detective who finds himself being consumed by his work. Again, there isn’t anything really to base our conceptions on other than the clips that we’re given (possibly because we don’t want to scare those lightweights who might find out they’ll have to read subtitles?) but this is an exciting trailer that mixes solid action with quiet periods of reflection. The Package Trailer They still make these kinds of movies? I saw one frame of this and just marveled at the incredible horribleness that still passes as entertainment. I’m positive that the 13 year-old me would have loved this, the latest from direct-to-DVD visionary Jesse V. Johnson. Now, of course this appeals to a certain demo and the language, the pacing, the sell job, points to all of that. However, it’s interesting that it just embraces that identity completely and fully. At about the minute mark when Steve Austin is on the run from God knows what, or who, that cheese ball metal riff kicks in and you might as well have calliope music in the background with how silly it all is. I’m sure there is some demo who is excited about this and for that I say I’m sorry. Life does get better, I promise. Nota bene: If you have any suggestions of trailers to possibly be included in this column, even have a trailer of your own to pitch, please let me know by sending me a note at Christop...@yahoo.com In case you missed them, here are the other trailers we covered at /Film this week:  | You are subscribed to email updates from /Film
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Josie Maran. The dogs!
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:47 AM PST
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Don't Feel Bad, Mitt Romney Never Wanted to be President
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:45 AM PST
| Don't Feel Bad, Mitt Romney Never Wanted to be President Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:09 AM PST | | Millions of Mental Health Records Go Missing as Americans Stock Up on Guns Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:15 AM PST | | Papal Pardons, In Order Posted: 22 Dec 2012 03:20 PM PST The pope met with his former butler today in order to pardon him for turning over embarrassing confidential Vatican papers to an Italian journalist. As official Church pardons go, it was " intense and personal," and was followed by the customary annual anti-gay Christmas address. But compared to other papal pardons, it barely merits notice: More »     | | Court Stops Ban on Gay Conversion Therapy Posted: 22 Dec 2012 01:49 PM PST | | Burgeoning Genre Face-Off: "New Adult" vs. "Coming of Old Age" Posted: 22 Dec 2012 01:28 PM PST If there is one thing that brings joy to my heart, it is charting the growth of newly invented genres. You can argue over whether trend pieces about " new adult" fiction or " baby boomer" literature are describing truly original developments or ginned-up marketing terms with no relation to measurable changes in book-buying practices (in fact, our very own Katie Baker has already done so in a very neat analysis). But at a certain point the distinction becomes meaningless; talk about "new adult" fiction long enough and Amazon will eventually dedicate a department to it. More »     | | John Boehner has a Real Reason to Cry, Is Voted Most Unpopular Member of Congress Posted: 22 Dec 2012 12:03 PM PST | | Details from The Snowman Sequel, In Ascending Order of Sadness Posted: 22 Dec 2012 11:30 AM PST The sequel to the silent Christmas classic The Snowman is set to air this Monday, more than 30 years after the original's premiere. The Snowman was nominated for an Academy Award and is broadcast annually throughout Great Britain. Occasionally shown with an incongruous introduction by David Bowie, it tells the wordless story of a young boy whose snowman comes to life and take him on a series of adventures, only to melt into nothingness by the dawn of the next day. More »     | | Here's How We Think Mariah Carey Would React to Demi Lovato Covering 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' Posted: 22 Dec 2012 10:30 AM PST | | This Week in Natural Disappearances Posted: 22 Dec 2012 10:06 AM PST | You are subscribed to email updates from Gawker
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Backed Or Whacked: Kids Projects Put The ‘Fun’ In Crowdfunding
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:38 AM PST
| Backed Or Whacked: Kids Projects Put The ‘Fun’ In Crowdfunding Posted: 22 Dec 2012 09:00 PM PST  Editor's note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin. 