Swedish filmmaker Sjöberg's visually innovative, Cannes Grand Prix-winning adaptation of August Strindberg's renowned 1888 play…
Dude, I could never stand the excitement.
8.11.2012
Censored in 1951!
Oh go ahead, tell us what you really think
Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so…
Sounds fine to me
WASHINGTON – Mitt Romney has chosen Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin to be his running mate…
At least it would get him out of the Congress.
8.10.2012
Rain
This might be the first really rainy day we've had since May. It's been raining and rumbling since midmorning. Fortunately, I got my errands done early and was back home before it began. It's been a dry summer here, but nowhere near as dry as it's been elsewhere.
A few winters back when there was a big snow down in Washington DC, some idiot congressperson (but I repeat myself) built an igloo in his front lawn and stuck up a big sign saying something like, ha ha Al Gore. Sometimes I wonder what is in his front lawn this summer, but then I tell myself that's probably a waste of time.
On the other hand, if it's not…
“If our consumer information is right, personalization is really a consumer desire right now, not so much a consumer fear,” said Michael R. Minasi, president for marketing at Safeway.
8.09.2012
Extra dry
Report: Drought worsens in key farm states - seattlepi.com
The weekly U.S. Drought Monitor map released Thursday showed that the amount of the contiguous U.S. mired in drought conditions dropped a little more than 1 percentage point, to 78.14 percent as of Tuesday. But the expanse still gripped by extreme or exceptional drought — the two worst classifications — rose to 24.14 percent, up nearly 2 percentage points from the previous week.
No frown unturned
Undernews: British police arrest man for not being excited enough about Olympic event
Guardian, Uk - A man with Parkinson's disease who was arrested during the Olympic men's cycling road race while sitting beside the route has said he wants a "letter of exoneration" from Surrey police, claiming their treatment of him was disproportionate.…
"It could have been done better. I was arrested for not smiling."
We think…
…although we are possibly not entirely, positively sure, that's our Seattle Bureau chief motoring past the Gig Harbor webcam in the state of Washington. We're pretty sure it is. We think.
No, fake blonde is certainly not after your job
Marie is an avatar, a life-size image of a woman digitally broadcast from a projector onto an inch-thick glass screen coated with a special film, said Luis Vega, 39, the vice president of Parabit Systems, the company that built Marie. The device uses motion sensors to prompt Marie’s 90-second script whenever anyone comes within 30 feet of her.
8.08.2012
There's always one more
Tennessee woman accuses physician husband of poisoning coffee with barium - NY Daily News
A Tennessee woman feared her husband wanted her dead after she claimed she found him slipping poison into her morning coffee.…
Last week, lab results confirmed the coffee contained high levels of barium, a toxic heavy metal, according to the newspaper.
[Fiction] Bounce
The low-end family-sized silver van took the corner Abraham himself was passing just fast enough to make it lean a little toward where he was walking and, seemingly, to eject a clip of voice through an open window in his direction. What Abraham heard was:
“It has nothing to do with your fucking brakes.”
Abraham glanced over his shoulder after the van, hoping in a vague way to hear more. By the time he could see it again the vehicle was already a block and a half away. As he turned his head back forward he noticed in the very farthest corner of his eye what appeared to be a bright red soft drink can fly from the van’s passenger-side window. The can, if it was a can, hit the curb and bounced straight up.
Murder most foul: Serial killers, impatient heirs, government agencies and corporate miscreants…
The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
Until the early nineteenth century few tools existed to detect a toxic substance in a corpse.…all find their place in Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook. It's a science history—the history of forensic medicine and toxicology—that reads like a novel. So if you're into watching those medical detective shows on TV, or you like a good history of New York at the turn of the 20th, or you just dig blood and gore, you can not possibly go wrong with this book.
Yes, Bunky, we are doomed
Some psychiatrists and employers now find it suspicious for an individual to keep off Facebook, reports The Daily Mail. That's because for today's young generation, having Facebook is considered "normal," while opting out is considered "abnormal."
Mashable
It's not a bug, it's a feature
The near implosion of the Knight Capital Group on an accidental $440 million trading loss may make many feel that Wall Street firms are on automatic self-destruct with the timer set to go off fairly soon.
The truth may instead be that the finance industry not only has fewer missteps than the rest of corporate America, but that sometimes failure is a good thing.
NYTimes
8.07.2012
Definitely spooky
Waitresses who wear red earn bigger tips from men, study finds | The Raw Story
Research recently published in the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research has found that waitresses who wear red earned bigger tips from men than waitresses who wore other colors.
Maybe you thought you had a choice?
Somebody's suffering from a TV overdose
The Olympics would not be the Olympics if the personal lives of the athletes did not play a major role in the event.
NYTimes
8.06.2012
[Fiction] Blonde
He had survived all these years without learning to play golf or even tennis and he wasn't about to start now. He found golf and tennis dull. Whenever the topic of golf or tennis came up at a party or over drinks at the club he would cheerfully announce his abiding passion for the game of bocce, and as though in unison the golf and tennis people would wander off to bore somebody else. Every time. Without fail.
He had taken the time to learn the rudiments of playing bocce just in case someone ever showed up to cover his bet, but no one did.
He had come across this self-preserving technique in New York back in the early 60s. It was then he discovered he could quell any discussion of baseball among his co-workers simply by announcing he was a fan of the Mets. The mere mention appeared to obliterate any thoughts of baseball within range of his voice, and he knew a good thing when he encountered one, and the same thing worked in its way for golf and tennis too.
One early afternoon at the club just as the conversation had turned to golf and he had played his bocce card he looked up and met the gaze of a big and somewhat squarish blonde woman he had never seen there before.
“Oh,” said the blonde, “I like bocce too.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” she said.
He and the big blonde went out together onto the spacious and perfectly manicured lawn behind the club and played bocce, just the two of them, until half past four.
--
”Bocce is without a doubt one of the most exciting and enjoyable sports.”
Pandering becomes an Olympic event
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House says President Barack Obama supports a measure that would exempt U.S. Olympians from taxes on their prizes.
Rubio too.
Oh sure you are
Major banks, which often band together when facing government scrutiny, are now turning on one another as an international investigation into the manipulation of interest rates gains momentum.…
One official involved in the case said that banks are emphasizing that "we're not as bad as the next guy."
New York Times
8.05.2012
And still no candidate
Think about it: Neither major political party in the U.S. has nominated a candidate to run for president yet. Pretty amazing, right? And even without nominees the whole affair is reaching for new heights of entertainment.
My favorite so far is Obama trying to scare me with Romney's Evil Tax Plan while at the same time claiming he doesn't get to do what he wants because the mean old Congress won't let him. Dude. Really?
Maybe he's trying to tell me he thinks Romney will be much more forceful president that he's managed to be, or maybe he's trying to tell me he thinks that mean old Congress won't be so mean if Romney is in the White House, in which case what we really need is more mean congressmen. And women. Of course.
Or maybe he thinks I'm just too dumb too know it's Congress that makes the tax law, not the President. [Spoiler alert: That's probably it.]
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