Archive for the ‘real life news’ Category

Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City

Raptor Devours Cheerleader

My ninjas, PLEASE! Hilarious.

The Rant that Brought out the Crazies

This is just in case you forgot what started these "TEA parties."

Village Voice’s Top 50 Worst of the 00’s

Super lame songs by charity "supergroups" have been the most expensive form of self-parody ever since Bob Geldof scribbled the word "Do" in "Do They Know It’s Christmas." Since its mid-’80s "We Are The World… Again" heyday, this blustery tradition has been the target of like a dozen Saturday Night Live sketches and at least two winky-winky parody all-"star" indie rock viral events, in 2005 and 2009. So yeah, it’s almost hack of me to bag on these cornball Artists Against Obscurity clusterfucks. Fortunately the expiration date on bagging on Fred Durst still has a couple of months left. Read More.

Notable Art Gaffes

After a woman put her elbow through a priceless Picasso at the Met, The Globe & Mail has a list of other notable art-world gaffes. Below is an excerpt:

The James Ossuary, which some believe once contained the remains of Jesus’s brother, arrived at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto from Tel Aviv in the fall of 2002. Although reportedly worth $2-million (U.S.), the limestone container had developed at least five cracks in transit, the result of having been flown to Canada in a cardboard box filled with bubble wrap.

Marc Quinn calls it an ‘urban myth,’ but others insist that it’s true. Reportedly a self-portrait bust that Quinn made from nine frozen pints of his own blood melted in the freezer of legendary London art collector Charles Saatchi after decorators working on his kitchen pulled the plug. Quinn’s blood busts currently sell for $1-million (U.S.) each and it reportedly takes him at least one year to accumulate the necessary blood. Read More.

KEO Satellite

KEO is a satellite that is designed to take messages from humanity and preserve them in orbit for the next 500 generations. They named it KEO because the sounds for "k," "e," and "o" are common to most earthly languages. Apparently, 50,000 years from now it will come crashing back down to earth to reveal all the mysteries of our current time. Like, what Britney was really thinking or what percentage of the population Tiger was sleeping with instead of his wife. In 50,000 years if you did a statistical study of my own mailbox it would probably still be mostly MoveOn e-mails. Uh, anyway.

Here’s the deal:

Every person living on Earth, small, weak, powerful or rich is provided with 4 pages of liberty and equality to pen down his message destined for his faraway great grandchildren.
All the messages received, without undergoing any censorship, will be embarked aboard KEO.

You can use this here to write your very own message, even though I believe the thing has already left. This is a very grandiose idea, signaling a vast departure from our general human plans of mass destruction followed by a ninja-led mass exodus- but I hope it pans out. Here’s more from the creators:

KEO will leave from planet Earth in 2007/2008. Once in orbit, KEO’S wings will take life, fluttering in rhythm to its passage under the Earth’s shadow and the sun’s ray, similar to that of a beautiful migratory bird gliding across the horizon.

KEO will then pursue its 50,000 year journey around the Earth, guarded from the hostile environment in space by several protective shields.

At the dawn of its return to Earth, KEO will create an artificial Aurora Borealis whose luminosity and glow will light up the sky, announcing its grand arrival home.

Wow, that sounds terrifying.

So, you might be a little bit late, but the site is still up and ostensibly accepting messages.I admittedly learned about this while watching some show on the History channel while drifting off to sleep.

-Visit the (poorly designed) Keo homepage-

Fear the Boom and Bust

A rap video made by George Mason University economist and Planet Money friend, Russ Roberts, and Spike TV executive producer and self described "amateur economic junkie," John Papola, is making it’s worldwide debut today on All Things Considered with a little help from Alex Blumberg. Read the Rest

From PlanetMoney

El Dorado Found in Amazon

Since the time of the conquistadors, the legend of an ancient, lost civilization deep in the Amazon forest has beguiled hundreds of explorers and led many to their deaths. Some called their dream El Dorado.

Others, most notably Colonel Percy Fawcett, the gloriously mustached British explorer (and real-life model for Indiana Jones) named it the City of Z. But no one has ever returned from the Amazon with conclusive proof that such a place existed.

Three scientists have now come close to doing just that. The journal Antiquity has published a report showing more than 200 massive earthworks in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil’s border with Bolivia.

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Doing journalism in 2010

Nothing frustrates me more than watching journalists who’ve lost their newsroom jobs entering the blogosphere… with no clue as to what they should be doing online. Too few emerging online journalists understand that the function of news publishing has changed in the Internet era. Simply reporting the news, however you might define that, is no longer enough, not when you are publishing in such a competitive environment. The journalists who succeed online are the ones who understand that they are no longer simply reporters… they’ve become community organizers.

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