'Tis the season when our thoughts often turn to the wee ones in our lives, and that has certainly been on the minds of some crowdfunding project owners and backers. Backed: ATOMS Express Toys. Clearly aimed at the little (or not so little) maker in the house, the ATOMS line consists of three kinds of components: Blue bricks sense things; red bricks connect things; and green bricks do things. Yes, you can see the faint outlines of the developer mindset already. The bricks are all linked together with standard audio cables. Taking a cue from the construction masters at LEGO, ATOMS has packaged its bricks into different sets, one for building monsters, another for activating things via a "magic wand," and a third for iOS control using a Bluetooth brick. One gets the feeling, though, that the young ones' favorite component will wind up being the exploding brick. Just a hunch. ATOMS isn't the first kid-friendly DIY e-bricks set out there. Littlebits uses magnets to link together components, but ATOMS seems to offer more functionality without any more complexity. With about 10 days left to go in the campaign, ATOMS has cleared its $100,000 goal by more than a third. The sets run from about $50 to $80 with the lot going for an early-adopter price of $190 with retail expected at $250 next June. Backed: Sqord. The first IndieGoGo project to be profiled on Backed or Whacked, Sqord combines children's activities with one of crowdfunding's favorite product categories: wristwear. Essentially, a 3D accelerator-based activity monitor for kids, the product is durable and cheap. Sqord's video shows off whacking the product with a hammer, something you wouldn't want to do to a Nike FuelBand or an original Striiv monitor. Unlike those products, the Sqord has no display and can relay its latest results up to the cloud by tapping the monitor against a base station using NFC. Reward levels include two Sqord monitors and the base station for $50, which the company expects to deliver in May. With about two weeks left to go in the campaign, Sqord has raised less than $20,000 of its $85,000 goal. But because they've used IndieGoGo's option for a flexible funding campaign, it gets to keep all contributions. Backed: iBuKu Pets. At first glance, the iBuKu Pets look a bit like a number of other rubbery protective shells for smartphones and tablets like the Speck iGuy for iPad (with perhaps a bit more cushion). Those taking a second glance will discover that co-creator Royce Channey has gone beyond that, integrating cable storage and a backup battery into the iBuKu; the latter is a particularly handy feature if it is to encase iPhone hand-me-downs. And those taking a third look will find that the team has even designed an iBuKu Pets app that features a quartet of characters, including the Furby-faced Alvie. One thing's for sure: The gang over at Arbor Cube runs a tight ship. The campaign, which ended on December 15th, met its $25,000 goal with only $585 to spare and actually shipped the $35 appcessory to backers three days later, hinting that this was one of those campaigns where the fundraising was more of a formality than a necessity. Backed: Genetipetz The mooraffe, zebugraphant and snurtlegator sound like the work of a collaboration between Dr. Seuss and Dr. Moreau. Actually, they are under the supervision of the animated Dr. Genetipetz. Charlotte, N.C.-based Jackson and Cavan Meade are the entrepreneurial young stars of the enthusiastic pitch video for Genetipetz, animal body part "plushups" that have a tenuous tie to genetics. The early bird-creatures who got a jump on the toys grabbed the first batch of 35 at $50, but this was another campaign that raced to the wire like a zepheetah, just poking past its $20,000 funding goal. The toys are slated to be delivered in February, which should get them out the door in time to avoid scrutiny from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Stuffed Animals. Whacked: Maze-O "Pretty much everyone loves mazes," asserts Dan Friedman, half of the Lakeville, Minn., spousal pair behind Maze-O. Maze-O is a set of 2.5-inch squares that easily fit together to allow kids to create mazes wide enough to accommodate a Matchbox car or Hexbug. Maze-O was inspired by the length of time it took for Master Friedman to create mazes using tools such as wood blocks combined with the resulting fragility of such mazes. Most parents would probably outsource the work to China, but not Dan, who spares us the special effects in noting, "We knew there had to be a better way and — light bulb — Maze-O was born." A starter 36-piece set of Google/Windows/eBay-themed red, yellow, blue and green Maze-O pieces was made available for $30. Alas, the Friedmans will need to rely on their 3D printer for printing such pieces for a bit longer. While just over 100 backers were willing to enter Kickstarter's labyrinthine funding process, the 30-day campaign lost its way in seeking the cheese of its $50,000 funding goal. | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch » Gadgets
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Boulder Startup Community
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:36 AM PST
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Base Two Binary Clock
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:23 AM PST
| Base Two Binary Clock Posted: 23 Dec 2012 04:30 AM PST  Everyone needs a clock of sorts to tell the time, but with the modern day smartphone and tablet being a staple device for most folks we have ended up relying on them to help us tell the time. The watch has become a fashion accessory (and an investment for those who fork out thousands for it) instead of being a staple contraption that you wear around your wrist, but there’s one thing for sure – clocks are still here to stay, especially when you are at home. If you happen to have a rather geeky persuasion, why not go all out and pick up as nerdy a clock as possible – with the $69.95 Base Two Binary Clock being a prime candidate?
