November 28, 2013 at 11:21AM
Author Archives: shaun
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Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, 1968 pic.twitter.com/kVWwxLxMMJ
— History In Pictures (@HistoryInPix) November 27, 2013
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Isn’t it a bad idea to release two movies with similar titles in such short order? Asked that in an interview in August, Gary Barber, MGM’s chief executive, said he was not worried. “MGM has the title locked up,” he said with a smile. “They will have to change theirs.”
But the rival companies are not budging. “If ever there was a title available for general use, it is Hercules,” a spokesman for Lions Gate said on Friday. “It is not protectable.” Dozens of films with Hercules in the title have been released over the years, from “Hercules and the Big Stick” in 1910 to “Hercules,” Disney’s animated musical, in 1997.
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/business/media/hercules-and-the-rival-studios.html?ref=todayspaper
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A few summers ago one of my best friends invited me up to what he affectionately called his “white-trash cabin” in the Adirondacks. This was not how I described the outing to my family. Two of my Jewish acquaintances once joked that I’d “make a good Jew.” My retort was not, “Yeah, I certainly am good with money.” Gay men sometimes laughingly refer to one another as “faggots.” My wife and her friends sometimes, when having a good time, will refer to one another with the word “bitch.” I am certain that should I decide to join in, I would invite the same hard conversation that would greet me, should I ever call my father Billy.
A separate and unequal standard for black people is always wrong. And the desire to ban the word “nigger” is not anti-racism, it is finishing school. When Matt Barnes used the word “niggas” he was being inappropriate. When Richie Incognito and Riley Cooper used “nigger,” they were being violent and offensive. That we have trouble distinguishing the two evidences our discomfort with the great chasm between black and white America.
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/coates-in-defense-of-a-loaded-word.html?ref=todayspaper
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Near the banquet hall where rulers of a Middle Bronze Age city-state and their guests feasted, a team of American and Israeli researchers broke through to a storage room holding the remains of 40 large ceramic jars. The vessels were broken, their liquid contents long since vanished — but not without a trace.
A chemical analysis of residues left in the three-foot-tall jars detected organic traces of acids that are common components of all wine, as well as ingredients popular in ancient winemaking. These included honey, mint, cinnamon bark, juniper berries and resins used as a preservative. The recipe was similar to medicinal wines used for 2,000 years in ancient Egypt and probably tasted something like retsina or other resinous Greek wines today.
So the archaeologists who have been exploring the Canaanite site, known as Tel Kabri, announced on Friday that they had found one of civilization’s oldest and largest wine cellars. The storage room held the equivalent of about 3,000 bottles of red and white wines, they said — and they suspected that this was not the palace’s only wine cellar.
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/science/in-ruins-of-palace-a-wine-with-hints-of-cinnamon-and-top-notes-of-antiquity.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0
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“[T]he constant use of the filibuster against political appointments made it extraordinarily difficult for the White House to fire anyone because they didn’t know whether they’d be able to appoint a replacement — or, if they could appoint a replacement, who Republicans would actually accept. And the more political controversy there was around an issue the more dangerous a personnel change became.
This became a standard excuse for why no one is losing their job over the HealthCare.gov debacle: Firing any of the appointees in charge would just trigger a disastrous confirmation process that would lead the agency rudderless and chaotic for months — and possibly for the rest of Obama’s term.”
– http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/21/one-huge-effect-of-filibuster-reform-obama-can-actually-fire-people/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein
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Keeping up with the endless spawning of new sub-and sub-sub-genres of music can be hard. Just when you catch up with seapunk and witch house, they’re not cool anymore. Everyone’s already moved on to Nintendocore.
To help you brush up on how rock music evolved into the many-tentacled beast that it is today, designer Brittany Klontz created an interactive infographic for ConcertHotels.com that maps 100 years of genres in less than a minute. It not only provides the names and birth dates of each style, but also offers sample songs allowing you to finally know what skiffle sounds like.
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““Selfie” — defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website” — has beaten out “twerk,” “bitcoin” and other comers to claim the title of Oxford Dictionaries 2013 Word of the Year.”
– http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/selfie-trumps-twerk-as-oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year/?ref=todayspaper
shaun james bockert 