This is one idiosyncractic clock that relies on binary notation to display the time, where it will mimic the same on-and-off calculation as electronic systems from the beginning of the computer age. There will be half a dozen columns of blue LED lights, wherein every two columns will represent the digits for hour, minute, and second. From bottom to top in each column, there will be individual lights that represent the values 1, 2, 4, and 8. All you need to do is add the values of lit units and voila, you are able to decode the digit represented by each column. Depending on your choice, you can set the Base Two Binary Clock to a 12- or 24-hour convention, with three brightness settings to choose from. Powered by AC, there is the option to stash in a trio of AA batteries to keep it going as well, nifty when the apocalypse happens and there is no power from the grid. [ Base Two Binary Clock copyright by Coolest Gadgets ] | | General Electric Durathon battery to power buses Posted: 23 Dec 2012 04:00 AM PST  We do seem to be making a move to electric vehicles slowly but surely, as the world catches on with the idea of global warming being a disaster. Hybrid vehicles are enjoying a pretty good sales run at this point in time, although the percentage is far from dominating the auto sales market. Well, having more efficient people movers in large cities are important, and so too, would making sure that these public transportation arteries are run by environmentally friendly vehicles. General Electric intends to answer this clarion call with the Durathon battery that they claim is cheaper to power buses using clean energy.
Basically, the Durathon battery will be used in tandem with a lithium battery and a hydrogen fuel cell, where this combination makes it possible for the vehicle to achieve full performance with a much smaller fuel cell compared to previous attempts. The battery is built upon its predecessors, where previous tests with a dual-battery system on a clean fuel hybrid transit bus, working alongside a high-energy density sodium battery with a high-power lithium battery did the trick. This is somewhat similar to a previous attempt by Harvard scientists to create a fuel cell which can produce and store energy, where the gist of the idea is to merge the power of acceleration that is made possible by lithium batteries, alongside the storage capacity of sodium batteries such as the Durathon, to deliver the best of both worlds. Since having a decent range is one major concern for electric vehicles, statistics have shown that this should not be a major worry for bus operators, as most of the transit buses that circulate on American roads travel less than 100 miles (160.9 km) each day. With 846,000 buses registered in the US, just pause for a moment and imagine if all of them switched to cleaner, emissions-free energy systems, the total amount of emissions reduced would definitely be a significant amount. GE claims that next year will see thousands of Durathon batteries shipped from its Energy Storage business in Schenectady, New York, to customers in the telecommunication arena, where markets like Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia will benefit the most. We’re all for green energy, how about you? Press Release
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Pirate Bay Censorship Backfires as New Proxies Bloom (Ernesto/TorrentFreak)
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:22 AM PST
| Pirate Bay Censorship Backfires as New Proxies Bloom (Ernesto/TorrentFreak) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:35 AM PST   Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Pirate Bay Censorship Backfires as New Proxies Bloom — As reported earlier, the UK Pirate Party has taken the difficult decision to shut down their Pirate Bay proxy service. — Music industry group BPI threatened legal action against six members of the party, who would each have to risk bankruptcy to fight for their ideals.
| | Intellectual Ventures: Don't Mind Our 2000 Shell Companies, That's Totally Normal (Mike Masnick/Techdirt) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 05:30 AM PST | | Verizon denies hacker's claims of swiping customer records, says leaked data is not from its servers (Emil Protalinski/The Next Web) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 02:35 AM PST | | Microsoft Releases Wordament, the First iPhone Game with Xbox Live Achievements (Husain Sumra/MacRumors) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 01:50 AM PST | | Foxconn Buys Stake In Camera Maker GoPro, Turning Founder Into A Billionaire (Ryan Mac/Forbes) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 10:55 PM PST | | Google Chrome 25 will disable silent extension installation, kill all such extensions retroactively (Emil Protalinski/The Next Web) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 07:50 PM PST | | Exclusive: Hacker nabs 3m Verizon customer records (ZDNet) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 05:25 PM PST  ZDNet:
Exclusive: Hacker nabs 3m Verizon customer records — Summary: UPDATED: A hacker has acquired more than 3 million Verizon customer records — but leaks only 10 percent of them, after the phone and broadband giant fails to fix a security flaw. — Follow @ZDNetCharlie Follow @zackwhittaker | | United States and Russia establish joint action plan to combat piracy (Justin Rubio/The Verge) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 03:00 PM PST | | Your Facebook Pokes Are Stored For Two Days, Then Their Encryption Keys Are Deleted (Josh Constine/TechCrunch) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 02:40 PM PST | | Airbnb Gets More International And Interactive: Adds 18 Languages, Reviews And Calendar Access In New App Update (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 01:25 PM PST | | Mozilla backpedals on Firefox 64-bit for Windows, will keep nightly builds coming after all (Emil Protalinski/The Next Web) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 11:20 AM PST | | The New York Times Paywall Is Working Better Than Anyone Had Guessed (Edmund Lee/Bloomberg Tech Blog) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 11:00 AM PST | You are subscribed to email updates from Techmeme
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Allen Solly: India’s First Twitter Powered Billboard
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:20 AM PST
| Allen Solly: India’s First Twitter Powered Billboard Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:28 AM PST What do you get when you mash-up fashion, social media and outdoor? Allen Solly with India’s first Twitter powered billboard that is spreading shirts to the tweeting audience. 
To launch the new autumn-winter collection, Ogilvy India went social for Allen Solly, a local menswear designer label. How did the magic work? In a massive billboard 52 shirts were placed in the billboard. Behind each shirt, panels were rigged with a solenoid. With every tweet with a relevant #, a random solenoid would inch forward, eventually punching the shirts from the billboard, right into the hands of the lucky tweeters that were waiting under the billboard to catch their price. See the video of India’s first Twitter powered billboard: Click here to view the embedded video. My Opinion
A very simple but clever campaign by Ogilvy India. It shows how a smart combination of outdoor and social media can really help local brands. I hope that many marketers out there are inspired by this example, and that we will see more powerful mash-ups of outdoor, billboarding and digital out of home (OOH) and social media in 2013. What About You?
How do you rate the Allen Solly campaign? What do you hope to see from OOH, Mobile and Social in 2013? We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments below. Follow & Share
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The View From Your Window
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:14 AM PST
| The View From Your Window Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:43 AM PST  Minneapolis, Minnesota, 3.29 pm  | | A Literary Saint Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:09 AM PST When the novelist Philip Roth announced his retirement from writing, his former student Arthur Plotnik wrote, "I can't help feeling as if the Master — the patron saint of fiction for two generations — has let me down." Morgan Meis uses the comment to ponder how artists, in our secular age, have become the equivalent of saints: How do you have saints without religion? It would seem a contradiction in terms. Not so, said the Romantics of the early 19th century. Let us, they suggested, put the artist into the role of the saint. To be fair, the Romantics didn't exactly consciously plan to secularize saints. But they did begin to speak about artists and to idealize artists in ways that resembled the way people used to speak about saints. "The artist alone sees spirits," Johann Wolfgang von Goethe proclaimed, "But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them." The artist, in short, has a special and heightened relationship to the world. The rest of us benefit from the wonders that only the artist can reveal. Likewise, the artist, many Romantics thought, has a special relationship to suffering. Everyone knows the trope of the Romantic artist in anguish. Lord Byron said, "The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain." The saint who once suffered in the knowledge that suffering can bring one closer to God has been transformed into the artist whose suffering reveals the truths of our worldly condition.   | | Ask Kuo Anything: Have Your Prayers Changed? Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:30 AM PST I've known David Kuo since he worked in the Bush White House as Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. When he was working there, he suffered a brain seizure while driving and, without his extraordinary wife, Kim, taking the wheels from him, they might both never have survived. But they have. David was diagnosed with brain cancer and left the Bush administration, reflecting in his conscience on his work there. The result was a book, Tempting Faith, that came out at almost the same time as The Conservative Soul. We found ourselves estranged from modern Republicanism and united by faith in Jesus. Thus a friendship was born, and it's one I have treasured deeply. We have talked together, joked together, laughed together and prayed together. And the cancer has come and gone and come back again. When I saw him last, he had difficulty walking very far. And then I got an email from him with the following news: In the last four weeks two new tumors have grown. Both are in the same area as previous tumors. One is located directly on the motor pathway that controls my left leg. The other is at the front of the cavity created by previous surgeries. The news knocked the wind out of us, gave us vertigo. Frankly we are still spinning. In all the scenarios we could come up with this wasn't one of them. My physical state, even taking into account the blood clots and bleeding brain, was on the upswing. Those sensory seizures had stopped. We were crushed. All the suffering from the surgery and it did nothing but weaken me? All the hope for the viral treatment and nothing? He has helped me so much over the years in my own spiritual journey; and it would be true to say simply that I love him and am proud to have him here. Watch his previous videos here, here, here, here, here and here. Read some of his writing here.  | | Putdowns For Book Nerds Posted: 23 Dec 2012 06:27 AM PST ShortList collects their 50 favorite literary insults. From Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: I told him he didn't even care if a girl kept all her kings in the back row or not, and the reason he didn't care was because he was a goddam stupid moron. He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron. From Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment: He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely. And from Shakespeare's As You Like It: "I desire that we be better strangers."  | | The Therapist's Coffin Posted: 23 Dec 2012 05:19 AM PST Sheng Li visited the Ruoshui Mental Health Clinic in Shenyang, China, to photograph the practice of "death experience therapy": According to 50-year-old therapist Mr. Tang Yulong, the clinic opened in 2009 and since then there have been more than a thousand people who have done the death experience therapy. The therapy costs 2000 yuan ($320) and usually lasts 4 to 5 hours, during the duration of which the patient is required to lie in a coffin while his/her relatives read "epitaphs" or give speeches nearby. The patient also needs to write down his/her feelings and share with therapists and family. Mr. Tang said that many of them burst into tears when they are "resurrected." He believes it is an extreme but efficient method to make people realize the value of their lives. Li interviewed a participant who described the effects of the treatment this way: Mr. Yang told me later that for a few seconds he really felt as if he were dead inside the coffin, and his desire to keep on living became stronger. And when he heard his wife reading a letter to him, he cried. He said that it was so strange that when he was "dead," he actually felt closer to his wife and loved ones. (Video: A less elaborate and less scientific coffin therapy service in the Urkaine.)  | | An Irregular Chip Off The Old Block Posted: 23 Dec 2012 04:13 AM PST Suzanne Koven interviews Andrew Solomon about his new book on parents with dissimilar children, Far from the Tree, which contains chapters on "the Deaf, dwarfs, children with Down syndrome, autism, and severe disabilities, as well as transgendered people, schizophrenics, prodigies, criminals, and children conceived through rape." One essential lesson that his research taught him about his own experiences: [B]efore I started on the book, I hadn't drawn the distinction—which has become important to me since—which is between love and acceptance. You know, I feel as though when I was in the process of coming out of the closet it was upsetting for my parents, especially for my mother, and they weren't very accepting of it. And I experienced that as their not being very loving. And actually, what I recognized writing the book, is that parents of children who have some kind of difference almost always have to struggle with it, and often manage to come through, and it's their love that motivates them to come to terms with the strangeness or difference or whatever it is that's extraordinary in their children. And having looked at all these other families I was able to say: Okay, my family didn't throw me out, they didn't want nothing to do with me, they weren't actively rejecting. It just took them a while to get used to it. And it took me a while to get used to it, too. We were all going through a process of accepting who I was. And there had never really been a deficit in their love. The deficit was in their acceptance. These were two separate things. And the deficit in acceptance was no worse than anybody else's deficit in acceptance. So I just felt that by trying to understand, How does a family deal with a child who has an identity they at least initially experience as aberrant?—I could fit my parents' behavior into a larger framework, instead of feeling that I was dealing with it just as itself, and adding layers of meaning to it that it didn't have.  | | Patronizing Sex Workers Posted: 22 Dec 2012 06:34 PM PST Laurie Penny criticizes the current campaign to regulate sex trafficking, despite the crusaders' "good intentions": Laws regulating sex work are written, in most cases, by people who have never done sex work and who have no sustained contact with those who do. The most well-meaning legislation, designed to prevent the trafficking of vulnerable women and girls (vulnerable men and boys are expected to fend for themselves), often backfires, pushing the sex trade further underground and giving the police licence to punish and victimise women walking the streets or working together for safety. In the UK earlier this year, a cancer patient, Sheila Farmer, overturned a conviction for "brothel-keeping" - she was selling sex in a flat shared with a friend for their mutual protection. In California, the controversial Proposition 35 has just passed, with the aim, again, of stamping out sex trafficking. As a result, women who are found to be selling sex may have to register as sex offenders and submit to internet monitoring for the rest of their lives, as may anyone receiving financial support from them, including their children. She concludes, "In reality, sex work isn't stigmatised because it is dangerous. Sex work is dangerous because it is stigmatised."  | | Cool Ad Watch Posted: 22 Dec 2012 05:48 PM PST Google Analytics captures the irritation that often results from online shopping: Moving the common mistakes and bad practices that online merchants make to a real life grocery store, the videos shows how alienating bad web design and marketing can be for potential customers by ruining the experience of shopping on the internet. For instance, one of the videos highlights—with a regular check-out counter at the supermarket—how frustrating it could be to check out online when there are too many security measures and hidden costs for customers to get through.  | | Drop The Lube? Posted: 22 Dec 2012 05:02 PM PST Maggie Koerth-Baker warns: Nothing has been proven yet — most of the data comes from disembodied cell cultures and animal testing, which doesn't necessarily give you an accurate picture of what's happening in humans — but several studies over the last few years have drawn connections between lubricant use and increased rates of STD transmission. (It also looks like some lubricants might kill off natural vaginal flora — the good bacteria that live "up there" and make the difference between a healthy vagina and, say, a raging yeast infection.) Some of these studies have provided evidence suggesting that the ingredients in lubricants damage the cells lining the vagina and rectum — which would explain why those lubricants might facilitate STD transmission. Lauren Wolf has more: Right now, the Food & Drug Administration doesn't typically require testing of personal lubricants in humans. The agency classifies them as medical devices, so the sex aids have to be tested on animals such as rabbits and guinea pigs. Rectal use of lubricants is viewed by the agency as an "off-label" application—use at your own risk. Questions about lubricant safety arose nearly a decade ago when microbicide developers were testing whether the detergent nonoxynol-9 could block HIV transmission. Manufacturers had been incorporating the compound into spermicidal lubricants for years because of its ability to punch holes in the cell membranes of sperm. In 2002, however, a Phase II/III clinical trial of a nonoxynol-9 vaginal gel failed to protect women from HIV infection. Not only that, but the detergent actually increased the risk of HIV infection in the sex workers tested—women living in countries such as South Africa and Thailand who used the product three or four times per day. Lab work eventually revealed the reason for the paradoxical increase: Nonoxynol-9 is so good at punching holes in cell membranes that it not only bores into sperm but also into the cells lining the vagina and rectum.  | | Those Frisky French Posted: 22 Dec 2012 04:19 PM PST  Renate Stendhal reviews Marilyn Yalom's How the French Invented Love: Yalom cites a recent statistic culled from a study in which a French and an American group were asked whether "true love can exist without a radiant sex life." Of the American group, 83 percent agreed with this statement; only 34 percent of the French agreed, Yalom writes: "A 49 percent difference in opinion on the need for sex in love is a startling statistic! This French emphasis on carnal satisfaction strikes tighter-laced Americans as deliciously naughty." Another crucial ingredient of French love includes "the darker elements that Americans are reluctant to admit as normal: jealousy, suffering, extramarital sex, multiple lovers, crimes of passion, disillusion, even violence. Perhaps more than anything, the French accept the premise that sexual passion has its own justification. Love simply doesn't have the same moral overlay that we Americans expect it to have." (Photo by Flickr user Thomas D)  | | A Book Worth Dumping Someone Over Posted: 22 Dec 2012 03:34 PM PST Kate Hakala nominates Kerouac's On The Road: I understand that it's romantic — this notion of endless wanderlust, searching high and low for the beauty and wonder in new life experience. But it's like that line in "Psycho Killer:" "You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything." Sal, Dean, and the gang don't speak with people, but rather, past them. They do not understand the nature of experience, only the idea of experience. There's a lack of connection, a neglect of any deeper side to humanity than what you can get on a road trip. ... So, maybe I'm not a fabulous yellow roman candle burning quickly across the heavens. But, you know what else burn burn burns fast? Chlamydia, like the kind you get from worldly travelers without insurance policies. Same with the romance of transience, or a junkie's need for purely novel experiences. It gets old, because there's no depth to wandering. For true experience, or value in really anything, you've got to put in the time, not just breeze through and write a run-on sentence about it.  | | Faces Of The Day Posted: 22 Dec 2012 02:58 PM PST | | Tragedy Mangles Your Memories Posted: 22 Dec 2012 02:04 PM PST Onnesha Roychoudhuri contemplates that idea in the context of Newtown: Sandy Hook: The school's baseball field where I first learned how to hit a ball and mean it. Where my brother had his tenth birthday party and I wore a pair of pink shorts printed with gray kittens. Where the outsized, green footprints of our mascot, the Green Giant, formed a path to the entrance of the school. Where my mother taught off and on. Where I wrote a sequel to The Hobbit for Mrs. Toomey, who was seriously unimpressed. Where, on a stormy day, Mrs. Hansen-Bolt let us gather at the front of the room and huddle together as she opened up a book and began to read. Where we felt safe. I wrote these memories feverishly while, in the background, I listened to the continuous coverage of the Sandy Hook shooting. It felt like a compulsive and involuntary act, a race to commit to memory images on an old filmstrip that might, at any moment, melt away. And in some ways, they will, the richness of these memories co-opted by a horror, a redrawing of a psychological map. The library where I sat with Harold and the Purple Crayon now the library where teachers hid their students, supplying them with paper and crayons. Telling them to color while twenty of their schoolmates were shot and killed. This is the geography of grieving, where a place of life becomes a reminder of death, a reminder that threatens to eclipse the memories that came before. It's a strange thing to watch a small hometown transformed into a monument, a memorial.  | | Mental Health Break Posted: 22 Dec 2012 01:20 PM PST | | Quote For The Day Posted: 22 Dec 2012 12:34 PM PST "Roy looks up at him with frightened inky eyes. "Will they put us in jail?" he asks, his voice high and precise, like wind chimes. Harry laughs. "Where'd you get that idea?" "Daddy hates jail." "Well who doesn't!" Harry says, wondering if the child is quite right in the head. Roy doesn't understand you should loosen the string of bathing trunks to pull them on, and while he fumbles and struggles his little penis sticks straight out, no longer than it is thick, cute as a button mushroom. He is circumcised. Rabbit wonders what his own life would have been like if he had been circumcised. The issue comes up now and then in the newspapers. Some say the foreskin is like an eyelid; without it the constantly exposed glans become less sensitive, it gets thick-skinned and dull rubbing against cloth all the time. A letter he once read in a skin magazine was from a guy who got circumcised in midlife and found his sexual pleasure and responsiveness went so far down his circumcised life was hardly worth living. If Harry had been less responsive he might have been a more dependable person. Getting a hard-on you can feel the foreskin sweetly tug back, like freezing ream lifting the paper cap on the old-time milk bottles. From the numb look of his prick Roy will be a solid citizen. His grandfather reaches down a hand to lead him out to the beach," - John Updike, Rabbit At Rest. Thanks to a reader.  | | Experiencing A Book Posted: 22 Dec 2012 11:44 AM PST  How we read is a growing area of scholarship: Did a reader's encounter with a book or newspaper happen in daylight or by candlelight? Was the book read out loud or in solitude? On the move or in bed? [Simon Eliot] talks about a kind of punctuated reading dictated by stagecoach travel, in which a reader jolted along rough 18th- or 19th-century roads might snatch a few minutes with a book at inns whenever the coach stopped to change horses, kind of like how travelers now might read in the airport lounge before boarding. Today's readers, at least in the West, tend not to fret about having something to read and light enough to read by, "because books are so cheap and light is so cheap," Eliot says. British readers of earlier eras were not so lucky. Unless they could afford oil lamps or beeswax candles, they had to deal with messy, smelly candles made from tallow. Those imperfect sources of light required frequent trimming and were a fire hazard. Under such circumstances, "reading has to be choreographed," Eliot says. "You have to stop and trim" the wick as well as avoid setting yourself on fire. (Collage by Erwan Soyer via My Modern Met)  | | The View From Your Window Posted: 22 Dec 2012 11:29 AM PST  Arezzo, Italy, 5.45 pm  | | Is The Internet Creating New Languages? Posted: 22 Dec 2012 11:05 AM PST Jane O'Brien suggests so: In previous centuries, the convergence of cultures and trade led to the emergence of pidgin - a streamlined system of communication that has simple grammatical structure, says Michael Ullman, director of research at Georgetown University's Brain and Language Lab. When the next generation of pidgin speakers begins to add vocabulary and grammar, it becomes a distinct Creole language. "You get different endings, it's more complex and systematised. Something like that could be happening to English on the web," he says. Robert Lane Greene disagrees: Many non-natives write online in English. Some of them have distinctive varieties of English, but none are creolising the main body of English. ... Singaporeans use (usually quite good) standard English with non-Singaporeans. Many other non-natives are simply writing English full of the typical mistakes of a non-fluent speaker. But there are no children learning their first language from this broken English and regularising the mistakes into a new creole. The reason is obvious: children do not learn their first language from the internet.  | | Culture Flash Posted: 22 Dec 2012 10:31 AM PST Giles Harvey urges modern man to slow down: These days, the shorter a book is, the more likely I am to read it. The prospect of being finished with something, soon, is enticing. I am always eager to be moving on to what's next—the next book, the next film, the next performance. I feel "the dread of not getting out / Before having seen the whole collection." The thought of spending a month, or several months, with a single work—a "The Magic Mountain" or an "In Search of Lost Time"—is somehow enervating. Of course, there is a pernicious logic at work here. Why read a long novel when you can read a short one? Why read a short novel when you can watch a movie? Why watch a movie when you can watch a TV show? Why watch a TV when you catch a minute-long video of a kitten and a puppy cuddling on YouTube? As soon as we start to think of art simply as something to be consumed, discarded, and replaced, we rob it of one of its greatest powers: its capacity to free us from the grip of easier but shallower pleasures.  | | A Poem For Saturday Posted: 22 Dec 2012 09:42 AM PST  "Little Boy Blue" by Eugene Field (1850-1895): The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and staunch he stands,
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket moulds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there.
"Now, don't you go till I come," he said,
"And don't you make any noise!"
So, toddling off to his trundle-bed,
He dreamt of the pretty toys;
And, as he was dreaming, an angel song
Awakened our Little Boy Blue—
Oh! The years are many, the years are long,
But the little toy friends are true!
Aye, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,
Each in the same old place—
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,
The smile of a little face;
And they wonder, as waiting the long years through
In the dust of the little chair,
What has become of our Little Boy Blue,
Since he kissed them and put them there. (Photo by JD Hancock)  |
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David Gregory Shocked By NRA's LaPierre: You Fly In The Face Of Common Sense (Adam Peck/ThinkProgress)
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 09:13 AM PST
| David Gregory Shocked By NRA's LaPierre: You Fly In The Face Of Common Sense (Adam Peck/ThinkProgress) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:40 AM PST | | The story behind Mitt Romney's loss in the presidential campaign to President Obama (Michael Kranish/Boston Globe) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:35 AM PST | | Wayne LaPierre: If It's Crazy To Put More Guns In Schools, Then Call Me Crazy (Evan McMorris-Santoro/Talking Points Memo) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:30 AM PST | | LaTourette: 'Plan B' failure not a rebuke of Boehner's 'leadership' (Carlo Muñoz/The Hill) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:05 AM PST | | Bloomberg, LaPierre and the Void (Ross Douthat/New York Times) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 08:00 AM PST  Ross Douthat / New York Times:
Bloomberg, LaPierre and the Void — FOR a week after the Newtown shooting, the conversation was dominated by the self-righteous certainties of the American center-left. In print and on the airwaves, the chorus was nearly universal: the only possible response to Adam Lanza's rampage …
| | Armed guards like air marshals, claims NRA program chief (Kevin Liptak/CNN) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:30 AM PST Kevin Liptak / CNN:
Armed guards like air marshals, claims NRA program chief — (CNN) - The man charged with developing the National Rifle Association's program to place armed guards in American schools defended the controversial plan Sunday against critics who claim it's a dangerous diversion from new gun restrictions. | | A Father's Journey - FOR a long while, my father's way of coping ... (Frank Bruni/New York Times) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:25 AM PST  Frank Bruni / New York Times:
A Father's Journey — FOR a long while, my father's way of coping was to walk quietly from the room. He doesn't remember this. I do. I can still see it, still feel the pinch in my chest when the word “gay” came up — perhaps in reference to some event in the news, or perhaps in reference to me … | | Guess Who Still Believes in Invisible Vigilantes (Paul Krugman) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:15 AM PST | | "Confiscation could be an option" (Jazz Shaw/Hot Air) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 06:10 AM PST  Jazz Shaw / Hot Air:
“Confiscation could be an option” — It's one of the most common refrains coming from the “reasonable discussion” crew as they pave the way for upcoming gun control legislation. Whether we hear it from the clucking tongues of guests on Morning Joe or from their legions of supporters on the web, the patter is the same. | | Coming Up on 'This Week': Asa Hutchinson, Sen. Johnny Isakson and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (ABCNEWS) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 06:00 AM PST | | How Party of Budget Restraint Shifted to 'No New Taxes,' Ever (Binyamin Appelbaum/New York Times) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 05:45 AM PST | | Energy Department's nuclear weapons chief stepping down (Carlo Muñoz/The Hill) Posted: 23 Dec 2012 05:40 AM PST Carlo Muñoz / The Hill:
Energy Department's nuclear weapons chief stepping down — The head of the Department of Energy division responsible for overseeing and maintaining the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal is stepping down, according to a statement issued on Saturday. — “The ability to serve our nation is a privilege … | | Mayan skulls say to forget apocalypse (Toledo Blade) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 11:40 PM PST  Toledo Blade:
Mayan skulls say to forget apocalypse — Ritual predicts new era, not end of times — Facebook Twitter Reddit Digg E-mail Print Rss — MERIDA, Mexico — The crystal skulls have spoken: The world is not going to end. — American seer Star Johnsen-Moser led a whooping, dancing … | | Egypt constitutional vote: 'Things are definitely worse than under the old regime' (Richard Spencer/Telegraph) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 10:45 PM PST | | New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo On Gun Control: 'Confiscation Could Be An Option' (Andrew Kirell/Mediaite) Posted: 22 Dec 2012 08:10 PM PST | You are subscribed to email updates from memeorandum
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MF Global Overseers Reach Accord Over Claims
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:47 AM PST
| MF Global Overseers Reach Accord Over Claims Posted: 22 Dec 2012 09:43 AM PST The officials supervising the wind-down of MF Global's remains said on Saturday that they had reached a broad settlement over claims among the entities they oversee. | You are subscribed to email updates from DealBook
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Dot Com Pho – The World Didn’t End Edition
Posted: 23 Dec 2012 07:38 AM PST
| Dot Com Pho – The World Didn’t End Edition Posted: 22 Dec 2012 04:48 PM PST Well, the world didn’t end so that means we get to do a Dot Com Pho to bitch about it. Once again, we headed for the patio of Pho Ba Co in sunny Orange County for an afternoon of fun and networking. Anyone is welcome to join us. Follow me on Twitter to find the time and location of the next meetup. For this edition of Dot Com Pho, we have everyone complaining that the world is still here, the bow tie man NOT wearing a bow tie, Sally blowing stuff up, home-made pho, and a whole lot more. Enjoy! | You are subscribed to email updates from John Chow dot Com
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